Scenario: Upgrading a customized case management solution

If your organization uses a customized case management solution, you need to have an upgrade plan, which ensures that your customizations aren't overwritten from one release of the case management solution to the next. This scenario shows you one way to upgrade a case management solution, compare the new and the customized solutions to identify differences, and then use the resulting report to update your customized solution.

An IBM business partner, PartnerA, builds a case management solution for the insurance industry. PartnerA names the solution InsuranceSolution and bases the solution on a standard case solution that IBM provides. After InsuranceSolution gets great reviews from industry analysts, PartnerA sells its solution to a number of customers, including a large insurance company, CompanyB.

While using InsuranceSolution, CompanyB realizes that it needs to customize the solution to meet the specific requirements of its organization. In particular, CompanyB wants to add a property, a role, and a task, and it wants to add a choice to an existing choice list.

PartnerA advises CompanyB to make the additions to a copy of InsuranceSolution, not to customize the original solution itself. So CompanyB makes a copy of the solution, gives the copy a different name (InsuranceSolution_CompanyB) and prefix, makes the desired additions to the copy, and then deploys the copy.

When PartnerA releases a new version of its case management solution, CompanyB imports it. The new version (InsuranceSolution2) overwrites the previous version (InsuranceSolution). As a safeguard, CompanyB makes a copy of its own customized solution (InsuranceSolution_CompanyB) and archives it. CompanyB then compares InsuranceSolution2 with InsuranceSolution_CompanyB, updates InsuranceSolution_CompanyB based on the reported differences, and deploys the newly revised copy.