Tag ' projects ' - 3SL Blog

11th October 2022

October 2022 – Newsletter

Welcome to the October 2022 newsletter from 3SL that provides a mixture of news and technical information about us, and our requirements management and systems engineering tool “Cradle”. We would especially like to welcome everyone who has purchased Cradle in the past month and those who are currently evaluating Cradle for their projects and processes.

We hope that we, and Cradle, can deliver real and measurable benefits to all of the exciting development projects that we see every day through your regular contacts with our support team. If you have any problems, please do not hesitate to contact 3SL support here.

32-Bit vs 64-Bit

For our next major release – Cradle-8.0 we are considering stopping support for:

32-bit Windows
32-bit Microsoft Office
32-bit Linux

We would like to understand if this affects any of our current customer’s and potential prospects. If you can find the time, please provide your views/opinions to our Support Team at support@threesl.com.

Please note that Cradle-8.0 will not be released until mid 2023 at the earliest.

Upcoming Training Courses

We still have places left on our two remaining Cradle training courses this year.

The next scheduled course is the Cradle Document Publisher course. The dates are 17th to 20th October. Document Publisher is a Windows® based publishing tool that allows professional documentation to be produced directly from the data within your project’s database. Fully understanding how to configure templates and data manipulation will offer the best output for you to provide to your stakeholders, customers, regulators and other interested parties.

The last scheduled course of 2022 is the Cradle Requirements Management course. The dates of this course are 21st to 24th November. This is a great opportunity for small teams, or a couple of new team members to get started with RM and Cradle.

Both courses are conducted over four ½ days.

Don’t miss out! To book a place on one of our online courses please click here!

Training Course Calendar 2023

We are currently preparing our training course calendar for 2023. This will be available soon.

The courses available in 2023 are:

Project Administration:
Cradle Training Courses
- January and July
User:
- January and July
Requirements Management:
- February and August
Document Publisher:
- March and September
Risk Management:
- April and October
Test Management:
- May and November
Configuration Management:
- June and December

Dates to be confirmed.

Making SWIFT Payments

Recently we have noticed some minor issues with receiving swift payments. If payments are to be made by SWIFT using a MT103 instruction, please ensure Field 71A is set to OUR instead of SHA.

Social Media

Last month we discussed:

We also paid our respects to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Thank You

3SL would also like to thank all of our customers/evaluators/prospects who have found the time to send feedback on our services, e.g. training courses, Cradle support etc. We understand how busy you are, but these responses help us to both monitor and look to improve the services we provide to you. Thank you.

That’s all for our October 2022 newsletter.

16th September 202216th September 2022

Moving Cradle Projects

Are you upgrading/updating your servers? Here we explain moving Cradle projects from an old server to a new server. There are two ways to do this:

Moving projects to a new server with the same Cradle version
Moving projects to a new server and upgrading to a new Cradle version

Both of these scenarios are detailed below.

Please note if users have Personal definitions, e.g. if they are are using Sessions, these will either need to be copied or exported and imported to the new server. Personal definitions are located in $CRADLEHOME\admin\definitions\personal and the folders have the users names. If copying the definitions they need to be placed in the same location within the personal folder.

New Server with Same Cradle Version

If you are not upgrading Cradle at this time, this is really simple to do.

Create the Cradle projects on the new server with the same project code as previously created on the old server. Ensure the pathname is the location where the databases will be stored.
Create Project dialog
Copy the contents of the Cradle projects on the old server to the new server. The directory contains all of the data including user profiles, project setup, definitions etc.
Project Contents
New Server with New Cradle Version

If you are upgrading the Cradle version as well as migrating to a new server, this is slightly more complex.

The safest method (although can be time consuming) is to create export files of the existing Cradle databases and then import them into the new server installation.

When exporting the information from the “old” server, ensure Owner is set to Everything as shown below:
Once the new version of Cradle has been installed on the new server, you need to create the Cradle projects on the new server.
In the new project you can then import the data exported from the old server . When importing, ensure Owner is set to As in file, Overwrite is set to On and the top four validation checkboxes are selected:
Repeat this for all projects

Another way to achieve this is to copy the project directories from the old server on to the new server and then manually convert the projects.

Create the Cradle projects on the new server with the same project code as previously created on the old server with the pathname being the location where the databases will be stored.
Create Project dialog
Copy the contents of the Cradle projects on the old server and overwrite the contents of the newly created projects on the new server. The directory contains all of the data including user profiles, project setup, definitions etc.
Manually run the necessary converters to ensure the new projects are in the same format as the new Cradle version installed. Please note this may be several converters if converting from a much older version.

Note: Please ensure the projects have been converted BEFORE logging in.

4th July 20229th November 2022

Create a New Database Based upon a Previous Database

The Problem

I want to create a new database that is a copy of a pre-existing database minus the actual data.

Cradle Project Environment

The environment for the Cradle project will contain:

Project Setup
Supporting definition files (views, forms, queries, documents etc.)
Users*

*If you will have the same users in the new project that are in the existing project.

The Solution

To avoid the Personal and/or User definition files being part of this import, we would suggest the following:

Log in to the existing project as MANAGER
Select Project > Export
In the Export dialog set Owner to Everything and Info Type to Project Schema and User Profiles (if users are required, see comment above)

Press Export to create the export file and close the Export Status dialog but do NOT close the Export Information dialog:
In the Export Information dialog, change the Info Type to ONLY show Definition Files:
You will see that some new options appear – Definition Type and Location:
The Definition Type option allows you to specify the types of definition file to be included in the export. For this example, we will leave this as All:
The Location option defines which location you are exporting the definition files from.
Users may have created Personal or User definition files that might not be relevant to the new project.
Personal and/or User definitions might only have been useful to an individual person rather than the project so could be omitted.
In this case, we would only need to select Team*, User Type* and Project
* It may only be necessary to select Project
Press the Export button again. This will present you with the option to Overwrite, Append or Cancel. Select Append:
In Project Manager, create your new project with an EMPTY schema:
Log into the new project as MANAGER
Select Project > Import and set Owner to As in File and Overwrite to On:
You will see that your new project contains:

Users
All the Project Setup information including the phase hierarchy and all supporting definition files

Summary Note

If you had NOT chosen to append the definition files, it is highly likely that the phase hierarchy from the existing project would not work in the new project and would produce errors.

These definition files are important to define the WorkBench environment.

Also, if you had chosen to export all the definition files, this may have resulted in numerous views, forms, queries, documents etc., that are not particularly relevant or accepted into project definitions.

20th January 201720th April 2017

Managing Projects

Managing Projects in Cradle

When you have a large number of projects and users it can get difficult to track them all. Project Manager, part of the Cradle suite, provides a method to hierarchically organise, categorise and sort your projects.

Project Manager showing projects in folder organisation. — Organise projects in Project Manager

Classification / Categorisation

A Project may belong to more than one sub category, “Mechanical Department” and “Current Project”, you can place a link to the project in each of these folders. In the future the link may be in the “Mechanical Department” and “Completed” folders, its up to you. Project manager can also add a host of user defined categorisations and references. This will help identify a project and its associated contracts or references, now and in years to come.

Attributes

You can set attributes for each project. These can provide extra details about the project’s purpose, status, dates and so on. Project Manager ships with nine default attributes, however, you can add your own or change those supplied.

Alias ‘Alias ID for the project, such as an alternative project ID number’
Division ‘General Description such as the company division doing the project’
Branch ‘General description such as the company branch doing the project’
Customer ‘General description such as the name of the customer for the project’
Reference ‘General Description such as the RFP or ITT reference number’
‘Inception Date’ ‘General description such as the start date of the project’
Purpose ‘General project description, used in any manner found to be useful’
Summary ‘General project description, used in any manner found to be useful’
Description ‘General project description, used in any manner found to be useful’

Showing the range of Project Attributes that can be set for a project

Setting Project Attributes

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
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Tag: projects