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[Aron Jurmu]

Hi – my company is upgrading from GP 2015 R2 to 2018.2.  We are looking into doing as much of this as we can ourselves, and have also reached out to our vendor for a quote on doing the upgrade.  

Does anyone have experience performing this upgrade?  Is if fairly straight forward?  I can handle quite a bit, and we performed our upgrade from 2013 to 2015 R2 with hardly any assistance.  Just wondering if this upgrade would be similar, or considerably more complex.  

Thanks for any input!

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Aron Jurmu
UPHP
Marquette MI
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[Beat Bucher]

Hi Aron,
Going from GP 2015R2 to 18.2 is straight forward pretty much.. I just did a full upgrade for a customer that went from 2010 to 18.2.1036.
A service pack was applied to GP 2010 to bring it to level 11.0.2390 and then went to 2015 (14.0.952) from which we jumped straight to 18.2.1036.
The important things are your 3rd-party ISV products to look for and test thorougly prior to the Go-Live, as they are the ones that can potentially cause you headaches. 
Don’t forget to backup all your customized Reports & Forms dictionaries, if you have some.

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Beat Bucher
Business Analyst, Dynamics GP SME
Montreal QC/Canada
@GP_Beat http://www.gp-geek.com
Montreal QC GPUG Chapter Leader
MBS MVP (2015-2018)

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[David Musgrave]

Hi

I would recommend backing up your customizations both by backing up the custom forms and reports dictionaries and .VBA files (> 4k, 4k ones are empty) AND also as packages via customization maintenance window.  Export from Customization maintenance using one package per customization or if that is not possible, click on the column headers to sort by type and then product. Then export one package for each type for each product. References should be exported separately.  This gives you the best chance to upgrade or at least re-install customisations.

I would also recommend using GP Power Tools – Database Validation tool (part of the Database Tools module) before you upgrade to ensure your system is in good order. This tool is the result of 13 years on the Microsoft support team and is designed to look for, find and fix all of the common issues that cause upgrade problems.

While making suggestions, if you have VBA, I would look to use GP Power Tools – Developer Tools module to replace all your VBA code with triggers and scripts that are more reliable, easier to create/maintain/upgrade/deploy and work on the web client too.

GPPT Portal: http://WinthropDC.com/GPPT

Regards

David

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David Musgrave MVP, GPUG All-Star

Managing Director
Winthrop Development Consultants

Perth, Western Australia

http://www.winthropdc.com
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[Sally Higgins]

Hi Aaron!
It is pretty straightforward, but if you’ve applied the year end service pack for GP2015 then you will need to do a step to GP2016 first. If not, then it shouldn’t be a problem!

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Sally Higgins
efs consulting, inc
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[Blair Christensen]

Just did that Upgrade a little over a year ago.  With upgrades, you have to look at your environment to evaluate the complexity.  I suggest starting by looking at your .SET file to see how many products are listed: how many are core modules and how many are add-ons?  The next factor is the number of companies, as each company upgrade takes time.  After that, look to see how many integrations you have and how many custom forms/reports.  If you have a limited number of modules (including third-party add-ons) and few or no customizations, you may have a straightforward upgrade that will only take a few hours to complete.

Once you’ve evaluated your environment, I strongly recommend setting up a copy in a test environment and performing the upgrade on it.  That will alert you to any unforeseen issues, give you a good idea on how much time the actual upgrade will require, and allow you to test the third-party add-ons and customizations.  I also strongly recommend taking notes as you do the test upgrade as it gives you a plan for how to carry out the real thing.

If you want to send me a private message, I can send you over some of the scripts I use to check on database size and program compatibility to warn me of any potential issues there.  I did a class on Upgrades at Summit last year you’re welcome to review called In the Trenches: Upgrading Dynamics GP.

Good luck and let me know if I can assist!

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Blair Christensen
Database Administrator
Oppenheimer Companies, Inc.
Boise Idaho GPUG Chapter Leader
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[Cecile Dinh]

Hi Aron,

I just finished upgrading from GP2015 R2 to GP2018.2 in UAT environment.  Willing to share my notes if you need.
Very straight forward.  Just one hiccup in SQL Server disk space as tempdb tends to grow during the upgrade.

Goodluck!

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Cecile Dinh
GP Admin at ARC (Airlines Reporting Corp.)
GPUG Chapter Leader – Washington, D. C.
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[David Morinello]

We did a double hop last June ourselves. Tested in 3 lower environments first. We have a lot of very large companies and for our test servers, I talked management into more RAM for the GP SQL server, from 32 GB in the first two test environments, to 64 GB in STG, and 96 GB in Prod. It cut the upgrade in half to under 15 hours (I did say we were large). SQL does like RAM. Production went very smooth with the quietest cleanest upgrade, the way I like it!

Make sure you not only test your 3rd party plug-ins, if any, but also allow for time for users to get used to any GP and 3rd party feature changes.

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David Morinello
Senior Dynamics GP Systems Architect
Ascend Learning, LLC
Leawood KS
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