Total Cost of Ownership of BPPM - Part 8: Best practice - File repository

During BPPM implementation, you will need to create some of your own files or modify out-of-box BPPM files.  These customization files include configuration files, cmd files, shell scripts, Perl scripts, KM files, PSL files, BAROC files, MRL files, etc.

One of the common practices I have seen at many organizations is to simply create new files and leave them on the server.  When the same files are needed for the second server, they are copied from the first server.  When the number of files becomes large, individual file copy is replaced by directory copy.

This practice certainly works in some extent, but there are several issues. For example,

1) If you make modification to some of the files while working on the third server, you will need to remember to repeat the same modification on the first and second servers.  Otherwise, your files on those servers will be out of sync.  A few months later, you won't remember which server contains the most up-to-date copy of your customization files.

2) When you start copying the entire directory instead of individual files, you could copy all the junk files generated during testing to the next server.  A few months later, you will have a hard time to remember what those junk files are for.

3) Upgrade will be a nightmare.  You will need to figure out which files you need to copy into the next version, which files you need to merge, and how many different variations of configuration/data files you need to extract out of the current version.

By using a single file repository, you can minimize even eliminate the above issues.

Pick up a shared drive as your file repository at a location where you can easily copy files to and from other servers.  Keep the directory structure as identical as possible to the destination servers (such as server\etc\cellname\kb\rules\).  Save only the files you created or modified in the file repository.  Never copy the original BPPM out-of-box files there.

As soon as you finish testing your customization files on a server, always save a copy of most up-to-date files into your file repository.  When you need to deploy files to a new server, always copy files from the file repository, not from another server.  If you are not sure if a server has the most up-to-date version of your customization, simply deploy all your files again from the file repository.  When it is time to upgrade, the files in your repository are the only files you you need to copy/merge into the next version.