I have been creating useful content for Advent users and the financial services firms they work with for many years now. Part of creating the blog is therapeutic for me, part of it is a well-intentioned effort to foster goodwill by sharing the lessons I have learned with other users to reduce pain points, and some part of it is an effort to get the word out about what I do in case users find that they need someone with my unique skillset.
When ChatGPT and similar services arrived on the scene, I was somewhat concerned about what would happen if those engines sucked up the knowledgebase I have created and presented it to my audience as their own information. There are documented ways to discourage AI bots like robots.txt, Cloudflare AI Crawl, WAF blocking and CMS-specific settings. I know this, but early on I made a choice to allow it, rather than fight it.
Initially, I remained most worried that my knowledge would be presented without credit to where it came from, but this past week I realized that there is another issue altogether. In the process of troubleshooting an Advent Software use case, I queried Perplexity. I was rewarded with a page of summary information that cited Advent, AdventGuru and 13 other sources. Some of those sources were relevant, most were not.
As I drilled down on the problem, most of the sources cited were in fact me. So here I was querying Perplexity for assistance, and it was attempting to assist me in troubleshooting the issue using information I provided. Some part of this makes sense and could be helpful if I were losing my faculties or wanted to query my own digital footprint related to the issue. Neither of these apply.
I wound up resolving the issue with the user and their IT consultant in less than an hour with no part of the credit for doing it attributable to using Perplexity with its “best” model. Our solution was collaborative. The client arranged a Teams meeting with me, and their IT consultant. The three of us worked together to try a few things. Eventually, we found a solution as a result of us all working together – not an AI query. We solved it because we found the time to have a meeting and made that a priority.
In the process of writing this, I ran the same query on Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4. The results were very similar. My blog and other online sources of current and historical information are the data that empowers these engines to respond to practical and esoteric questions with anything relevant beyond their training data. However, as I read though their responses to the query, it became clear that I was heavily cited without any solution being provided to the problem.
While I am flattered that my subject matter expertise is held in such high esteem by AI inference engines, I am concerned that when AI models attempting to utilize what I have written – citing me repeatedly throughout their response as a source of information – fail to provide a solution that reflects poorly on me. In the particular case we resolved, I am almost 100% certain that a solution does not currently exist online. I have already written a separate blog post detailing the problem and its solution, but now the question for me is, do I put that solution up on my blog?
By doing so, I continue to provide access to users that have relied on me as a source of information that may not otherwise be discovered, documented or publicly available, but I am also empowering AI inference to parody my expertise in more meaningful ways that may make users think their favorite AI chatbot is a substitute for getting knowledge directly from the source. The latter is problematic because written works contain meaning and nuance that are lost when information is taken selectively and presented out of context.
Chatbots cannot be trusted to provide the best possible answer – only the best possible answer based on their training, parameters, capabilities, available data, and the prompts we use to query them. My blog posts are representative breadcrumbs of my experience that I have chosen to share. In this case, the chatbots reviewed my blogs to determine if and how something can be done, asserted that it could not be done, and then provided instructions on possible workarounds, but there was a solution that could be found without the assistance of a chatbot all along and it makes a lot more sense than the workarounds that were recommended by Perplexity and its cohorts.
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
I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: if Advent does well, it follows that someone like me should do well, too. I profit directly from Advent customers when they hire me, and indirectly when companies that provide services to Advent customers hire me. That said, there is a certain amount of Advent’s dysfunction that helps my business. In short, I offer what Advent cannot and/or does not want to provide to their customers, and many of my customers hire me specifically because I do not work for Advent.
Steeplechase race in 1912, Celtic Park, N.Y., through water
On the other hand, there is a limit to what is reasonable. If Advent proverbially lights their hair on fire and jumps off a tall building, that is not good for me or my business. With thirty-five years of experience dealing with Advent, acting as an advocate to clients, I have seen some absurd things and have a high tolerance for some of it, but even I will occasionally find myself flummoxed. It pains me to say so, since I really want Advent to succeed… at least enough that they aren’t losing business to competitors without good reason. That is bad for their business and mine.
Advent Options
If you are to believe the natural progression of things as they are presented to the masses, it follows that some Axys customers who are frustrated by its limitations can be better served by Black Diamond or APX. From what I have seen personally, Advent hasn’t had great success moving Axys customers to Black Diamond. I have seen a few good Axys clients go Orion and Tamarac, but I have yet to see one of my clients go to Black Diamond successfully. This is not meant as a criticism of Black Diamond – it’s just an observation that my typical clients haven’t found the complete solution they are looking for in Black Diamond.
For those firms where Axys is no longer the answer and Black Diamond cannot meet their expectations, APX may offer a viable upgrade path. Aside from its cost, APX has always been a relatively easy upgrade choice for Axys users to make because it is an Advent option that supports the legacy of Axys, which includes knowledge of portfolio management and performance fundamentals, transactions, processes, reporting, and scripts. That means that when those customers move to APX, much of the reporting, infrastructure and established workflows can remain the same.
In short, APX offers everything that Axys does, plus the benefits of an Enterprise/SQL server platform. The incremental learning required for operations staff to go from Axys to APX is very manageable, and things pretty much work like they did in Axys.
Among APX offerings, I know of at least five possible permutations:
APX Self-Hosted on Premise
APX Self-Hosted in the Cloud by a Third Party
APX Dedicated with AOS
APX Dedicated without AOS
APX Multi-Tenant (hosted by Advent)
I have listed these APX environment options in order of my personal preference, based on specific experience with all of the options and the ease with which one can effectively manage, integrate, automate, and enhance systems. From my perspective, the first two options clearly give you the greatest degree of control and autonomy over your own systems. Choosing one of the other three options puts you in a place where Advent is enforcing various controls over your system – good and bad. Firms that have always had complete control over their systems and want to continue to do so should bristle at the very idea of this.
Advent’s Dedicated Hosting Service for APX Users
One that is used to hosting their own APX system on premise might think that hosting via Advent’s dedicated environment would be nothing but a boon, but reality quickly shatters that dream for savvy, hands-on APX users. Advent’s value add here is clearly AOS, but if that is the case, why would they ever sell someone dedicated hosting without the AOS service? When they do that, the Dedicated Hosting service provided is arguably no better than what a third-party vendor can deliver. Oh, wait, that’s not true. It is potentially worse, because the system will be locked down in such a way that you won’t be able to do the things you would be able to do if your APX hosted environment was provided by a third-party resource that needed to make sure you were satisfied with their service.
This is because, without an AOS resource, some things that a firm would want to do to automate and enhance their systems simply cannot be done because they fall under the responsibility of the AOS silo. You can call Advent support all you want, but they cannot resolve your problem, because only AOS can do these things.
Want to schedule a process to run at a certain time? You can’t do that. Do you want to install a third-party product? You can’t do that. Do you want to log into the server directly? You can’t do that either. All of these things are only possible with the cooperation of an assigned AOS resource. And even if you have an AOS resource, you still cannot do those things, but instead must ask your AOS resource.
A fitting analogy for comparing the work required in their locked-down environment to what one might otherwise do in a self-hosted environment could be comparing the 100-yard dash to steeplechase. As a result, the automation that you may create is more likely to resemble a Rube Goldberg machine than a typical streamlined process due to Advent’s forced assistance and rules regarding what can and cannot be done.
Unfortunately, as you invite a higher degree of involvement from Advent vis-à-vis Advent’s dedicated (a.k.a. “managed”) hosting model, you lose control of the systems you are entrusted to manage and improve unless you had the foresight to have Advent agree upfront to the access rights required or are willing to spend countless hours dickering with Advent about the rights, which may ultimately end in frustration anyway. This comment is not based on my direct experience with these systems alone, but also what I have heard amongst my peers.
Advent basically has the keys to the kingdom in this scenario, and the users are at the mercy of Advent. It’s almost plausible that they cannot allow you access to certain areas of the system that you usually have, but at the end of the day, when you cannot easily perform work that you were able to do in the past when you self-hosted APX, it feels much more like a ruse intended to ensure that Advent gets not just what clients have agreed to pay them, but any other work you might want to perform in the environment related to automation.
However, the problem is that they cannot necessarily perform the same work of a contractor with specific experience Advent may lack. From my perspective, Advent’s focus in their Dedicated Hosting seems to be maintaining the status quo, not constantly striving to build a better mousetrap to service your business processes. That is the directive I am looking for from my clients.
Anyone that can’t envision how Advent could consume their money, time, and resources while providing this service to them may lack experience working with Advent, or the imagination necessary to take their own client experiences with Advent and extrapolate the possibilities once Advent has a greater degree of control over their systems. The frustration this arrangement creates can be amplified if the firms facing this entanglement are committed to long-term, bajillion-dollar contracts. These large, multi-year contracts could be part of the reason Advent feels comfortable repeatedly saying the one word my clients never want to hear—no.
Over the years, Tamarac, Orion, Addepar and Ridgeline have all made inroads to capture market share from what was once predominantly Advent’s business to keep or lose, and they will continue to do so until Advent makes improving its rapport with clients a priority. You may have already guessed, but Advent’s worst enemy and biggest threat to the future of their business may be Advent’s hubris, and winning the WatersTechnology Buy-Side technology award for the Best Portfolio Accounting Provider two years in a row is unlikely to change that. Even so, if you have deep pockets and are truly ready to hand the reins over to Advent, you may be happy with the results.
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.
“What we have here is a failure to communicate.” -Captain
Rackspace played an important role in part of the tech stack I implemented for many of my IT customers for nearly ten years. We started implementing Rackspace’s Hosted Exchange solution back before Microsoft Office 365 hit its stride, and their service offering was truly first-rate at the time. Unfortunately, that time is gone, punctuated by Friday’s dismal service breakdown and Rackspace’s complete failure to communicate with their customers in real-time as things unfolded.
If I am managing the Exchange server for a single company, never mind thousands of companies – which is likely what Rackspace is doing – and that server is not working, I have one responsibility that is just as important as getting the server back online. I must communicate with managers to give them information about what is going on to create reasonable expectations for when and how the issue will be resolved and facilitate their ability to mitigate risk. In a normal situation, doing so makes perfect sense.
There is no good reason that wouldn’t be done. The fact that this wasn’t done throughout the day on 12/2 can only mean a few things: absolute chaos, inadequate staffing, lack of information or perhaps some of each of those things. Almost anyone managing IT and Exchange knows this. I realize that Rackspace was likely determining the scope and severity of the issue, but in not communicating anything meaningful for the entire business day, Rackspace failed its customers. They put the IT workers who support their solution in the unenviable position of only being able to communicate to their managers and customers that Rackspace wasn’t communicating with them.
To those who called Rackspace multiple times, listened to incessant jazzy hold music, and kept a vigilant eye on their status page most of the day, it no doubt became clear that this issue wasn’t something they could count on Rackspace to resolve in the short-term. We will eventually know more about what happened, but the real story so far is Rackspace’s poor communication about what was going on in the moment.
For those still monitoring the status at status.apps.rackspace.com on 12/3, there was an update at 1:57am. Any lingering hope of Rackspace resolving the issue sometime soon died with this update: “security incident … do not have an ETA for resolution … may take several days” So too would any other plans that IT workers utilizing Rackspace as part of their tech stack to provide Hosted Exchange had for their weekends.
The full message as provided from Rackspace at 1:57am on 12/3 follows.
What happened?
On Friday, Dec 2, 2022, we became aware of an issue impacting our Hosted Exchange environment. We proactively powered down and disconnected the Hosted Exchange environment while we triaged to understand the extent and the severity of the impact. After further analysis, we have determined that this is a security incident.
The known impact is isolated to a portion of our Hosted Exchange platform. We are taking necessary actions to evaluate and protect our environments.
Has my account been affected?
We are working through the environment with our security teams and partners to determine the full scope and impact. We will keep customers updated as more information becomes available.
Has there been an impact to the Rackspace Email platform?
We have not experienced an impact to our Rackspace Email product line and platform. At this time, Hosted Exchange accounts are impacted, and not Rackspace Email.
When will I be able to access my Hosted Exchange account?
We currently do not have an ETA for resolution. We are actively working with our support teams and anticipate our work may take several days. We will be providing information on this page as it becomes available, with updates at least every 12 hours.
As a result, we are encouraging admins to configure and set up their users accounts on Microsoft 365 so they can begin sending and receiving mail immediately. If you need assistance, please contact our support team. We are available to help you set it up.
Is there an alternative solution?
At no cost to you, we will be providing access to Microsoft Exchange Plan 1 licenses on Microsoft 365 until further notice.
To activate, please use the below link for instructions on how to set up your account and users.
Please note that your account administrator will need to manually set up each individual user on your account. Once your users have been set up and all appropriate DNS records are configured, their email access will be reactivated, and they will start receiving emails and can send emails. Please note, that DNS changes take approximately 30 minutes to provision and in rare cases can take up to 24 hours.
IMPORTANT: If you utilize a hybrid Hosted environment (Rackspace Email and Exchange on a single domain) then you will be required to move all mailboxes (Rackspace Email and Exchange) to M365 for mail flow to work properly. To preserve your data, it is critical that you do not delete your original mailboxes when making this change.
I don’t know how to setup Microsoft 365. How can I get help?
Please leverage our support channels by either joining us in chat or by calling +1 (855) 348-9064. (INTL: +44 (0) 203 917 4743).
Can I access my Hosted Exchange inbox from before the service was brought offline?
If you access your Hosted Exchange inbox via a local client application on your laptop or phone (like Outlook or Mail), your local device is likely configured to store your messages. However, while the Hosted Exchange environment is down, you will be unable to connect to the Hosted Exchange service to sync new mail or send mail using Hosted Exchange.
If you regularly access your inbox via Outlook Web Access (OWA), you will not have access to Hosted Exchange via OWA while the platform is offline.
As a result, we are encouraging admins to configure and set up their user’s accounts on Microsoft 365 so they can begin sending and receiving mail immediately. If you need assistance, please contact our support team. We are available to help you set it up.
Will I receive mail in Hosted Exchange sent to me during the time the service has been shut down?
Possibly. We intend to update further as we get more information.
As a result, we are encouraging admins to configure and set up their user’s accounts on Microsoft 365 so they can begin sending and receiving mail immediately. If you need assistance, please contact our support team. We are available to help you set it up.
IT workers likely spent much of Saturday and Sunday migrating email to another provider, such as Microsoft, and some may still not be done today. Depending on the readiness of contingency plans in place at various firms and/or the extent of local OST caching some firms may now be depending on Rackspace to recover their email records. It is a little late to look at the SLA, but it is probably worth another glance now.
Though nearly all investment professionals utilize email journaling due to compliance requirements, I am not sure that everyone doing so has a complete backup of their current active email accounts. They may have the ability to query their email records for compliance analysis using the journal but recovering all of the records that were stored at Rackspace as they were on 12/1 may be more complicated and drawn out.
Based on what customers currently know, it is possible that some users may not be able to recover some emails. Remember that users are waiting for Rackspace to resolve a security issue. Security is as much about protecting data from being lost as it is about it being compromised. So there may be an issue with data loss rather than potential hacking that could have exposed passwords or data. Rackspace hasn’t divulged the exact nature of the security incident.
One obvious takeaway from this issue is that you should be locally caching all Exchange data for your account in your local environment if you can. To check your settings in Outlook, you can navigate to the screen shown below in Outlook by doing the following:
Click on File, Account Settings, Account Settings (again).
Select the email account you want to verify and click on the Change button.
The default for downloading email for the past is typically “1 year.” If yours is set to “1 year”, you probably want to drag the control to the right to until it says “All” as shown below; however, I would defer to your IT people on this, because if they aren’t downloading all of your data, they could have a good reason.
Once you have updated the setting, click the next button and then done button to commit the changes.
Migration, Initial Recovery and Complete Recovery
For the companies faced with this issue, restoring complete functionality of email and supporting applications will take time. If they haven’t already, they need to initiate migration by redirecting their DNS records so that email flows to another service provider and perform an initial recovery to get email running on computer/phones. They may also need to do a more complete recovery that includes all of the records that were stored in the users’ email and any specific email profile configuration settings that might have been lost.
Assuming the migration process goes smoothly, my estimation of the time required is roughly 2+ hours to update the DNS records necessary to point your email to a new service provider, wait for that info to propagate, and make sure all users are set up in the new service provider’s environment and everything is working properly. Let’s be pessimistic and say this takes four hours. Beyond that, you would still need to do the following items for each individual user:
Have a backup of the PST on hand and ready to import, or create one from existing cached copies.
Create new mail profiles to replace individual accounts within the current email profile. (My recommendation would be new profiles because I would want to maintain the old ones with their email records.)
Depending on how things are configured, that might be a process that you would have to do once per user, or multiple times if they have notebooks and desktops with separate email profiles.
Additionally, any mail accounts on Apple iOS and Android devices would need to be deleted and recreated.
Expecting to spend less than an hour per user on average to do this would be overly optimistic, but two is probably a reasonable guesstimate and some of the processing could likely be accomplished for various users simultaneously. But things like this almost never go smoothly. These times could potentially be reduced through the use of third-party tools and automation, but let’s assume you don’t have access to those. A relatively small ten-person office that was using Rackspace could require 24 hours of IT work done over the weekend to bring them back online with most of their email on a new service.
What happened with Rackspace should also be a wake-up call to firms utilizing any cloud services and depending on them for real-time business continuity without necessarily having a full understanding what will happen in certain contingency scenarios. Any service, whether it is cloud-based or on-premise, is only as good as the people managing it and your SLA.
Thankfully, the number of customers I service with a dependency on Rackspace has shrunk to almost none. Most have moved to Office 365. Given this latest issue, it appears to me that Rackspace has been treading water with their Hosted Exchange service for the past year or so. During that time using Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) with email has become a critical business requirement and Rackspace hasn’t answered that call on their Hosted Exchange platform. Their recommended solution for Hosted Exchange customers has been to buy Office 365 via Rackspace to get that MFA functionality from Microsoft.
To Rackspace’s credit, they did eventually start to give more useful information and constructive advice regarding the situation at 8:19 pm EST on Friday, but they went a whole day without providing anything of note. I don’t think I have ever seen a critical IT issue handled quite this way. If you are dealing with a Rackspace employee today, or with someone at your office who has been impacted by this event, try to be patient and kind. Doing anything else is pointless and counterproductive. These people are in an unpleasant and untenable situation today.
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.
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:
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.
