How to migrate the configuration of a user during an upgrade of Trados Studio?

Dear Support,

I am in charge of regularly upgrading the versions of Trados Studio our translators are using. To do so, we build software packages that we deploy using SCCM and the Software Center.

However, the configuration part if still a manual and time-consuming process as of now and we would like to automate it as much as possible. One of our pain points is related with the configuration of Trados Studio set up by our users. Usually, they gradually improve it over time without keeping a trace of which options they modified. When we upgrade their version of Trados Studio, as there does not seem to have an option to export/import the user's configuration, they lose it and have to go through the painful process of resetting it over time.

Is there a way to preserve the configuration of our users when we upgrade their version of Trados Studio?

Thank you,

Sébastien

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    Just to be sure I checked with a developer and in fact you cannot do this through the API.  This is going to change, but right now it's not possible.

    You may be able manage this in a more "hacky" way through the xml settings file directly from the roaming folder.  This one to be exact:

    c:\Users\[USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\Trados\Trados Studio\Studio17\UserSettings.xml

    If you export the sdlprofile for a user and then compare the contents to the UserSettings.xml for that user you will find some remarkable similarities.  You would have to do a little detective work to see what part of the UserSettings you needed to keep since you would not want everything, but you may be able to automate this once you knew what to keep and what to throwaway within a powershell script and recreate the profile you wanted.

    Note that this is definitely a hack... but as a quick test I took a copy of the UserSettings file for my Studio, then reset Studio.  I added the following root and saved it as sdlprofile:

    <UserProfile Name="exported" Description="User profile recommended for new users." WellKnownId="DefaultUserProfile">

    </UserProfile>

    I was then able to import this file as a new profile with no errors.  But that's all I checked... I have no idea what was brought in, how well this worked (if at all).  But perhaps with some time it might be worth exploring this sort of "hack" given the time it would save and the fact we don't support another method.

    I might also explore replacing the UserSettings.xml instead of messing with profiles as I also quickly checked putting it back worked and it did... as well as demonstrating to me that some things were missing from the sdlprofile import hack, especially around plugins.  However, this is very likely to be problematic between versions so I would tread very carefully there.

    Anyway... main points are these:

    1. the API to manage this doesn't exist yet
    2. there is sufficient similarity between the sdlprofile and the UserSettings.xml to warrant some investigation into an unsupported and untested hack!

    I would not recommend this for anyone to do, but a technical person may be able to make use of this to find a workaround to avoid a lot of work.

    Paul Filkin | RWS Group

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  • Thank you very much   for this comprehensive answer!

    If time permits, I will try to investigate this "hacky" way of doing.

    If at some point in the future the API allows exporting the User's preferences, feel free to drop a line to this discussion so that I can investigate this new approach Slight smile

    Thanks again!

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