What Does the New Tool Do?
This new cross-platform application lets you save a copy of a Spira product template to a .templ file on your local computer. It also lets you migrate everything about the template to any Spira instance.
What is the Benefit for Me?
Being able to store, share, and migrate Spira product templates gives you lots of powerful workflows. For example:
- The backup file can be used to audit a live product template in Spira to see if it has changed
- You can restore a backup to your main Spira instance to clone the template quickly or to help you revert to a template before a series of now unwanted changes
- You can share templates with others that serve a specific need, such as for a particular industry or process
Many of our customers in more regulated industries such as healthcare, life sciences, capital financial markets, manufacturing, and defense/aerospace will need to have multiple instances of Spira from a configuration management perspective:
- Product instance that is used with live data, where no untested configuration changes are allowed
- Staging/test instance that is used to test and verify workflow/configuration changes
- Development instances that are used to try out possible workflow/configuration changes
Previously, you would need to make a configuration change to a template (e.g., add a workflow status or transition, modify custom properties, etc.) in the development/staging environments, and once tested, manually recreate the same change in the production instance.
Now with the new template migration tool, you can create and test potential configuration changes and then, once accepted, migrate the template from test/staging to production.
How Do I Obtain and Use The Tool?
To get the new product template migration tool, go to the Spira Add-Ons and Downloads section of our website and then download the appropriate (Mac or PC) version of the new migration tool:
The application runs on Windows or Mac OS and is available to download. To install it, follow the instructions in the application installer on your platform.
The documentation for the new tool can be found on our central SpiraDoc documentation website.
When you open the application, you see the main welcome screen:
From here, you have two options (note that you must be a system administrator to proceed):
- Start New Backup: starts a new process to save a Spira product template to a template file
-
Open Backup File: continues a previous process based on the state of the template file selected.
These options are discussed in more detail below.
Template backup
To start a new backup of a product template to a local file:
- select "Start New Backup" from the welcome screen.
- on the next screen, enter valid administrator credentials for the Spira instance you want to backup a template from
- select the product template to backup and a place to save it on your computer (the file extension will be .templ)
During the backup process, you will see the progress and details about what actions have been completed. If you click "Stop" during the backup, the process will pause, so you can resume it later (you can only migrate after the backup has been 100% completed). Just in case there are any issues or errors, the application saves a log alongside the backup file.
Once the backup has finished, you have two options:
- "Return to Start" to go back to the welcome screen. Choose this option to either make another backup or to quit the application
- "Migrate" to immediately start the process of migrating the template to a different Spira instance
Template Migration
Once you have completed a product template backup, you can migrate the product template to another Spira instance:
During the migration process, you will see the progress and details about what actions have been completed. If you click "Stop" during the migration, the process will pause, so you can resume it later (the new product template will not be usable in Spira until the migration is 100% completed). Just in case there are any issues or errors, the application saves a log alongside the backup file.
Future Plans
Now that we have released the new product template backup and migration tool, we have the following exciting plans:
- The older Spira product backup and migration tool that is Windows-only and was released prior to the introduction of product templates in Spira 6.0 will be fully depreciated, and its functionality incorporated into the new cross-platform tool.
- We are in the process of creating a new Inflectra marketplace for extensions and add-ons for our products. It will include third-party extension such as SpiraApps and Rapise custom libraries, but we also plan to include product templates for different industries, use cases and methodologies, developed by our partners and other third parties that you can use.