Building Docuware Test Environment for DW7 upgrade

Hello,

I'm preparing a DW 6.12 test environment to test both the upgrade from DW6.12 to DW7 and the new features and functionality of DW7.  My plan is to mirror our current live DW6.12 system, however, I've been hit with a few hurdles.  I built the system from scratch and ran the 'Restore Organization Settings' option.  This however, did not restore all data.  Most notably it excluded the users, groups, and roles.  The data is within the tables, just not in Docuware Administration.  

It has been suggested to attempt a P-to-V restore into our virtual environment.  This should work, however, I have a few concerns regarding a potential mirrored server.  What changes would I need to make to the virtualized test environment to avoid interfering with our live server?  I am new to restoring a physical server to a virtualized environment, so please forgive my ignorance.  As an example, we have an SMTP server connection in Docuware that isn't needed in the test environment.  Is there an issue with having both the live and test environments the same SMTP connection?

Thanks,

-Will

You are going to need to tread very carefully. What database is being used? Is it on the DocuWare server or a separate server?
Where are the documents? On the DocuWare server or a SAN / Network share?
How do you intend to start the VM when it will have the same name as the production server? Different network?
After re-naming the VM the DocuWare services will not start and the database will need to be patched. You will need our help to do that.

Phil Robson
Senior Director Support Americas

Thank you for your quick reply, Phil.

We are using MS SQL on a separate server.  The documents are on the local Docuware server.

My expectation was to change the servername to avoid conflicts with the live server.  Like you mentioned, once that is changed, a lot of services and links will no longer work.  I understand that this is a complicated scenario, however, I am trying to be proactive in the upgrade process.  I want to avoid our previous experiences with upgrading from 6.10 to 6.12.  In my opinion, the DW7 upgrade will be much more impactful than our previous one.  I do not want to install it 'blind' on our live server to find issues like before.

From your reply, would you recommend that I contact our account rep to move forward?  

Thanks again for your insight.  This is extremely helpful.

-Will

Will,

The problem of setting up a test server for you is more problematic. 2 different DocuWare systems cannot share the database, so the VM copy will be completely inoperable. I think that you should have our professional services work with you to avoid any chance of a problem. You are going to need to install another instance of MSSQL on the test machine. While it is not overly complicated, there are many traps for the unwary.
So yes, start with your DocuWare Rep.

Phil Robson
Senior Director Support Americas.

Will,

It's pretty simple but would involve a manual install of 6.12 in your Virtual Environment, all you need is a DB backup, the documents and a Spare Install Server/DB.

Instructions are below - 

https://faq.docuware.com/en-us/knowledgebase/article/KBA-35828