Best practices for managing the dev/test/prod environnements

Hi,

Do you have some good practices to share about the governance for managing different M3 environments (Dev/Test/Prod and even more ..) ?

How to do you transport some configuration or settings from one environnement to another ? Do you do it manually or with using some tools ?
How do you refresh the data of a test environment from the data of a production environment?
Is-it possible to erase totally or partially data from an environnement ? If yes, how do you proceed ?

Thank you for sharing

Regards

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Legacy Contributor

Hi Dens,

It really depends on what platform you are working on.

Unfortunately I do not have any experience with managing environments on smart office.

However in the Cloud Environment you can actually export and import M3 configurations with great ease. In the Administration tools in M3 there is a section called "Business Engine Data Management". Within this section you can choose a combination of Tables, Companies and Divisions to export.

For Importing configuration we use the Import tab to overwite and clear the existing environment.

In terms of managing each environment, we have a "golden" company setup in our DEV environment which is purely for config only. there are no transactions. Whenever we want to do a data refresh to another environment we will backup this golden company and then overwrite the target environment with the updated configurations.

Once this is done with will then use the smart data tool to bulk import master data into the refreshed environment..

Hope this gives you a rough idea on how to maintain the environments.

King Regards,

Qasim

Denis MARETTE

Thank you for your feedback. It's great!

I will analyze the different leads you gave me. This corresponds to the information I wanted to collect to enlighten me on what might be possible to consider.

At first glance, you seem to indicate that it is possible, even in the Cloud, to act in a targeted way on this or that element. I was afraid that it was not really possible to do this. And whether it is at the level of reference data or at the level of parameter tables.

For additional information, I was only talking about the Cloud context.
Today, my colleagues with a strong expertise in On-Premise used to be able to access tables and even databases more directly and therefore had habits or automatisms that are perhaps no longer conceivable in a Cloud environment.

When you say you want to do a backup/recovery of your company, which is a kind of core-modele in my opinion, how do you do it? Do some operations require the intervention of Infor or can you do everything on your own?

Legacy Contributor

Hi Dens,

I'm glad I could be of some help.

Originally when we were on the smart office client, we have a 3 party do all of our environment refreshes. this was a major issue as our data refreshes were based around the availability of the party. Since moving to the cloud environment I have taken the responsiblity for the data refreshes that happen at my workplace. which has now been over a year and a half.

In regards to your question about backup/recovery and how we operate. We do not get Infor involved with any of our refresh processes. Its that straight forward they are not needed.

When it comes to backups/recovery - as part of refreshing the environment/companies I am able to choose what Tables i would like to export. Once I have choosen them I then choose what Company/Division from. this creates a zip file of all the selected tables and the data held in each table.

my naming convension consists of the {Environment}_{Company}_{Date format(YYYYMMDD)}.

One thing to bare in mind is that some tables that are shared across the environment and not companies cannot be exported and imported. for example CRS021 - Sorting Options. this is something you will have to maintain across all your environment.

hope this helps.

jason-billing

Do you happen to have a list of programs you maintain manually? I realize it may not be a complete list, but would be a start.

Denis MARETTE

Hi Qasim,

In order to use the Administration tools in M3, did you need to install the Cloud File Transfert Client software on a machine ? or does it work without that component ?
"Enterprise Connector" is already installed and I don't want to introduce a additionnal non mandatory component that could bring some problems in my actual configuration.

Thank you for your advice

Legacy Contributor

Hi Dens,

In order to use the Administration Tools in M3 you need to have the Security role "M3BDP-Administrator" assigned to your user within the Mingle user management section of Cloud.

You can access the Administrator tools without the need for the CFT tool however when it comes to exporting configurations between environments then it is required.

As we have multiple environment, we have a didicated server for our TST and PRD environment, each has the CFT and EC tool installed.

Hope this helps

Denis MARETTE

@qasimaslam

Do the tools in the Business Engine Data Management menu perform the imports like an API (so with some integrity check intelligence) or is it more of a "rough" database operation without much consistency check?

If it's the second case, isn't there an order to respect in the import chronology or precautions to avoid having a database with inconsistent content?

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