Upgrades R Us

Well, so far nothing's blown up...

Today is the much anticipated Electronic Document Management System Upgrade Day. I kicked off the day with a very large cup of coffee and a series of backups of the SQL databases and the vault archive itself (always back up everything you can think of, and then everything else just in case, at least twice before doing a major upgrade). Then... the server upgrades. Woo hoo - they went very smoothly! There was much joy. I even had a good connection to our replicated server in New Mexico and was able to upgrade that server on the first try. That brought on the first happy dance of the day. Whew!

Along with the upgrades to the EDMS, we're taking this opportunity to apply service packs to the Windows servers; one down, one to go. Also, the new EDMS offers a Content Index service, so I've just gotten that set up and started... it'll be nice to be able to search within our document vault not only by title or state, but also the actual contents of the files themselves. Very nice - can't wait to try it out.

And, thanks to a batch of change requests that were finally approved Wednesday, there are a substantial number of structural changes in our WBS, which leads to many, many changes in our systems database, ICD charts and most importantly, our vault structures. So since everyone is locked out of the vault anyway, I'm using today to get those file moves done. They can take a very long time to do because 90% of the files being moved are SolidWorks 3D CAD files - if you've ever had to re-path a part in SolidWorks, you know how important the referenced paths are; the move function is designed to repath the references as part of the file move, so theoretically after the files are moved, the assemblies that call the files already know where their new homes are - but it takes quite a while for assemblies as large as we have. So while I'm waiting, I'm able to get the clients updated on all my staff's machines, and read some journals and blogs that I'm way behind on.

Today is turning out not to be the Hell on Wheels Day I fully expected when I left the house this morning. For this I am immensely thankful!

It's 90° out there with a whopping 9% Rh. Wheee!