Installations
And to a large extent it is.
Unless that program happens to hold all the information pertinent to your business and the patch doesn't go quite as expected.
What if it dies?
Or what if it corrupts all your data?
Now what you have is a very awkward and heavy paperweight on your desk instead of your electronic corporate entity.
When we are dealing with little installations like the next version of Internet Explorer or Bearshare, this is not a momentous event. But when it involves all your corporate records and customer information, the chance of failure increases the probability that you should probably be taking care of how you handle an upgrade or new installation.
What I am giving below is a medium to high level action plan that will serve to keep you as safe as is reasonable to expect for small to medium sized businesses.
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Planning
- Read all the information
- Read it again
- Check out the manufacturer's website for updated information and additional patches
- check the internet to see if other people have done this upgrade and what happened.
- Back up all your information
- Back it up again somewhere else (redundancy)
- Back up your operating system
- Back up your program files (as compared to your information and data files)
- Write out the steps that will need to be done (execution plan)
- Confirm who is going to be doing what if more than one person will be involved
- Plan a time for the installation when nobody is on the system
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Regression Testing
(1 day prior to actual installation/upgrade)
- Run some sample reports that you will be able to duplicate after the installation
- Run some sample reports from an historical time frame (3 months ago or more)
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Execution
(day of actual installation)
- Reread your Execution Plan
- Grab a coffee
- Shutdown your system to outside access (users and the Internet)
- Do whatever backups you are going to do
- Reboot the computer for a clean start
- Start the installation
- Finish the installation
- Reboot the computer (clear memory)
- Apply any patches
- Run reports exactly as you did in the regression testing section
- If the reports are not exactly 100% the same, you have problems.
- If the reports differ only in something small like a font change, this will probably not be serious, but still a consideration
- If everything checks out, do a full backup of your system
- Go home!
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