Posted: 02/03/2020 10:36AM
Updated: Monday, 22 March 2021 at 09:57AM
Prior to going live with Vista in the Viewpoint One Cloud, customers will work together with Viewpoint's transformation engineering team to test and validate their new cloud environment. This testing process will ensure that items such as custom Crystal and SSRS reports, third party integrations, VPN connectivity to Vista, data entry, and more are functioning correctly prior to officially cutting over from on-premise to cloud hosted Vista. Normally, the go-live process will take a few weeks, but in some cases, due to the complexity of the on-premise environment being moved into the cloud, the time required to test and migrate the on-premise environment to the cloud can take longer. When this happens, customers from time to time have requested a data refresh of the environment in our cloud from the on-premise database.
The goal of such a data refresh is to allow their line of business teams to test reports and grid data entry with data that is closer to the current set of data on-premise, rather than with data that is "stale", being weeks old. While this does provide more comfort to testing teams, due to the familiarity they may have with more up-to-date data, it provides no benefit for the testing of Vista functionality due to the way that Vista, and especially the Vista reports system, is architected.
Conversely, an additional data refresh between the Initial Data Upload and the Go-Live Data Upload has significant negative impacts on the go-live process, including but not limited to:
Due to new security technologies introduced in recent Vista versions, performing a new data refresh is not a simple as restoring a new database backup from on-premise; adding a new database will overwrite security secret keys that lock the database to the app server, which will break connectivity between that app server and the DB. Instead, our technicians need to reinstall the entire Vista program stack, from app server to Viewpoint Repository, which will generate new linked secret keys in the database and app server.
Reinstalling the app server stack will also necessitate a reinstall of all SSRS and Crystal reports, which if we’re not careful, will overwrite any changes and updates we made to those reports.
Reinstalling the app server stack will also break connectivity with HFF and require the reinstall of that HFF stack.
The time involved will require the rescheduling of the go-live date, as the go-live process is not designed with a tertiary data refresh in mind
The rescheduling of the go-live will require significant changes to Viewpoint's engineering team resource scheduling
Please note that a customer-requested delay of cloud go-live, such as that necessitated by a tertiary data refresh, will be considered to be a cancelling of the mutually agreed upon "Cutover Date". This has negative ramifications to a customer's cloud contract, as cloud contracts include penalties for customer-initiated cancellations of cloud go-live (a.k.a. Cutover) dates.
tl;dr: Vista reports are reports, once they work, the calculations are the same, no matter how fresh the data is within them. Attempting to perform line by line comparisons of totals and calculations is a wasteful effort that provides no true value. As such, mid-stream data refreshes during cloud go-live testing serve as nothing more than a way to delay cloud go-live processes, with potential negative financial implications for all concerned. As such, Viewpoint does not allow mid-stream (i.e. tertiary) data refreshes in between the Initial Data Upload and the final upload at cloud go-live.