Freezerworks 2019 Upgrade Pt 1

Introduction – 00:00

Hey guys, welcome to the Freezerworks 2019 Learning Series, your visual guide to our sample management software. So, you'd like to upgrade to Freezerworks 2019? Well, that's wonderful! We've done so many things with 2019 that we'd love for you to implement as soon as possible. To learn more about those things, see our What's New video. Today, however, we're going to spend all of our time in Freezerworks 2018 preparing for our upgrade to 2019, then in the next video we'll upgrade, run the pre-upgrade reports, and finally, I'll take you through the steps you'll want to complete following the upgrade and prior to deploying the software for production. Before we get started, first ensure that you are in the latest version of Freezerworks 2018, 10.1.06. The nature of the 2019 upgrade means you may have to run it multiple times, and upgrades prior to 10.1.06 were very data-intensive. Save yourself some time and use the About Freezerworks option in the Help & Support menu to ensure you are in the latest version.

Pre-upgrade Checklist – 01:20

Now, before the actual upgrade there are five major things you need to do:

1. Obtain the ADMIN user account password (as you'll need to log in as the admin for the upgrade to run. Now this is the SUPER ADMIN user – the one in all caps – not just any user with a System Administrator Role)
2. Make a backup of the data file immediately prior to upgrade. You can make one now and one after you make the changes that we'll discuss in a second, you can never be too careful.
3. Test new hardware and software environments before the upgrade. Do this with a validation copy of Freezerworks, so as to ensure things run perfectly in production.
4. Map out Group access to samples in 2018. In other words, record how users are securing their samples
5. Reassign sample ownership to current users.

The first three steps should already be quite familiar to you if you've upgraded before, but it these last two that are exclusive to the 2019 upgrade and what we'll be discussing in detail today.

Sample Security Conflicts – 02:28

See, by far the most widespread change we've made in 2019 is to Sample Security. Sample Security in Freezerworks is based on the Owner of a sample, and, prior to 2019, Owners were always individual Users – a sample’s creator was its owner by default. You then set up access to samples on a User to User basis, which, for a number of reasons can cause headaches:

• Users leave and orphan samples
• You get a new User that joins an existing Group
• Maybe even another User joins
• Finally, new Groups come in and require access to existing samples

Pretty soon, your security looks like a spider web. In 2019 though, samples will instead be owned by entire Groups, simplifying security maintenance in the long run. A User leaves? No problem, as their Group owns any samples that they created. Got a new User? Just add them to a group and the existing securities will automatically apply. Now, this will obviously change your system quite a bit if you currently use Sample Security. Let's go through a few examples so you understand how things are going to work in the upgrade.

Let's imagine a Group named Laboratory that User Mary is a part of. Mary owns samples in 2018. In 2019, the ownership will simply switch to Laboratory. Now, let's imagine in 2018 that Mary's group was given access to samples owned by another User, Randy, but not access to User Joe's samples. If Randy and Joe are both in the Group, Research, this will create a conflict during upgrade. Freezerworks will automatically fix this conflict in 2019 by giving the Laboratory Group access to the Research Group samples, regardless of Joe's personal settings. In other words, the least restrictive setting from 2018 will be used. Now, during the upgrade you will receive a pre-upgrade report listing every conflict, so you can return to 2018 and either fix them or plan for the changes. In this previous example, for instance, to fix the conflict and maintain the same security we need to create a new Group in 2018 that User Joe is a part of, and then remove Joe from any other Group. That way, Laboratory would have restricted access to the new Group’s samples and thus Joe's, but not Randy's. Now, what happens if Mary owns samples in 2018, but is also a member of multiple Groups, Laboratory and Research? Freezerworks will provide a separate report listing all these instances during the pre-upgrade process, and if you continue with the upgrade it will automatically create new Groups to handle them, like so. New groups will be given the prefix “DWD” so you can easily tell which ones these are and rename them if you'd like. This will only occur if the user who is a member of multiple Groups also own Samples, so you can fix this in 2018 by reassigning ownership of the samples to Users in a single Group. With Owner Name on the List View, use Batch Update to do this quickly. Alternatively, you could remove the User from multiple Groups, but this may not be ideal.

Reassign Sample Ownership – 05:48

Finally, due to this change to Sample Ownership and the ‘groupless’ nature of the ADMIN Super User, any samples owned by Admin must be reassigned before the upgrade can be completed. Start by searching your database for all samples with the Owner Name of Admin. I'm going to use Simple Search and just look for the Owner Name is equal to Admin. Then, with the Owner Name on the list view, begin using Batch Update to reassign ownership as you see fit. Just ensure that the new owners are not members in multiple Groups, so that no new conflicts arise.

Conclusion – 06:25

And that's it for today's upgrade prep talk. The 2019 upgrade is a big one and we can't possibly cover everything in a five-minute video. If you need any help, don't hesitate to call support. Otherwise, in our next video, I'll demonstrate the upgrade process and discuss what you'll need to accomplish post-upgrade to implement Freezerworks 2019. Thank you for watching, see you then!