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I am an Epicor and Crystal Reports Newbie. I have started working with these programs a month ago, when I was hired. I am still trying to figure out how you know whether you are trying to customize a BAQ, Dashboard, etc. How to know where/when to make a new BOM report and such. If anyone out there has some tips, I would greatly appreciate it. I feel slightly intimidated by the program but am also determined to learn my way through it.
Thanks!
Toohey! Welcome to the world of Epicor!
Although I'm sure in the past couple of months you have learned the ropes, here are some extra tips to keep you moving forward:
That is not part of the system functionality
In order to keep costs under control, err on the side of not making system customizations to meet all user requests. You will quickly see that adding a quick field as a customization to a form isn't just the 5 minute change it seems like. You will soon be creating several custom reports and dashboards to report off of this field, and the cost of the change soon outweighs the benefit in many situations. As you become more familiar with this, try to balance ROI against the high cost of Epicor system customizations. It is best to lead with "that is not part of the system functionality", and when they push the issue, treat even small changes as controlled projects.
BAQ and Report Changes
Inevitably, you will need to customize the system's BAQs and Reports to meet your business needs because the standard system isn't designed exactly for your business.
Epicor has standard BAQs that start with 'z' and many reports. You should avoid editing the stock BAQs and reports, because they will be overwritten with each patch of Epicor. Instead, copy the standard distribution BAQs and rename the copies using your company initials as a prefix. Similarly, you want to create a custom reports folder separate (or within) the standard reports folder where you place all of your modified reports. You can then link the menu to the BAQ Report or Report Data Definition, and link the report style to the location of your new custom report on the server.
Customizations
Maintenance of customizations has a high long-term cost if you do not have in-house developers. A critical piece of advice here is to make sure all of the code, be it in C# or VB, is thoroughly commented. Even if you're generating code with a wizard, do yourself a favor and put a standard header into the script of every customization that includes the first date of the customization, when it was modified, and detail everything that was changed (especially if the change was a property change or a field addition that does not clearly appear in the script). Customizations have been known to fail for unexplained reasons, or create bad script that is not editable through the standard Epicor interface, and there may come a time when you have to rebuild the customization from scratch using only this change log and things you can clearly see in the form. You should save your customizations with some obvious standard naming convention (something like ORDER_ENTRY_CSR_YYMMDD), and make sure you update all menus to reflect the newest customization for the purpose you're using it. We also export our customizations for archival, just in case something should happen. Another note here is if you do not increment the customization name on a change and then update the menu items, users will still be use locally cached versions of the page until they clear their client cache. So, I always recommend incrementing. Another note on customizations and every custom exportable object in Epicor is to do yourself a favor and export them to either a source control system or a file repository so that after you deploy a faulty customization, rolling back to the previous version is quick and painless.
BPM Directives
As you're probably aware by now, BPM directives are powerful tools which can be used to update tables and prevent users from making terrible business decisions. A note on these is similar to customizations - comment comment comment!
Consultant Use
If you are using external consultants to create BPMs or Customizations, mandate distribution of commented source code that can be understood internally by one of your team members.
I hope this helps!
Source: 4 yrs experience as an Epicor ERP programmer
I would like to add that you should develop any Customization, BPM or Baq/Dashboard in the test system because any error on a solution can stop users from perform their job. Also, you can use a powerful tool called tracing options that helps you to recognize where to place the BPM directives. Further more there is a huge Epicor forum where you can post questions and a comunity of consultants , developers and users will answer your questions, and advise you about best Epicor practices, and it is completely free. You need to register on it; this is the link www.e10help.com.
About 6 months ago we started using AccuRev with JIRA for our source control and issue management, but there are some obvious problems, like a lack of security, everyone can pretty much do anything, like lock and unlock stream and change streams belonging to anyone else and on top of it the default email trigger that ships with Accurev is not very good.
Accurev allows for pre-create, pre-keep, pre-promote and server-post-promote phase and I've decide to use those to help me manage some of the wild west of Accurev development. I'll stick with PERL since that is what they used for the original trigger and will post mine here later, but before I start, I was wondering if someone maybe already had this problem before, how did you solve it and if you could post some of your triggers here or ideas for triggers and what can be managed through them, it would be greatly appreciated.
Disclosure, I've worked for AccuRev for almost 7 years. It's mostly by design that AccuRev starts off in an open development model. The goal is to enable whatever process you as an organization want to adopt. Some companies flourish in this wide open model, others have very stringent requirements and lock things down tightly using a combination of GUI features and the triggers you mentioned.
The sample triggers we ship with the product provide a solid framework for advanced process security. For example, one of the default clauses in the server_admin_trig.pl is that you can't change someone else's workspace. Typically, companies will work with AccuRev at initial implementation time (or any time later, or on their own) to determine what level of customization, if any, is needed for these triggers.
Sounds like you have the requisite Perl experience to setup whatever you need, but can you give an example of some behavior you'd like to control, and perhaps I can post a sample. As a sidebar, please feel free to contact me using my username # accurev dot com and I'm sure we can find some way to assist.
Regards,
~James
Since Accurev 5.7 there is a very good example server_admin_trigger.pl in the distribution with all the commands covered and described. Once we upgraded to 5.7, getting the admin trigger done just the way I wanted was a breeze.
I am working with a client who has an ERP system in place, called M1, that they are looking to make custom changes to.
I have spent a little bit of time investigating the ERP system in terms of making customizations. Here is a list of what I have found with regards to custom changes:
Custom changes cannot be exported/imported. There is an option in the M1 Design Studio, however, they always appear to be disabled... I tried everything and I couldn't find a mention of it in the help documentation.
You can export a customizations change log (CSV, XML, Excel, HTML) that provides type, name, location and description. In essence, it is a read-only document that provides a list of changes you made. You cannot modify the contents of this log.
Custom form changes made, go into effect for all data sources (Test, Stage, LIVE). In other words, there does not appear an ability to limit the scope of a form change.
Custom field changes must be made in each data source (Test, Stage, LIVE). What's odd here is that if add a field in Test, adjust a grid to display it, subsequently change to LIVE, it detects that the field doesn't exist and negates the grid changes.
I'm unable to find documentation indicating that this application supports version control.
sigh
....
So...
How do I manage changes from an SDLC: ALM methodology and tools standpoint?
I could start by bringing in a change request system to manage pending and completed customizations. But then what? How should changes me managed and released? Put backups of application under source control and deploy when needed?
There might not be a good answer to this question since I'm unable to take advantage of version control and create a separation of environments, but I figured I'd ask in case anybody has had similar experience or worked with M1.
I take it from the lack of answers in two months that your question is unanswerable. SDLC is something you could write a textbook on, or read a textbook on, and not know enough about your environment, other than that probably in order to get hired at your shop, "SDLC" would be a bullet point on the hiring qualifications.
I have no experience with M1, but I am assuming that you're going to have to ask your peers at work for their ideas, because it sounds like you're asking a vertically closed (your shop, your tools, your practices) question that has no exact technical answer.
As for best practices; I suggest you investigate best practices outside your M1 ERP silo and apply them as makes sense to you.
The company I work for also uses M1 erp. We have similar issues regarding version control of the customisations. From what I can tell, all customisations are stored in the M1DD database. You could backup a copy of this database before any major development work as a basic revision control system.
I am familiar with the issue of all changes becoming immediately active in all datasets. This is particularly annoying when you are making changes to a commonly used modules as you don't know how live data will be affected during the development process. One technique I have found useful is to surround untested code with an if statement so it is only executed when I am logged in.
If App.UserID = "MYUSERNAME" Then
'new code here
End If
I would be interested in hearing how you solved this problem.
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We have written a software package for a particular niche industry. This package has been pretty successful, to the extent that we have signed up several different clients in the industry, who use us as a hosted solution provider, and many others are knocking on our doors. If we achieve the kind of success that we're aiming for, we will have literally hundreds of clients, each with their own web site hosted on our servers.
Trouble is, each client comes in with their own little customizations and tweaks that they need for their own local circumstances and conditions, often (but not always) based on local state or even county legislation or bureaucracy. So while probably 90-95% of the system is the same across all clients, we're going to have to build and support these little customizations.
Moreover, the system is still very much a work in progress. There are enhancements and bug fixes happening continually on the core system that need to be applied across all clients.
We are writing code in .NET (ASP, C#), MS-SQL 2005 is our DB server, and we're using SourceGear Vault as our source control system. I have worked with branching in Vault before, and it's great if you only need to keep 2 or 3 branches synchronized - but we're looking at maintaining hundreds of branches, which is just unthinkable.
My question is: How do you recommend we manage all this?
I expect answers will be addressing things like object architecture, web server architecture, source control management, developer teams etc. I have a few ideas of my own, but I have no real experience in managing something like this, and I'd really appreciate hearing from people who have done this sort of thing before.
Thanks!
I would recommend against maintaining separate code branches per customer. This is a nightmare to maintain working code against your Core.
I do recommend you do implement the Strategy Pattern and cover your "customer customizations" with automated tests (e.g. Unit & Functional) whenever you are changing your Core.
UPDATE:
I recommend that before you get too many customers, you need to establish a system of creating and updating each of their websites. How involved you get is going to be balanced by your current revenue stream of course, but you should have an end in mind.
For example, when you just signed up Customer X (hopefully all via the web), their website will be created in XX minutes and send the customer an email stating it's ready.
You definitely want to setup a Continuous Integration (CI) environment. TeamCity is a great tool, and free.
With this in place, you'll be able to check your updates in a staging environment and can then apply those patches across your production instances.
Bottom Line: Once you get over a handful of customers, you need to start thinking about automating your operations and your deployment as yet another application to itself.
UPDATE: This post highlights the negative effects of branching per customer.
Our software has very similar requirements and I've picked up a few things over the years.
First of all, such customizations will cost you both in the short and long-term. If you have control over it, place some checks and balances such that sales & marketing do not over-zealously sell customizations.
I agree with the other posters that say NOT to use source control to manage this. It should be built into the project architecture wherever possible. When I first began working for my current employer, source control was being used for this and it quickly became a nightmare.
We use a separate database for each client, mainly because for many of our clients, the law or the client themselves require it due to privacy concerns, etc...
I would say that the business logic differences have probably been the least difficult part of the experience for us (your mileage may vary depending on the nature of the customizations required). For us, most variations in business logic can be broken down into a set of configuration values which we store in an xml file that is modified upon deployment (if machine specific) or stored in a client-specific folder and kept in source control (explained below). The business logic obtains these values at runtime and adjusts its execution appropriately. You can use this in concert with various strategy and factory patterns as well -- config fields can contain names of strategies etc... . Also, unit testing can be used to verify that you haven't broken things for other clients when you make changes. Currently, adding most new clients to the system involves simply mixing/matching the appropriate config values (as far as business logic is concerned).
More of a problem for us is managing the content of the site itself including the pages/style sheets/text strings/images, all of which our clients often want customized. The current approach that I've taken for this is to create a folder tree for each client that mirrors the main site - this tree is rooted at a folder named "custom" that is located in the main site folder and deployed with the site. Content placed in the client-specific set of folders either overrides or merges with the default content (depending on file type). At runtime the correct file is chosen based on the current context (user, language, etc...). The site can be made to serve multiple clients this way. Efficiency may also be a concern - you can use caching, etc... to make it faster (I use a custom VirtualPathProvider). The largest problem we run into is the burden of visually testing all of these pages when we need to make changes. Basically, to be 100% sure you haven't broken something in a client's custom setup when you have changed a shared stylesheet, image, etc... you would have to visually inspect every single page after any significant design change. I've developed some "feel" over time as to what changes can be comfortably made without breaking things, but it's still not a foolproof system by any means.
In my case I also have no control other than offering my opinion over which visual/code customizations are sold so MANY more of them than I would like have been sold and implemented.
This is not something that you want to solve with source control management, but within the architecture of your application.
I would come up with some sort of plugin like architecture. Which plugins to use for which website would then become a configuration issue and not a source control issue.
This allows you to use branches, etc. for the stuff that they are intended for: parallel development of code between (or maybe even over) releases. Each plugin becomes a seperate project (or subproject) within your source code system. This also allows you to combine all plugins and your main application into one visual studio solution to help with dependency analisys etc.
Loosely coupling the various components in your application is the best way to go.
As mention before, source control does not sound like a good solution for your problem. To me it sounds that is better yo have a single code base using a multi-tenant architecture. This way you get a lot of benefits in terms of managing your application, load on the service, scalability, etc.
Our product using this approach and what we have is some (a lot) of core functionality that is the same for all clients, custom modules that are used by one or more clients and at the core a the "customization" is a simple workflow engine that uses different workflows for different clients, so each clients gets the core functionality, its own workflow(s) and some extended set of modules that are either client specific or generalized for more that one client.
Here's something to get you started on multi-tenancy architecture:
Multi-Tenant Data Architecture
SaaS database tenancy patterns
Without more info, such as types of client specific customization, one can only guess how deep or superficial the changes are. Some simple/standard approaches to consider:
If you can keep a central config specifying the uniqueness from client to client
If you can centralize the business rules to one class or group of classes
If you can store the business rules in the database and pull out based on client
If the business rules can all be DB/SQL based (each client having their own DB
Overall hard coding differences based on client name/id is very problematic, keeping different code bases per client is costly (think of the complete testing/retesting time required for the 90% that doesn't change)...I think more info is required to properly answer (give some specifics)
Layer the application. One of those layers contains customizations and should be able to be pulled out at any time without affect on the rest of the system. Application- and DB-level "triggers" (quoted because they may or many not employ actual DB triggers) that call customer-specific code or are parametrized with customer keys) are very helpful.
Core should never be customized, but you must layer it in somewhere, even if it is simplistic web filtering.
What we have is a a core datbase that has the functionality that all clients get. Then each client has a separate database that contains the customizations for that client. This is expensive in terms of maintenance. The other problem is that when two clients ask for a simliar functionality, it is often done differnetly by the two separate teams. There is currently little done to share custiomizations between clients and make common ones become part of the core application. Each client has their own application portal, so we don't have the worry about a change to one client affecting some other client.
Right now we are looking at changing to a process using a rules engine, but there is some concern that the perfomance won't be there for the number of records we need to be able to process. However, in your circumstances, this might be a viable alternative.
I've used some applications that offered the following customizations:
Web pages were configurable - we could drag fields out of view, position them where we wanted with our own name for the field label.
Add our own views or stored procedures and use them in: data grids (along with an update proc) and reports. Each client would need their own database.
Custom mapping of Excel files to import data into system.
Add our own calculated fields.
Ability to run custom scripts on forms during various events.
Identify our own custom fields.
If you clients are larger companies, you're almost going to need your own SDK, API's, etc.
We have a web application which contains a bunch of content that the system operator can change (e.g. news and events). Occasionally we publish new versions of the software. The software is being tagged and stored in subversion. However, I'm a bit torn on how to best version control the content that may be changed independently. What are some mechanisms that people use to make sure that content is stored and versioned in a way that the site can be recreated or at the very least version controlled?
When you identify two set of files which have their own life cycle (software files on one side, "news and events" on the other, you know that:
you can not versionned them together at the same time
you should not put the same label
You need to save the "news and event" files separatly (either in the VCS or in a DB like Ian Jacobs suggests, or in a CMS - Content Management system), and find a way to link the tow together (an id, a timestamp, a meta-label, ...)
Do not forget you are not only talking about two different set of files in term of life cycle, but also about different set of files in term of their very natures:
Consider the terminology introduced in this SO question "Is asset management a superset of source control" by S.Lott
software files: Infrastructure information, that is "representing the processing of the enterprise information asset". Your code is part of that asset and is managed by a VCS (Version Control System), as part of the Configuration management discipline.
"news and events": Enterprise Information, that is data (not processing); this is often split between Content Managers and Relational Databases.
So not everything should end up in Subversion.
Keep everything in the DB, and give every transaction to the DB a timestamp. that way you can keep standard DB backups and load the site content at whatever date you want if the worst happens.
I suppose part of the answer depends on what CMS you're using, and how your web app is designed, but in general, I'd regard data such as news items or events as "content". In other words, it's not part of your application - it's the data which your application processes.
Of course, there will be versioning issues between your CMS code and your application code. You could manage this by defining the interface between the two. Personally, I'd publish the data to the web app as XML, which gives you the possibility of using XML schema to define exactly what the CMS is required to produce, and what the web app should expect to process.
This ought to mean that most changes in the web app can be made without a corresponding alteration in the rendering of the data. When functionality changes require this, you can create a new version of the schema and continue to make progress. In this scenario, I'd check the schema in with the web app code, but YMMV.
It isn't easy, and it gets more complicated again if you need additional data fields in your CMS. Expect to plan for a fairly complex release process (also depending on how complex your Dev-Test-Acceptance-Production scenario is.)
If you aren't using a CMS, then you should consider it. (Of course, if the operation is very small, it may still fall into the category where doing it by hand is acceptable.) Simply putting raw data into a versioning system doesn't solve the problem - you need to be able to control the format in which your data is published to the web app. Almost certainly this format should be something intended for consumption by software, and therefore not usually suitable for hand-editing by the kind of people who write news items or events.