Hi,

Can anybody describe the initial steps of migrating from Baan IVc4 to BaanV? We have BaanIVc4, Oracle 8.1.7, Solaris 8. How shall we convert our data to new version?

Thanks in advance

You are running Baan IV on solaris 8? Interesting. I am still waiting for them to come up with a porting set for my 5b.

Anyway..

It sounds to me like you are good on your OS and backend, so all you need to worry about is creating a new tablespace in Oracle, install the new Baan, and moving your data from the old to the new one.

Baan provides tools for these type of migrations. I have never used them myself and have heard mixed rumors about their price/quality ratio. Maybe others can share their experiences with Baan migration tools on the board here. I have a renewed interest myself facing a 5b -> 5c upgrade in the near future.

There are alternatives however. Identify your key data tables and use any means (Oracle, exchange, long-legged bleech blond temps) to move the data from one tablespace to the other.
Whatever way you chose, prepare for a bucket of fun, cancel your vacation and always remember:

If at first you don't succeed.....destroy all evidence that you tried.

From Baan IV to Baan V the software hase undergone some (interesting!) conceptual changes. So migration won't be just a technical thing like migrating data.

If you want to take the best from the new software version, you should set up a migration project covering the functional area first. Otherwise you will get stuck with Baan IV functionality in an Baan V environment.

Probably you will have to redefine business processes, because you can do things easier with Baan V than with IV and so on. When this has been done, then, and not earlier, go for the data migration procedure and evaluate the migration tools if the fit the functional needs.

Uli

We have written customized tools for migrating Baan IV data to Baan V. The following features are available:

1. Conversion of Master Data from Baan IV to Baan V.
2. Conversion of Transactional / Historical Data from Baan IV to Baan V.
3. Use of transformation rules to convert data from Baan IV to Baan V.

Our migration toolkit has been used by 3 customers already, to successfully migrate data from Baan IV to Baan V.

e-Emphasys is the other name I was trying to think of - they do have successes out there.

Shasbe - any light you can shine on who's tool that is would be appreciated - is that the official Baan Migration Tool, as written by you guys, or is there another tool that Baan is referring too (the documentation I read was from Baan.)

Good luck in the upgrade )

This tool has been developed by e-Emphasys Technologies. I am not sure if Baan has a data migration tool that will convert all data from Baan IV to Baan V by applying business and transformation rules.

You may want to check with Baan, if you are looking for a standard Baan Migration Toolkit offering.

Lodestar has developed comprehensive table mappings between Baan IV.x and V.y along with a Migration Toolkit. We have have a proprietary Upgrade Methodology (AOC - always on course) and I can email you a copy of our Migration Best Practices whitepaper.

We have 3 customers testimonials available.

Best Wishes,

Rocky Sanghvi
Lodestar
rs@mylodestar.com
(215) 499-3962

Visit us at: www.mylodestar.com

There is SW + Migration Strategy + Effort Estimation Utilities developed by Baan Company for this purpose of Migration. They exist in the "bc" package.

The latest Migration software for Baan is I believe to SP11 on Baan5.0b. A similar one exists for Baan5.0c too.

This software is primarily divided into the Migration tool components (for load balacing, UI, table selection, handling multiple bshells etc) and the application components(which are primarily one DLL per destination table).

So if you are migrating from Baan 4x to BaanERP series, and we are looking at Bussiness Partners for example, the you would have one DLL that would get all the relevent information from 4x, prepare the data file and dump it into the data folder.It is easy for us users to actually see what are the criteran used to populate the BPs in ERP.

This strategy, assuming you have the source code available with you, has a lot of advantages for adopting the existing 4x customizations. Also, it enables the Migration "tool" to inteligently select and dump the tables of our choice.

To upload these data files into the BaanERP environment, the native database loader is used and this data is avaliable in ERP.

TO describe all the capabilities and goodies of this tool would take a long time, hence I have detailed very briefly. Hope this gives all of you a broad picture of the available SW from Baan.

regards,
Srini