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I spent this weekend upgrading our version of Dynamics (which is a financials software that we use for our bookkeeping) from 9.0 to 10.0. This is a pretty robust program and Microsoft bought it from Great Plains about 3 years ago. It’s gradually losing the Great Plains references and migrating to Dynamics alone — sort of trying to make custom boxes for this odd fitting piece of software that attempts to be all things to all people. But I digress.
Our Service Partners had done a test upgrade on an old backup of ours and determined from that how long we would be down and what surprises there were in store for us once it was complete. They made this nice little step-by-step spreadsheet for us to follow.
Well, I’m sure you know where I’m going with this — the first thing out of that custom box, the upgrade went south. What was SUPPOSED to take a maximum of 8 hours (and who generally speaking in their right mind would normally TAKE 8 hours to perform an upgrade like this I ask you??) ended up taking 18 hours — and that was just to do the initial upgrade! We still have to install the service packs, then re-run the Dynamics Utilities package. That will probably entail us being down for another 8 hours or so.
The first bug we encountered required us to uninstall Microsoft.net 2.0, then reinstall it, then we had been instructed to put the service pack (there are now 2 service packs for Dynamics 10 out there) before loading the software — well, 3 hours later, we removed the service pack and the installation at least launched then.
Evidently the Microsoft gurus saw fit to almost completely change the table structure of the database and since there are literally THOUSANDS of tables in this database, doing that on a DB that’s 40+GB in size was a really big hairy and LONG ordeal. Although it wasn’t finished with that first part of the upgrade, I went home some 32 hours after I got there on Saturday for some much needed sleep. We’re still making changes to client machines today as we have some customizations that needed to be installed and then there’s the tax program which is a 3rd party program for figuring sales taxes that has to be installed on certain users computers.
We may be unique in the grand scheme of Dynamics users since ours is a 24/7 business, so being down for 18 hours straight is a pretty big thing for us. Thankfully it was a slow weekend business-wise — I don’t know if we could have stood it if we had been covered up.
I know it isn’t easy writing upgrade programs for software that’s as intricate as this is, but I can’t fathom that testing on larger databases wasn’t done prior to releasing this so that those users would have some idea of the true impact to their business of upgrading to this newer version. I sure hope all the new stuff it’s supposed to do is worth it.
