Jason,
Please let me try to answer at least some of your questions on this sort of Migration from a support perspective.
Has anyone already gone through the migration effort from CA Workflow to PAM?
Yes, at this point I would say that the majority of Service Desk clients have already moved to CA Process Automation or are in the middle of making the switch.
Has anyone utilized CA services for this or has everyone done this on their own?
Both. Which migration path probably falls very much along the initial CA Workflow implementation path - if Services originally implemented Workflow, they were likely brought out to implement CA Process Automation. I have spoke with clients that have had Services recreate their most important process(es) in PAM, but are doing the others themselves.
What are the some yoiur best practices to consider, tips and tricks for migration, or gotchas that we should avoid? (i.e. Naming conventions, design standards, development ideas, error handling suggestions, etc..)
The major one that I can think of is that you can run both CA Workflow and CA Process Automation at the same time as you shift from one to the other. The thing to consider with this is that you can only point a Category at one Workflow type at a time.
As an example, take a Category named 'New PC' which is connected to CA Workflow and launches Workflow process 'Order New PC' - You could leave that in place and create a new Category 'New PC_Pam' then connect that to the newly designed Process Automation process 'Order New PC'. Once the PAM process is ready inactivate the original Category and have everyone start using 'New PC_Pam'
The alternative is to build and verify a replacement PAM process in a Development environment and once it is ready move it into Production; then going into the Category and switch it from pointing at CA Workflow to the CA Process Automation process. The main thing to watch out for in this situation is that[i] ALL open change orders must be completed and closed prior to making this switch. Any tickets opened prior to the switch will be attempting to access the associated CA Workflow process in the PAM engine which will fail and lead to errors and prevent those tickets from being closed in Service Desk.
Lastly, I realize this is a loaded question, but how much effort is there in migrating a single CA Workflow into IT PAM?
This is difficult to address as you suspect. The answer is dependent on how complex your Workflow processes are, and to a greater extent how good of a PAM Process Designer you are. Unless you can use some of the out of the box content you will have to recreate your CA Workflow processes from scratch in CA Process Automation.
One thing that may help is getting the old CA Workflow processes that came with the install, rebuilt for Process Automation. These can be found on our
Best Practices Page
CA Process Automation Sample Process Definitions for CA SDM - The sample CA Workflow Process definitions provided out of box in CA SDM (Order PC, Problem Analysis, and Change Management), have been converted to process definitions to be leveraged by CA SDM 12.7 and CA Process Automation 3.1 SP1. The attached zip file contains the following: 1.) An XML file with all of the Processes, SRF's, IRF's, Custom Operators, etc required for implementation of processes. 2.) A PDF file with setup, configuration, integration, and Best Practices information. It also contains a screenshot demo of all Process Definitions 'in action'.
Please note, the information on the Best Practices Page is being moved slowly to the Product pages on support.ca.com so it is possible that the above links will not be valid in the future.