Forum: SDL Trados support
Topic: SDL Studio GroupShare Installation Support
Poster: ATB Translation
Post title: Half Good News
Thanks to help by local support staff and fact that we formatted and reinstalled the system (i.e. OS), we could retrieve back our Groupshare 2011 installation, with little data loss. Financially it's a mess of course.
Now, we have to work double hard to make up/compensate last two weeks' loss. Now I am creating projects, as usual....
However I cannot mention about one piece of software which was vital in this solution: It was clonezilla, a linux based disk cloning livecd. After installing the Windows 2008 R2 Server, I took an image of the vital parts, thereby we could manage to test almost a 100 solutions. When we break something I simply restore the partition and all is brand new again. (BTW, I am not exaggerating; I installed and reinstalled the Groupshare application so many times, I started dreaming about it, disrupting my peace of mind. Now I am celebrating with a bottle of scotch.... Yeah.)
Since I mentioned that I tried reinstalling it hundreds of times, that nullifies Paul's suggestion. (BTW, if I were in your shoes, I would obfuscate my email, (like pfilkin(at)sdl.com) posted on a board, since spam robots collect emails and that's why once I started receiving several hundred spam mails everyday. But I shall contact you when I sober up.)
Anyway the software piece (i.e. Groupshare 2014) has serious shortcomings:
1. IMHO (in my humble opinion) and as far as I observe, since it's not hardcoded software (i.e. not coded in c, c++, pascal, fortran, etc.) but rely on such volatile and bug-ridden, insecure quasi-programming languages as .net, java, any smallest change to .net, java VMs, etc. simply breaks the code. That's why, again IMHO, it acts strangely. (Dot Net is Micro and Soft's Wannabe Java. That's really it.)
2. Despite system requires a specific "locale" setting (i.e. English) on the server, the installation guide does not mention about that. After installing the server OS, the installer started giving strange and obscure errors such as "IIS not installed" (which is not true). (That's because locale of our OS is different from the requested locale, English. So I've been told.)
3. The process is not well documented. I mean, even a fully qualified system admin (which, despite I am not for Windoze domain, I am for linux (debian flavor) domain), could not find its way around. That's because, apart from being poorly documented, the error messages are cryptic and mostly not associated with the real cause of the error.
4. The installer requires different server/SQL configurations than stated in the Guide. That's really bad. Because, even the well qualified system admin (which our guy was), could not predict. SDL must consider the real solution of "Unattended Installation".
In order to -kinda- contribute the process, I shall post my findings and tips and tricks regarding the installation.
Now another problem is before me. It's a business decision:
I have so many translation projects. Consequently another two week disruption would be very bad not only for me but for my translators too. (I am a translator, by professions and I always look after my translators.)
The question is, is it possible to install this thing in a day on a platform and prerequisite software as stated in the guide????? (I mean I am told to buy SQL Server 2012 but the guide only recommends that if the file sizes are very large, which is not a case for us. Similarly I am also told to buy Windows 2012 Server. But that's not specified on the guide too. And I am told, "before" that somebody managed to install it on Windows 2008 Machine with SQL Express.)
If it's possible to do it so then I shall make an appointment with local support and they will help me do this.
However, if it's not possible, our company does not want to take this risk and has not an option but ask for refund and restitution of our 2011 licenses.
BTW, I am taking this opportunity to thank local support for their help.
Best Wishes,
[Edited at 2014-04-21 20:56 GMT]