Upgrading BMC Digital Workplace

Upgrading to BMC Digital Workplace 18.05 restarts the BMC Remedy AR plug-in server process.

You plan to upgrade to BMC Digital Workplace 18.05.

• Before upgrading to BMC Digital Workplace 18.05, you must upgrade to BMC Digital Workplace 3.3.02 or later.
• Install BMC Digital Workplace and BMC Remedy Smart IT on separate servers.
• Use separate Apache Tomcat servers for BMC Digital Workplace and BMC Remedy Smart IT
• Use a separate database schema for BMC Digital Workplace and BMC Remedy Smart IT

The AppZone integration is removed when you upgrade to BMC Digital Workplace 18.05.

Review the Release notes and notices.

Apply patch 1 for BMC Remedy AR System 9.1.04

Prepare your relational database by estimating the space (and time) required to copy the social and notification data stored in the MongoDB database to your RDBMS.

Before migrating your social data, you must estimate the space you will need on your relational database. The space required on your relational database, and time needed for the upgrade can vary according to how much notification data you keep, determined by the setting described below.

• The retention period for notifications will have a direct impact on the space and time required.
  For instance, 1 month of data requires ~500 MB and takes ~15 minutes to transfer
• Use the historical data consumption values on your MongoDB as a reference to calculate the free space required on your relational database.
  For instance, if the space required for 1 month is 500 MB, you need to factor in a proportional increase in capacity to accommodate the data.

┌───────────────────┬───────────────────┬───────────────────┬──────────────────┐
│Period in days     │Number           of│Estimated migration│Estimated DB  size│
│                   │notifications   not│time (secs)        │required (MB)     │
│                   │older than period  │                   │                  │
├───────────────────┼───────────────────┼───────────────────┼──────────────────┤
│30                 │0                  │0                  │0                 │
│90                 │1                  │0                  │0                 │
│365                │5357346            │8928               │7663              │
│All                │5663115            │9438               │8101              │
└───────────────────┴───────────────────┴───────────────────┴──────────────────┘

(optional) Estimate the size of the attachments on your existing BMC Digital Workplace installation and decide if you want to only move attachments larger than 5 MB.

Before migrating your BMC Digital Workplace data, you may check for and move attachments that are larger than 5 MB, and choose to not migrate these attachments.

If you are upgrading from the versions 3.3.02-3.5 or 18.05, you must Install the ITSM integration patch.

Before you upgrade BMC Digital Workplace , you must install the ITSM integration patch. This patch enables  BMC Remedy IT Service Management (BMC Remedy ITSM) to work with BMC Digital Workplace . Without this patch, timelines, email notifications, and social features do not work in BMC Digital Workplace . The installation applies required BMC Remedy ITSM patches.

Upgrade to JRE 8 on all the servers where you have BMC Digital Workplace installed.

Take a backup of BMC Remedy AR server database, MongoDB database, and BMC Digital Workplace database.

Ensure that all the following pre-install checks run by the installer are successful before proceeding with the installation:

• Disk space
• JAVA runtime version
• Database version
• Directory permissions
• BMC Digital Workplace installed version
• Components operation status

Installation does not proceed if the pre-install check detects inconsistencies in the required components.

Do not use Xming to install the  BMC Digital Workplace server, because it might not perform reliably during installation. Instead, use VNC, MobaXterm, or any other client.

Post-upgrade, you might need to change the ports if you did not specify an open port during installation, or if these ports are in use. These ports are used to connect the web and mobile clients to the BMC Digital Workplace server.

Integrating Remedy Single Sign-On

This topic describes how to configure the integration of Remedy Single Sign-On with BMC Digital Workplace .

BMC Remedy Single Sign-On authentication applies to both the universal client and to mobile applications. When a user logs in to a mobile device, the user is prompted to enter the hostname and port. If the server has SSO enabled, the mobile client opens a browser to the SSO login page. The SSO server sets the SSO cookies after authentication on to the device browser. When the user relaunches the application, if the cookies are not expired, the mobile client displays the application. If the cookies are expired, the user is shown the login page again for authentication.

Self-service users use BMC Digital Workplace to open HR cases and to search HR knowledge articles. BMC HR Case Management can be installed either on the same server with BMC Remedy IT Service Management (BMC Remedy ITSM) or on a separate server.

Note: The BMC HR Case Management server requires BMC Remedy Action Request System 9.1.

If you enable the integration of BMC TrueSight Operations Management, services monitored by TrueSight Operations Management are listed in BMC Digital Workplace and the availability status is updated by BMC TrueSight Operations Management.

IT users access BMC Digital Workplace through Apple iOS and Google Android mobile clients, as well as through the universal client. The universal client provides access through a web browser.