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Creating a studio Vectorworks installer


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Hi Jim,

Can you please tell me any issues I might be causing for my team by creating a Vectorworks installer for our studios?

The way I go about this is to do a clean install of Vectorworks on one machine, and from that create a disc image containing an Automator script that copies into the same respective location on each machine;

1. The Vectorworks app with our special sauce (that is, our templates and modified libraries),

2. Vectorworks preferences (from the users Library/Preferences folder),

3. Some files and folders from the user Library/Application Support/Vectorworks folder.

As far as I am aware, this is the only way to be able to roll out correct line endpoint styles, and back up prefs for the whole team. Also makes it much easier to roll out to 30+ machines, allowing for a general studio support member to run the installer.

Is there any way copying these user prefs could be causing problems on other machines? Is there another way to set user prefs without tainting them on a single machine first?

Thanks.

TD

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

This is exactly the method I recommend for doing mass installations. Especially if you have a G or C series network license where all users share the same serial number, so copying the preferences from one machine to another also removes having to enter it manually. If the Licenses are E series, then you'd have to enter each persons SN manually but it still saves the most time on the install and the setup.

The only time you wouldn't want to do this (and this is just the occasional incompatibility I've seen) is if you installed on something like OS X 10.9 and then tried to deploy to an OS X 10.11 machine, sometimes going across multiple Mac versions things are missed, but as long as its from the same OS to the same OS you're fine.

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Hi Jim,

The only time you wouldn't want to do this (and this is just the occasional incompatibility I've seen) is if you installed on something like OS X 10.9 and then tried to deploy to an OS X 10.11 machine, sometimes going across multiple Mac versions things are missed, but as long as its from the same OS to the same OS you're fine.

What types of things might be missed?

Thanks for that.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Specifically, the spotlight plugin that allows you to see the content of .VWX files shown on their icons and in quicklook (spacebar preview) but thats the only major one I can recall tracing back specifically to that. Otherwise its generally a good idea to install locally on any machines that give you trouble, but I haven't heard reports of issues doing that in a long time. This was most volatile around the OS X 10.8 to 10.9 era I think.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Not really, overall it's been more stable other than user-account specific stuff which can crop ip. If you can create new user accounts on those machine and install locally, let me know if the issues stay the same or change. When you get random strangeness it's best to revert everything back to stock and remove any custom solutions from the equation.

Their hardware may matter more this version however, the system requirements are higher and more important than they were in prior versions.

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