As you probably have heard that End of Support on IBM Case Manager 5.3.x (CM) has been extended until April of 2022. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be planning your upgrade or migration today. Once you upgrade everything will continue work just as it did in CM 5.3.x. The CM engine is moved to the BAW server in the new release, but all of the databases remain as they were. And you’ll have expanded capability of IBM Business Automation Workflow (BAW), like the benefit of using the full spectrum of Business Automation Workflow capabilities to manage and deploy unified process and case solutions by using the new common Workflow Center.
But one step at a time. When you upgrade to Business Automation Workflow, your case data and navigator configuration will be preserved. No migration is necessary for those. You’ll keep your Content Platform Engine (CPE) and IBM Content Navigator (ICN) and their databases. The main steps in the upgrade process will be: 1) Upgrade CPE. 2) Upgrade ICN. 3) Install BAW 4) Augment your Case installation with BAW. It sounds simple. You’ll end up with something like this:
A lot of CM customers today are running on WAS 9.0 for their CPE and ICN. So, the first question they ask is do they really need a separate WAS install for BAW? The answer is yes. BAW is only supported on WAS 8.5.5, so it will need its own environment.
The second question I get asked is whether that means additional licensed PVUs are required to have all those components running separately. IBM FileNet Content Manager and IBM Content Navigator are Supporting Programs according to the BAW License Agreement, so if you have the resources to run BAW that same server with the other two there will be no additional license costs.
What’s next? Assuming you’ve backed up your databases and applied all the fixes to ECM and ICN and brought them up to current level, the next step is to install and configure a BAW deployment environment without the ICN and CPE features enabled. The Typical BAW Installation Option is the simplest and quickest and works well for many customers.
You’ll need to install the Workflow Center as well as the Workflow Server. Remember both of those are licensed parts and Workflow Center is almost always counted as a production environment. You can save license costs if you can run both in the same VM.
After installing BAW you’ll need to configure security. Since you already have security set up on CPE your configuration for BAW should look similar. After BAW is installed and configured you’ll enable the external CPE and ICN and hen you’ll run the BAW Case Configuration Tool, which installs BAW Case plugins into the external ICN.
And of course after you’ve got everything stood up and it’s been tested you’ll want to remove access to the old Case Builder app, usually by removing it. When all of that is complete you should have a happy BAW environment with full support for your existing Case applications.