MLS information missing from LCR

For three of our seven wards, not all the home/visiting teaching information made the jump from MLS to LCR.

Two of the wards seem to be missing only history, but still have companionship information. The third ward has nothing -- no companionships, no history, etc.

Is there any way to fix this? Presumably there was some script or something that took a drop of information from MLS and moved it into the LCR database. It seems like it should be a pretty simple matter to just re-run that script (or whatever the process is), but with multiple calls to SLC I have yet to find anybody who understands how it works.

So, is there any way to fix this?

You could try sending feedback using the link on the bottom right of the Leader and Clerk Resources site. One of the developers does visit the forums every once in a while, but using the feedback form is more reliable.

Do you know for sure that all of the wards were using MLS to record home teaching information? Some of the wards in my stake (and I'm sure not just my stake) have been keeping track of home teaching entirely outside of MLS, because of inconveniences of having to use the clerk computer. So nothing transferred over.

Since this is a conversion issue, I would contact the Global Service Center. That will get to product manager in a different way and is going to be processed faster than feedback would be processed.

Another possible factor in this is that users may have been blocking the patch program from doing the update to MLS. I may have to make the rounds in my stake to see if MLS is up-to-date everywhere. Fortunately, I don't need a MLS login to do that. Just get to the login screen.

sbradshaw wrote:Do you know for sure that all of the wards were using MLS to record home teaching information?

Yes. I sat down with two of the three affected ward clerks and verified what was happening. In both cases, the information was correct and complete in MLS -- companionships for HP, EQ, and RS were defined, visit history was visible, complete, and apparently correct for 12 months.

When viewed in LCR, the one ward has no information at all -- statistics show 0% for the past 12 months, and no companionship information is defined for either HP, EQ, or RS groups. The other ward I looked at had companionship information, but the history was all showing as 0%. (The third ward seems to have the same problem as the second, but I didn't observe it myself.)

scgallafent wrote:Since this is a conversion issue, I would contact the Global Service Center. That will get to product manager in a different way and is going to be processed faster than feedback would be processed.

I've called three times, and have yet to be able to connect with anyone who understands the process and/or can tell me anything other than "I guess you just have to re-enter everything."

Actually, I'd think it would be Local Unit Support, which I think is part of the GSC. They're the ones you typically talk to about membership issues.

russellhltn wrote:Another possible factor in this is that users may have been blocking the patch program from doing the update to MLS.

I believe this is a contributing factor.

The three wards with problems all recently got new computers. Our stake technology specialist set up the computers with the ward clerk logins not having administrator rights, which according to him was per the directions given him from the Church. (I didn't see the instructions myself, but I assume he's correct.) It appears that the lack of admin rights blocked MLS from updating to the 3.8 release; I had to log in with the stake administrator password and do the update manually.

So, my best guess is that the failure mechanism was that as part of the upgrade process, some script or something was supposed to grab a snapshot of the MLS information and transfer that to LCR, but when the upgrade failed, the transfer to LCR also failed. And the later manual upgrade apparently didn't kick off the "transfer to LCR" script.

Or something like that.

Anyway, the data all still exists in MLS, and clearly a mechanism of transferring the data from MLS to LCR exists, but it's not clear whether the triggering of that mechanism was a one-time "if it doesn't work now it will be broken for time and all eternity" thing, or whether there is some way to kick off the script (or whatever it is) again manually, and I just have yet to find the person who knows the magic to make that happen.

kotarokun wrote:The three wards with problems all recently got new computers. Our stake technology specialist set up the computers with the ward clerk logins not having administrator rights, which according to him was per the directions given him from the Church. (I didn't see the instructions myself, but I assume he's correct.)

While the release notes for MLS indicates it's possible, I've not seen any instructions on how to setup/install a new computer where the MLS user is not a Windows admin.

I was referring to the RTPatch UAC pop-up that appears when MLS is started and a update needs to be done. A number of people don't know what that is and clicks "no".

russellhltn wrote:While the release notes for MLS indicates it's possible, I've not seen any instructions on how to setup/install a new computer where the MLS user is not a Windows admin.

Yeah, I didn't see the instructions myself. At any rate, we've changed those three ward logins so they now have admin rights. Hopefully that will help eliminate the problem.

russellhltn wrote:I was referring to the RTPatch UAC pop-up that appears when MLS is started and a update needs to be done. A number of people don't know what that is and clicks "no".

Possible. Is this a new pop-up? I don't remember ever seeing it before, until this week.

In either case, the admin rights were clearly an issue -- we couldn't run the install manually under the ward login, we could under the stake login.

kotarokun wrote:Is this a new pop-up? I don't remember ever seeing it before, until this week.

Not really. It might be "new" in the sense it started only when the patch was released. It only pops up if there's something to be installed. But the popup was reported in 2013, so it's not a new procedure. Note that 3.8.1 was just released 5 days ago. So yesterday was the first Sunday with this update. If you were on 3.8.0, that should have been fine. (3.8.0 was released back in March.)

You might dig though the MLS logs to see what version you were on before.

A survey of my stake show 4 of the 9 units are on 3.8.0. The rest have gone to 3.8.1.

kotarokun wrote:

scgallafent wrote:Since this is a conversion issue, I would contact the Global Service Center. That will get to product manager in a different way and is going to be processed faster than feedback would be processed.

I've called three times, and have yet to be able to connect with anyone who understands the process and/or can tell me anything other than "I guess you just have to re-enter everything."

Call the Global Service Center once more. Tell them you wish to request a manual import of the HT/VT data from MLS to LCR for the affected units.

If the GSC is unclear or does not understand, give them the name of the person above who suggested you call the GSC.

This post in another topic explains what probably will happen. (Note who made that post.)

russellhltn wrote:

kotarokun wrote:Is this a new pop-up? I don't remember ever seeing it before, until this week.

Not really. It might be "new" in the sense it started only when the patch was released. It only pops up if there's something to be installed. But the popup was reported in 2013, so it's not a new procedure. Note that 3.8.1 was just released 5 days ago. So yesterday was the first Sunday with this update. If you were on 3.8.0, that should have been fine. (3.8.0 was released back in March.)

You might dig though the MLS logs to see what version you were on before.

A survey of my stake show 4 of the 9 units are on 3.8.0. The rest have gone to 3.8.1.

Interesting. I'm guessing we previously had the pop-up set to "unblocked," so we didn't see it before, but it got re-blocked when we got a new computer a couple of months ago. That would explain why I saw it for the first time recently.

I'm pretty sure the stake computer was at 3.7.4 before 3.8.0; as of when I checked a couple of weeks ago, all the ward computers were also at 3.8 (after I manually updated the three stubborn ones from 3.7.4).

kotarokun wrote:The three wards with problems all recently got new computers. Our stake technology specialist set up the computers with the ward clerk logins not having administrator rights, which according to him was per the directions given him from the Church. (I didn't see the instructions myself, but I assume he's correct.) It appears that the lack of admin rights blocked MLS from updating to the 3.8 release; I had to log in with the stake administrator password and do the update manually.

So, my best guess is that the failure mechanism was that as part of the upgrade process, some script or something was supposed to grab a snapshot of the MLS information and transfer that to LCR, but when the upgrade failed, the transfer to LCR also failed. And the later manual upgrade apparently didn't kick off the "transfer to LCR" script.

That is correct. The functionality that transferred HT/VT data from MLS to headquarters required MLS 3.8. If MLS was still on 3.7.4, your data never got sent. If MLS wasn't running with admin rights, that would also have caused problems because of the way the export module was transferred to the clerk computers.

kotarokun wrote:Anyway, the data all still exists in MLS, and clearly a mechanism of transferring the data from MLS to LCR exists, but it's not clear whether the triggering of that mechanism was a one-time "if it doesn't work now it will be broken for time and all eternity" thing, or whether there is some way to kick off the script (or whatever it is) again manually, and I just have yet to find the person who knows the magic to make that happen.

It wasn't a one-time "if it doesn't work now" thing, but the update function disabled itself on July 15. There would be quite a bit of manual intervention involved at this point to run a data transfer.

I see three wards in your stake that only have data going back the last two months. I'm assuming those were the three affected. If the data was transferred to headquarters, we would have to purge the data they have entered so that we could run the import script. At this point, it's probably better for them to just plow forward.

scgallafent wrote:It wasn't a one-time "if it doesn't work now" thing, but the update function disabled itself on July 15.

Missed it by that much...

scgallafent wrote:I see three wards in your stake that only have data going back the last two months. I'm assuming those were the three affected. If the data was transferred to headquarters, we would have to purge the data they have entered so that we could run the import script. At this point, it's probably better for them to just plow forward.

Understood. It's not a great answer, but if it's the best answer available, I guess we'll have to go with that.

Thank you for the help.