Author: Eric Vasbinder
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Moving to Trimble Construction One (TC1) (a.k.a. Viewpoint One) and enabling Vista Remote Link (VRL) for Viewpoint For Cloud (VFC) customers is a different process than it is for customers in Viewpoint Enterprise Cloud (VEC) / RDP Published Apps Cloud. Overall, the process still consists of two major sections:
Commercial: Ensuring the customer is on a Viewpoint On (VP1) contract. There are two methods for this:
(RECOMMENDED) Adding the Field Management users bundle to the customer's current VFC contract.
This is a simpler and less complex process and is our currently recommended approach.
OR
Completely converting a customer's contract and billing structure over to Viewpoint One
This is more complex by far and should only be done by customers willing to work through the substantial differences.
Technical: Enabling VRL connectivity for end users and ensuring SSO infrastructure is stood up.
A key item to note is that the initial goal of VFC was to create a premiere location for IT Server and Workstation Outsourcing for the construction industry. On the other hand, our more recent cloud solutions, VEC and VP1, are intended to be the premiere location to experience the totality of Viewpoint products and solutions. As such, VFC has a much broader supported set of integrations, and technologies, whereas VEC/VP1 are more specifically tailored to Viewpoint solutions, excluding many third party solutions from being directly hosted.
See the section below on third party integrations for more information.
Given all of the above, though "moving" to VP 1 for VFC customers still has the same two high-level actions as moving to VP1 from VEC/RDP customers, the technical aspects of moving a VFC customer to Viewpoint One with the ability to use SSO and VRL are different and must be understood.
In addition to the technical aspects being different, the billing for resources consumed and how those are requested is different in VP1 as opposed to VFC.
As VFC was intended to be an IT Outsourcing hosting solution, billing was modeled around common practices for Managed Service Providers: monthly billing, billing in arrears, and requesting services through support. Viewpoint One (VP1), on the other hand, is a SaaS-based solution, focused on Viewpoint products. As such VP1 requires three year contracts, billed in advance annually. All services provided are requested through a customer’s sales account representative, who then creates a sales order under which the new service (e.g. an additional hosted server for a supported third party integration) will be provided.
As such, when a customer completely converts their contract structure from VFC to VP1, an individual billing and contract review should be performed by the Viewpoint account rep for that customer, the customer’s IT and finance representatives, and the Viewpoint technical resource assigned to help with this review.
There are a number of architectural differences between our legacy VFC cloud and our current Viewpoint One cloud that need to be accommodated and for which the customer and Viewpoint need to jointly plan.
Our latest cloud offering for Vista, Viewpoint One, which runs in the same architecture as Viewpoint Enterprise Cloud (VEC), has a different architecture than VFC. The following is a high level list of the differences between the two:
Different internal management domain: VFC customer environments are managed internally with a different management domain structure than VEC.
Different networking structure: VEC customer environments have different Azure Network Security Groups (NSGs) than VFC customers.
Different IP ranges: Different static IP ranges are used for VFC environments as compared to VEC/VP1.
Different management templates and scripts: due to the above differences, Viewpoint uses different automation tools to manage VFC environments as compared to VEC or VP1 environments.
Client Experience Differences: VFC is experienced through a fully virtualized desktop; a DaaS environment over RDP. VEC / VP1 uses either VRL (Preferred) or RDP Published Applications (RemoteApps). In the case of VRL, no client applications will be hosted by Viewpoint; all of these need to be hosted on the end user's on-premise workstation. For VEC/VP1 over RDP, Viewpoint will host Vista, as well as associated Vista-integrated applications in the published app environment ONLY; no additional applications beyond those supported client-side integrations will be hosted on RDP.
Third Party Client Side integration Differences: Third party client-side integrations that are supported in VFC are not supported for hosting in VEC/VP1 (the few exceptions are listed below), so these must be relocated to customer workstations
Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat, Bluebeam, SSMS, Crystal Builder, SSRS Report Builder, and Insight Spreadsheet Server
Third Party Server Side Integration Differences: Many third party integrations that are supported for hosting by Viewpoint in the VFC environment are not supported for hosting in the VP1/VEC environment.
File Storage Differences: Many customers in VFC make use of individual "My Documents" and "Desktop" folders that are stored on the VFC Terminal Server itself. In addition, VFC users often leverage the shared folder, known as the "H" drive that we provide in VFC to allow for collaboration amongst different team members. In effect, VFC becomes a file system / file storage solution over the years. When moving to TC1/VP1 with VRL from VFC, all client-side components are removed from Trimble's infrastructure, meaning that users can no longer use a shared "H" drive or a cloud-stored set of Documents and Desktop folders; files must be removed from our cloud when moving to VP1/TC1
For customers in VFC who are in high latency locations, such as Hawaii, Alaska, rural counties, or who are using satellite internet (see next section for more details on satellite internet), moving to TC1 can be problematic. TC1 is a much more latency sensitive option as the Vista client runs locally: on end user workstations. As such, performance can suffer, especially as compared to the experience to which the end users were accustomed in VFC. Remember, VFC is the fastest way possible to experience the Vista ERP, where both the server and the client are in environments that are fully optimized for speed.
The reason is that the Vista Remote Link (VRL) technology that allows the Vista client to be installed locally, on the end user’s workstation, is extremely sensitive to latency. With high latencies, such as coming from Hawaii across a third of the Pacific Ocean to the closest Azure data center on the West Coast will cause an additional 30-40ms of latency. For a customer that was used to VFC, where they have the fastest Vista performance possible, such a move will decrease speed by an appreciable amount, especially for heavy data entry forms. Moving from field to field and from line to line in grids will have hesitations and delays, reports will be slower to move from page to page, etc.
Vista, unfortunately, has a significant chattiness from the client to the server, so when you move the server into the cloud, away from the client, or in this case move the client out of the cloud, away from the server, things slow down.
This creates a conundrum for VFC customers. Since we cannot host all of the client-side apps that VFC customers are accustomed to using in VFC in their newer TC1 cloud, and since running the Vista client locally using VRL may be unacceptable, we need to look at other options.
Customer Cloud Hosted Thin Client AVD - An Ideal Solution
An ideal solution for customers in high latency scenarios, or who have large numbers of client side applications that need to be in the same environment as Vista, is for the customer to set up and manage their own Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) environment in the same data center where we are hosting the Vista server. For example, in our hypothetical scenario of a customer in Hawaii, the customer would set up an Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) instance in their own Azure subscription in West US, which would be the same data center as where their Vista instance would be hosted for a Hawaii-based customer. This would give the customer the same level of control and client-side app hosting as in VFC, as well as keeping the performance at an acceptable level; the clients would be hosted in the same datacenter as Vista's server, ensuring very low latency, similar to VFC.
As such, we highly recommend the “Customer Hosted Clients on AVD” approach for customers who are located in Hawaii or Alaska, or who have satellite internet or are located in rural areas with slow Internet.
Of course, customers can try using VRL on local workstations; some users even with high latency find it to be perfectly acceptable. However, customers should plan and prepare on using their own AVD instance.
Please note that it is entirely possible for customers to have their IT service provider, consultant, etc. set up and manage the AVD instance for them. Depending on the sophistication of the customer's own internal IT resources, that may be the preferrable option.
Commercial Reminder
The setup and hosting of client side applications in a customer-managed AVD instance is outside the scope of a customer's TC1 contract. As such, any costs associated with hosting or maintaining the customer-managed AVD instance will be borne by the customer, separately from cloud hosting. This includes, but is not limited to any hosting, management, setup, upgrades, software licensing, etc.
Technical Specifics
Please note that if you will go forward with your own AVD instance in Azure, you should ensure the following requirements are kept so that your experience in TC1 can be as smooth as possible:
Your environment should have a static, public IP, so that the TLS Database Endpoint (TLS VPN) can be properly set up.
This allows for easy connectivity to your Vista database directly over ODBC for tools such as SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), Crystal Reports Builder, SSRS Report Builder, Insight Spreadsheet Server, and more.
You may need to use an Azure gateway into your AVD instance to allow for an IPSEC VPN to be stood up in case you need automated server, to server imports into Vista.
Please note that the IPSEC VPN is required not only for imports, but to properly use SSRS Report Builder.
Satellite internet providers, such as Hughes, Starlink, Dish Network, DirecTV, and Viasat, can be very effective at providing access to Internet in locations that would be next to impossible to find connectivity otherwise. Remote locations, such as forestry roads, farm country, oil slopes in Alaska or Canada, and more can be easily connected to the Internet through the use of these services. However, these services come with significant downsides in terms of network performance and latency.
There is no escaping the reality of physics: when connected over satellite Internet your network traffic will need to be transmitted from the surface of the earth to a satellite orbiting the earth sometimes thousands of miles away, then transmitted from the satellite back down to the surface of the earth, proceed to the destination machine, and then returned by the same circuitous route from the earth to the satellite and back to the earth at your location again. This can sometimes result in network latencies as high as 120-300 ms or higher.
Please keep this in mind when considering a move from VFC, as VFC would be supported over satellite internet, but VRL-based clouds like TC1 would not be supported with satellite internet.
KEY POINT: Satellite Internet connectivity is only supported for RDP terminal services deployment (e.g. VFC and VEC RDP) models and will never be officially supported for VRL.
Please note, even with RDP, application performance over a satellite Internet connection will be less than over a supported hard wired connection.
Third party integrations are called out separately in this document due to their unique nature and additional nuance. The key item to note is that the integrations that are supported in VP1 are different and fewer compared to VFC. In addition, those integrations that are supported are often ONLY supported through external hosting in a customer’s own environment (cloud or on-premise), connected over a VPN.
CRITICAL - The below steps should be performed for EACH third party product used in your VFC environment PRIOR to when Viewpoint begins the migration process to VP1
The first step in understanding your situation with regard to third party products in our clouds is to determine if your specific third party integrations are supported in Viewpoint One. To do so, you may search on this Cloud FAQ site for the integration in question or browse the list of supported integrations here: https://sites.google.com/trimble.com/vista-cloud-faq/home/specific-integrations
If your integration is not listed on this site, you will need to request approval to connect that integration to Vista in the cloud over your VPN connection. You may request approval using the process here: https://sites.google.com/trimble.com/vista-cloud-faq/home/integration-technology/request-new-integration-support
NOTE: With TC1 / VEC / VP1, all third party integrations, save for PowerBI, are only supported for EXTERNAL hosting, connecting to the Vista database over a TLS Database Endpoint (TLS VPN) or an IPSEC VPN, rather than the physical bits being hosted in the Viewpoint environment itself.
Whether your integration in question is a client side integration, such as Bluebeam or MS Office, or a server-side integration, such as Morpeus’s ERP connectors or ToolWatch, the integrations used to connect to Vista will most likely be only supported for external hosting outside of our cloud. For those integrations and tools that directly integrate to Vista, they will be connected to Vista over a VPN, or through imports. As such, you will need to coordinate with the vendor of the product in question and Viewpoint to move that integration from the Viewpoint cloud, to an external location.
If the integration in question is a server-side integration that communicates with Vista on an ongoing basis (i.e. automated ODBC connectivity), you should plan to stand up a second instance of this third party tool outside Viewpoint’s cloud, PRIOR to the move to VP1. However, this solution should neither be activated nor connected to the Viewpoint Vista server until such time as the previous installation is taken down. Normally, the previous installation of third party integration is taken down during the migration to Viewpoint One weekend.
In the less common event that the integration in question is supported for hosting within the Viewpoint One cloud, you will need to determine if you wish to continue to host that integration in the Viewpoint environment or host it externally. This is, however, extremely rare, as at this time, only the Ryvit data connector and a few SSIS Packages are supported for hosting in TC1/VP1 for new environments. If you wish for Viewpoint to continue to host this third-party integration in our cloud, there will be associated additional fees to enable continued hosting; for security reasons, third party products must be hosted on separate servers from Viewpoint’s own products. Please note that in many cases, even integrations that are still supported for hosting in Viewpoint's cloud can be hosted externally and connected over a TLS Database Endpoint (TLS VPN) or an IPSEC VPN. As this incurs no additional server hosting costs, we do recommend that you discuss this option with the vendor in question.
IMPORTANT: TC1/VP1 Cannot be used for local workstation end user file storage: there is NO such thing as a shared "H" drive or cloud-hosted "My Documents" or "Desktop" folders in TC1/VP1.
See below for more details.
As mentioned above, the shared file folder "H" drive, along with the individual "My Documents", and "Desktop" folders will no longer be accessible in our cloud after moving from VFC to TC1. Remember, the TC1 cloud is designed to have no client-side tools and components hosted by Trimble Viewpoint; files included.
As such, as part of moving to TC1 from VFC, you will need to download all shared files, documents, and folders from these VFC hosted locations and then store them in a centralized location that is easy to access for the members of your team.
Solutions that we have seen provide this fairly effectively include:
Microsoft OneDrive
Dropbox
Box
Egnyte
Many more
Please note that these solutions give you the opportunity to synchronize shared folders such that actual copies of these files are located on the end user's local workstation. This differs from the "on demand" option that is available for a number of providers that allows you to save storage space by only downloading the file when accessed. The synchronization approach is preferred for solutions such as Insight Spreadsheet Server, where the GL templates are expected to be always in the same location, physically present. For more information about this integration and how to use shared folders in OneDrive, box, dropbox, etc. please see the following cloud FAQ article: Insight (Global) Spreadsheet Server (GSS / ISS)
Once a VFC customer has had their commercial status upgraded to be Viewpoint One (VP1), the following are a high level description of the steps that are involved in making the technical switch:
Customer: Coordinate with Viewpoint Account management to ensure Field Users bundle is added to your VFC contract, OR that you are fully converted to VP1 from a commercial perspective.
Viewpoint: Stand up "Transformation" resources, including project tracking, test plan, dashboard, etc.
Viewpoint and Customer: Identify "Conversion" team point of contacts and set regular cadence of meetings.
Customer: Perform network latency tests to validate the supported datacenter with the best possible / lowest network latency. Send results to the Viewpoint team.
See this URL for more details on performing these tests: https://sites.google.com/trimble.com/vista-cloud-faq/home/moving-to-the-cloud/network-requirements-testing
Viewpoint: Create a new environment for the customer in the Azure region with the smallest latency to the customer's location with the highest number of heavy data entry users
Usually workflows such as Payroll Timecard Entry, AP Unapproved Entry, Purchase Order Entry, etc. are the ones that are the most sensitive to high latency. The results from the latency tests for these users should be weighted higher when determining where to locate the new Vista environment.
Viewpoint: Stand up VRL proxy server and prepare an environment for Initial Data Copy.
Viewpoint and Customer: Coordinate to set up new VPN tunnel(s) as necessary to the new environment.
Viewpoint and Customer: Schedule a time of low activity (usually after hours) to perform an Initial Data Copy from current VFC installation to the new VP1/VEC environment.
This data copy will include a backup of the SQL databases in question (Vista records, VPAttachments, and HRIM - if Keystyle / HFF is used today), all custom reports, templates, etc.
If any third party, server side integrations (e.g. Bid2Win, HCSS, Prophix, Cosential, etc.) are currently hosted in the customer's VFC environment on separate servers, those servers will be replicated to the new environment.
NOTE: depending on the third party server side integration in question, the integration may need to be hosted externally and connected over a VPN if
Viewpoint: Perform the Initial Data Copy from VFC to the new environment.
Viewpoint: Perform data restore and test results.
Viewpoint and Customer: Setup Trimble ID SSO. Schedule meeting to set up Trimble ID SSO.
Viewpoint: Send information to the customer on how to connect to the new environment to begin testing.
Instructions on how to install and configure the Vista VRL rich client will be included and are located here as well: https://sites.google.com/trimble.com/vista-cloud-faq/home/vrl-explained/installing-vrl-client
Customer: Begin testing of Vista reports, data entry, and more, following the instructions given to you in the test plan supplied in step 2 above.
OPTIONAL - Customer, Viewpoint, and Third-Parties: Coordinate to configure hosted server-side integrations.
Customer and Viewpoint: If any issues are uncovered in testing, partner together to correct them.
Customer: Ensure Vista client is available for all users.
VRL (PREFERRED): Where possible, you will be using VRL for all end users. In this case, you will, prior to going live with the VP1 environment, install a Vista rich client on each end user workstation
NOTE: You may use the information on this page to "pre-configure" the Vista rich client to connect to Vista VRL using GPO and domain login scripts: Pre-Configuring the Vista VRL Rich Client
RDP (BACKUP): For situations where a customer has users on satellite Internet, or whose connectivity is too high of a latency to work through VRL, you will be setting up RDP access using the Published Apps method, rather than RDP Desktop as per VFC.
Customer: Ensure desired third party client-side applications are installed on local workstations so that they will be available as needed after go-live.
Viewpoint and Customer: Determine a cutover day to move to the new environment.
Customer: Notify end users that they need to be out of the system by cutover time.
Viewpoint: Turn off all Vista, HFF, etc. services on the old VFC server.
Viewpoint: Commence Final Data Copy to new environment
Includes: Vista records, VPAttachments, HRIM, reports, SSRS, "H" Drive, etc.
Viewpoint: Copy all "H" drive, "My Documents", and "Desktop" content from the VFC Terminal server to a blob container in Azure for the customer to access.
Customer: Download all "H" drive, "My Documents", and "Desktop" content from the blob storage container to shared and personal folders as appropriate on OneDrive, Box, DropBox, or Google Drive, or to a local network file share
NOTE: This step can be performed at any time during the process and need not wait to be started.
IF YOU WISH TO START THIS EARLY, instead of copying the data from the Azure blob storage container, you will be copying the data directly from your VFC terminal server itself. Please note that this process over the mapped local drives from your local workstation will be slower over RDP than it would be over Azure storage Explorer from the container.
This will be ideal for VRL usage and will decrease storage used, possibly decreasing your (customer's) storage costs in Viewpoint's cloud.
Viewpoint: Final Data Restore in new environment; notify customer when complete.
Customer, Viewpoint, and Third Parties: Complete any outstanding third party integration reconfigurations.
Viewpoint and Customer: Coordinate to address any final issues uncovered.
Customer: go-live with new environment
changelog
Friday, 27 September 2024 at 12:23PM:
Added note about all third-party integrations in TC1 needed to be externally hosted now, save for PowerBI.
Tuesday, 07 May 2024 at 01:05PM:
Added heading and commercial note about customer-managed AVD.
Tuesday, 07 May 2024 at 09:27AM:
Added section on preferred approach to use AVD for high latency scenarios
Wednesday, 20 September 2023 at 09:16AM:
Added additional section for File storage to call out the criticality of finding something to do with all of the files from the VFC Terminal server.
Friday, 08 September 2023 at 08:13PM:
Added section on satellite internet and being unsupported for VRL.
Thursday, 01 June 2023 at 01:41PM:
Updated to include note on moving all data and files "My Documents" and "Desktop" from VFC Terminal Server.
Monday, 20 March 2023 at 03:01PM:
clarified that SSO is another step.
Wednesday, 08 June 2022 at 11:10PM
updated to note that the TLS Database Endpoint (TLS VPN) is available. In addition, noted that Ryvit and a few SSIS packages are the only items still supported for physically being hosted in the TC1/VP1 cloud for new environments.
Monday, 16 May 2022 at 03:03PM
Added references to TC1 as, from an architectural perspective, Trimble Construction One (TC1) is the same as Viewpoint One (VP1).
Thursday, 31 March 2022 at 03:11PM
cleaned up changelog; added tags
Updated: Friday, 09 July 2021 at 04:16PM
Tags: VFC to VP1, Viewpoint for Cloud to Viewpoint One Transition, Move to VP1 from VFC, Move from VFC to TC1, VFC to TC1