Author: Roger Suttmeier

So what is the best way to “get it out there” for others to consider? You certainly want the erwin Product Manager and Developers to know your thoughts, but you also want your peers to be able to be aware, and to possibly comment, criticize, or praise your suggestion.

For erwin, the process used to be to contact erwin Technical Support and open an “issue/case/ticket.” You typically would get a response back in about a month or two. This served the purpose of communicating it to the erwin development team, but it didn’t share your ideas with your peers. User groups were a way to share your ideas and engender conversation, but it seems we all have smaller and smaller travel budgets, so unless you are fortunate to be in a major metropolitan area with an active user group, these opportunities are becoming fewer as well.

Enter the Data Modeling Message Board in the erwin Modeling Community on erwin.com. In particular, enter the Idea section. We now encourage everyone to leave their idea in the Idea section of the Data Modeling and erwin User Communities’ Idea Walls. Why did we change this? With the advent of social media, keeping one idea internally on one record in one place handled by one person at a time is just an inferior communications and organizational method to having your idea “socialized” in a community setting.

The benefits of having your idea socialized on the Data Modeling Message boards are as follows:

• Your idea is uniquely identified by a combination of the date/time stamp, the title, and your name. It is immediately visible by everyone in the community in a designated place easily accessible and very obvious. Comments from your peers, either alternative suggestions, workarounds, criticism, or improvement suggestions, are also posted in a similar way and you get notified by email when they occur. From erwin Development and Product Management’s point of view, it is instantly obvious which ideas resonate with other erwin users so it’s easy to gauge the community’s sentiment.

• Ideas are visible on the main Community Page on the right side bar entitled Recent Ideas. The special Idea section can be accessed, among other ways, by clicking on Show All link under this summary section. Here you can search/filter titles and sort by newest/older date, activity (number of comments), or title. Furthermore, you can Like, Bookmark, or Reply to an idea with a comment.

• Lastly, you can view all the Ideas in a tabular or tile view, and you can the status of what is Planned, Delivered, Under Review, Wish Listed, and so on.

Some customers say they liked talking to Technical Support while submitting an enhancement request or idea. If you feel that way, by all means contact us by Chat or phone, and we will be happy to talk with you and kick around ideas, suggestion, and workarounds. We love to talk to you! But, in the end, if it boils down to a new functionality request, we encourage you to record your idea in the erwin Community Idea Wall because it’s the fastest, most productive, most interactive, and generally superior way to share it with erwin product management, development, and your peers.

We look forward to your ideas to improve our erwin Data Modeler!

Probably the easiest way to seek an answer is to hit the “F1” key to activate erwin Data Modeler’s context-sensitive “Help” system. erwin will automatically search for help about the functionality you are using without your having to determine the best search terms. Beginning with erwin r9.6, the Help system is online and dynamic (if you are not online, Help defaults to the content packaged and installed with the product), receiving regular updates.

If the context-sensitive Help does not give you the answer you need, the next step is to go to “Help/Help Topics” in the Help system, and either do a search, or look through the indexes for the functionality you are exercising. The benefits to the Help system build into the product is that it is quick and available 24/7.

If the Help system does not answer your question, the next step is to go to the erwin Technical Support Web Page. This one-stop-shopping page offers a variety of immediate tips and a variety of options tailored to the complexity and urgency of your question.

The top left resource is our Knowledge Base Search. Our engineers regularly publish new Technical Documents on tips, techniques, and problems as we encounter questions from customers. This regularly evolving source of knowledge is also available 24/7 and is quick and easy to use. To make your search as productive as possible, especially when using multiple terms, click on the Search Tips link (below the search box) and/or click on the Most Viewed/Recent Articles for popular and the latest breaking knowledge. When you run your search, we also provide tips on how to expand your search beyond our Knowledge Base by using a popular search engine.

If the Knowledge Base search does not supply the answer to your question, or if your question is relatively esoteric, you can also try asking your colleagues in the erwin Community, which resides next to the Knowledge Base search box. While this won’t provide an immediate response, it will enable you to access the knowledge of a large cross-section of fellow erwin users. This is especially helpful when looking for feedback on how others have accomplished a specific task.

If the above search options fail, then please contact us. The quickest way to do this is to click on the “Support Chat” button directly below the Knowledge Base search box. A erwin Technical Support Engineer generally responds within 30 seconds. You can ask your question immediately with no case-opening formalities. If the question is complex and requires talking, screen sharing, files to be transmitted, tracking, etc., the engineer will open a case for you and then call you back to proceed.

If you initially know your question is complex, the best step may be to open a case via the “Open a Support Ticket” option in the bottom right, next to the Chat area. This allows you to express your question in your own words, provides a record of the complex details, and provides functionality for screen sharing, transmission of files, and a tracking process that is monitored by management. It also enables the content to be shared with other engineers, in case the original engineer needs to engage senior resources or send the matter to our Sustaining Engineering Developers.

Each of the above contact techniques offers different speeds of response, ease of contact, and communications methods. Our mission is to provide the best possible answer in the most professional manner in the shortest possible time to help you meet your data modeling and data governance needs. Being aware of all these options may help you decide which will be most productive, depending on your question’s complexity and urgency.

Lastly, if you want to escalate your matter at any time, there is a “Contact A Manager” button on the same Support page, which sends an email directly to the Support Manager and Principal erwin Engineers.

We look forward to hearing from you!

First you want to review and describe your “as is” environment. You want to specify your “to be” environment and you want to plan your transition from “as is” to “to be”. This process should be familiar to data modelers since it is the same one you use to design a database. Modeling or planning your upgrade provides you with the same benefits of avoiding unpleasant surprises and last minute production impacts to your upgrade, as it does when building a database.

Next, you want to review all necessary resources. You certainly want to review all the product documentation having to do with upgrading. Product documentation can involve erwin Data Modeler Edition Release Notes, new features and enhancements, system Information, installation considerations, general considerations, known Issues, fixed Issues, licensing, training, and so on. Remember the Mart Server Release Notes (again, new if you are starting from a version less than r9) which include sections on Mart Architecture, Installing and Configuring the Mart, and upgrade and troubleshooting in. Product Documentation is available both from within the product, and online at https://s38605.p1254.sites.pressdns.com/support.

If you have questions beyond the Product Documentation, you can search our Knowledge Base, raise a Chat, open a Case, or call us by going to https://s38605.p1254.sites.pressdns.com/support.

You also want to review any environmental documentation and any internal company change request processes and procedures. You want to contact and establish a rapport with any IT resources that you will need if you are starting at a version less than r9x. Moving from r7x or r8x to r9x means moving from a two tier environment to a three tier environment and involves an application server and new security protocols.

After you have familiarized yourself with all the resources, you want to create a plan with the required steps, time frames, action owners, and resource contact information. The complexity of your plan may be as minimal as a simple email to yourself or other parties involved, or a real project plan. It all depends on what is necessary, but this is the time to make sure it is all written down, so you can understand the scope of what needs to be done.

When you have gathered this information and created your plan, we are happy to provide you with a pre-installation or pre-upgrade consultation to walk through your plan together.

Lastly, one of the *critical* steps for a smooth upgrade is to set up a test environment and perform a dry run of your plan with a copy of your data. To use the data modeling paradigm again, a dry run is your physical exploration or prototyping of your logical plan. If you run into any surprises, we can help you work through them with no impact to your production environment. A dry run helps ensure that when you perform your production upgrade there won’t be any surprises.

Additional installation and upgrade resources are available on our support site. In particular, we have a video, How to Make a Smooth Migration from erwin Data Modeler r7x to r8x to r9x, which discusses this process in greater detail.

In conclusion, upgrading can be relatively painless, but you do have to model or plan where you are, where you want to go, what steps are necessary to get from the beginning to the end of your journey, what resources you need to execute these steps, and then you must perform a dry run to verify your plan.

And remember, if you need a hand, we are here to help at https://s38605.p1254.sites.pressdns.com/support.