Another beginning

I guess there are workarounds that can be done for us to install the CMS product on our dev. server.  It won’t get done though until 2 days before the Jump Start.  With that being said, we can still experiment a bit on our training sites.  It’s still not something that makes me happy, I know that once this is up and running.. hopefully there won’t be issues like this.  But, right now .. I’m still frustrated.

Geez.  This is good practice for patience.  I know that in a few months, I’ll have to have plenty more..  but on a personal level, it’s always different.  We’ve discussed time and time and time again with the CMS vendor that we have an idea on how we want to set up our servers.  They’ve listened, they’ve agreed with us .. stating that we had some excellent ideas.  They did NOT however tell us that we’d have to pay for consulting hours to get it to work.  That’s f*cked up.  In my opinion.  I’d rather use our consulting hours for things that we seriously need help in implementing our sites.  Not how to install their product on our servers.  I mean, c’mon.  We can’t even start to implement anything until we can get it running.  Basically, we’re dead in the water.  That just seems to be so wrong.  I’m annoyed.  My manager is annoyed.  So, we have a Jump Start in less than 2 weeks and if we can’t even implement our development server – then we’re wasting our time.

How do vendors survive!  Seriously….

There’s so much to do, it’s hard to know where to start. The really difficult part is that one can’t do as much planning until we get through the training and know what to expect.

I’m disappointed that we were led to believe that we could use their Partner to migrate our data. It’s really the most daunting task that I could think of and to have us think that they or their Partner had experience and then find that it was untrue; was tremendously disappointing. So, we’ll see how long it will take us to move the data forward into the new DB schema. I’m afraid we’ll be spending too much time on it.

We’ll see more next week, we’re also finishing up the last bit of training and then we can really delve into creating and migrating our websites.

This is probably going to be the first of many posts.  We’re doing a CMS installation that *has* to be finished by August.  That’s a hard deadline that cannot be changed.  We should have said the deadline was July, and have August a fallback, just in case.  But, too late for that.  We’re converting our old CMS system into a new one.  I’m hoping it won’t be too bad.  The difficult issue will be migrating data.  Making sure it’s in the logical order that people are familiar with.  We had many choices for CMS systems, but we choose one that was not open source (due to not having the resources or the amount of time it would take to implement); but it is in ColdFusion.  For us, that’s vital.  We at least will speak the same language.

Anyways, time to do a bit more research…