lisaturchi said:
We have actually made great progress we just cant get it to go through the upgrade without manual intervention. I will keep you updated on our progress.
Yes, we should join together. We have many issues going through Citrix, i.e. printing issues, Dragon Issues, etc... All of our physician's have local installs.
I was told once that "I could make a .msi myself" (Gee, thanks GE). The problem is that to configure something like that it not real easy, and the ability to test it is the hard part. I have had bad .MSI in the past, made by another company and I would not want to saddle myself and my users with such a thing. Every time the computer was restarted the app seemed to reinstall and you had to hit cancel 8 times to get it to go through asking for non-existent media. It was a help desk nightmare and almost nobody would actually hit cancel 8 times. I would not want such a thing to happen with a 3 am GE workstation upgrade. If we could get the same build to test and hope that the build wasn't upgraded on upgrade night then we could have it built in advance but you never know what will happen on upgrade night and if 3 am would be the earliest to start on workstation installs.
I also thought of taking a class on how to make .MSIs for deployment. All I found were classes which had lots of dev/programming as prerequisites (not me or my assistant in my staff of "two").
I also worked with a GE tech on this and he was determined to help. He got it 99 percent but I would still needed to deploy a registry hack to finish the installs. He told me how he did it but I was not able to replicate.
There is also a .MSI builder which does this for you but you ahve to start with a new build of XP to start the process and run through the steps of installing while making sure you hit every prerequisite like .NET, java, etc as part of the install. This showed the most promise but did not work consistently probably because I missed a prerequisite (again, I am not a developer and never will be) and this is more like a reverse engineering deal which is never as good as having the developers do this as part of their installation development.
I would be willing to pay someone to show me how to do this or to do it for me. It would certainly save us time and money in the clinic and this is one thing I have never made any progress on automation with. We would have less downtime during upgrades and we would be able to upgrade more often when tehy come out with service packs. We have such a small IT staff here that I am busy playing the role of software tester for GE sometimes when I could otherwise be learning how to automate deployment of the product.
So this is what I have already done over the years and I did eventually give up out of frustration. I always thought that if I pulled it off that it may only work for one version of CPS. If GE continues to refuse to do this then I guess there is no hope.
Posted : April 22, 2014 11:35 pm
