7pace Timetracker Professional Services & Migration Questions

Does 7pace Timetracker offer any professional services?

Answer

We know everyone can use a little help sometimes, and so our team is ready to assist with any paid service for custom widget creation, API integration or additional training needs you may have. We offer custom widget/report building services with your 7pace Timetracker deployment. Want to set up more comprehensive training for your team? Contact support@7pace.com for more information or a quote.

Below are some examples of questions the 7pace team receives for professional services:

How do we migrate from DevOps Server (on-prem) to DevOps Services (cloud)?

We are planning to move from DevOps Server (on-prem) to DevOps Services (cloud). How do we migrate our data and is there a variance on license count or cost from one to the other?

Answer

Migration from DevOps Server to DevOps Services has two aspects - data migration and license migration.

Data

We do not support any migrations from DevOps Server to DevOps Services; there is no automated script or process available to export, convert and import 7pace Timetracker-related data from DevOps Server into a migrated DevOps Services account.

There are two ways to keep your Timetracker data when you move to DevOps:

1. Serviced Migration (recommended)

We recommend that you provide the data to 7pace so that we can perform the migration for you (please be aware that this is a paid service). This method is applicable only when you use/used DevOps Server (formerly TFS) ->DevOps migration using Microsoft's official guide (see https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/devops/migrate/).

Please see below for additional information on our paid service for migrating Timetracker data from DevOps Server (on-prem) to DevOps Services (cloud).

2. Import/Export Method (less preferable)

For smaller amounts of data (between 10,000 - 20,000 rows), you have the option of exporting time-related data from your original account and then importing that data into the new account.

To export data, you could use the export feature available from the "Budgets" page: or use the Reporting API. 

To import the data, you could use the import feature available on the "Times Explorer" page, or use the workLogs endpoint from our REST CRUD API and also our NPM package.

Can you tell me about 7pace Timetracker’s paid migration service?

We are planning to move from DevOps Server (on-prem) to DevOps Services (cloud) and are interested in your paid service for migrating 7pace Timetracker data. Could you tell me how we can arrange that?

Answer

As outlined above, we do not support any migrations from DevOps Server to DevOps Services; there is no automated script or process available to export, convert and import 7pace Timetracker- related data from DevOps Server into a migrated DevOps Services account.

However, 7pace does provide a paid service to import your 7pace Timetracker-related data into your newly-migrated DevOps Services account.

Please contact sales@7pace.com to receive a quote for this service on your account. We will need some information from your existing DevOps Server collection to provide an offer.

Required Steps

If you decide to go with this service, here are the required steps on your end to deliver the data to 7pace to migrate it into your cloud account:

1. Perform a data-tier application export of your Timetracker database https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/data-tier-applications/export-a-data-tier-application 
   *Important: remove all Windows users or users you assigned to that database before performing the export

2. Provide us with a link to that database to be migrated.

3. Provide data displayed on the page https://{vsts_account}.visualstudio.com/_apis/projectcollections (your link will look similar to this sample link).

4. Provide data displayed on the page https://{vsts_account}.vssps.visualstudio.com/_apis/identities?scopeId={collection_id}&api-version=1.0 (your link will look similar to this sample link).
   (you can get the collection_id parameter from Step 3)

Important: If you have already installed 7pace Timetracker for DevOps Services into your account and have existing records, we will clean these records prior to import. For an extra cost, we can also offer you an additional option to merge your old and new worklogs.

After that, we can run the import of 7pace Timetracker data and you will have all your worklogs migrated to DevOps Services, with all prior settings and customizations.

Can I migrate 7pace Timetracker data from one DevOps server to another?

Is it possible to migrate 7pace Timetracker data from one DevOps server to a different DevOps server?

Answer

Unfortunately, we do not support any migrations between DevOps servers.

On each DevOps server, there is a unique set of IDs (Guid's) for Users and Collections, and we map Timerecords on these IDs. Because the second DevOps server has different IDs for the same User/Collection, we cannot map Timerecords from the TimetrackerDB with IDs from first DevOps server. For 7pace Timetracker, these unknown IDs are another or new Collections/Users.

Please note that any manual changes made to the database by users will render 7pace Timetracker in an unsupported state.

We do support updates to DevOps Server on the same machine; for more information please click here.