What’s the Deal with Fiber Manager™ Users Upgrading to 10.2.1a?

January 5, 2015 — Dean Perry

Schneider Electric’s 10.2.1a version and subsequent patches provide a host of performance improvements, functionality updates, and new capabilities. The release is exciting for Fiber Manager™ users in particular because it includes new support for something called Wavelength Division Multiplexing, or “WDM”.

WDM is not a particularly new concept, however it’s gaining popularity in the telecommunications services industry for its ability to trace, report and assign circuits to the wavelengths that are being multiplexed throughout their networks. In short, you get significantly more bandwidth using this practice, so it is generally valuable within the telecom community. (Read more about WDM here.)

Many existing Fiber Manager™ users have expressed interest in acquiring this functionality when they upgrade to 10.2.1a, but may have heard that this is not yet possible. What’s the deal?

The quick answer is: you are correct, the functionality cannot yet be acquired by existing users upgrading to 10.2.1a – but it will be soon!

The WDM supported data model is significantly different than the typical “older” data model most Fiber Manager™ shops employ today. The connectivity is more complex.

So, the functionality would require existing users to update their data model before using Fiber Manager™ at 10.2.1a. Of course Schneider Electric is very aware of this limitation and they have been developing a “migration tool” to allow existing Fiber Manager™ users to upgrade their data model to a compatible one.

This migration tool should be available in the February-March 2015 timeframe and you can find it on eXchange once it is out!

Note: anyone who is implementing Fiber Manager™ for the first time can fully use Fiber Manager™ at 10.2.1a with the new WDM functionality supported. The migration tool is only for existing users starting at older versions of the software.

Note 2: The support for WDM is not yet available in Wavepoint. Only in Fiber Manager™. If you implement or upgrade to Fiber Manager™ 10.2.1a, you will not be able to use Wavepoint. (Wavepoint will continue to work at all previous versions). The next version of Wavepoint should support WDM.

Note 3: You can upgrade everything except those clients with Fiber Manager™, if you don’t want to wait. Keep the Fiber machines at 10.2.1. The only exception is that ArcFM Server™ 10.2.1a will also not work with pre-existing Fiber data.

Let us know if you have any questions. You can also get up-to-date information on Schneider’s eXchange site.

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