Promoting the Snapshots

After you import a solution, you promote the associated snapshots into your environment. Promoting the snapshots places the contents of the solution, including all reports, notifications, process apps, and auxiliary table data, onto your SBM Server.

Important: You must promote the snapshots before you modify and deploy them. Promoting maintains data that is necessary for some operations such as maintaining internal IDs and priming Request Center with sample data. Deploying first could cause compatibility problems later on.

Important: If you are upgrading from a previous version and you want to preserve modifications you have made to existing process apps, see the Serena Service Manager On-Premise Upgrade Guide for steps to preserve your changes before you promote new versions of the process apps. Promoting the new snapshots overlays any existing modifications that you have made to your existing workflows.

Note the following information about promoting the snapshots:

If you import multiple solutions, you can promote each set of process apps in any order. For example, you can promote the Serena Request Center process apps before or after you promote the Serena Service Manager process apps.
You can promote the process apps for a given solution in any order, except for the Serena Request Center process apps.
Important: You must promote the SRC apps in a specific order, because the Starter Pack and Service Request process apps contain unique references to one another. This ensures that the proper forms in the Starter Pack process app are available for use in each of the services. Promote the SRC apps in the following order:
1. SRC - Starter Pack Forms – IT
2. SRC - Service Request
3. SRC - Starter Pack Forms – IT (promote again)
4. SRC – Knowledge Management
It is recommended that you promote all of the process apps for a given solution, except for the SSM - Integrations process app. You should only promote the SSM - Integrations process app if you are using Serena Asset Manager or the Asset Discovery Adapter.
Tip: Other than the SSM - Integrations process app, if you do not plan to use a particular process app, it is recommended that you still promote it (you do not need to make it available to your users). Each process app references other process apps and you will encounter reference errors in SBM Composer when you attempt to modify the process apps if you do not promote them all.
If you encounter any problems with promoting the snapshots, refer to Troubleshooting Promotions.

The following sections describe the promotion steps for the snapshots in each solution: