Drupal pause, EDMS head-bashing

So. After such a flurry of happiness with my Drupal problems, I was cheerfully buzzing along getting all my missing documentation uploaded and linked in, and somewhat avoiding the issue of our EDMS. I finally got the go-ahead for reimplementation from our Big Boss but I knew it was gonna be a huge pain, so I postponed, and postponed... until I can't anymore, not really.

So (sigh) I'm putting Drupal on the back burner until the new year. It's fascinating and I'm getting a total kick out of it, but it's not mission-critical the way getting the staff back into the EDMS is. So a few days ago I started spending all my time working on the EDMS, with some good and some bad moments.

The biggest bad moment - and I guess all things considered it's not "bad", just "really really annoying" - is that there's a bug in the export system. So when I exported the workflow, user and group lists, cards, etc etc, it turns out that none of the passwords, permissions, notifications, etc were captured and brought over. Which means - yes, boys and girls, what fun! - that I have to do it ALL OVER AGAIN. So far I'm a day and a half into it and only a third through the workflow. (A bit of history: this is a setup that took over a year to get worked out and in place, so having to recreate all the "who gets notified when what happens" and "who has to approve what for the next step" all at once is not a fun task.)

After I get all this sorted out, then it's client install time, and then the next fun part that's gonna take a lot of time: migrating all the files out of our shared file server and back into the EDMS. On the up side, almost all the staff starts their holiday vacations next week, so if I can get through most of this this week, next week there'll be hardly anyone to inconvenience with file moves - fingers crossed.

All this is a rather long-winded explanation (whine?) about why you won't be seeing any Drupal entries here for a little while. I'll post any librarian image things I come across, but everyone seems to be being rather quiet these days - I haven't seen anything come across in a while now! (If you've seen something, please forward it on to me... thanks)!

It's been raining for five days now, on and off, and it's been make-me-whine cold. ('Course, that doesn't take much, as I pull out sweaters if it drops below 70°...) But the rain is good, and needed, and it's a soft rain that hasn't caused too much flooding, which is a nice change from the summer monsoons. And hey, it's not an ice storm, so yay for that.

Snarl, Growl, Thrash About

Today is, apparently, "Wrestle with Every Major Software Package You Administer" Day. Only no one told me about it. What a rude surprise!

* I've spent most of the day evaluating various file management tools for Drupal and still haven't found one I like. Sigh. And until I figure out a figure caption solution, my users won't create or manage content - it has become the bottleneck issue for the new web site (for some obscure reason that noone can explain to me). Double sigh.

* I've just discovered the largest issue we've been wrestling with for our EDMS is a known bug and has been for over a year... yet my vendor technical support people haven't mentioned it to me at all, either the situation or the workaround; I found out from another user. On the one hand it's good to know it wasn't just us, that others have run into the same problem; on the other hand it would have been nice to know there was a workaround in place a year ago - it would have seriously helped head off the ugly situation I'm in now. Arrgh.

It's a blissful, sunny 90° right now; at least one thing's been nice today. And I had good coffee this morning...

A Return to Tradition

I have decided that I've had it with these dratted newfangled electronic document management systems and I want to go back to a 3-ring binder with green grid paper and a PENCIL! Arrgh! I don't care if it means more work for me to keep track of what state each document is in, it can't be as much work as this fardling program is right now. If I could get a good grip on my hair, I'd be tearing it out right now.

I've sent my formal help request to the support line, and I'm going to go play with Drupal for a while. At least there I'm making progress and having some fun, dang it!

99°, 28%Rh, lovely clouds over the mountains, but I dunno about rain today...

Drupal Subtheme Joy

Well, I did it! I successfully created a subtheme for Drupal, and it showed up in the administrative manager and everything! I haven't tweaked it yet - only on paper so far (I'm marking up the main theme's CSS with notes and stuff - I can't help it, sometimes I need paper and pencil), but I'll be trying that first thing tomorrow (after brewing some coffee, that is).

My plan for the coming weeks is to spend half the day on the EDMS (today I managed to create a batch file that actually works [after a couple of tries; gotta have those quotes in the right place!] to do all the "mkdir" commands to recreate the new, collapsed structure) and half on Drupal (see above). So far so good! Well, except for yesterday - my plan to work on Drupal in the afternoon was sidelined by a not-very-enjoyable vasovagal reaction to the hyalgen injections. (Yes, I passed out. A short-lived but exciting time was had by my husband and the orthopedist.) If it weren't for the fact that the last round worked so well for me... dang it. Ah well; it's the price you pay for having knees forty years older than you are.

Currently 92° and cloudy; it feels cooler than that, but the mugginess is not pleasant. How do folks on the East Coast live with this year-round?

Cranky Old Knees

So, we continue to have Fun with Monsoon Storms here in (usually sunny) Tucson - and my knees are telling me all about it. Today I have the first injection of the second round of hyalgen viscosupplementation - at least I know what to expect during the shots and what the aftereffects will be, and last round gave me 15 months of relief (which is a nice long time for this stuff, believe me!) - I hope for the same this time around. Whee...

In other news, we'll be testing a proposed SolidWorks assembly transfer process this week (if you rename a path in the filename of a SW assembly, it breaks the references and, thus, breaks your model - makes it very hard to transfer assemblies into a new directory structure). Keep your fingers crossed. And while that is going on, I plan to continue my assault on Drupal themes and modules - maybe I'll actually get somewhere this week (which would be nice). These two tasks will be my main focus for the month of August - we lose the test server on 1 September, and that's also my deadline for having a working web-CMS to present to the staff. More whee...

Time to jet to the orthopedists' office. It's still lightly sprinkling and a lovely, cool 74°.

Vendor Make-up

I spent the day with two representatives from the company that makes our EDMS (that we were having such problems with) and I'm quite pleased with the progress we're making. It is no longer unthinkable that we may be using the software again before the end of the year. Not only are we starting to get real results (as in, "hey, we could duplicate your problem here and found the cause" kind of results, although they would have been nicer to have last year when we had the problem) but they brought me a brand spankin' new Dell server to use as a testbed platform. (Pity I have to give it back in September!) I'm feeling very positive about what we've worked out so far and the progress we made today, and given that most of the engineers have stopped spitting whenever the EDMS is mentioned, I'm hoping things will work out all right. (I still believe in this product; eternally optimistic, that's me!)

It's currently a lovely 86° and we got 0.03" of rain today! Too bad I voted for no rain in our office pool... ah well, would rather have the actual rain than the points!

It's a Start

After a couple of months of feeling like we were the purple pony in the room, a couple of folks from the vendor for our data management system made a site visit today. I have to say, I'm encouraged, and once again feel a small flicker of hope that we can get this fixed and working again. It wasn't wine and roses, but I'd say it was at least beer and daisies :-D and a very good start. Fingers crossed!

So far today: sunny and 103°. Our AC at work is a bit overenthusiastic and I had to actually go outside twice today to warm up... one thing about 103°, you warm up pretty quickly!

Ah, Mondays...

And it's only just noon!

Got in this morning to a zillion error messages from the RAID arrays on our major data archive machine, which also happens to host some of our web sites. It seems the SCSI controller is failing... what joy. The RAIDs are still rebuilding... guess migrating those last few web sites to the other server has just moved up on my priorities list.

All the staff, in both locations, is now (as of two hours ago) back working with our data in the new flat shared network drive format. We'll see how that goes this week. I'm going to scrub the server of every vestige of the old EDMS product, right down to the registry, and then do a fresh, new installation with the latest service pack, then start to rebuild the vault with the data in the flat structure. We'll see if that helps with some of our past problems. And we just had a lovely hysteria moment (at least I did) - one of the assemblies was opened out of the flat structure on a machine that's had the old EDMS completely wiped from it - and it gave *exactly the same errors*. Ha! (Whimper...)

In the meantime, as if this wasn't enough for a Monday, the big color printer has decided to stop talking to anybody...

At least the weather is beautiful - 78° and sunny, with a light breeze. Aahh...

At last, we haff returned

So. At long last, my staff is back in our data files... via a shared network drive instead of our EDMS software. It only took two weeks... arrgh! We had a small venting opportunity this afternoon with playground balls dressed up in the logo of the product, a pickax, and some knives. (Really.) It was surprisingly satisfying.

Maybe now I can get back on board with the CMS investigation....

hello, second day of 90° temps!

The end of an era?

We've been using this one particular electronic document management system for going on three years now. It sounded like the perfect tool - manages CAD and Office files, provides for version and revision control, has a very customizable workflow to manage various processes, etc etc - but there's only one problem.

It's never really worked, not the way it was supposed to. Some problems have been small ones, easily fixed, while others have been rather hugely mountainous; yet we keep chugging along, applying upgrades, and blowing time better spent on actual productive work on trying to fix whatever the Problem Du Semaine is. I think we were handed the last straw today; my staff gave an almost unanimous vote of no confidence in this package. Next week I'll be investigating how to manage certain processes automated by this program and moving all our files back to a basic flat file system.

I'm really torn. I think the potential here is awesome, and after all the sweat and tears I've put into it over these last few years it's hard to think about walking away. On the other hand, my users are not able to get their work done. We've just lost - just this week - 3 days total worth of 4 FTE's time. That's effectively 12 days of work lost. We seem to have approached - nay, smacked full into - the "it's just not worth it anymore" wall.

I'll be spending some significant time Monday on the phone with my dedicated technical support person, but unless something astonishing and amazing happens in the next week, I think much as it pains me we're going to be walking away from this product. Even though I can't find (yet) anything else that does what it does, we'd be better served with a networked flat file system than by this mess.

What a rotten end to a rotten week. TGIF, baby. And it's only 94°!

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!