Author: Eric Vasbinder
Many times, when moving into the Trimble Viewpoint cloud, customers will want to avail themselves of the opportunity to set up a test environment. By utilizing a full test environment, customers can test new Vista (and optionally HFFS) versions to ensure compatibility with custom code, reports, and more prior to rolling out a new Vista or HFFS version into production. In addition, customers can use the test environment to develop enhancements and additional customizations without any impact to daily production activity. This works because full test environments are a completely independent and isolated copy of a customer's production Trimble Viewpoint ecosystem in the cloud.
However, due to the unique nature of cloud test environments, there are several aspects to them that must be covered, including: additional costs, environment and user setup process, and connecting to the test environment. Please see below for details around each of these three topics.
As mentioned before, each cloud test environment is a completely separate, isolated environment from not only other customer environments, but from your cloud production environment as well. This means that there are additional server and infrastructure expenses that are incurred from Microsoft by Trimble Viewpoint for test environments. These costs need to be passed on to our customers. That said, the price charged is dramatically less than for a standard, production environment. Please reach out to your account manager for more details on pricing if you are interested in a cloud test environment.
Setting up a cloud test environment and its associated users is fairly straightforward. Please see the following two sections for more information on how to set that up.
Ensure your cloud test environment is listed on your cloud contract.
If it is not, you'll need to purchase a cloud test environment. Please reach out to your account manager to have a test environment added.
Once the test environment is on your contract, the infrastructure should be set up within short order without your involvement.
NOTE: If you are in the middle of your cloud transformation process, please reach out to your cloud transformation Project Manager to to see if the cloud test environment infrastructure has already been stood up. If not, Trimble Viewpoint's Cloud Engineering team will stand up the test environment infrastructure.
Once the environment has been stood up, Trimble Viewpoint will begin the process of performing a data refresh from your cloud production environment into test.
NOTE: If you are not yet live in the cloud, any data refresh from production to test will not be as useful, since you already have your pre-production environment available for testing as you get ready to go-live.
IMPORTANT: for additional information about data refreshes into cloud test environments, please see this cloud FAQ article: Refreshing Test Environment Data
Once the data has been refreshed so that your test environment has a full set of production data, you can then begin the process of setting up users in your test environment.
Please note that HFF Instances do NOT come by default with cloud test environments as most customers merely adopt new HFFS versions directly into production.
However, if you would like to have HFFS added to your test environment, you may do so AT NO COST TO YOU.
Merely create a cloud support request to have the HFFS installation added to your cloud test environment. Once added, you can create a support case for a data refresh from your production cloud instance HFFS and Vista into your test instance.
An initial admin user account in Vista will be created by the Viewpoint team for you in your test environment. This admin account will have access rights to add new users into Vista and HFF. You (the customer) will use this account to set up new, additional user accounts in your test environment.
There are two methods by which we can stand up user accounts for your test environment: pure SQL user accounts and using our legacy CloudWorkspace method. Each method has advantages and disadvantages. Please see below for details on how to set that up.
These accounts are set up within Vista itself. In production environments, these accounts are only used for third-party integrations. However, in test environments, customers can set up SQL accounts for their end users to log into Vista to perform testing and validation.
For details on how to set up those accounts, please see this cloud FAQ article: I need a dedicated SQL account for my integration to Vista in your ...
IMPORTANT: Please note you will need to copy security from an existing account into this new SQL account once created to ensure the same access rights apply to this account as the original user in production.
These accounts are set up in BOTH the CloudWorkspace Admin Portal, as well as the Vista VA User profile. This method is the same one that we have used for our cloud environments since 2017.
Overall, the process is the same as for production environments that use the Legacy CloudWorkspace method and is detailed here: https://sites.google.com/trimble.com/vista-cloud-faq/home/using-your-cloud/add-new-vista-cloud-users
However, there are a few differences that need to be taken into account:
The cloud Identifier MUST be unique for each environment: this means that if you have a cloud identifier in production of @companydomain.com, you cannot use that in test. Rather, you may want to use @companydomaintest.com.
CRITICAL: A Cloud Identifier in CloudWorkspace may LOOK like a domain, but it is NOT. You do not need to purchase that domain or even use it for anything other than CloudWorkspace in the Viewpoint cloud.
Usernames must have unique email addresses. Since email addresses should not be shared between customer environments (e.g. joe.user@company.com in a production environment cannot exist as a username joe.user@company.com in a test environment.)
We recommend setting up email forwarders so that a unique email address can be used for the new test environment account. For example, joe.user@company.com might be the user's email address in production, whereas in test he might use joe.user.vistatest@company.com. This email address can be created as a forwarder to forward messages intended to go to joe.user.vistatest@company.com to joe.user@company.com. This preserves the ability to have unique emails for each environment, without needing to create brand new email accounts for every user.
The process to log in to Vista and HFF for test environments is substantially the same as for our older legacy CloudWorkspace method: Vista uses a username and password and HFF will use your employee number and associated password.
IMPORTANT: No matter the method chosen to authenticate to Vista, you will always use your employee number and password to authenticate into HFF's portal in your test environment.
If you are connecting via VRL, you will need to update the Vista client to add a new server name for your test environment into the login form. To do so:
Please click on the plus icon next to the server name field.
Enter the new URL, which will be in the format of https://CODE-vrl.viewpointforcloud.com
Click the checkmark to add the new test server URL to the list.
Now, you need to log in to Vista. As such, please note that there are a few subtle nuances - differences - between whether you are using SQL accounts to authenticate to Vista or the Legacy CloudWorkspace method. Please see below for the descriptions of the differences.
In this case, you will be using a pure SQL account, with no connection to CloudWorkspace. To log in to Vista, you merely put your SQL account username into the username field and then the password into the password field. Click Log in. Your account username format will usually be in the form of username.sql depending if you followed the recommended naming convention specified here: https://sites.google.com/trimble.com/vista-cloud-faq/home/integration-technology/creating-sql-accounts
To reset your SQL account password, you'll need to know the old password, as the reset password form will require the use of the old password to reset it. In addition, these passwords can only either be reset in Vista itself by logging in as the impacted user, or using SSMS as an account with "SA" privileges. As we do not give out "SA" rights to customer admins, you will need to submit a support case to reset a SQL account password in the event that you do not know the previous password.
Steps to Reset Password in Vista
Log in to Vista as the impacted user.
Click on Options->Reset Password
Fill in the old password and new password on each appropriate field on the reset password form.
If the reset password form does not appear, you'll need to reach out to either your security Vista admin to receive rights to open this form, or you'll need to create a support ticket.
Click OK
This is straightforward and uses a username and password, just like the SQL method above. The only two differences are the usernames are in a different format and passwords can be reset using a cloud admin web portal page without needing to know the previous password.
The username format will look like this VIEWPOINT\username.code, where VIEWPOINT\ signifies the internal domain we use to manage all cloud accounts and the ".CODE" specifies your unique, 3-4 character alphanumeric code for your cloud test environment.
Fortunately, we have a Vista Cloud FAQ article that hits directly on this topic. Please see the following URL for more details: Logging In - Via Legacy CloudWorkspace Method
Here is a Vista Cloud FAQ article that will provide more details on this topic: How do end users reset their passwords? Legacy Method - NOT SSO Method
NO SSO: As of this time, due to the requirement that only one Vista instance may be associated with a customer's Trimble ID SSO Enterprise, only a customer's production instance of Vista may be associated with Trimble ID SSO. Access to test environments is through either pure SQL accounts or through the CloudWorkspace method, depending on your setup.
NO SHARED EMAIL ADDRESSES: As a reminder from above, email addresses in our cloud MUST be unique, across all environments. As such, each Vista and CloudWorkspace user must have a unique email address. Again, email forwarders for your test teams are a good approach.
Refreshing data from production to test is and the process to do so is explained at this article: Refreshing Test Environment Data
Tuesday, 16 August 2022 at 05:29PM:
Clarified that HFFS is not included by default with test environments, but can be added upon request at no additional charge.
Thursday, 09 June 2022 at 04:08PM:
Initial Posting
Tags: test environment, connecting to test environment, connect to test