A new milestone build 'M3a' as been made available.


Why a new milestone build?

With M3 being available for a week we have seen a fair level
of adoption and learned that the milestone build has problems.

We identified two defects in the database migration code:
- The database migration fails for process areas and
process templates whose process specifications are valid
but don't contain certain sections (see defect 33375).
- The database migration creates archived project areas
that contain unarchived iterations (see defect 33582).

We also learned that it is difficult for users to find out whether their
database migration was successful or not. When migration errors are not
being detected properly this may lead to corrupted databases being put
in use and causing exception in the server code.

We fixed the two identified problems and are making a new milestone
build 'M3a' available. We also added administrative tooling that allows
for manually correcting some of the migration issues.


What do I need to do?

Nothing if you are running M3 on a new database that was not migrated.

Nothing, if you are already running M3 without any problems and your
migration was successful.

Download M3a and use it instead of M3 if you are planning to use M3 and
you have to migrate a database.

Re-run the database migration using M3a and deploy the M3a server bits
if you are running M3 and you experience problems such as that you are
unable to create work items. If you don't have any archived project
areas whose process specification migration failed, we can help you fix
the problems manually using the M3a client bits. Please use the
newsgroups to contact us.


Thanks to Aaron and team who helped us track down the problem.

Kai