There are various posts and videos showing the new features of 7.6 from a user’s perspective.

There are a number of areas that will affect support teams and they don’t get as much attention.

Here are a few of the most important ones where support staff will need to change their processes or learn new technologies:

• Installer manager – The installation software so any installation warnings are logged in new log files.
• Cognos for reporting – BIRT is still there but support staff will want to understand how to build/maintain Cognos reports and Cognos administration for more high level reports
• New log messages including improvements for leak detection and other logging enhancements to make it easier to trace activities/problems
• Crontask servers are now load balanced – crontasks can move between the JVMs between runs so more logs need to be checked – this directly affects custom crontasks that need to remember information between runs
• One of my favourite support changes is that the Release notes now include more details about the changes in each release including behaviour changes. This is really great when having to work with change managers to assess the impact of changes
• Greater use of the database for integrations e.g. using the database for integration error message – Reduced need to monitor/cleanup the file system although disk space monitoring will still be required

Learning about each of these areas will take time so set aside time to explore them. Deliberately create problem scenarios that you know can occur e.g. what happens if you don’t get the Security settings right for a new Cognos user?

I’ll highlight some of the new areas offering opportunities for support staff in my next blog posting.