Migration SAS CI Studio 6.5 to CI 6.6

[gorata]

Hi Guys,

We are planning to migrate from SAS CI 6.5 to CI 6.6 coming weeks.

Following set up:

RHEL Environment
SAS M6 already installed in place
PostgreSQL DB

Do you have already some experience with migration to 6.6 or some suggestions resp Guide steps which we have to follow.

Any ideas , suggestions are very appreciated!
Thanks a lot and best regards!

[carol_c]

Hi there,

Not sure which of the CI6.6 products you currently have - and that will significantly influence the approach, effort needed and duration of an upgrade. 

My advice would be to reach out to your local SAS Professional Services team to work with you to assess the current environment and put together an upgrade project with you. It may be your organisation can do a significant proportion of the work; alternatively you may benefit from the Professional Services team being heavily involved, It will all depend on your particular scenario.

One good activity to start whilst you engage your local PS team... start review the current campaigns and associated objects (export definitions; campaign definitions etc) to identify any campaigns or objects that are no longer active. The less old, and unused, content you migrate the easier and cleaner it will be

Hope that helps

[ravindrrapaal]

I hope as of now no client is moved on this 6.6 specially for SAScI and RTDM. We are also in initial phase of analysis for upgrading. As new version is supported by HTML not by flash

[Jidong]

Hi @gorata , do you update to 6.6 successully? is there any specail hotfix needed ?

We also plan to update our MA and RTDM to 6.6, it is really a hard task for us, even answer the question from high level management :" what is the benifit for updating to 6.6?"

"we have risk and cost, no benifit for business, but no better choice for us" ~ they are unhappy for this answer

[Dmitry_Alergant]

Happy or not, there is not much choice - Flash-based version will just stop working (and possibly stop being supported to? not sure about it) after Dec 31. The benefit is business continuity.

Functional improvements exist both for MA and RTDM but are relatively minor (though to whom how); Both MA and RTDM improvements a listed in the What's New section in the documentation (Users Guides) as available on the Support portal...

[Jidong]

Yes, you are correct. Since Adobe will end support of Flash Player on December 31, 2020.
 
Google and Microsoft are eventually planning to remove Flash completely by the end of 2020.

I work on SAS products more than 15 years, for this first time, I must say: we no better choice...

[gorata]

Hi,

We Stil not updated yet. It’s planned in a couple of weeks.
But I will keep you posted.

Business Benefit- I will say not really .. Just an flash-html5 necessary technology substitute .
And small visual add ins based on html technology.

Just my view on it..

Best regards

[Jidong]

thanks for your reply, sas consultant have a demo for us for the new 6.6 UI , it looks similar for 6.5.

our CRM manager tell me it looks like a "ancient style" 🙂

I will also keep you posted...

[JOHNB2]

We have actually performed the 6.6 upgrade now.  There were a few issues but they were mainly linked to our platform.  There are some 'bugs' in the 6.6 version of SAS CI Studio and SAS are working on those with urgency.  But our users on the whole are happy with the HTML5 version and we are now ready for Flash removal.

[heysangeeta]

Hi John ,

would you be able to help us wth the steps required for the migration . What are all things need to be taken care of ?

Thanks

Sangeeta 

[JOHNB2]

There is a migration guide which is available form SAS and you will need to request this from your SAS account manager as it is not available on the web site.  You need to ensure your platform is fully up to date.  We had to add more storage to cover backing up our platform config files before the upgrade and add extra memory to SASServer1_1.

Be aware that so far we have discovered 4 'defects' within the html5 version of SAS CI Studio which is impacting our users.

[ravindrrapaal]

Thanks for sharing. Although during the process of validation for M6.6.
As a business user i am seeing some changes with functionalities in Treatments, like End date in treatment, must be set additional in customer page as Max_value option else it doesn't allow to change anything on existing treatments. So Just a request if any one has complete release note from SAS for all such minor changes which are going to impact the functionality can be shared with us would be a great help.

[ravindrrapaal]

One more Bug we have found in SAS RTDM - for the decision campaigns if we are having more than 150 process box then over all diagram gets corrupted and if any Batch simulation is replicated along with that it also creates issue.
1-point for 150+ nodes is accepted as bug in SAS CI and hope some release soon .
it could be better if they can some how merge with M6.6

[jcawesome]

Hi @ravindrrapaal ,

You must have crazy RTDM flows to have more than 150+ nodes in one diagram. Just curious on your work around for this kind of problem. Did you move some of the nodes into subdiagrams? Or just try consolidating some of the nodes into a SAS process node instead?

Regards,

JC