In my last post, I said I was going to make some posts about giving our tips on products.
I have decided to devote a tiny amount of energy toward helping others. While I tend to avoid giving product-specific tips, I decided to break that rule in order to share some tips with others. Today’s product – SampleManager LIMS / LES.
To those of you experts out there, you know there are things that people SHOULD know but don’t. There are certain issues and questions that tend to come up too regularly. With that in-mind, I thought if each person who sees this could share one good tip that it would help those out there who are on their own build better systems through better basic understanding.
Rather than getting into specific modules, such as the workflow, SM-IDI, or the like, the plan here is to try to give tips that are so basic that they can apply anywhere in the system.
To those who would read this, keep in-mind that this is not a support site. These tips are merely meant as potentially a useful collection of extra tips. All support should remain with the SampleManager discussion groups or your consulting company’s internal discussion help groups.
I will begin with the first tip as a comment to this post but I welcome tips from all others who wish to share and encourage it. We complain so much about the silly things we see in the programming and configurations, lets help others instead of complaining about them.
Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com/
Tip:
Make the upgrade of the LTEs from older VGL versions to the new .NET forms a separate project.
Explanation:
Most companies don’t realize how much extra code they’ve added to their LTEs. It seems so easy to just switch them over to the newer versions’ .NET forms and the .NET forms look so much more up-to-date.
Unfortunately, when you do that, you’ve lost all that code that you added and changes that you’d made to your LTEs. Reprogramming them all in .NET isn’t trivial. Consider, too, that many of these aren’t going to need to change – they already work and much of what you’re going to want from the upgrade is to use the new features.
It can be useful to put both sets of the LTEs on your own menu (not the user’s menu, of course, where it’s confusing why they’d have two of each LTE). That way, you can go through them, one-by-one, to evaluate how many LTEs really need any changes and what kind of changes they need.
Otherwise, what tends to happen, is that you upgrade, excitedly work on the menus to switch to the new .NET forms, and quickly find out that you’ve spent a lot of time working on the menus when you’re not as ready to switch as you thought.
Make this its own block of work – it needs analysis time before you ever start converting them.
Gloria, I applaud your effort to share your knowledge on specific products you have expertise in. This is rarely done in an independent forum (if ever) with the Labware or Thermo products. This makes your posting unique, relatively speaking.
The main thing I wonder is… why is it necessary in the first place? Doesn’t the vendor have this sort of facility for shared user collaboration and knowledge sharing? Perhaps they do but it is restricted to paying clients and authorized partners. In that case, I can see why there is no big demand for an independent venue for sharing information and thus, I understand why you typically do not have these types of postings.
Some vendors do share knowledge, others don’t. Also, for those who do, some do a better job of it than others. Even where there is a community of sharing, I’m not sure I’ve seen someone do a “let’s share some things we just happen to know from our experience” kind of a post. And, as I’d said about how this isn’t the help desk – it’s just a one-off topic for anyone who wants a place to share their expertise.
While I have access to some discussion groups and not others, even in the ones where I do have access, I think some readers might see it as annoying if I came in with a post like this, as most of the discussion groups are oriented toward answering specific questions. Here, I can do what I want.
But, with that said, I don’t necessarily expect a lot of responses. Most people are just terribly busy, others are probably specifically prohibited from posting vendor-specific posts outside the private groups, and some are quite timid that their tip is as good as the next person’s. I can’t do anything for the first two, but for the last concern, people shouldn’t worry that their tips aren’t good – a little tip is better than no tip at all.
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