From There to Here: Part 5
The end of one thing, the beginning of another
After our initial deployment of the new tools, we quickly discovered that we did not have adequate training on them. The training we did have was not setup to reflect an actual design project, and there were key portions missing that pertained to the use of Vault and the configurations that we had deployed. Initially, this seemed like an acceptable risk because we had DID, and most of the design projects that were being worked on where retrofit, “brownfield” jobs that were not initially scoped for use in the new system. But we started having lots of issues with DID.
DID’s age and fragility was catching up to us faster than we had anticipated. Although we did still have disaster recover plans and options in place, it was becoming harder to find replacement hardware due to the age of the components. We were running out of time to make the cutover and we really needed to accelerate our training development and delivery. To that end, all of our team took on the additional responsibility of training material development and vetting, along with training delivery. We were all poised to begin a strong effort on delivering our training material. We were also fixing any bugs and adding any and all missing features to our new client facing web site called SCST Vault, which is the main user facing replacement of DID. And, we were planning for either migrating all 3 million files from DID into our newly configured and running Vault server or otherwise providing access to them from our web client. This started really picking up steam towards the end of 2019 and early 2020, and we know what happened then.
Since the February/March 2020 timeframe, our team has provided training, service, support, and production level help to our design organization, all while working remotely. We have trained nearly our entire design team, along with much of our external contractors, and many construction and operations groups on all of the new software that we have created and configured. We have created, provided, and trained people on processes and guidance on nearly every aspect of how to use the new tools to create designs in the new way. We have taught them how to migrate, move, and otherwise use and maintain their documents, drawing and models in Vault. And we have done this all while continuing to maintain a high level of service and support on all of the existing tools and features we created in Vanilla AutoCAD starting in 2012. We have written new tools to help manage projects, created reports to provide information that is no longer available in DID due to legacy drivers that no longer work, and we continue even today to maintain DID until we officially retire it. That retirement is currently scheduled for November.
I am proud and blessed to be a part of this team. We developed high level skills across so many areas in our pursuit of this project and we feel that we can do so much more for our customers now. Our team now has verifiable experience in ALL of the following areas, most of which came about due to this effort:
- Training creation
- Training delivery
- Technical writing
- Web/Windows/Services Development (.NET and JSON + Full Stack)
- SQL Server administration
- SQL Server, Oracle, and MySQL DBA
- Windows Server Administration
- Active Directory group administration
- Windows scripting
- Installation scripting for Product delivery and automation
- Autodesk Vault Administration and Installation
- Autodesk license server install/admin
- Autodesk product suite install and administration
- CAD/BIM management
- Autodesk add-on development in AutoCAD + verticles (ACADE, Civil3D)
- Inventor addon development
- Autodesk Vault development
- Autodesk Forge and BIM 360
- UNIX Shell scripting and UNIX Server Administration
- Perl programming (web/CGI/shell)
- IBM NAS Administration
- Project Management
- Jira/TFS/Azure Dev Services administration
Rest in peace DID, and long live SCST Vault!