Uh Clem's Admin World

So I downloaded the latest DWA 8.0.2 hotfix last week (Hotfix 229.051) to fix some problem I was having.  After applying the hotfix you could run a spell check and it would result in the message "No spelling errors found"......ALL the time, regardless of how many spelling errors there were!  Oops!

The fixpack I received contained 3 dictionary files to be replaced (us.dic, uk.dic, wpdic.dic).   After opening a PMR the tech suggested I revert these 3 files back to the original files.  After doing so the spell check started working again.

So if you plan to apply the DWA Hotfix 229.051 make sure you test the spell check.  Your users may end up with "perfect spelling"!

By the way,  my original problem wasn't fixed with the hotfix.

So my testing of DWA 8.0.2 has gone pretty well, and I'm moving forward with deployment.   I blogged about a bug with nested groups in the Sametime Contact List here.

But I have run into another bug that might be a little more troubling for the user.    Apparently the use of the up/down keys to navigate the inbox do not work if you have both the preview pane open, and logged into Sametime.   THIS one is going to be really annoying to my users.  I didn't think this was a common method for inbox navigation.  I would have guessed that users would use the mouse more.  But I've been given feedback that the up/down keys are used quite a lot.  Go figure.

This bug has been reported as SPR XMXL6XCA5D.   They could not give me a timetable as to when they were going to address this bug.  If you want this fixed sooner rather than later open a PMR with tech support and subscribe to this SPR, and tell them this is impacting your users.   This will give higher weight to the SPR, and maybe they will address it sooner.

I upgraded a handful of DWA users this week as a pilot for my company-wide upgrade to 8.0.2.   Some of the users complained that the names in their IM contact list were not sorted in some of the groups.  It turns out that those groups happened to be nested groups.  The DWA IM contact list will show the first sub-group sorted, THEN the second sub-group sorted beneith the first.   If there are multiple groups in the top-level group, the name list looks a mess.

Also if the group is nested 3 levels deep the group doesn't even expand in the contact list, and there is no "+" next to the group to expand it.

IBM tech support referred me to technote 1223002 which says DWA 6.5 doesn't support nested groups, but they said it is still not fixed.

So for now my only option is to tell my users to use the sub-groups explicitly.

 I've had a heck of a problem getting the DWA 7.0.3 to stabilize.  I have now been through 2 hotfixes.  Most of it revolved around opening attachments.   You might get the right one, or you might get a previous attachment that you opened.  It had to do with how IE saves a temporary copy of the attachment you are opening.

While I was testing the last hotfix (DWA Hotfix 281.111) my IBM Tech Support rep could not reproduce my problem.   I sent him exact instructions to recreate it, but to no avail.

After almost a month the PMR was re-assigned to another tech.  This tech somehow made a connection with a problem an international customer was having with DWA attachments.   As a lark she asked me what the Use UTF-8 for output field was set to in the server doc.  It was set to No which is the default for 7.0.3.  She told me to change it to Yes.  And that fixed my problem.

Now the UTF-8 enables the unicode character set.  Logically this should have nothing to do with my problem, but this tech somehow put 2 and 2 together.

So thank you, Emily, for making the unlikely connection, and for having such a pleasant phone voice.

Sometimes your success with tech support all depends on who you end up with.

Since 80% of my users are primarily DWA users I get feedback on the slightest thing wrong.   When I upgraded my servers to 7.0.3 last week they noticed a problem viewing emails.  It turns out there is a bug that truncates the sender address after a comma when viewing or printing an email (of course the comma is in the quoted "alias" part of the address).   Anyone else run into this?

So I submitted a PMR and, sure enough, this was a known issue.  Tech support rendered a hotfix for me for Linux (DWA Hotfix Pack 280.081) which I installed this morning.

This is the 4th or 5th DWA hotfix I've installed, and each time I'm impressed at how easy it is.  It's simply a matter of replacing a half dozen files (5 in my case) on the Domino server.  The cool thing is all you do is stop the HTTP task,  rename the old files (for backout purposes), copy in the new files,  set the attributes & file owner info, then restart the HTTP task.  That's it!

If you are new to DWA hotfixes,  I recommend you thoroughly digest the readme.txt that comes with the hotfix.  It is 8 pages long, and unfortunately it is in plain text, so all the sections run together.  What I do is delete the sections that are for the other operating systems.  This reduces what I really need to just 1 page.   I really wish they would deliver this in a better formatted file that makes it easy to decipher just the parts you need.

I'm also curious about how little I see written or referenced regarding DWA.  Not much in the blogs.   The new DWA Lite was mentioned at Lotusphere, but that's about it.  

So is anyone else out there using DWA as much as I am?