Preserve user's layout during upgrade?

Help & Support
1

Hello,

I don't want to be a nag about this (I've already had an email correspondence on the subject) but I think it's worth a dedicated topic here in the forum. Perhaps others will weigh in with their own feedback.

I appreciate that GPSoftware works very hard on Directory Opus and wants the most users possible to benefit from new features that are introduced and that exposing them by way of the default layout is a very efficient way to maximize the chance that people will explore the new features. I also expect that this was something that received some internal discussion. Nonetheless, I find it almost completely counter to the nature (customization) of Directory Opus to reset the user's layout during an upgrade. :confused: It seems to me that any serious home user of Opus will have done some level of customization. Similarly, in a corporate environment it's very likely that the IT department will have provided a customized layout to facilitate the work being done by the employees. Also, in a corporate environment every user will need to understand how to restore their layout after the upgrade. Inevitably many of them will need help from IT no matter what preparations/training/resources have been made available to them. Further, in an application server environment (i.e. Citrix) they need that help pretty much simultaneously, unfortunately. As the upgrade process presently works, each upgrade to Opus leads to user confusion and adds unnecessarily to the work of any applicable IT staff.

I urge GPSofware to reconsider this issue and to find a different mechanism for exposing new features to users.

Thanks for an awesome product! :opusicon: :thumbsup:

Thanks,

Jason

2

The default toolbars are turned on, and any old toolbars turned off (but not deleted), but I don't think any layouts are changed. ("Layout" has a specific meaning in Opus.)

The old toolbars can be turned back on trivially if needed. We assume that anyone who has done heavy customization will be able to do that without problems. On the other hand, less technical users would miss out on the hundreds of improvements and new features added to Opus 10's default toolbars unless we switched them by default.

The change only happens once, when you upgrade from 9 to 10; subsequent updates leave your toolbars as they are.

The list of toolbars which are turned on is stored in /dopusdata/ConfigFiles/toolbars.oxc, so in a corporate environment you can manage that file however you wish. (e.g. Copy and restore it either side of running the installer.)

The old default toolbars in Opus 9 dated back to Opus 6, with not much being added or changed (a little, but not much) over the years. With Opus 10 we decided too much functionality was hidden by default and it was time to do something about that, and we also reduced the reliance on three-buttons (favouring menu-buttons instead) because time had showed us that people didn't discover the right- and middle-button actions on them, missing out on even more built-in functionality.