Planning an Upgrade to Siebel 7 > Planning an Upgrade >

Upgrade Best Practices

Here are important best practices to follow when planning an upgrade.

• Review System Requirements and Supported Platforms, Release Notes, and Siebel Alerts related to upgrades to verify your upgrade path. These documents are available on Siebel SupportWeb at http://ebusiness.siebel.com/supportweb/
• Gather all relevant documentation that describes the current implementation, for example, requirements documents, design documents, and architecture context diagrams.
• Do not start a new development effort until after the new version has been rolled out. This is especially important when you are upgrading from Siebel 5.x or 6.x to Siebel 7.x. There are significant user interface differences between the two versions, and you must change existing functionality before moving on to customized functionality.
• Implement a change management program. For example, communicate roll-out dates to users, schedule training, allow adequate time for users to adjust to the enhancements, and provide a process for end users to provide feedback to the project team.
• User adoption is critical to a successful upgrade. Provide access to a test environment that allows users to become familiar with the new version of the application, and provide end-user training on the upgraded application.
• Consider database layout in your planning. Plan to tune the database and database server for the upgrade, because settings and parameters for upgrade differ from those required for OLTP.
• If you are migrating multiple languages from a prior version, plan extra time (one to two weeks) for the repository merge process. The expected merge time may increase with the number of languages in the repository. You also might need to plan for additional installation-related tasks.
• If you are installing new languages that were not part of your prior repository, do not add them until after the repository merge process occurs. This will minimize the time required for the merge and the number of conflicts that you may encounter. For more information, see the Siebel Server Installation Guide for the operating system you are using.
• For DB2 UDB platforms, consider increasing the size of your tablespaces prior to going live. Make sure that your custom tablespaces are large enough for upgraded Siebel 7 tables by using a Siebel upgrade utility called tblsize. For information about this utility, see the Upgrade Guide for the operating system you are using.