Oracle® E-Business Suite & Cloud Applications
Configuration Automation and Control
Reduce Time - Reduce Errors - Reduce Cost - Reduce Risk
Effective management of application setup is essential during upgrades and there are particular challenges that organisations must overcome to ensure a successful upgrade project. The complexity of the E-Business Suite and Cloud Applications, from both functional and technical perspectives, makes this a time consuming and costly process.
Most E-Business Suite systems include customisations that may be affected by changes during the upgrade. These must be identified and assessed for potential impact. The scope of what should be considered a customisation is broad and all such areas should be considered. As well as custom database objects and programs it is key to include any setups that incorporate some code element in their definition.
There are several possible effects on application setups and each of these should be considered:
A huge challenge is the potential effect on security by the upgrade; the introduction of new forms, functions and concurrent programs etc. must be understood and this is difficult within both the E-Business Suite and Cloud Applications. The nature of areas such as menu structures and permissions can lead to users automatically gaining access to functionality that should be controlled.
Further setup changes will almost certainly be necessary after the main upgrade process. These must be managed to ensure they are correctly repeated during each iteration of the upgrade.
Upgrade projects consist of several iterations and it is essential to accurately repeat all required steps for each. A missed or incorrect step could have serious consequences for the success of the project.
Close control of testing cycles of the upgrade are also key to its success.
ConfigSnapshot is able to identify existing customisations and present them in an easy to understand format enabling project teams to assess whether each individual customisation should be retained after the upgrade. This allows a comprehensive test plan for customisation areas to be established early in the project.
Further, ConfigSnapshot is able to determine the likely impact of the upgrade on each retained customisation showing each affected object referenced in the code and highlighting in the code itself each instance of the object. Development teams can scope and plan the work required much earlier than if they were manually checking each code item; saving significant time and reducing the risk that the work required greatly exceeds any initial estimate.
Directly comparing the pre and post upgrade application setups allows any changes or additions to be identified. Teams can quickly determine any actions that might be required to deal with unexpected effects and to plan effectively based on other changes, whether to implementation specific or seeded data. Project teams can identify new functions and programs introduced by the upgrade to determine which should be controlled and which users have inherited access so any necessary restrictions can be applied.
Several features are available to simplify managing any setup changes made, including:
ConfigSnapshot enables you to directly compare the setups of each iteration of the upgrade process quickly identifying any differences. The project team can assess whether any difference is expected or whether it indicates a step has not be completed correctly during a particular iteration allowing corrective action to be taken. This provides further quality assurance for the upgrade of the Production environment to minimise the risk of error.
ConfigSnapshot provides change tracking to allow all environments to be controlled; ensuring any modifications can be identified. This enables tracking both of any additional setups required for the upgraded version and during key test cycles to ensure any changes made are accurately captured.
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"ConfigSnapshot has been part of our team’s ‘tool kit’ since 2009. It is very powerful and yet simple to use. We use ConfigSnapshot on regular basis, it saves us a lot of time!! I would also like to mention that ConfigSnapshot has a strong and dedicated support team which is an added bonus. I highly recommend it."
Oracle Business Analyst, Industry: One of Australia's Largest Financial Services Brands
