Upgrades Never go Smoothly

After almost 10 years in IT, I should know this. But I was provided another example of it this week.

We have been using Trial Director version 4.5 for awhile now. It’s a nice package, it helps collect all your documents and present them electronically at trial, it integrates nicely with Summation so you can simply keep all your documents in the Summation case DB, and use Trial Director to do things like highlighting, callouts, etc.

Well, we had a case going to mediation soon, and the attorney wanted to use Trial Director as part of his presentation. It wasn’t a particulaly large presentation and since we’ve been meaning to upgrade to the 5.0 version anyway, this seemed like a good time to do it. So my manager proceeded to upgrade the network install of Trial Director to 5.0, and then assigned me to put the presentation together. I did that Tuesday, got all the markups done and everything working, so that he and the attorney could go over scripting the presentation to the exhibits I had created.

Yesterday, once they had finalized everything, it was my turn to get involved again, by taking the Summation and Trial Director cases from our network, and loading them on the laptop they would be using during the mediation. Only one problem, the laptop had 4.5, we had built this case using 5.0. We only had the network upgrade CD, they hadn’t sent us any CD’s for the mobile version.

So, I make the call to tech support, to get a download link for the mobile version. During this conversation, I discover that they don’t have the mobile version of 5.0 available for download any longer, because they just released 5.1. Naturally, according to the tech, 5.1 mobile will not work 5.0 network cases, but he can provide me the link to download the 5.1 network upgrade as well.

I spent yesterday afternoon downloading both versions, upgrading the network install on the server, for the second time in a week (much to the chagrin of our server/network guys, I’m sure), burning the mobile version to CD, installing that on the laptop, and copying over all the case data to the laptop. At 4:40 I tried to open Trial Director on the laptop. I was prompted to activate the software, using my license key. The only license key I had was for the server, or for 4.5 mobile, neither of which was going to get this software unlocked.

First thing this morning, back on the phone with tech support. They provided me one of our mobile keys, I don’t know why he would only give me one, apparently we have a couple of them, but I guess we’ll have to talk to our sales rep about those. Since we had a late morning deadline to get this equipment in the right hands for Monday, I was not in a position to do that. Got the software activated, created the case, copied in the data, corrected all the paths to images, ran through the presentation to make sure all the slides worked, and all was right with the world.

It seemed like such a simple case too… 😉

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