Tips for Preparing for Infor Patch Bundles

For Infor Cloud customers, Infor periodically releases patch bundles that keep their cloud applications up to date. There are typically dozens (or hundreds) of patches applied during these bundles, to all the Infor applications hosted in the cloud. This can be an overwhelming prospect for users and IT staff who are tasked with testing and validation during these patches.

Here are some quick tips for preparing your organization for a patch bundle:

Preparation

• Release notes: Infor always provides release notes on the patch bundle that they are implementing. These bundles are cumulative, so the notes on Lawson for instance, will describe ALL of the CTPs that are available for your version of Lawson. So, to make it more manageable, compare your last bundle’s release notes to the current one, and determine which patches are actually going to be applied. Then, save off the html files for those patches and review them.
• Security: Occasionally the bundles will impact Lawson Security, and even more frequently they will implement new forms/fields/tables/columns that need to be secured. Run some security reports before the bundle so that they can be compared to the same reports after. Also, search your html release notes for any tokens that will be added, and determine if your organization needs to secure them.
• Reports: Run reports or queries for data validation, but also search the release notes for database changes, and make sure that you are ready to update any reports that are impacted by those changes.

MSCM

• Certificate: If you own MSCM, it is almost always going to be updated as part of the patch bundle. There is often an issue with the certificate after this update. Either the certificate is no longer valid, or it wasn’t generated during the patch. After the update, make sure you go directly to the CAB file location and that you see a valid certificate there (it’ll be named like your server). If you don’t see the file, or if you get security errors when trying to connect, open a ticket with Infor letting them know you think your cert is not valid.
• CAB files: It is best practices to delete all your CAB files from the handhelds and reinstall them after these major updates.

IPA

• Interface validation: There is a high probability that one or more of your IPA processes will be impacted by the patch bundle. It is important to test every single interface end-to-end.
• IP Designer: The IP Designer version MUST match the Landmark/IPA version exactly. So, after a patch bundle, you WILL have to download a fresh version of IPD.

Testing

• What to test: You are most likely going to need to test everything. Daily, weekly, monthly, and annual processes should be included in your testing.
• How to test: Provide users with test scripts for each function, and have a central location for users to log the results. We like to use Jira as our central repository for testing.

Validation

• You can use LID to validate data counts. You should also compare pre-update reports to post-update reports in all applications, including security.