Hello Sage Citizens.

before jumping into the main topic I wanted to talk a little bit about the title of the series and why i chose it. There is a nature series produced by the BBC starring (at different time) Sir David Attenborough and Steve Erwin. The show would follow these men (now both deceased)., and their adventures in nature and the creatures they ran into out in nature. It helped give folk who otherwise wouldn't have time to really experience nature and give them just a little insight on the natural world.

Now onto the topic

ARE YOU READY TO UPGRADE TO 2015 (FROM 2014 OR LOWERS)?

Well. If the answer to either of these questions is yes, then the answer for now is PROBABLY NO.

1. Do you have more than 15 companies.

2. IS either your HRMS server or your SQL server running on window 2003 or lower.

PROBLEM.

With 2015 we have a new feature that allows for simplified reporting in crystal. It creates virtual views for all the employers so that you can now easily link HRMS databases to ALL THE ACCPACC PAYROLL DATABASES as if they were all one unified data set with an company code indicator for each payroll table. This is actually quite awesome and is something we in support have wanted for some time because it allows you to create just one report to handle all companies instead of a different version of the report with database drivers set up for each employer respectively. It also means the manual maintaining of SQL views for this task would also no longer be needed.

The problem though is that the process required to create the views is extremely memory dependent and if your machine does not have enough memory available* then the process will fail on upgrade and if you do manage to bypass the failure on upgrade then you will just run into a stopping point every time you go to employer setup.

memory*: We have not determined which aspect of memory it is that is the absolute stopping point be we believe it's a combination of any of the following concepts. (disk space, free ram, allocated ram, page file size, OS restricted memory, ram on sql server, allocated ram on sql server). I know it would seem strange that we have pinned this down to memory without knowing what kind of memory shortage we are running into but when we get to the symptomology it will make much more sense.

SYMPTOMS.

On upgrade you will get an error with the term SERIALNO or if you have passed the upgrade portion and are in employer setup (rules/system/modify employer), the screen hangs for around five minutes then returns various possible activation errors.

POSSIBLE WORKAROUND AND ADDITIONAL SYMPTOMS.

If you encounter the error on upgrade, break the link to payroll in SYEMPLOY.

update syemploy set e_paydata=''

this will cause HRMS to forget that each company was setup to connect to payroll and will bypass the view creation process. then log in, go to rules , system modify employer. Update just one company with the correct payroll database ID and lit it grind. Once complete, then make your way thorugh the lists of employers one at a time until you are able to complete updating each one or until you finally get a hard error. You should note that each employer you move on to will take progressively longer to save. This will occur regardless of the size of the company or what order you go through the companies.

If you do reach a fail point make note of the last company that you were able to successfully update, then re-wipe the connection to payroll again via the above scripts and then repeat the process start at that last employer. Continue until you either reach the last company or until you get the error again. If you get the error again, then repeat the process again and again until you finally reach your last employer.

Once you do manage to the last employer, then you can re-link all your employers again, but you must do it on the back end in SQL. If you consistently use the same payroll database ID for your companies you can use the below script.

update syemploy set e_paydata=e_company

If you do not link all companies, or one company has a significant deviation on payroll database ID rule, then you will need to update these values manually.

Once this is all complete, don't visit the employer setup section again until we have the official fix/patch released.

OFFICIAL PATCH/FIX.

Engineering has prepared a hotfix that is currently undergoing testing. If you have been afflicted by this problem reach out to me directly and i will send you more information on that topic. If you have already upgraded and haven’t run into the problem then you don't need the hotfix. If you haven’t upgraded yet but you have more than 15 employers or are running on extremely old hardware, then you should stay on 10.4x until we announce a newer version of 10.5x.

Thanks again for reading IN THE WILD. I hope this has been enlightening.