Director Migration and System Snapshots

Body

The migration of Gentran Director for Windows from one machine to another is a methodical, step by step process that is easy to do and well documented.

Customers can run into problems when they stray from the process, especially when they employ a "parallel processing" mindset commonly used with other applications.

A migration needs to be a clean cut-over from the old system to the new, as having both systems on line and responding to incoming data can cause unecessary problems when both machines respond to a single inbound document, or one machine processes a document while the other machine processes a different document, and control numbers become out of sequence.

It needs to be remembered that once a snapshot is taken of the old machine, no further processing should be done by it.  
The old machine should either be shut down or the network connection terminated either by cable disconnect or system command.

If a migration snapshot (the process of copying transaction directories and the database) is done and additional data is processed on the old machine before its retirement, the new machine could run into duplicate control number issues as it begins to process data.

If this situation does occur it can be remedied by manually increment all control numbers on the new machine for the partner (interchange, group, document) much like you can do if you were to lose a check book.  
If your last known check was 456 but without your register you don't really know if there is a 457 and 458 out there, you can order new checks starting at 1456 and know that you will not duplicate a check from the previous book.
Notify the trading partner in case they use sequence checking on their end.