LabVIEW justification

[vt92]

Hello,

I am trying to convince my organization that we need to upgrade from LV 8.6 to 2009.  (I plan to also get the service agreement so we will get LV 2010).  We are an R&D group, so we don't make money directly from LV apps, but I write new LV programs for custom tests all the time.

Any suggestions on how to justify an upgrade to 2009?  I looked through the new feature and, honestly, I will probably only use about 50% of them.

[Ray.R]

If you use 50% of the new features, then that would be justification.  It will allow you to implement solutions in a shorter time.  Is that worth the extra investment?  Probably. 

Work on that angle.

[JÞB]

Snippets-  'Nuf justification right there.  I'm assuming you care about how fast you can re-use chunks of code that may or may not need other things- and you work in a multi-developer enrionment?

You aslo said "SSP" so you'll get  2010 when it comes out.  I can't say much but I like it

[JackDunaway]

I'll take a potentially unpopular stance.

The LabVIEW 2009 new features that I was most tickled about were the new icon editor, partial diagram cleanup, the new options on the Feedback Node, and partial block diagram clean-up. Parallel For Loops and Native Recursion are sweet, but we would not benefit from any life-changing improvements from either. Also, using snippets are really cool since they make it easier to share code, but as you can see in the forums there quite a bit of inertia/momentum with the the regular ol' VI upload and a screenshot.

For reasons that I don't even want to think about, we were forced to take a LV2009 hiatus for a little while. (Of special note is our local technical sales guy was incredibly supportive, as he has been for years). Did we miss the LV2009 features while reverted back to 8.6.1? Yes. Was it detrimental, and did the project suffer? No.

Consider this: begin warming your group up to the idea of a LabVIEW upgrade, because based on some hunches I have from the Idea Exchange, we're going to see some real fireworks in 2010 and beyond. Don't get your hopes down if the department budget doesn't immediately approve, but certainly get 'em ready for later this year.

[jcarmody]

The only justification we had for moving to 2009 (we let our support lapse some time last year) was the idea that we'd be able to get all of our groups onto the same page so we could (in theory) work together.  I don't know how we'll justify keeping support next year.

As far as snippets go: NOBODY USES THEM (well, almost nobody).  I use the Code Capture Tool to create snippets, anyway, so this function is not limited to LV 2009.

[TCPlomp]

Well just keeping up with support, will make sure that you get cheap new versions, letting it lapse is quite expensive.

Do you have a Site license?

Ton