While we were busy writing the last blog, IBM dropped a bombshell and stunned everyone by announcing the sale of WebSphere Commerce to HCL along with 6 other stand-alone software products in the marketing, security and collaboration segments for $1.8B. It was reported that IBM divested this part of its software portfolio to strengthen its focus on artificial intelligence, cloud computing and other high-value growth segments, such as cybersecurity. This is a huge deal, but fear not, we will let the dust settle and then tackle it in our next blog… shall we call it The Fall Out?

In our last blog, we talked about your target version but as it turns out, your source version is equally important. Your source version is the version you are currently on, so we feel compelled to write about this before moving on to Part 2 – Infrastructure.

Beware of the First Gotcha!
So this is the first “Gotcha” we’ve run into. One of the IBM pre-requisites for a successful V9 Migration is the fact that the customer must be on V7 FEP8 at a minimum, meaning that if you are not on FEP8, you must get to FEP8 first before V9. Well, there is more. Not only do you have to be on V7 FEP 8, but you must also enable ALL of the features in FEP8. Why?

Here’s a quote from IBM PMR (Problem Management Report) on the ticket we submitted: “From V8 onwards, feature enablement is no longer a concept that exists. In V7, features were shipped out in different FEPs and had to be manually enabled. However, in V8 and V9, the features that are found in Commerce are automatically enabled and built in from the beginning. There is no way to disable them as they are part of the base code. These features that you are seeing in V7 are a part of V9 and hence need to be enabled so that the schema changes will reflect the features correctly.”

So in a nut shell, when you enable ALL the features in FEP 8, there are database schema changes generated and when you run the migration scripts, they will fail if they don’t have access to these database schemas.

So then the next step is to Go Live with your FEP 8 to make sure your store works fine while you are moving on with V9 migration tasks.

We were not excited when we discovered this Gotcha, but you will be glad we did!
Enabling ALL the features in FEP8 and Going Live with FEP8 will affect your schedule and budget so please do not ignore it.

We wish you success every step of the way in your V9 Migration journey.

For help with a successful migration journey, email the Zobrist Consulting Group at sales@zobristinc.com or call 877-962-7478.