I’m still surprised by the number of companies that are using FRx 6.7 in the field as Financial Reporting tool.. Given that it is most often customers that are on an older GP version, like 10 or 2010, it’s not much of a surprise that they haven’t migrated to MR 2012… If it’s not broken, don’t fix it !
As I was upgrading a customer recently from 2010 all the way up to 2018, there was no way that they could continue to use FRx, as it wouldn’t run on Windows server 2016 (Ok, some were able to make it work, but it’s unsupported by Microsoft, and requires quite some tweaking).
So it was time to plan the migration from good Ol’ FRx 6.7 to the latest Management Reporter 2012 (Aka MR2012 CU16). Please always refer to the only place where you can get the latest MR2012 build: https://mbs.microsoft.com/customersource/northamerica/MR/downloads/service-packs/MROverview
There are various places and sites from Microsoft that are not up-to-date with the builds or versions, nor with the Fix list (like here and here), which can cause some confusion. At the time of this writing, the latest version was released on Aug. 23rd, 2019 and is build 2.12.16006.0. If you try to apply a hotfix (like HF3 released in Nov 2017) and don’t check your MR version, you may end up with a message like this:
Data Preparation
There are plenty of References about how to prepare your FRx data in order to migrate all your content over to MR 2012. I’m not going to enter into the details, as this is already covered in either Microsoft documentation or other blogs. This Microsoft KB summarizes most of it, and this series on FRxBuzz does also provide a wealth of tips. The MSXgroup has some interesting tips for after the migration is completed too.
The point is that cleaning up your existing FRx data before the migration takes place might help reduce drastically the risk of errors and the time it will take to convert the definitions. Your mileage may wary, but in my case I had about 60 reports to transfer from FRx to MR 2012. The owners had done some clean-up in FRx and reduced the numbers of reports down to 26, but after the process, the ControlReport table in MR held 61 entries from the conversion.. which i thought was the full set of reports in FRx. Turned out not to be the case and when opening MR Designer, I had exactly 26 reports in my Reports Definitions folder.
Warning! When preparing MR 2012 as an empty set for your new environment to receive the converted data from FRx, Microsoft installs a default set of reports under the Building Block Groups (Menu Company in MR). Microsoft warns you in the preparation steps that anything that might be there prior to the migration will be gone after the process..
So you if you ought to have any own definitions in there, you better export them before starting the process, as they will be gone once completed.
The result is the complete Specs Sets from FRx that haven’t been removed prior to the wizard run.
As you can see, even the “Default” building block has been replaced by the old Spec Set from FRx. I’ll explain at the end of the process how to clean that up and get a functional MR 2012 building block.
Before we move on to the actual Migration Wizard run, lets talk about the data you need to backup for this. The only important folders are the “IO_Data” and the “SysData” folders from your old FRx setup. I had them simply Zipped each into an archive file and moved over from the old server to the new Windows server.. No need to install FRx or anything of that sort.
On the new server, I unpacked the archives to restore the original 2 folders. That’s all is needed for the wizard. Next, all you have to do is grab your MR 2012 setup application and fire it up to select the last option at the bottom.
Make sure that when you upgrade your MR version (CU) if it has been installed prior to the FRx Migration Wizard setup, that you re-install the wizard, as otherwise you’re going to run into this type of errors when reaching Step 3 of the process as it tries to connect to your SQL server Database:
Re-run the MR setup and the FRx wizard install, to confirm you’re upgrading to the latest version compatible with your current MR 2012 Database:
To start the FRx Migration Wizard, simply hit the Start menu button in Windows and open the sub-folder Dynamics GP > Migration Wizard.
In Part 2 of this post, we’re going to walk thru the entire migration process and give a few tips on how to complete the FRx post-migration clean-up.
Until next, happy reading!
@GP_Beat
The Dynamics GP Geek Blog 