Over the past couple of months we've been discussing Change Management and Kronos Workforce Central Environments. We don't really have good tools for Change Management for these projects, but when it comes to managing Environments, we're better off. We're going to cover these tools now so that you can effectively manage those environments and be confident that your (manual) Change Control processes protect your system from mitigatable risk. Here we will describe, with practical insights, the functionality of the Setup Data Manager tool (which is a part of WFC's Record Manager) and how to create Change Control process that allow you take advantage of the features of SDM while minimizing the pitfalls.
Setup Data Manager (SDM) is that it is a tool which allows you select an individual configuration element (e.g. a pay code) and copy that element over to a different environment. It does this by submitting an XML transaction to the application server, exactly the same as if you were to log into your target system and key the element in from scratch. This functionality is completely different than Record Manager's Bulk Copy function which one can utilize for archiving data and moving "rules" from one environment to another. Those Bulk Copy functions perform their tasks at a database level and take an "all or nothing" approach to moving stuff around. SDM lets you be more specific in what you move and simulates what would happen if you were to have done it manually in the application. This is an important distinction to understand.
Because SDM allows you to pick and choose individual configuration elements, it is an excellent tool for enabling individual configuration change controls. When you have a development environment with your master configuration in it, you can pick and choose pieces of that master configuration to move other environments for testing or for promotion into production. SDM takes out the uncertainty that results when you have to rekey your configuration into your production environment after testing, eliminating any inadvertent manual mistakes that you could make while rekeying.
Next article we'll look at more detail about what SDM does.
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Thanks again to Chris Flanders and others for contributing to this series