Hello, I am looking for some advice regarding the transition from Venus 4 to Venus 6. My group has a Vantage that is running on Venus 4.5 on a Windows 10 computer, and the IT department wants us to get on Windows 11, which then forces a transition to Venus 6.
I’ve been chatting a bit with an applications specialist and they are telling me that this transition will involve re-testing a lot of methods. These are methods that are in regular use in the lab, and we want to avoid downtime as much as we can.
If you have made the transition to Venus 6, do you have any advice to offer? Did you encounter any unexpected difficulties? How long did the transition end up taking? Thank you!
Except for some specific libraries, VENUS 6 is backwards compatible with methods written in VENUS 4, so it shouldn’t require complete rewrites.
Note that some of the incompatible libraries just need a newer version installed while others (namely one, the ASW GUI library) may be obsolete, so the commands would have to be replaced by a different library.
That being said, I haven’t seen your methods so perhaps there is something I’m missing. I’ll direct message you and coordinate with your applications specialist to determine the scope of work involved.
Could you have a dedicated PC with Windows 11 and VENUS 6 installed and start moving/testing the methods while retaining the VENUS 4.5/Win10 PC for production runs during the transition?
Barring VANTAGE firmware incompatibilities you should hopefully be able to switch which PC is plugged into the Vantage and do your testing on the Win11 PC while switching back to the Win10 PC whenever the lab needs to use the current VENUS 4.5 methods