The reason for an end user to purchase DW from a reseller is to leverage the knowledge, experience & resources of said reseller. A major portion of those resources include knowing the best practices learned from other customer’s installations. When we as a reseller, develop those processes within a given market segment, it behooves us to share that knowledge with other customers with the same needs.

So, let’s say for example, that this week I begin an install for a new customer, with a need for considerable customization of their DocuWare Installation. Because of our experience, we remember that we did something very similar for a customer last year. So we make a copy of the file cabinet structures that we did for a previous customer, as a XML file, then use the XML file as a basis for a new cabinet on the new customer’s server.

It may seem like this wouldn’t save much time, but for County Governments in the State of Indiana, they are not allowed to actually dispose of their paper documents unless they have them also copied onto Microfilm and burn the digital images onto WORM media. DocuWare makes that possible by allowing us to limit the disk capacity size. However, when you limit the size, it doesn’t by default check the boxes to automatically create a new disk and then switch to it. When you create numerous file cabinets from scratch, it is easy to overlook those seemingly minor details. But some months down the road, when the customer is not allowed to save any more documents, it becomes a headache that could have been prevented.

The same thing applies to File Cabinet profiles and dialogs, why should we have to recreate Read Only, or any other consistent type of profile, when they are the same 95% of the time. And we always create Accessed by, Modified by & Stored by fields and dates, which are auto-populated within the dialogues. Just the time required to set up those 6 fields to work properly for each and every file cabinet is considerable. Keep in mind, that one of our customers has over 50 file cabinets.

Any time that you have to recreate something from scratch there is an increased chance of making mistakes.

In every previous version we could at least copy a file cabinet structure to the same version of DocuWare or a newer version of DocuWare. Since we have never been able to copy a file cabinet to an older version, we are required to keep an old version running inside of our office. We have a division which scans paper documents for our customers, indexes them and stores them into file cabinets. We then copy the file cabinet structure from our server and use it to create the file cabinet on the customer’s server. Then we can copy the documents to baskets, upload them to the customer and easily store them in their file cabinet. To do this we can’t have a newer version of DW, than the oldest version installed on any of our scanning customer’s server.

But lo and behold with the latest and greatest release, we can’t even copy from one version to a newer version. DocuWare is supposed to be improving, not going backward! It works all the way up to 6.1.

Here is the following advice that I got from your technical support department:
Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do in this case. DocuWare 6.5 made numerous changes to the database and as such the structure of the XML file changed. There is a lot of new information that is present in DocuWare 6.5, that is not present in 6.1. As such, DocuWare cannot process the older XML files. Unfortunately, there is also no conversion tool to get around this issue. One would have to be written from scratch, which is not feasible. The best suggestion that I can give you is to import that XML file into a DocuWare 6.1 system, and then to upgrade that system to 6.5. You can then export the settings file as the correct version.

So what you’re saying is that anytime I want to utilize some existing resources from another customer, I should create a fresh install somewhere of the same version of DocuWare that the existing customer is using, then export the settings from the customer’s installation, & restore those settings into my temporary installation & then upgrade the temporary copy of DocuWare to the version that the new customer is using. Just to copy something as routine as a File Cabinet. It was bad enough that we couldn’t copy something to an older version, but we understand that is normal in the software world. But we’ve always been able to copy forward. I just copied a customer’s 4.6 File Cabinets into a new DW 6.1 install for them last month.

Another possible workaround just came to mind. Do you need just the fields, or do you need the profiles and dialogs as well? If you need just the fields, you could import the ADF structure file. That would at least get you the fields and that file is version independent as far as I know. You can find the ADF structure file in the ‘cstcache’ folder. It should be under the ‘C:\Windows\Temp’ folder. In that ‘ctscache’ folder, you will see some additional subdirectories that are named as GUID’s. Those GUID’s are the GUID’s of file cabinets. Find the cabinet you want, and in that directory should be the ADF file. I believe this has to be done on a system that is running the Windows Client.

If the upgrade process has the conversion tool built into it, then it would not have to be built from scratch. I just checked to make sure that I can use a XML file from way back in Version 5.1b and import it into Version 6.1. We all know there were many more database changes between those versions than between the last two.