Migration from Metastorm BPM 7 to 9

Jerome_Pearce

The support for version 7 of Metastorm BPM is nearly at an end. Many customers have version 7 systems. Many even have version 6 systems still running. These will probably need to be migrated to Metastorm BPM 9. As well as allowing continued support, this allows supporting platform software that also has run out of support life to be discarded in favour of newer supported software.

 

The real problem many are facing is working out how to manage this. As a provider of Metastorm BPM services and solutions for 12 years, we have a performed large number of migrations between Metastorm BPM versions. In recent years, these have all been conversions from Metastorm BPM 6 and 7 to Metastorm BPM 9.

 

Migration to Metastorm BPM 9 is not as simple as previous versions. Effectively, the platform itself has been completely altered. Although Metastorm did a remarkable job of making the Designer and Client look and work at least similarly to previous versions, under the hood it is a very different beast. Because of this, and to allow a staged migration, the system cannot be updated 'in situ' as before, but must be migrated to a new system.

 

This migration is a two-part migration. Firstly the code is migrated, and then validated and fixed to work in version 9. Then the data itself can be migrated. When complete, this can then all be tested and fixed as needed. This is not a simple process. If tackled correctly, it should be successful. If it is not, you can waste a lot of time, effort and money fixing mistakes that have been made.

 

In this article we outline some of the concepts that you need to consider, and how you can plan for your successful migration. In our next article in this section, we will discuss the available alternatives.

Migration from Metastorm BPM 7 to 9