Maximo Upgrade Tips: Order of installations in Multi-Industry Solutions/Add-Ons scenarios

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Hello!

As I usually test some Maximo Upgrade scenarios for some different products and releases, I am bringing today another tip when performing upgrades from Major Versions (6.x to 7.1.x or 7.1.x to 7.5.x).

This tip is related to the order of installation of the Industry Solutions/add-ons in the step of preparation for the upgrade process. To be clear, you have to understand that it is just a step of the whole upgrade process, which you can learn fully by reading the Upgrade  Guide).

If you are upgrading your Maximo Asset Management version 6.x to some 7.1.x version and it includes more than one Industry Solutions or add-ons 6.x (Ex.: Maximo for Service Providers, Maximo for Transportation, Maximo Asset Configutation Manager, etc), in the step where you have to build the 7.1.x folder to perform the upgrade, which is done by the installation of the 7.1.x offers, a best practice to avoid errors during the process is to install first the old 7.1.x versions followed by the new 7.1.x versions.

For example: In order to upgrade a Maximo Asset Management 6.2.8 which includes Maximo for Transportation 6.3.1 and Maximo for Service Providers 6.1.2, the best practice when creating the 7.1.x folder to perform this upgrade process is first installing Maximo 7.1.1.12 (and the last hotfix of this version), then installing Transportation 7.1.1 + Transportation 7.1.1.1 (and the last hotfix of this version) and finally, installing Service Providers 7.1.2 (and the last hotfix of this version).

Notice that Service Provider 7.1.2 release number is major then Transportation 7.1.1 and 7.1.1.1 release number, and for that reason we are letting Service Providers as the last one to be installed.

The reason to follow this best practice is that Industry Solutions share between them some internal components. If you apply Transportation 7.1.1 lastly, after installed Service Providers 7.1..2, it could be overwriting a newest version of these shared components with an oldest, that should work fine for Transportation 7.1.1 but maybe failing later, during the updatedb, for Service Providers.

Remember that Transportation and Service Providers are used as examples here, since this best practice should be followed with whatever different Industry Solution and add-ons that you have, when you have more than one in the same environment.

The same approach should be adopted when you are trying to upgrade an environment with more than one IS/add-on from 7.1.x to 7.5.x versions.

Jean Carlos.