Are you tired of the highly repetitive manual task of assembling and building packages to deploy changes? With the recent tools release of JD Edwards, Oracle provides the template for an orchestration to automate the building of packages. This enables customers to establish automation for their package builds, which will save the administrator valuable time on the recurring manual task of assembling and building packages to deploy changes.
OMW automation opportunity
With the release of tools release 9.2.5.3, Oracle has released an orchestration to automatically assemble and build a package. The orchestration is a template that customers can implement to automate this part of the change management process in JD Edwards.
The objects included in the package can either be individual objects, or they can be based on a project or project status.
It is great news that JD Edwards facilitates this process with an orchestration template. It is however important to realize, that you can’t use this orchestration to automate nor control the complete process of the technical JD Edwards change management and its different scenarios. You will still have to put time and effort in quite some manual processing, as well as in communication, when making use of the orchestration for package building and deployment within JD Edwards.
Manual interventions
There are different kinds of manual involvement required in different scenario’s when building and deploying a package.
Most importantly, a package can be automatically assembled and built, but the deployment still has to be done manually. The latter usually happens outside office hours, so that is where automation would also be desirable. Creating this automation is not straightforward, as it implies checking the enterprise servers are available for deployment and may include some post-deployment tasks.
Although different orchestration schedules can be setup and planned for each pathcode build to automate the package build execution, there are still parameters that need to be changed before every schedule runs. This prevents the schedule to be used as a true set-it and forget-it process. An example of a parameter that needs to be
Another task that still has to be done manually, is promoting projects to a different status in OMW to prevent the objects and projects to be included in the next scheduled build as well.
In addition, it will remain cumbersome to keep UDO changes that are specific to a change, aligned with the OMW projects of the same change.
So the automation of the package is basically what it describes: the automation of the assembly and the build of a package. But it’s not possible to completely automate the change management process.
Packman: the fully automated option
Forza Consulting has been offering the Packman solution for many years, not just to fully automate the assembly and build of package, but also to automate the complete life cycle management process in JDE.
Packman is a proven solution for JD Edwards change management, with comprehensive features and functions to facilitate and control this process. It is recognized and valued by a large number of customers and managed services providers in the JDE community.
Packman automates the change management process in JDE with a configurable workflow process. It covers both the build and deployment process. can be completely scheduled, selecting projects at specific statuses and taking into account different subtasks and still running processes. A dashboard enables you to control the whole process. In addition, different notifications and reporting make sure that changes get communicated and events can be assessed and tracked.
In addition, web initiated package builds and object librarian based OMW project promotions initiated from the web are not yet implemented by Oracle, until tools release 9.2.5.x. However, Packman already supports the starting and monitoring of package build from the web interface and the promotions of object librarian based OMW promotions, since tools release 9.1.5.x (this includes application release 9.1).
We’d like to inform you about Packman’s other functions that will help you with automating your package building:
Build and deployment:
- automatically deploy packages in a controlled way. This includes BSSV server deployment;
- automatically create package names according to your naming convention, including sequence numbers, sequence character, dates, etc.;
- automatically select projects into a package with the promotion of the project to a ‘pending’ status;
- create the package using a configurable template;
- build the package to a configured set of enterprise servers per pathcode.
Scheduling tasks and additional automations:
- integrate the package schedule into your E1 batch schedule, so the build and deployment will start when deployments are possible;
- temporarily pause or hold the package build flow and resume based on time, time period or manual restart;
- include executions of scripts in the execution of the package build flow for example to execute tasks between the build and the deployment;
- automatically generate/alter changed table structure with retaining your data;
- execute server manager tasks as part of the package workflow for example to restart enterprise server, AISservers after a deployment or to refresh the caches after a deployment;
- set operating hours to control the package build and deployment service windows per pathcode in which packman processes may execute.
Monitoring and aligning OMW projects:
- use the project dashboard to select, review projects based on a composite pages;
- start and monitor on demand packages from the project dashboard;
- initiate a new BSSV only package when BSSV objects are found in the selected projects;
Communication of changes:
- configurable notifications are sent to the admin, key user, project managers or users assigned to OMW projects based on workflow status and pathcode. Packman reports are attached to the notifications to inform project members about the Packman workflow;
- you can attach build and deployment reports and package build logs to the package dashboard for easy access from the E1 web interface.
In short: Packman offers a lot of functionalities that will help will save you a lot of time while building your packages. Are you interested in further automating your JD Edwards change management process? Contact us for a demo or trial license of Packman. Or do you want to read more first? Then visit JDEpackman.com.
