IBM FileNet P8, Version 5.2.1            

Traditional application migration model

A typical organization divides its infrastructure into several deployment environments. An application in different stages of its lifecycle moves through these environments.

Traditionally, an organization might have some or all of the following deployment environments. The size of the organization and the complexity of its infrastructure can determine which of the following environments are used: The more deployment environments that are used and maintained by an organization, the more important it is to create a process for the deployment environments that saves time, reduces errors, reduces risks, ensures similarity among the environments, and reproduces problems reliably for troubleshooting and resolution.

Many organizations use at least three of these environments: development; user acceptance, testing, and quality assurance; and production. For example, developers create applications in the development environment. Then, the application moves to the user acceptance, testing, and quality assurance environment for various types of testing. If a problem is found during testing, the problem can be fixed and tested directly in the user acceptance, testing, and quality assurance environment. After all testing is complete, the application can be deployed to the production environment. The changes to the application must also be deployed into the development environment so that the application is synchronized in all three environments.

In addition, the user acceptance, testing, and quality assurance environment in the example is used to test, capture, and automate the configuration steps that are required to support the application. One major component of the configuration is the LDAP structure that is used for user authentication. The test environment uses the same LDAP structure as the production environment. This similarity of the test and production environments enables the testing, application documentation, and automation of configuration steps, including LDAP configuration, to be used directly in the production environment.

Within this example, the user acceptance, testing, and quality assurance environment plays a vital role. This environment enables the creation of an automated and repeatable deployment process for the application into any of the deployment environments, particularly into the production environment. The keys to creating this deployment process include the following tasks:
As the example shows, the creation of a well-defined, repeatable, bidirectional process to ensure the accurate migration of applications to various deployment environments is critical. The following list of practices are not required, but they are best practices for the creation of an application migration model in a FileNet® P8 system:


Last updated: October 2015
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