I'm up in Saul Ste. Marie right now for a week and officially shut down the old system last night about 6:45 PM, imported the data into Crescendo and did the training today. It was _very_ well received. Everyone really loved it and talked about how it's been designed exactly how they need it, it's very easy to use, and they're all excited about getting to work with it. I wonder if part of the excitement is because they all got new laptops and desktops to work with the new software :) The HRDC was there to review the software and to make sure it does everything it needs to do to give them their quarterly extract file. There are a few minor tweaks I need to make but other than that they said it looks great. They remarked about how similar it is to their software suite but said Crescendo looks nicer, and does certain things that theirs doesn't. Of course, theirs also has features Crescendo doesn't have. This is great news to us.

I'm having one hell of a week. Yes -hell- of a week hehe. I drove up Sunday (6 hour drive) and went to work Monday morning at 9am to prep the server. It's a new server with Win2k3 Server 25CAL and it will become their new domain controller, file server, print server, and crescendo server. I spent the whole morning and most of the afternoon fighting to get the free version of SQL Server installed and working properly. I wonder how many grey hairs that gave me? I've never used it before, I'm used to the normal version of SQL Server. Finally I got Crescendo Server all set up and it was time to create the user accounts for everyone, set up all the right permissions, group shares, home directories etc... that took me until about 7:30 PM. Then I had dinner, went back to my hotel room and made some last minute tweaks to the main program and setup program. I worked until midnight.

Tuesday I went to work at 9am again.. unpacked and set up 13 new computers. I cleaned them up, set up a bunch of other programs needed on it them and finally installed Crescendo. Sean helped me with that (thank god) and that took until about 5:00 to finish. No issues. I had dinner, then shut down the old system, and began the importer program. It didn't finish importing until 10:30 PM. There was tons of data to import plus the logic to translate the data was huge. Next I realized that one of the fields didn't import properly.. a critical field so from my hotel room I had to fix the bug, upload the importer to the server, wipe out part of the data and reimport it :( My bug fix had new bugs and it took 3 tries. Finally everything was done by 1:45 AM and I could rest. You know, none of that stressed me out too much because I know that no matter what goes wrong I can fix it. That is such a good feeling. I realize things can take time but I'm also confident in myself that I can fix the problem.

Today.. I go to training, train everyone and OF COURSE.. bugs I've never seen before even after tons of testing. Bugs I couldn't explain, some I couldn't duplicate, and others caused by incomplete data imported by the old system. The kinds of bugs I expected. It happens every time we roll something out and a bunch of people start using the software. For the most part everything worked flawlessly. The bugs we found were mostly minor and I can fix from my hotel room tonight. Yes I've got another few hours of programming tonight before bed.

Tomorrow I meet with the group again for the morning. While they work away at the program getting to know it more I will be moving email and files over from about 4 computers to their new workstations. After that I have to meet with two other departments and do speed training with them :( I've also got to go around to 25 computers and join them to the new domain controller and switch the network printers to the new server. OMG can I do this all in a day? I need the people there to type in their passwords :/ I'm starting to feel sick. I've been working insane hours lately and despite how well things went today I know that I've got tons of work I NEED to do tonight before morning, and even more work that needs to be done tomorrow. I leave Friday. It's a 6 hour drive and I'd really like to leave by noon or 1:00 PM. That'll give me a few extra hours to finish up things that didn't get finished on Thursday.

Yay for Crescendo!! Sean says this opens the doors to many great new things and processes. He thinks the government will see it's benefits and might find other uses for it. The HRDC joked about how they could train people on this system since it was so easy to use.