Upgrade This!

Day 114: Right before Christmas, the nice folks in our IT department at the Park upgraded our old SharePoint to an entirely different version. The old one was getting pretty well stuffed with volunteers and applicants and hours, and was starting to really bog down when we needed to add something new. However, we soon discovered that the upgrade's capacity for handling our volume of files was significantly less, requiring us to compartmentalize large groups of files in multiple smaller increments. In other words, in the old version, you could see all the files for the last ten years. In the new version, you were lucky if you could see a whole year without having to open a second set of 500. Instead of having a broad overview on one page of A-Z, the new version required you to close "A-Cr" in order to open "Cr-Do" as a new page.

The next thing we discovered was that categories such as "position description" had disappeared entirely. Data fields had to be recreated from scratch in the new SharePoint. Then there were issues with missing hours, whole missing years, evaporating categories which resisted reinstallation, and so on. Each day brought a new set of challenges, and the regular work was backing up. One thing after another had to be readjusted, reinvented, realigned. The air was getting a little blue in the office as both Kevin and I exhausted our vocabularies and threatened to pitch the computers out through the second-story windows and into the snow.

Little by little, tweak by tweak, Kevin and IT worked at whipping the system into shape, but broken bits kept cropping up here and there. Much to our dismay, we discovered that the electronic copies of applications we'd attached to potential volunteers' files had gone missing. Resorting to backup files from the old system and from other sources, my task for the last few weeks has been figuring out what needed to be reattached and where to find it. Today, I buttoned up the last of them; done, complete, finito.

Kevin still has a list of tweaks to make, but I'm caught up on new applications and recording hours. The next time somebody says "upgrade" to me, I'm going to upgrade them right between the eyes.