Upgrades, New Sites, and New Projects – Oh My!

Since we last “spoke” those of us in Click Professional Services have participated in the successful upgrade of existing customer sites to Extranet 5.6, helped usher in brand new compliance sites, and kicked off several new projects. It’s only fair to mention that none of this would be possible without your significant efforts. Don’t be shy, you know who you are.

Let’s take the process of upgrading to Extranet 5.6, for example. While we can help with all the technical bits, and guide your effort an upgrade will never go smoothly without the diligence of your technical and business staff to regression test your site to verify that there are no upgrade surprises. From a calendar time perspective, this is the biggest part of any upgrade. This past weekend was the culmination of a well executed upgrade project for a IRB and CTRC site. Though I stayed within reach of my computer all weekend just in case I was needed, I only received a couple of calls and the upgrade completed without any serious complications. This is a testament to the work done by the site owner to properly test and prepare for the actual upgrade and proves that a well executed upgrade doesn’t need to be characterized by a plethora of crossed fingers. I’m not saying it can be completely stress free as there are always those little worries and time pressures but those who are well prepared can keep those worries from defining the effort. Congratulations on a well executed upgrade!

Also this past weekend, I supported the roll out of a brand new IACUC and IBC site. New site deployments are often tricky as the communication plan which includes all the pre-launch training, the “new site is on it’s way” announcements and all the promises  up the management chain really increase the stress level. First impressions of a site are so critical to it’s near term success that not meeting the commitments made about the when’s and what’s negatively contribute to those first impressions. On the flip side, rolling out the site as promised , on time and with the advertised features is the first step in establishing the long term success of the site. No pressure, right? The number of variables involved in rolling out a site also contributes to the stress level. Did the legacy data load work? Were any of the steps missed? Can the users properly log in? I’m so tired, why didn’t I eat a good breakfast this morning? Did I forget to turn off the stove? OK – those last two may seem unrelated but once we start down the path of worrying about all that can go wrong, the lines seem to blur a bit – or is that just me?

Just like an upgrade, most sources of angst can be minimized through proper preparation, practice, and testing. This means that time is allocated in the schedule for a “let the dust settle” period between development/test and deployment. This period is used to do all the little things that are often forgotten such as triple check the things that caused you to loose sleep and to make sure you turned off the stove. Hopefully this will help you gain a small amount of calm confidence.

Even if you aren’t able to achieve the desired level of calm, don’t worry. Realize that your users are new to this site as well and you know more than they do about how to use it. Expect there to be new issues discovered after going live and expect there to be a series of configuration updates to be applied to incrementally correct and tune the site. The feedback you will get over the first few weeks (and beyond) is a great source of information and informs your release planning process. Constructive feedback is not only a sign that user’s are using the site but that they are also invested in it’s success. If you haven’t already put your SDLC into action, now is the time because you have actual users, live data, and a steady stream of future enhancements to push out the door. Accept the fact that a site is never done but by all means celebrate your achievement of going live! Now where’s the party?

Cheers!

Ideas that worked and those that haven’t (yet)

Over the past year, I’ve released a few development techniques into the wild, not knowing if they would return to bite me or flourish. I’m happy to report that I’ve yet to be bitten. Here are the techniques that are starting to flourish:

• Hybrid CDT – I’m aware of this technique being deployed in at least 5 customer sites so far with great success.
• ProjectValidationRule – To my knowledge this is being used in 3 customer sites so far and I’ve already been getting enhancement requests which is a good sign.
• Using JQuery and Ajax in your site – To be honest, this technique shows a pretty basic pattern so knowing if my post spurred you to action or you came up with it on your own is difficult to say but I’m personally aware of 6 sites which use this or a variation and I’ve see a couple of very impressive uses of Ajax to implement things like inline form expansion to facilitate the entry of CDT data instead of using the standard popup. I have no doubt we’ll be seeing more examples of this approach over the coming months, including in the base Extranet product. I’m looking forward to the Ajax-driven choosers in Extranet 5.7, for example.

I also blogged about a couple of experiments I was trying which, unfortunately have yet to work out. They are:

• Modules and Solution support in Process Studio – For those of you unfamiliar with this feature, it was released as a “technology preview” in Extranet 5.6 (which basically means it hasn’t been verified to work in all cases). The goal of this feature is to allow you to be able to categorize your workflow elements into different modules and to define Solutions which are comprised of those modules. When you build a configuration update, you can select which solutions to include. It’s an exciting idea because, when it works, it will allow you to manage separate release schedules for each of your solutions that coexist in a single site. I gave it a try on a recent project and was able to identify a few issues which makes it unusable in its current version. This effort was useful though because we were able to both identify the issues and, through practice, suggest to the Engineering team the short list of fixes that would be required before it can be tried again. I’m still very excited about this feature and will definitely give it a go again when the few critical issues have been addressed.
• Object Model documentation approaches – I’ve blogged about various data modeling techniques as well as the importance of establishing your data model as early in the project as possible. One of the challenges in getting a model implemented is how to review the object model design before making the investment to actually implementing. I explored various tools using a few key evaluation objectives and eventually settle on two open source tools: StarUML and Doxygen. I was very pleased with the results when used as an initial design tool but less pleased with the fact that it wasn’t integrated into the overall implementation process. What was required was round-trip-engineering support. Once designed, it would be great to then auto-create or update the Project Types, Custom Data Types and Activity types in the development store. It would be equally nice to also publish the implemented model back into StarUML. I can see how both could be accomplished but failed to find the time to make it happen. I still use this technique for initial model design and review but it becomes too costly to maintain once development is underway. One day, I hope to find the time to add round-trip support. In the meantime, the Applications team is doing some promising work to be able to generate eType reference pages in real time. I like this approach because those reference pages are always accurate. The downside is that the model needs to actually be implemented before those pages will work and reviewing a design after implementing seems a bit counterintuitive. The value in that technique dramatically increases after the model has been reviewed and implemented for real.

There are a couple of other techniques which I hope will be useful but have not heard about since released into the wild:

• Extranet to Extranet Single Sign-On. I’d love to hear if you have put this technique into practice.
• Script Editor Update – One of me earliest posts, It’s been fun to stumble upon customer sites where this has been put into practice. It wasn’t perfect by any means and I still have the list of improvements some of you have suggested and hope to implement them some day. I verify that it works on Extranet 5.6 and if it doesn’t publish a new version. If you already know if it does, please let me know.

So, no real failures but a couple of experiments that need more time to mature and a couple that haven’t flourished…yet. The efforts that flourished are enough for me to want to keep throwing ideas your way. If you find them useful (or even if you don’t), let me know. I’d love the feedback.

Cheers!