Ultimately, it's your call whether you want to take advantage of them or not - and when you wish to do so. That said, there is a specific reason that you may wish to convert your existing overwrite overlays to additive overlays prior to upgrading the applications.
Without granular overlays, any modifications that you make to the object creates an overwrite overlay for the entire object. Thus, even if you just added a custom permission to an object, that entire object is now overlaid. Any modifications to the object done by BMC in a future release will not be activated during run time - because your overwrite overlay "wins". Granular overlays now enables you to change some commonly modified attributes (e.g. permissions) but know that that the rest of the object can be modified by BMC and such changes will be active during run time. You don't have to go through the task of reviewing all the changes made by BMC and folding them into your overlay. It is not required prior to upgrading - you can leave everything as non-granular overwrite overlays. But it may save you some time in reconciliation to do it prior to upgrade so that post-upgrade you really only need to look at the objects where you made changes to non-granular portions of the object's overlay. If you don't make changes to BMC objects - i.e. you're _adding_ to the product, not modifying - then there's little change with granular overlays. However, if you are creating overlays by modifying objects (not adding custom objects), it can be a huge time saver if you're changing things like permissions or form lists. So your call. It can be done either before or after the application upgrade. If you do nothing, overlays will continue to work as they did in previous releases. -David J. Easter Manager of Product Management, AR System BSM & Atrium Solutions Management BMC Software, Inc. The opinions, statements, and/or suggested courses of action expressed in this E-mail do not necessarily reflect those of BMC Software, Inc. My voluntary participation in this forum is not intended to convey a role as a spokesperson, liaison or public relations representative for BMC Software, Inc. -----Original Message----- From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of SUBSCRIBE ARSLIST theReel Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2013 8:32 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Converting Overlays to Granular Overlays - before or after ITSM 8.1 upgrade? Hi Guys, Is there a specific reason you should re-engineer overlays with granular overlays before upgrading applications? We have a 7.6.04 SP2 ITSM install (windows/SQL) on which we have implemented some customisations using the object overlay method available in 7.6. These are mostly basic customisations but some are on the major forms (HPD:Help Desk, Incident Console etc) - examples would be adding custom tabs & fields, moving the position of fields, adding columns to tables etc. We are now looking at upgrading to the latest 8.1 release. So I am wondering, when we upgrade to AR System 8.1 do we HAVE to re-engineer the customisations to Granular before upgrading ITSM OR can we upgrade all the applications and at a later date re-engineer the customisations. I understand that it will mean we will not be able to see some new features if we have overlays in place (eg: the Classification tab in Help Desk etc) but the base form would still be updated so in theory I can come back later and change to granular overlays hence revealing the new features. Am I overlooking something? is there a specific reason you should implement granular overlays before upgrading applications? Thanks Tony _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years" _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years"
