Video Transcript
Welcome everyone. Today we're walking through the Pre-Installation Checklist for Adept — the document your Project Manager sent over to make sure your environment is ready before Synergis arrives. This isn't just paperwork — it's the foundation for a smooth go-live, and every item maps directly to a checkbox on that document. By the end of this walkthrough, your team will know who owns each task and what the five-business-day deadline means for your project timeline.
Adept implementations touch a lot of infrastructure — servers, SQL, networking, client machines — and Synergis can't verify all of that remotely on installation day, so this checklist puts the responsibility on your team to confirm readiness ahead of time. The number to remember is five business days — that's the window you have to return the completed checklist to your Project Manager once it's issued. Don't skim past the warning: if these items aren't done, it's not just an inconvenience — it can cause serious delays, missed deadlines, and rescheduling fees. The ask is simple: assign an owner to each section we're about to cover, and get it back within that five-day window.
The first task is getting the software downloaded — all three packages live on the Synergis Software Customer Portal: Adept Client and Server, Adept Web, and PublishWave if you've purchased it. Two things for your infrastructure team to do before installation day: register for a Customer Portal account using the credentials from your licensing email, and don't just download the installers to a laptop — copy them directly to the related servers. That saves real time on installation day because the consultant isn't waiting on file transfers. If PublishWave wasn't purchased, that third item simply doesn't apply.
Once the software is downloaded, the next step is making sure every prerequisite is installed — along with current Windows Updates — on the correct server role. This table is a map: the Native Server running everything needs all six prerequisites, while the Web Server only needs the .NET Framework, Visual C++ redistributables, and the hosting bundle, and the File System Server needs just the framework and redistributables. The last three rows — Word and Excel, eDrawings, and Inventor — are conditional, only required if users will view those file types through Adept. Assign this table to whoever owns your Windows Server builds, and have them check it off role by role.
Networking is one of the most common sources of delay, so five services need ports open between your Adept servers and workstations. The File System uses port 7 8 9 1 by default or 4 4 3 over SSL, the Desktop Client uses 24000, the Web Client uses 80 and 4 4 3, the Adept Viewer runs only over SSL on 4 4 3, and MSSQL uses the standard 1 4 3 3. The key tip here: get your network or firewall team involved as early as possible, because in many organizations opening a port goes through a change-control process that can take days or weeks. If that ticket doesn't get submitted until the week of installation, it becomes the bottleneck for the whole project.
SSL is a hard requirement — Adept will not run on a self-signed certificate. A valid certificate needs to be imported and bound to port 4 4 3 on every Adept server, and DNS must be configured correctly so that any alias used to reach Adept resolves properly, or the certificate binding won't line up with what users are typing. Self-signed certificates are explicitly not supported, so if your internal team was planning to generate one without going through a certificate authority, that won't work here. You need one certificate per Adept server unless you're using a wildcard certificate that covers all server names — if your PKI or security team handles certificate issuance, loop them in now since requests can take time to process.
SSO is the one optional item in this checklist — only relevant if you're configuring single sign-on for Adept. If you are, your identity team needs to register the exact callback redirect URL in your Identity Provider pointing at your Synergis web server, and populate several OAuth keys in the appsettings.config file — including the OAuth server endpoint, client ID, client secret, scope, and user lookup field. One hard constraint to flag: Adept only supports OpenID Connect, not SAML or legacy OAuth flows, and if you're using Azure AD, it requires HTTPS, which ties directly back to the SSL requirement we just covered. If SSO isn't in scope for your rollout, this section can be skipped entirely.
SQL Server setup is usually owned by the DBA team, and a misconfigured database is one of the most common installation-day blockers. The database needs to exist ahead of time, configured for Mixed Mode authentication, with the collation set specifically to Case Insensitive and Accent Sensitive — that's not the default in every locale, so double-check it. A dedicated SQL user needs to be created with its password set, its default database pointed at the Adept database, and Owner rights granted on that database — not just read-write, but Owner. Document the server name, database name, username, and password somewhere your DBA can hand off quickly on installation day, and if your internal policy forces any deviation from Microsoft's default SQL Server install, flag it now rather than discovering it during installation.
Your Active Directory team needs to create a domain account with administrative rights specifically to the Adept servers — that account is what runs the Adept application pools and services, and it may also need the ability to log onto the servers interactively. This is not a Domain Administrator account — scope it to what Adept needs on its own servers, not domain-wide control. The note at the bottom is a heads-up for anyone in a locked-down security environment: Synergis assumes there are no restrictions on installing or running software as part of our default requirements. If your organization has application whitelisting, endpoint protection policies, or change-control gates that would block installers or services from running, get your security team into these conversations now — not on installation day.
This step is where you map out your actual server topology — for each role, the Adept application server, web server, SQL server, and AFS server hub, mark whether it lives on the same native Adept server or on a separate dedicated machine. The consultant uses this to plan the installation sequence and know exactly which machine to touch for which component. If you operate satellite offices with their own local file servers replicating back to a hub, note those locations here so the consultant can account for the multi-site topology when configuring AFS. If you're a single-site, single-server deployment, leave the satellite section blank and move on.
Shifting from servers to end-user machines: every workstation running the Adept Desktop Client or Adept Creator needs Windows 11 as the baseline OS, along with matching versions of the .NET Framework, Visual C++ redistributable, A S P .NET Core hosting bundle, and .NET Desktop Runtime — version numbers matter here since older builds won't support Adept correctly. You can push these components using your existing deployment tools like SCCM or Intune, but make sure your deployment account has administrative rights since many of these installers require them.
PublishWave is Synergis's automated printing and publishing module, so this slide only applies if you've purchased it — if not, check the 'not purchased' box on the checklist and move on. For customers who do have PublishWave, the same core prerequisites apply again, plus every design application PublishWave will process files through — AutoCAD, Inventor, MicroStation, SolidWorks, Word and Excel, and the Peernet TIFF Image Printer — needs to be installed, licensed, and running under that domain service account we discussed earlier, not a personal user account. Note that AutoCAD LT is explicitly not supported, only full AutoCAD. And don't forget the physical side: any printers PublishWave will drive need to be installed, tested, and reachable from the PublishWave server before installation day.
Eight things need to happen before your installation date: stage the software, install prerequisites and Windows Updates by role, open network ports and bind your SSL certificate, configure SSO if applicable and get SQL Server ready, create the scoped domain service account, document your topology including satellite sites, verify client workstations and PublishWave if applicable, and return the completed checklist within five business days. If anything comes up that doesn't fit neatly into one of these categories — a custom integration, an unusual security policy, a nonstandard network setup — write it into the Additional Comments section of the checklist so your Project Manager and Application Consultant can plan around it instead of discovering it on installation day. Assign owners to each section this week, and let's get this checklist back on time for a smooth go-live.
