BSI upgrade to version 8

We need to do this upgrade as well. I have just done the esp 7 and am about to start testing to see if everything works after all that patching.

Thanks for sharing that info. Since this is an environment patch, what will your testing strategy be?

Will you be testing full system functionality or only portal screens and their functionality?

Thanks for any assistance on this. Please let me know how your testing goes.

Well as far as Lawson environment, servers etc I am the only technical person here. I will be trying to get the users to do as much testing as possible.

I just got ESP7 installed and I haven't done all the patches yet to get TF80 going.

If you run into issues or bad documentation please let me know.

Thanks

--JayR

I did get BSI 8.0 working. A few issues here and there.

"issues" - that is sounds scary to me.

Could you let me know what you ran into? Our implementation folks did the BSI hookup so we are not too well versed.

Any insight would be very appreciated.

I have BSI 8 working in are DEV environment. We did do a small payroll run and it appears to have worked. It will have to be tested some more before going to production. The issues we ran into so far are with the installtion. They are really not that bad other than a little frustration. For instance some of the required patches have been replaced with newer patches. When doing the WebServerSetup I had watched the online demo and it looked to me like you just select the web server. If you haven't done this step before you actually select create new. This is actually in the docs but I didn't really catch it. Because of the size of this patch and that I haven't done something like this before we created an extra test environment. There is some docs on doing this but I think they left out a spot or two where things needed to be repointed. This is not something we will have to deal with when going to are regular dev or going to production so I am not too worried about it. There is a patch for the portal smoke test that I had a little trouble finding. Basically issues like this.

Do you know if any of the functional areas have ran into problems yet in their testing? We will be doing this whole process in the next couple of months.

No issues on the functional side that I know of. We have a kick off meeting next week so I am hoping to get more testing from them fairly soon.

Jay,

I assume when you referring to the web setup piece you're talking about the new process for patching with ESP 7 and using the java installer or is that somehing to do with the new BSI option for the client/server and browser version?

It sounded like you were referring to the new Lawson Java installer required for environment patches but I wanted to make sure.

We've upgraded to BSI 8 on our dev server and things at the moment are working quite well, however we're not doing payroll in any states that require locator data or reciprocity rules either.

Yes I was talking about the java installer. We did run into one other issue where Time and Expense(PSA) broken. We need to put back some changes in index.htm and servenv.js that PSA needs. We still need a lot more testing.

We did our ESP and MSP upgrade and we then we started preparing for BSI 8.0 and found that it was an all or nothing. Lawson confirmed that we had to either finish the BSI upgrade or remove BSI 8.0....

We have unstalled BSI 8.0 and are planning to complete the upgrade in 2 weeks. I think it will be fine but we really want to do some testing before we activate BSI 8.0

can you elaborate on the "all or nothing" statement?

Elaborating...

All I know is that we completed the upgrades to Lawson to "prepare" for BSI 8 and had some problems with the two systems communicating (upgraded Lawson and BSI 7). We contacted Lawson and BSI and were informed that when we ran one of the Lawson CTP's it made it so that Lawson would ONLY talk to BSI 8.0. We were advised to back it out until we were ready to install BSI 8.0. We are installing BSI 8 this coming week. Sorry I do not have more details ...

Shane

I think that I may be able to explain about Lawson not wanting to work with TF70 after your upgrade. I ran across this when I recently put a patch into TEST. I rec'd the instructions below from GSC which worked. I asked them HOW on earth we were supposed to know that the patch was going to update our system to indicate that we were on TF80 and that we'd have to go in and change it back to TF70...the GSC person said that we would not have known that and the only reason he knew it was because he had just got done troubleshooting this for a client and found this out.

here are the instructions that we apparently have to do for each patch now UNTIL we do finally move over to TF80.

Go into Message definition (msgmnt)
Go to the Category field and enter PRTFX. Use your arrow keys to move down to message 700.
Change message 700 from TF80 to TF70

We are having issues with TF 8.... Our state unemployment taxes are calculating incorrectly. Right now we are trying to find where the problem is coming from and will be opening a ticket with GSC this afternoon.

Shane

What state are you having problems with? We are also in the middle of testing and ran into and issue with Arkansas UT.

We are having problems with Wisconsin, Arizona, Illinois and Nevada - all calculating at 2.7 percent which is way to high. I am starting to think that it has something to do with our upgrade process....

Upgraded BSI to version 8 in TEST
Ran calculations but the TEST data was too old and we were getting all kinds of retro calculations
Took backup of PRODUCTION (up-to-date information - however production is BSI 7)
Uploaded the PRODUCTION data to TEST....

The strange thing is that all other calculations seem to be accurate -

The Unemployment is calculating incorrectly for everyone and some 401(k) limits are stopping at the wrong amounts - appears to be associates with catchup contributions to 40(k).

Shane

We are faced with the same dilemma of having to do a technology upgrade from 8036 because of TF80 right at the end of the 8.03 lifecycle (we're moving to LSF9 early next year). This is incredibly bad planning by Lawson and appears to be intentional. We have only one environment instance and I am very concerned about the risk to our production ProcessFLow, Smartnotes, Self Service, IOS and Portal which will need 8037 patches as well. Lawson GSC also told me that only TF80 will be supported for their HR year end programs so we will be put at risk if choose not to upgrade. Has anyone tried to run TF80 without upgrading to ESP7 or upgrading to Environment ESP7 without putting on all the other updates for Pflow, LSN, IOS and Portal?

You are aware that the ESP7 was released 11 months ago. This whole TF80 ordeal has just reinforced a policy that I tried to enforce for the last 2 years: keep as current as possible with ESP's and MSP's. If a company has a strong testing process and stays on maybe the second most current version, they should have very little problem upgrading in a month or two.

You are correct, ESP7 is not something that was just sprung on the Lawson community however the requirement of ESP7 for TF80 only became apparent to us when read the TF80 prerequisites. My intention when we upgraded to ESP6 was to stay on it until LSF9. Normally our policy is to apply upgrades when they provide some value or there is a compelling business need. In this case I am pressed to find any immediate benefit to my company provided by ESP7 or TF80. I do not know the internal differences, but I can't imagine why a technology upgrade is needed for TF80. Lawson's position is they do not want to support multiple versions, the decree has come down and we suffer the aftermath.

Beverly
Was this in your test or production environment? With 6.0 to 7.0 you could switch back and forth by that msgmnt setting. What did Lawson mean and all or none. Can you not switch back and forth since they use different data sets.

Shane
Do you recall the CTP patch that you had to back out. We will soon be upgrading and if I know the patch I will avoid putting it in.

Joseph
I would suspect that the advantage rests in the loss of support on a product.
When my previous company lost support when upgrading to 8.0.3 then they paid 5000.00 dollars a month for support. The last 2 months they dropped it and prayed.

We would never get into a unsupported situation. I'm going to have to bite the bullet and do the tech upgrade for TF80 before December and hope it doesn't break anything in PFlow and Self Service. BSI just quoted me $18,000 per month to continue TF70 bulletins after 12/31 - a real bargain!!!