Many IP Office Manager versions on one computer

The challenge

We all have been in the situation that we had the most actual IP Office Manager on our Laptop but were in the need to manage a system that was running older firmware. Based on what Avaya tells us every Manager should be backwards compatible and able to deal with older systems. But the experience tells another story. Especially 9.1 Manager can cause issues with earlier IPO firmware.

So what is the solution? Rather than just upgrade from release to release we want to have a copy of every Manager release available on our laptop.

It will have another benefit. Did you ever have to recreate a non working SD card? And did you ever run into the situation to find an older release at the customer site than the current one you carry with you on your laptop? You know what I mean… Struggling around, changing working directory and so on. In earlier releases it had been possible to set the installer directory of an older Manager as the working directory but Avaya decided to change the folder structure so that it won’t work anymore that way.

Again, what is the solution? Having a full installation of all the needed Manager versions would be great.

So far so good. That is probably nothing new and discussed many times before. But I want to conclude the steps you need to do. And to help you a little I plan to write a small Powershell script that will help you to do the needed steps for you.

Implementation

So how to start? You have to know that we work with just one single version of System Status Application and System Monitor so that we have to ensure that we are working always with the latest version to avoid conflicts connecting to a newer IP Office with an older application. That leads us to the need to always install the latest admin suite as the last step.

Let’s consider we are currently running a 9.1 version of the admin suite and want to add – not to upgrade – the admin suite in version 10.0 now. So we have a folder called ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Avaya\IP Office\’ that contains the 9.1 admin suite at all. To ensure we keep that Installation when running the newest installer just rename the Folder ‘Manager’ to ‘Manager91’ reflecting the current version and start the latest setup.exe.

The installer will do it’s work as expected. It will replace the older System Status and System Monitor applications and will do a fresh installation of Manager into a new folder named ‘Manager’. If the installation is finished you will find the new (10.0) folder ‘Manager’ along with the older folder ‘Manager91’ and we are able to start either the 9.1 Manager or the 10.0 Manager from their folder by double clicking the contained Manager.exe.

Different installed Manager versions

Different installed Manager versions

To ease the start of the wanted version I recommend to create an additional icon bar within the task bar or a folder on your desktop containing links to the Manager.exe files of all your installed versions.

Shortcut bar to chose Manager version

Shortcut bar

Conclusion

To recreate a SD card for the older version 9.1 you should think of the following: All Manager settings are stored within the same location in Windows registry and are used by all installed Manager versions. So to recreate an older SD card version you have to not only start th older Manager version but you also have to adjust the working directory to match the Manager you want to use to recreate the SD card. The working directory by default is ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Avaya\IP Office\Manager\’ and you have to change it to ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Avaya\IP Office\Manager91’ to not write 10.0 bin files onto the SD card even if you have started the 9.1 Manager.

Have fun so far. I’m thinking about a way to automate these steps with a small Powershell script to gather the installed versions, rename the needed folder and start the setup.exe.

If you need further help with IP Office you can contact me through my main website: https://www.fwilke.com/home

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