Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Have You Seen This in Notes 8.0.1?

We have a few people who have moved to the Notes 8.0.1 client and are planning the rollout to the rest of our clients. However, we have been seeing some problems in the client that we can't explain and want to try to sort out before continuing on.

The machines we have upgraded are our developer/admin machines, so they had the Notes, Admin and Designer clients installed (all 7.0.2). We did an upgrade rather than uninstalling 7/installing 8 and none of them had an 8 beta installed. These are all Win XP machines. We also had Sametime Connect 7.5.1 installed and I'm not sure if that was uninstalled before installing 8. The one thing we may not have done that is in the installation guide is to stop all other Windows programs before installing.

What we are seeing is that the embedded Sametime client does not always start correctly. It will be OK sometimes, but other times will not login and will not allow us to login. Other times it will login but the system tray icon will show as "disconnected". Sometimes when logged in, it will not open a chat window. Restarting the Notes client usually resolves the issues.

We can't figure out if it is something to do with how the client was installed on these machines, if it is related to how our environment (OS) is secured or something else. We did have local admin rights on the machines when we installed the software.

We're worried about the impression these kinds of things will leave, and we really have no desire to remove all traces of 7 before installing 8 (that seems to resolve the problems) because of the extra work it will cause everyone in setting up their Notes environment again. Any thoughts would be appreciated - no idea is too crazy at this point.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

We only "Play" with sametime in my company... So we're far from experts with it... When I upgraded to 8.0.1 (maybe even 8... not sure) I had a heck of a time logging into sametime.. Eventually I figured I could do it if I used the ip address instead of server name. Of the 4-5 people who have been upgraded and are on sametime I'm the only one that had any problems. One other person was also using designer and administrator.
I've seen other weird things in designer....

Anonymous said...

We have seen a ton of issues with the 8.0.1 standard client related to Sametime and many other things and these are many reasons why we are waiting for 8.0.2 in September to rollout enterprise wide. We have about 60k users.

-Tim E. Brown

Anonymous said...

I don't know exactly what is going on, but you can uninstall 7, then reinstall into the same directory and you'll still have all your config and data directory in place as before. (of course, have a backup of \data before proceeding, just in case).

I have had some problems where simply going into the ST preferences panel and re-doing the config there solves the issue, too.

Chris

Anonymous said...

Play around with the sametime server name in the person document Domino Directory, trust me, it needs to be blank or filled in.

Anonymous said...

I have the same problem as you describe, so I will be interested in hearing back re: what the solution is.

Uninstalling 7 did not work for me, nor does resetting the preferences.

- LH

P.S. -- I am an end user, not an admin (i.e., I don't have access to the server). My peers do not get this problem, only me.

IdoNotes said...

Do you use the Domino server name in the person documents or a proper DNS name?

If you use a Domino name do you have a local connection record to that server created?

Don McNally said...

Thanks everyone for your comments. We're still having problems and they are maddening because they are so intermittent.

@Tim - We thought about waiting but don't really want to, for a variety of reasons. But we don't have 60K users either! ;)

@Chris - We may go the uninstall/reinstall route (installations are scripted through MS SMS) but were kind of hoping to avoid it so we didn't run into problems with migrations of things like bookmarks and workspace. I know - it should work, but as soon as you depend on it working, something breaks.

@IdoNotes - The Domino server name is used in the person documents. The Sametime config has the full DNS name of the server. We have local connection docs on all clients that point at the Domino server.

Anything else come to mind? It really seems to me to be something in the client, like things not getting loaded when they need to be, maybe due to other activities happening at the same time.