Migrating from FootPrints version 11.x

Leveraging the power of the FootPrints application to design an effective implementation plan

• Ensure that you select a design that suits your business needs. If your processes are simple or don't fit the out-of-the-box Business Process Templates provided by FootPrints, it might be cost effective for you to design your implementation plan from scratch.
• Design simple forms with a small number of fields. Simple forms are user-friendly, easier to maintain, and enhance the application performance.
  For example, if you want to design a form with more than 100 fields, you might want to reconsider your design approach. Your design can be implemented effectively, if you can split your processes to use two items instead of one.
• Workspaces allow you to organize items that serve a similar business process in one container. If you think that your workspace might have more than 10 items, you might want reconsider your design approach. You can organize your items and create multiple workspaces instead of a having a lot of items in a single workspace. Fewer items in a workspace are easier to maintain and enhance the application performance.
• If you have a lot of options in a drop-down list or a multi-select fields, it might impact the application performance. If you have a field with more than 100 choices, you can classify the list to make it manageable and user-friendly.
  For example, if you have a drop-down field that lists all the cities in the country, you can create another field that contains all the states and use field dependency to show the options in the City field.

Fields and dependencies

• When deleting fields or field values, ensure that you are aware of the implications. You might have rules, field dependencies, and import mappings configured to use the fields or values that you are trying to delete. When deleting a field or a field value, FootPrints does not know about what you would want to do with the configurations where the field or the field value is referenced. If you delete a field that is referenced, FootPrints prevents you from publishing the change and you have to manually select an option about what you want to do for each configuration where this field or value is referenced. 
• Dependency trees with more than 3 levels of dependencies are hard to maintain. If the dependencies are hiding or showing different fields, it is possible that you can solve the same problem by creating another item. Also consider adding multiple dependencies as compared to a big complex one.
• Rename the control labels on the form instead of renaming the fields in the item. Renaming a field can cause confusion as the database column name does not match the field name which will make reviewing the database difficult. For example, when building reports.

• If you want to have two workflows apply to the same field, ensure that the defining criteria is mutually exclusive. 
• If you have an existing time-based rule that might impact a significant number of tickets at the same time, consider redefining the rule to achieve the same result that applies to a smaller set of tickets at the same time
• Try to schedule time-based rules to run outside of business hours, especially the ones that might impact a large number of tickets. Updating too many tickets at the same time can cause performance problems for other users of the application.
• Do not schedule multiple time-based rules to run at the same time.
• Ensure that you configure the right schedule to run a business rule. For example, do not configure to run a business rule every 15 minutes if you can meet the business need by running it once a day                

• Even if you are using an external authentication, try to keep the FootPrints Internal Authentication enabled and have at least one system administrator user that is using the internal authentication. This ensures that you can recover from any unexpected changes to your LDAP server that might prevent you from logging in.

• Ensure that you keep running the tests while implementing your design plan at every step. Do not wait until you have added all your items, forms, rules, and so on, to test. Testing the run time at every step makes it easier to troubleshoot in case you of a problem.
• Have a testing environment where you can always test changes before applying these changes to the production environment.
• Update the testing environment regularly so that it has the same data as the production environment specially before testing any change.
• FootPrints releases in small increments on a quarterly cycle. Try to stay current with the latest FootPrints releases. Ideally, your test environment should always be on the latest version and your production environment only one version prior. Upgrade your production as soon as you are done testing the release on your testing environment. Waiting too long to update and skipping versions add risks including security risks.