Tuesday, June 19, 2007

who installed your system 9? did you get any documentation?

Beware of who's performing your install of hyperion system 9.

I have a client that has just been swindled by paying for 3 full days of install time for an infrastructure person from a hyperion preferred partner, yet got no documentation. There was material deemed as confidential or proprietary to the firm.

I know for a fact that some config files were changed and also that scripts were run on the sql server side. These scripts created some tables and user id's. These are items that would have been performed during the hyperion installs but these guys chose to write their own scripts. Their install could not be reproduced by the client (me) since these steps and scripts were not provided when asked for.

Due to the fact that no documentation will be forthcoming, the servers are going to be reimaged and I'll perform the installs myself fully documenting all server settings required to get everything up and running.

The environments need to be reimaged for 2 reasons. Our dev environment is coming online and this firm was not going to be used to stage that environment. This would then mean that our 2 environments were not installed in the same manner. There would be inherit differences between them. Future applications of patches would not yield the appropriate comfort level that a patch that worked in dev would also work in production without issue.

Apparently an important discussion to have with your hyperion preferred partner (really any consultant or consulting firm) is:

"Will we get full documentation as to how / what is installed on our servers?"

"Anything that is run on our servers is our (clients) property."

"There will be no running of scripts on our servers that we will not receive."

thoughts or modifications?

I was thinking something short and sweet. Not too much legal stuff to require lawyers.


hj

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice to see your blog. I am also a HFM System 9 consultant based in DUbai.

I look forward to see more postings in your blog.

Regards,
Ramesh, Dubai

Anonymous said...

A theoretical reason for your situation follows:

You were not the client, you were a hired consultant. The client was the company that you were swindling.

The client has in its possession full screen by screen documentation of the install. Just you were not given that documentation.

It was proprietary information (held back only from you) because the client was not paying for the other consulting firm to teach you how to install System 9. That would be billed at a higher rate because that would be taking away one of the preferred partners revenue streams.

It is not customary for one consulting firm to teach a rival (if you can consider a single consultant a rival to a preferred partner) how to do your job.

Maybe you had 6 weeks to make the environment work, but you could not get the "Interactive Reporting Base
Service 1" to start. The preferred partner had the environment up and running in 3 business days because they had installed System 9 before. You have only taught pre-system 9 bootcamp (per your resume).

After this preferred partner completed this install, with screen prints of everything working, you went to try and reverse engineer the install process (so that maybe you could install it someplace later). Could this be the reason that you had to re-do the entire environment (because you screwed the pooch on it).

Scripts might have been run to create users and databases on MS SQL automatically. Any SQL DBA could have created them (or even had the server script them for you). These scripts were not in place of the scripts that are run through the install process, but before you install Hyperion.

Also, config files are changed while using the config tool. There are massive amounts of tweaking that can be done in a Hyperion environment (it is part of the install).

Also, could all of the scripts and still be on the servers, but you just haven't found them?

Could you sir have swindled the client because you mis-represented your skills.

Anonymous said...

"Do they write their own sql script"!?!? i'm surprised everything is working!!

D, italy

Howard Johnson said...

sounds like it can get pretty nasty out there.

Anonymous said...

Not bad article, but I really miss that you didn't express your opinion, but ok you just have different approach