New MAXADMIN

New MAXADMIN? An unexpected field promotion perhaps? Replacing the last MAXADMIN Team?

These and other scenarios continue to occur, and there are several needs out there to be addressed. Here is an example from May 2022, where the responsibility was assigned, but not any training:

A new administrator reached out with a problem after 3 days of researching her issue. This administrator was given admin function (and responsibility) a year previous when the former team was dismantled and had no idea how to fix the issue.

“I have a start center template saved and deployed, and then assigned that template to a security group. When the team in that group opens their start center, however, it shows a message for each portlet that it has not yet been setup. However, when I view the page as admin, I do see the data so I know they are configured. I would greatly appreciate any help or documentation you can send my way. I will keep looking on your website as well, I just really don’t know what to even search for. “

After a couple more communications, it turns out there were 2 issues. First, once the template was saved, the users needed to hit the ‘Update Start Center’ button to pull the update from the database to be associated with their individual user id. That helped until you got to result sets.

The result sets were based on queries, and in several cases, those users were no longer there AND substitution variables were not used. There were somewhat lengthy instructions on changing the ownership of the queries to then update the queries, but there were warnings with this as well; clearly someone had taken a deep dive into the Maximo relationships as they had referenced related objects (tables) in the database for potential update including LAYOUT, SCCONFIG, SCTEMPLATE, and more, in addition to performing updates directly in SQL for the QUERY object (table).

A different, long-term approach was taken.

Create new queries for the result sets:

• Build new queries with substitution variables, with MAXADMIN as owner
• ---- Future updates can be made by the next person who is MAXADMIN
• ---- Substitution variables that reference things like the current user, or based on the current date as examples, can live on in perpetuity as personnel are reassigned to different work orders, person groups, etc.
• Replace the old queries with the new in the start center templates
• Have users update their individual start centers from the templates in the database

More front-end work, but definitely more reliable and it worked just fine. Additional reference material may be found in the MORE Maximo Community.

Then, at Maximo World 2022, Terrance O'Hanlon supplied this graphic:

Terrance highlighted the first portion of the graphic, indicating that of the Maximo World 2022 attendees that responded, 36% had less than 5 years’ experience with IBM Maximo. If you look at the first 2 graphics however, the number goes to 50% having less than 10 years’ experience.

There are a number of communities, user groups for industry verticals as well as regions, training and even free training available, so you just need to know where to look.

This is even more important as I write this article and take a call from a completely different industry / region who has lost their super users and support pretty much at the same time; they need to get reporting from Maximo, and did not know what was even available to them out of the box. Prepare your organization for changes in personnel; these will happen. Maximo 7.6.1.x end of support is September 30, 2025 and many will probably go longer than that.

‍