Getting started with Business Administrative Changes (BAC)

[avillanueva]

So, I have not used this before but am force feeding myself online docs related to BAC. I have a fresh empty Development instance of 13.0.2 and would like to flow my changes from Dev to Test (Clone of Prod) to Prod eventually and utilize BAC to do that. My previous experience has been doing this manually. I have a few questions.

1. Am I correct in assuming that I cannot use BAC to export changes from my 12.0.2 system to my new Dev system right? I would use traditional export mechanisms lifecycles, workflows, types and other setup to align my Dev instance to what my current production system has. 

2. After I complete my upgrade of Prod to 13.0.2 and clone to create my Test instance, I would have to baseline Dev/Test/Prod to start and register them to allow this process to work correct? What happens if I make slight differences to these environments before this baseline? Any gotcha's or best practices before I start configuring my empty Dev instance? Its a clean slate now.

[Fadel]

Yes you are right BAC works on  different environments, not different systems which may refer to different sites (different installations).
A different environment is usually a system cloned from the production and both or all are almost identical.

[avillanueva]

In my case, Prod and Test will be clones. Not development since its new installation (empty) of new version. Assuming I match my new Dev (13) to Current Prod (12 which will be upgraded to 13) in terms of BAC supported entities, your saying those would be considered different sites right? BAC would not work (or be difficult) between those?

[joe_morton]

2 cents...

I tried using BAC on our 12.0.2.18 systems. Export seemed to work fine, but import was unusable for my scenario. I ran into several confusing error messages. My favorite was when I got stuck in a loop where there were 2 errors. Either one could be resolved using the retry options, but not both at the same time. So the import was impossible.

We decided to not use BAC with 12 and investigate again after we upgrade to 13.

[avillanueva · Accepted solution]

I ended up manually configuring my Dev server. I do not think based on conversations that it will likely ever work via BAC. However, when I complete my upgrade and clone it, from Test to Prod should work once I establish a baseline on each. I will pursue that later.