Testing OpenText Provision 9.0.0

I started high level testing the OpenText Provision 9.0.0 desktop client yesterday.  Our envornment is a flex licence server, file based shared repositories on a shared LAN drive, and Windows XP SP3 desktops.  Overall reaction: Impressed.

New features:

• The new formating tool "layout" is much appreciated and works well. This allows any property of the object or any relationship to be displayed (turn on via View; properties).  We had been manually appending drawing objects or custom styles to object to indicate things like status. This avoids the need for such work arrounds. 
• The fix to allow vertically aligned text; I expected a new property on the fromat style text tab but this isn't how they have done it.  It's related to the drawing tool, so if you rotate an object by 90 degrees either way the text will be displayed vertically. Great for those conceptual models where we want to show an object spanning a number of horizontal objects.

Repository / Notebook Conversion (we are currently using a shared file based repository)

• Copy and convert repository / notebook from version 6.3.0 to version 9.0.0 worked seamlessly although there was a short delay before I could access the new repository / notebook with my correct permissions (customization tab was grayed out).
• Applied our custom modelling language based on Enterprise Architecture and it appears to have worked for custom objects, custom links, custom styles, and our modelling framework.
• Every model checked visually appears to be 100% as it was before conversion.

Basic Functions

• Check out and check in working
• Tools; compare notebooks working

Still to be tested

• Translator export and import (we use round tripping to do bulk updates to content). Ideally property grids would allow Excel like updates of properties, but for now Excel beats accessing record by record.  Also want to check if exporting an object set via the translator now includes the parent child table. 
• Publishing to word, and compliled HTML.

So far so good and nothing that would stop us migrating to version 9.0.0. 

Regards

Jim