How to document customized stuff and make it release proof

[Bastien]

Hi there,

I am currently struggeling on how to document my BO environment.

I have a basic installation document, a customize document
and everytime a service pack is installed i go through these documnets to see what may changed.
Example: After every service pack the HTML settings in the Web Intelligence are resetted to standard which means no HTML allowed.

This procedure is very time consuming and also can miss something.
I also noticed that the parameters created APS get touched by the service pack so these need to be compared to. This is the most ineffective thing to do. And also there is possibiity to make too much errors.

What is your way of fool porrf documentation? How do you versionize your customized changes?
How do you document in-between tweaks of parameters? A checklist?

I just want to discuss different methods.

thank you
kind regards
Bast

[JohnBClark]

I don’t know of a good way to address what you are asking about.
I have a series of Word documents that I update every time there is an upgrade. I have a separate document for each of the Business Objects services where I document the default configuration and then have a section for our configuration. I highlight in yellow the items that we modify so they are easy to spot. If I make changes in between updates, I enter the date by that line and what was changed.

There are some things, like configuration files that I script with PowerShell. I have a source file and then I backup the file on the server before copying the source file to the server. This hits more than just the service settings within Business Objects but it has been very helpful and has reduced the time to run the actual upgrades.