Have you ever had the opportunity to work in a ramp-up project? Well I know that there are a lot of people out there who think one should wait some time after a new release is out before doing an upgrade.
The company I am working for at the moment planned an upgrade to 7.0 first, but for some reasons (some of the new features which were already introduced at teched 2009) we decided to go with the brand new system and tried to join the ramp-up process. Fortunately we succeeded.
But before I start reporting about the whole process, I will tell you a bit about the history of our BW.
The development/implementation of the whole system started with 1.2B up to the 3.5 of today. As the system was used for 2 companies of which one separated about 2 years ago, our system was left with a lot of unnecessary stuff we cannot get rid of because of all the well known reasons you can imagine. Another thing is the use of yearly cubes to limit the data of the cubes in order to have a better reporting performance. I know this is pretty common in all BW implementations and of course, sometimes you have other criterias to separate the data in different cubes. So this was the point were the idea was born to use the new SPOs and to summarize -- the idea was born to redevelop the whole system from scratch.
This meant, that we had to go thru the complete process of blue printing and defining specs as well as an overall develpment manual. The discussions we had as well as the questions that came up during the process while defining the architecture as well as the conventions (standardization) will be described in the next blog.
