Maintain User Preferences After Update

Question

So, my organization finally updated to 2021 R1. Everything has been smooth so far, however one complaint we've had is that our user preferences/settings were not maintained through the update. Minor annoyance that everyone had to spend time getting their windows, ribbons, tool boxes, etc. back to their preferred locations. Is this just the nature of the beast when updating? Or is there a way to maintain these user preferences between updates? If so, I'd like to make our IT department aware for next time.

MaryB · Answer

While I can't speak to any changes to user preferences between versions... 
 ORD has the ability to use a user preference seed file - an SPF file. This is basically a copy of your user preference file with a different extension. To use this they would: 
 
 Save off a completed copy (just the way you want it) of your UPF file as an SPF to a location outside of the ORD directories. I don't know if your company has resources on any network drives, but if they do, that's a great location that will be undisturbed by local updates. 
 Define the variable MS_USERPREFSEED somewhere in your configuration to point to that file. Again, I don't know how your company manages resources, but this can be done. 
 After the upgrade, delete the UPF from your user directory. 
 
 If all goes as planned, a new UPF will be created the next time you start the software, based on the preferences from that SPF.

Maintain User Preferences After Update

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