With my long-standing history as a seasoned and impartial technology consultant catering to the wide-ranging needs of Advent users, it should come as no surprise that companies that have moved away from Advent call me to assist them if they have Advent specific needs after their agreements with Advent have lapsed. In those specific cases, I suspect my independence from Advent is one of the most appealing features of my service, but many Advent users that have ongoing agreements with Advent also retain me to provide a level of service that Advent seems unwilling or unable to provide.
One of the things I get regular calls about is getting Axys running again. These calls occur either when firms upgrade their servers or when firms that have moved on to competing Portfolio Management Systems dust off their old Axys files with hopes of tapping into Axys again. My experience consulting to financial services firms using Advent Software for thirty-plus years facilitates my ability to resolve issues like these easily.
Many of those calls I get start with the caller telling me, “We reinstalled Axys on the server and it isn’t working.” And inevitably, this tells me more about the underlying issue than the caller ever could. You certainly can reinstall Axys, but you probably don’t need to because Axys on the server is just a bunch of files that you access from another PC. The most important thing to keep Axys working properly aside from the proper installation being done (at some point in the past) is making sure that users have all necessary rights to the shared folders.
This article is focused on explaining what the requirements are to empower you or your firm to resurrect Axys. As usual, I’ll be providing a level of information in this piece that may be more than you need to solve any immediate problem with the hope that info is useful to you in the future.
Axys Versions
There are two fundamental versions of Axys: the multi-user version and single-user version. To add a little confusion, the multi-user version is frequently referred to as the network version, but both fundamental versions are regularly installed on networks. So, the network version is a bit of a misnomer. Among these two fundamental versions, there is also the version of the software, which is at this point typically version 3.8, 3.8.5, 3.8.6 or 3.8.7. In addition to these, there are also Monocurrency, Multicurrency and Variable Rate versions, to name a few. Suffice to say, there are a lot of different versions.
Axys Licensing Model
The concurrent licensing model that Axys implements applies to both single-user and multi-user versions. In both instances, the number of real Axys users typically exceeds the total licensed users, but having a multi-user version allows more than one user to use Axys simultaneously and adds certain multi-user features, such as user-specific settings and separate blotters, et cetera.
Understanding How Axys is Installed
Initially, the single-user version is simpler to install because the primary program (Axys) and supporting programs (Dataport, Data Exchange, Report Writer, et al.) hypothetically only need to be installed once. That would be true if there literally was only one user using the software on one PC. In actuality, the single-user version of Axys and supporting programs get installed multiple times in a network environment. They need to be installed once for every user, albeit to the same destination for each user (e.g., F:\Axys3).
During the Axys install process, certain required files are copied to the user’s PC and/or profile and Axys creates registry keys in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Advent. The most critical Axys registry keys are stored in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Advent\Axys\3. Although there are several important Axys files, the firmwide.inf is perhaps the most crucial file. In a single-user installation, this text file, which can be found in the root folder of Axys (e.g., F:\Axys3), details certain settings in use and where all of the other Axys files can be found.
The multi-user version must also be installed multiple times for users, but the initial Axys install varies. You install it once to the network/primary destination folder (e.g., F:\Axys3) and then install it again for the rest of the users (e.g., F:\Axys3\users\kevin where a firmwide.inf file will be created). Similar to the single-user version, the supporting programs such as Dataport, Data Exchange and Report Writer would also need to be installed if the user needs those, or if you are trying to make sure all of the users have access to all of the supporting apps. The same registry keys are used for the multi-user install as the single-user version, but the multi-user (a.k.a. network) version adds an additional critical file: the netwide.inf file.
Netwide.inf versus Firmwide.inf
These two files are closely related. The netwide.inf file should only be found in the root Axys folder of a network install, but firmwide.inf files exist in both single-user and multi-user environments. The multi-user version is designed to use the settings in the netwide.inf as the system default and have any settings in the firmwide.inf supersede the settings in the netwide.inf. As a rule, you should never see a firmwide.inf in the root Axys folder of a network install. You should also almost never see a netwide.inf file in the root of a single-user Axys installation.
A Recurring Axys Installation Bug
With regard to installing Axys, there is a rather annoying issue that has been going on for several years. It seems that the Axys install will not recognize certain network locations and/or mapped drives. The fix requires the following registry settings:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
“EnableLUA”=dword:00000001
“EnableLinkedConnections”=dword:00000001
Once those settings have been applied, the Axys install program will be able to find the mapped drives. It seems to me that this is an issue Advent should have addressed a long, long time ago.
Understanding Those Axys Shortcuts and Corresponding Registry Entries
The working folder of the Axys shortcut needs to point to the appropriate folder for the firmwide.inf file. That means that an Axys shortcut for a single-user version of Axys should have a “Start in” folder like F:\Axys3, whereas the multi-user version would have “Start in” folder like F:\Axys3\users\kevin. Assuming the same install folder was used, the target for these shortcuts would be the same: F:\Axys3\Axys32.exe. Likewise, the registry entries associated with Axys should match these settings. When I am looking at a system, I can usually determine if Axys has been installed properly by looking for consistency between the shortcuts and the following registry entries: ExePath, NetPath and UserPath.
In summary, your Axys install is dependent on a few things: the files themselves, access to the location where they are stored and proper mapping to the location of those files in the registry, firmwide.inf and netwide.inf if applicable. Hopefully, you can get things back online on your own, but if you need assistance with your Advent installation, reach out to me and I’ll do my best to assist you.
About the Author: Kevin Shea is the Founder and Principal Consultant of Quartare; Quartare provides a wide variety of technology solutions to investment advisors nationwide.
For details, please visit Quartare.com, contact Kevin Shea via phone at 617-720-3400 x202 or e-mail at kshea@quartare.com.
It is that time again… Advent has released a newer version of Axys 3.8.x. Those of us that looked at the Advent Product Support Matrix distributed a couple years ago with a certain level of trepidation can take a deep breath since we now have a clear replacement to those versions that were once aggressively scheduled for various decreasing levels of support.