Cumulative Updates Workflow

MiguelOliveira

Hi,

I come to you not seeking your opinion about the Cumulative updates process update.

With the fast release of cumulative updates my company finds itself having to manage many updates in a very short period of time.
When you have customers going live at different times you easily have situations where each customer has different hotfixs installed.

I would like to know if anyone has found a straightfoward solution or method to this or basically does what we are doing so far which is:

For the Application Updates: to install only the KB, in a cumulative update, that we know are causing problems in the new customers.

For the Plataform Updates: install the latest update in the new customers. Analyise old customers if it is worth installing the platform update.

Best regards,
Miguel Oliveira

vremeni4

Hi,

This is a big issue at the moment for all partners. The latest versions of NAV (NAV 2013, NAV 2013 R2) have so many issues , it is almost impossible to keep up with Cumulative updates (Every 20-30 days).
NAV 2013 is on CU14 and NAV 2013 R2 has CU7.
Additional there is a Data loss issue in NAV 2013 R2 in all cumulative updates before 6 .

In other words it is a bit of nightmare the current situation.

Our approach is to install the latest platform fixes on all clients, as it is relatively a quick process.
(Just copy Dll's and executables)
To keep different platforms woudl create a chaos on the development server.

For Application fixes, (changes in NAV code, e.g. tables, pages, reports) we only apply them if customers complain about a bug.
We check first on the list of application fixes and if the bug is fixed in the latest CU.
If it is, we explain the process to the customer, they usually agree, to merge objects and apply the fix.

I hope this helps.

Thanks.

MiguelOliveira

Thank you very much for your reply and sorry for the late response.
It did help.

At the moment we are following the same approach for the Platform fixes.

For the application fixes we were trying to have a proactive approach before a project starts.
We analyize the latest Cumulative Update and try to see which KB article can prevent problems for that customer. After that we would apply only those fixes.
For example in Cumulative Update 8 we would install only the ones we think would be needed (KB 359367 and KB 358772 for example).
This of course is not easy because for each customer we have to take time for a developer to do this and it is not easy to sell "Database Preparation" to the customer.

Best regards,

daborg

Implementing a source control solution such as TFS (Team Foundation Server) will allow you to more easily and quickly apply the complete CU object updates to your customers. Through branching and merging in TFS we are able to update 2 vertical solutions each month in a mater of a few hours.

MiguelOliveira

daborg,

How do you use TFS? do you have an external app that links with TFS and NAV like iFacto or O.M.A.?

Marije_Brummel

TFS is part of Visual Studio Online, which is free until 5 users.

http://markbrummel.wordpress.com/2014/0 ... velopment/

Should work for most NAV projects and saves the time of setting up your own TFS, remote access etc.

MiguelOliveira

Thank you for your feedback Mark.

I agree with your view although I believe that it is possible to work with an Object Management Solution in NAV for the most part.
For me the big problem in Object Management in NAV is mainly the fact that I cannot have a respository for all of our customers.

Unfortunatly TFS does not work seamlessly with NAV and requires some maneuvering to have a speedy development workflow, ence my question before.

You're post however has given me a few ideas and I will be trying VFS online + Powershell.