Specifications

Lotus Redbooks Wiki – IBM Lotus Notes and Domino V8.5 Deployment Guide
47
the upgrade.
It is strongly recommended to plan your upgrade in small steps:
•
Give a higher priority to the applications that must be fixed before the upgrade and assess the
resources and efforts necessary for this task.
•
Focus your efforts on the issues that are easy to fix, while avoiding the introduction of new features
• Upgrade the application that are based on standard templates, notify the users and assess if
training would be necessary for them
It is strongly recommended NOT to upgrade applications and application servers if they are already having
issues. Fix the existing issues before you attempt an upgrade.
When you do application testing, the key is to do it intelligently. You do not need to test every single
application in your organization. Leverage your application inventory and the information you've gathered
earlier, based on complexity, importance, and audience. Then, build a sample list like the following example:
•
Mission-critical applications
•
Applications used by executives
• Complex/Custom applications relying on backend or third-party software
• Applications based on the same standard template
It is critical to document your findings and to inform the application owners. if possible, leverage existing
tools to assist you in your testing.
To guide you in your efforts, use your priorities and test results:
•
Find the most important items that must be fixed before the upgrade
•
Build a small team to test low-priority applications to identify unforeseen issues after the upgrade
If you have not done it already, install a Domino 8.5 server in your test environment dedicated for application
testing. This server will be used for acceptance testing. After every successful application testing, it is
recommended to archive copies of new templates.
If possible, it would be good to have a pre-production / quality assurance server where pilot users can
actually use the upgraded application, just like in production. Make sure you document and resolve new
issues encountered. It is recommended to wait until the upgrade is fully completed to implement new
features, in order to avoid too many changes implemented at the same time.
Third party applications
Like many organizations, you may have third-party applications in place in your environment, such as anti-
spam, anti-virus, backup, and monitoring. When reviewing your Domino environment, it is important to fully
understand the third-party applications you have in your environment.
Things to consider while assessing the use of third-party applications in your environment include:
• Which third-party applications you have in place
•
Versions of each third-party application
• Dependencies for each third-party application
• Interaction between Domino and third-party applications
There may well be other concerns, depending on the nature of the third-party applications you have in place.
Because of the variety of applications and vendors, it is important to work closely with the teams supporting