I had the opportunity to upgrade not one, not two, but 5 ColdFusion boxes we own in ColdFusion (dev and production). Most of the installs were great and without any major issues, but there were a couple of the installs I had some issues with.

We have an “intranet” web site (called SheaTV) in our company where we centralize all of our media assets (videos, podcasts, training on demand videos, etc.). From there, our users can easily find what they want to watch (or listen to) by searching through a variety of subjects.

So I took the plunge and migrated my ColdFusion MX 7 server into Adobe ColdFusion 8. Below, I’ve detailed the steps I took.

I did not uninstall MX 7 prior to installing 8 (this is the developer version since I did this first on my local machine before doing development and/or production to make sure that all of our websites work ok with version 8…I highly recommend you do the same.)

After downloading the developer version from Adobe.com, I went ahead and double clicked ColdFusion-8-win.exe. I then followed the wizard.

Shut down all CFMX 7 services, especially Verify, if you have any collections that need to be transferred over to version 8.
Make sure you have installed JDK 1.6 or above.
Splash screen - Choose language and click OK.
Introduction - Click next.
License Agreement - Accept and click next.
Configure Installer - Enter Serial #, select trial, or select developer edition and click next.

Wow! I can’t belive Coldfusion is in version 8 (and this version comes from Adobe).

I remember when I first used ColdFusion it came with O’Reilly’s Website web server (this is a long time ago). It was known as DBML back then. Before version 1. Then I went through version 1.5, 2, 3, 3.01, 3.11, 4, 4.01, 5, 6, 7 and now 8 (I skipped a few of the .01 and other updates in between).

The product started with Allaire (the original Allaire brothers created it), then it was purchased by Macromedia, and finally, of course, by Adobe (as part of the entire Macromedia merger with Adobe)

For those of you that don’t know ColdFusion, it’s a back end scripting language to create dynamic websites. If you heard of ASP.net (from Microsoft), then think of it as that, except, 10,000 times better (do you think I’m a ColdFusion fan?).