Lessons Learned from a SmartConnect Upgrade

A customer recently installed SmartConnect on a new server, upgraded, then imported their existing SmartConnect maps into the new instance.  Doing it this way caused a lot of additional work.  Such as:

• Double-quotes (“) or single quotes (‘) in migrated maps’ scripts were occasionally replaced with a question mark (?).  This doesn’t happen with every quote character; and I wasn’t able to see a pattern to the errors.  We had to validate every task to check for the problem.

• Schedules don’t migrate unless you move the SQL database. Our customer has approximately 50 maps and had to set up the schedule for each map manually.

• Custom script namespaces did not get transferred to the new server, and there was no warning that they were missing.

To avoid the issues above, I would instead recommend the following SmartConnect upgrade steps:

• Install your current version of SmartConnect on the new server.

• Take a backup of the SmartConnect SQL database from the old server.

• Restore the backup of the SmartConnect database to the new server.

• Upgrade SmartConnect on the new server to the newer version.

Even with this approach there are a few general SmartConnect migration items to remember:

• Install any helper applications on the new server.  Examples:   
  • Our customer uses WinSCP to upload and retrieve files from FTP sites.  This needed to be installed on the new server, and a new certificate fingerprint had to be generated.  
  • The customer also needed to have Excel installed since they use Excel as a data source.
• Install any drivers that are used in your maps but are not included with SmartConnect.
• Set up the scheduled task to restart the SmartConnect service on the new server.
• Set up the SQL Server job to clear locked maps on the new server.

About the Author

Maureen Franz
Access Programmer
Maureen has been a developer at HBS for 6 years.  During her time here, she has worked with several different technologies and has recently expanded into integrations using SmartConnect with multiple data sources/destinations, including Great Plains, CRM, SAGE, SQL Server, etc.