An interesting statistic is that in a recent organizations migration from FRx to MR, 80% of the reports migrated properly with very little manual intervention. A further 10% required moderate intervention and the last 10% required re-design due to the fact that row linking was used in FRx.
Pre-Migration Clean Up in FRx
- Backup your Sysdata folder
- Backup your Specification Set(s)
- Decide which FRx reports and associated building blocks you wish to migrate to MR
- Prepare your FRx data for migration
- Remove/rename any building blocks with 'spaces' at the beginning of its ID
- Delete any unneeded reports and building blocks
- Delete any companies not in use, including the sample companies
- Associate any building blocks not being used with a Report Catalogue (otherwise, it will not be migrated to MR)
- Ensure that any rows currently used with a row linking design in FRx are attached to a Report Catalogue, as they may not convert properly based on my experience. (Note: Any reports with Reporting Trees that are referencing multiple rows will not be migrated properly as row linking is not currently supported. Having said that, it is possible to reference multiple dimensions using the row links in a single row format, but I have seen some issues with this design migrating properly.)
- Remove any .G32 files not required
- Compact the FRx database
- Set each FRx company as default
- Ensure all GP2010 companies have the same segment names. This step is only required if you have a multi-company installation and you have the same or similar segments/dimensions in each company's chart of accounts. FRx' segment approach did not look at the actual names of the segment (i.e. Account, Department) but rather its position/length. MR does look at this information and a typo or segment identified as 'Segment 1' could botch your entire migration!
- The documentation on this is readily available and quite good.
Remember, running the MR wizard is generally a one-time event, as each time you run it, it will remove all the MR building blocks.
Cautions:
- Rather than muddying your production FRx environment, I would recommend a separate FRx installation, preferably pointing at your GP2010 data as this comes in handy for validating that reports are working properly.
- Remember to review the current MR readme information for information on what does not migrate (i.e. security) as well as to understand the functionality differences between FRx/MR (i.e. row linking, account sets)
