Working with version management and promotion management best practices BO 4.1

Question

Hi Experts
I wondered if anybody knows if there is a document or something about best practices to work with the version management and promotion management in BO 4.1?
Our Environment includes two servers. The first one is our development and test server. The second server is our prod system.
Now on the dev server we have basically two folders called dev and test. We control access to them with a right system based on the folder structure.
My question now is how you would work in this scenario (third server is not an option). Main target is to have as few reports as possible. Therefore we try to work with the version management system and only have one version of each report in the dev folder of the cms. But this is where problems start. Sometimes the newest version is not the version we want to publish to the test folder or even prod server.
How would you publish the report to the other folder? Make a copy of the concerned report (transport to the same system via promotion management is not possible). Also how would you use the version management in regards to the folder structure? Only use version management in dev folder and export reports to test folder (out of vms control) or also use vms in test folder and how would that work?
Further more I’d be interested in learning best practices with promotion management. I found out that the promotion of a report that doesn’t exist in prod doesn’t make any problems. But as soon as an older version already exists there is only partial success and the prod folder gets renamed to “test”.
Any suggestions on how to handle these problems?
Thank you and regards
Lars

Answer 1

Thank you for your answer.
So you are basically proposing to work with the vms in the dev folder and publish the desired version to the test folder. And the test folder is out of version control in this scenario if I understood you correctly (like simple data storage)?
And how would you suggest promoting reports to the prod system? Simply by promoting the
desired version from dev folder directly to prod? This would probably lead to inconsistence because we would need to promote from dev system to test and dev to prod instead of promoting a straight line from dev over test to prod. Furthermore it would not solve the problem of the promoting result itself (A new folder called dev will be generated in prod but the report gets promoted to the prod folder if there was no report before).
Thank you for the link. I came across this page just a few days ago and found also lots
of other tutorials and papers describing the basic promoting process. The promoting process in general is clear to me but I wondered if it is possible to change some parameters to  prevent folder renaming for example.
Regards
Lars