I see your point, yes that is surely something you could risk, but with the whole concept of overlays, you would hope that the occurrence of "hey where is that functionality gone" would minimize to near 0 IF AND OLNY IF the patch implemented had no new functionality (in which case it should not be called a patch but a minor version upgrade at the very least).
One would hope that with a patch only non working components or components working with some sort of an identified bug, are the ones that are resolved. If that means an original piece of workflow was touched which was modified, overlays should take care that the modification made before should not just disappear. So the users should technically not be at that crossroad of where is my missing functionality with a patch upgrade. Life is very beautiful in theory. It's usually the reality that is scary ugly so I do see your point to an extent :-) Joe _____ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Jason Miller Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2014 12:23 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Re: Patching question.... ** Lol! I tend to view it opposite :-) ITSM patches (more so SPs) are what keep me up at night. That is where the functionality that is exposed to your user will be affected. Less often an AR System patch/SP changes behaviors your users see. Most customization conflicts will be with the app not AR. It is after an ITSM patch/SP your users will say "hey, when I did X in a Task Y would happen. That doesn't happen anymore." SP5 does add have some considerable changes to AR and FTS however I don't think many would be noticeable to the average user. Maybe somebody would notice "Wow! I can copy to new again. I haven't been able to do that since we went web-based." For contrast... About a year and a half ago we upgrade our ARS 7.5 p1 system that is HD6 and everything else custom to ARS 7.6.04 SP4. There were some duplicate index errors with workflow and a few other things that needed to be taken care of so we had to run it against a non-production system a few times to work out the issues. Once we had a successful run without errors we scheduled production. We never had users do any kind of testing. My team validated nothing major broke and just did the upgrade. In Feb we upgraded our ITSM 8.0 system to 8.1 and we did rounds and rounds of testing with users. We started the project in Oct. Admittedly I feel politics and what not dragged out that process but it was just a .1 upgrade and there was all kind of hate and discontent. Sure it was more than an SP upgrade but since it was the apps everybody noticed. I am starting to workout the upgrade of our ARS 7.6.04 system that I first mentioned to 8.1 SP1. We are going to follow the same process we did last time for that environment. One morning people will login and it will be ARS 8.1 and likely not even notice a difference. Warren, This sounds very rushed. Proceed with caution. You didn't specifically state but it sounds like your production "needs" to be patched in the next few days. I am trying to figure why there appears to be such an urgent need to patch ITSM? Do you need the latest patch or apply the latest service pack? If you need the latest and greatest that would be SP5 (not sure if there is patch for SP5 yet). Jason ** I think the ITSM patches are not a big deal - it won't majorly change the way your application behaves as a result of the application patch. It's the core AR System patches that needs more caution. I have not heard of any DO's or DON'Ts for ITSM patches for the release of the ITSM application you are talking about. Joe _____ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Warren R. Baltimore II Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2014 3:51 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Patching question.... ** We are about to patch our ITSM Suite. Windows 2008 running on MS SQL 2008 ARS 7.6.04 patch 5. We are currently on ITSM 7.6.04 Patch 1. We have just been informed that we need to patch this in the next few days bringing it up to the most recent ITSM Patch level (7.6.04 patch 4 I believe). Does anybody have any insight into things that we should look for? Our installation is not to heavily modified. We do have a tie in with Kinetic for service requests, but we don't expect too many issues there. Any insight would be most appreciated! Thanks -- Warren R. Baltimore II Remedy Developer 410-533-5367 _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years"
