Aquaveo & Water Resources Engineering News

Aquaveo held its first annual User Conference from October 16-17, 2018! It was amazing to get to meet so many of our users at once. We hope everyone had a great time.

For us, it was exciting to meet users from all over the world. We met users from the United States, Canada, Portugal, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, Guyana, and Thailand. When asked why they came, the attendees said they came to learn:

• How Aquaveo’s products can help with their projects
• More of what Aquaveo has to offer
• What Aquaveo is all about

In listening to what our users had to share with us, we took away a couple key items that you want to see improved in our software.

1. You want modeling to go faster. We understand the demand to give results in less time is growing, so we will be looking at ways to make the process of modeling take less time and still be accurate. Some of the innovations added into Aquaveo’s software already significantly reduce the time it takes to complete a model. We hope to add more automation and tools to speed up modeling times.
2. You need to be able to work with big data. More data is becoming available and you want to be able to use it. This means processing large files covering larger areas in more detail. At Aquaveo, we are working on doing this, including optimizing our code and adding new tools to work with large files such as lidar files.

We’d like to thank the following for participating in our user conference:

• Rob Wallace with the U.S. Department of Defense's High Performance Computer Moderdernization Program
• Alpaslan Yörük with Hydrotec
• Veronica Ghelardi with the Federal Highway Administration
• Jim Nelson with Brigham Young University
• Scott Zey with Ayres Associates
• Steve Jones with Hansen, Allen, and Luce
• Antonio Trigo-Teixeira with the Instituto Superior Tecnico, University of Lisbon
• Francisco Aguirre with NTM Engineering
• Charles W. Downer with the U.S. Army Corp's Engineer Research and Development Center
• Michelle Smilowitz with HydroGeo Group
• Pornchai Pongpanlarp with Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand
• Jeff Davis with Barr Engineering
• Regina Graziano with SynTerra Corporation
• Willis Weight with Carroll College

If you couldn’t make it to the Aquaveo User Conference this year, we will be having another one next year. Watch our website and Facebook page for future details. See you next year!

Are you an IT administrator needing to perform a silent install of GMS, SMS, or WMS in a classroom or office? Some classrooms and offices have multiple students or employees changing machines regularly. Non-administrator users are often unable to change the licensing password, lock, or server when these license settings are stored in the global area of the registry. Because of this, we changed the license settings so they are now stored in the user area of the registry. This means that each user account requires this to be setup.

This silent install (or quiet install) workaround requires each user to have the rights to modify the registry. If registry access is restricted, a network administrator can do this by opening the Group Policy Management Editor and creating a startup script that automatically runs the batch file whenever the computer is restarted.

Note: Editing the Registry in Windows is a very advanced administration step. Please always create a backup of the Registry before making changes.

It can be a burden have to manually update the network lock server address in HKEY_CURRENT_USER for each user on each computer. The silent install process is simplified by creating a Windows Registry file that contains the license information and a batch file that can be executed to insert the registry information and launch WMS. The batch file automatically updates the registry for the user and then opens the WMS application. This is the safest way to edit the registry key, as well. The batch file can then be placed on each computer that needs to be updated, and the individual users can execute it as needed.

This workaround uses WMS as an example. This information also applies to GMS and SMS. You can see an example of a registry file in step 1 and the batch file in step 2, below.

1. Create a file, “Netenble.001.reg”, as follows, replacing "license" with the name or IP address of the network lock server. For example, if the network lock server was at 127.0.0.27, you would use “127.0.0.27”:
   Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00M
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\EMRL\WMS]
"Netenble.001"="license"
   Note: This information was created using Windows 7. Because different Windows versions can have different REG file formats, we recommend you install WMS on one machine, register it to the correct network lock server, then export the [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\EMRL\WMS] registry key. Open the registry file in the text editor and remove every line except those similar to those shown in the image above, and save the file as “Netenble.001.reg”.
2. Create a file, “wms11.bat”, that will update the registry and start WMS: reg import Netenble.001.reg
wms.exe
3. Place these two files in the WMS folder in the image that will be distributed to the affected computers. For example, for the 64-bit version of WMS 11.0, the default location for the folder is “C:\Program Files\WMS 11.0 64-bit\”.
4. Create a desktop shortcut to the batch file for the convenience of the user. If doing this via a startup script in the Group Policy Management Editor, this step can be skipped.

This silent install workaround can save you significant time as a network administrator. Try it out today!