Planning the Upgrade

In the planning stage, you can review the upgrade documentation for information about expected behavior, new features, deprecated features, compatibility between versions, and requirements for preparing your production environment. When you finish the review, you can then conduct a site survey to identify the infrastructure, applications, and custom configuration settings. Finally, you can test the upgrade on a subset of your data before committing to the full upgrade.

The following diagram shows a high level view of the phases in an upgrade project.

Overview of stages to upgrade: 1 - Assess content in source environment 2 - Create test environment 3 - Deploy content 4 - Test upgraded applications 5 - Move to production.

When planning your upgrade, ensure that you

  • gather the necessary information, such as the required inputs and expected outputs for each phase
  • install the new software in a test environment and deploy the content to the test environment
  • test the upgraded applications to ensure it run as expected

Deployment and testing is usually an iterative process. Assess any differences between the source and target environments to determine actionable activities. Move to your production environment when you are satisfied that the deployed applications meet your business requirements.

Before you begin

Ensure that you have the skills available, either internal or using external resources. Also consider the hardware that you will need before you begin.

Procedure

  1. Review the documentation.
  2. Assess applications in the source environment.
  3. Perform a trial upgrade, which includes the following tasks:
  4. Move to the production environment.