Have you applied any patches to ITSM 7.0.03 yet? If you have not, doing so will uncover every pitfall of customization for you, especially patch 007 and earlier. Try it on a snapshot of production (development or test server) and see what gets broken.
When I took my patch 006 system to 007 a couple of years ago, I had to build a long checklist of everything that had to be restored or re-customized while testing on development, then apply that checklist to production after applying the patch. Patch 008 and 009 (applied together) were a little less damaging, but still required building a checklist on dev and executing it on production after the patch. Some tricks helped, like applying the patch on dev, then migrating customized fields/forms back from production so that I wasn't overwriting any forms (which some of the patches DO). Then I was able to migrate the custom objects back to production from dev after applying the patch on prod. Make darn sure that you re-disable anything you disabled and copied to custom workflow; the patch may have re-enabled the original object, AND it may have made a change to it that you will need to add to your custom object! Any attempt to upgrade from 7.0.0x to 7.5.01 or 7.6 will be much worse, as whole subsystems were rewritten and some of your integration points/customization interfaces will have changed underneath you. We are making the jump to 7.6 from 7.0.03 a migration rather than an upgrade as a result, and we only made a limited number of customizations or integrations to Incident Management, People, and People Search. Every customization you make to ITSM has the potential to cause difficulty when the next patch comes out, and is even more likely to hamper an upgrade. That said, some customizations are essential to meet local requirements. Christopher Strauss, Ph.D. Call Tracking Administration Manager University of North Texas Computing & IT Center http://itsm.unt.edu/ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jim Coryat Sent: Monday, February 15, 2010 1:16 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Customization Management Info ** We are in our 3rd year of using Remedy, we have all the modules implemented from the ITSM suite and are finding the customers are wanting customizations partly due to our previous system was essentially a custom build. Part of the reason we went to Remedy and ITSM was to get away from the support cost of having a custom environment. Initially we developed our naming standards and development standards to follow to ensure consistency in the environment and follow the BMC standard for making customizations. Now that we are a little more mature in the product we are wanting to ensure we are still on the right track with what we are doing. If anyone could point to any whitepapers or be willing share experiences (good or bad) in the management of customizations we would be very interested and trying to glean more information. Jim Coryat Micron Technology Inc. ITIL v2 Practitioner Certified _Platinum Sponsor: [email protected] ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"_ _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Platinum Sponsor:[email protected] ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"
