List of 11.0.2 connector bugs/annoyances

[jaime.pinto]

So, just about our first month with scalix in our organization. We started with 11.0.1 and a week later we upgraded to 11.0.2 server/OL_connector. Nobody has SmartCache ON anymore.

Below is a list of *EXTREME ANNOYANCES OR BUGS*. I say extreme because in practice they affect primarily the "C's" in the company, by that I mean the *Senior Management* group: CEO, CFO, COO, CTO, and all mid-management personnel and they all use Outlook 2003. It has been very difficult for me to take the beating on behalf of scalix, in particular because I made the recommendation. That means, if I don't have a solution very soon, possibly for the very next maintenance release next week (11.0.3), I may be forced to reconsider the whole scalix exercise.

Here it goes (as I said, in order of priority):

1) BLACKBERRY:
Very often entries on Calendar/Contacts appear to be fine from OL or SWA, but when it's time to sync with the BB they choke at some point. The workaround has been to either delete the entry of "save" it again. When the choking happens at 22/25 entries it's not a big deal, since we can quickly find the problem entry by trial/error, but when we has 729/750 or 1122/1200 entries the situation is much different, because it makes the BB sync process impractical and the BB calendar useless. All senior staff has a Blackberry. I blame this squarely on the connector, since we *never* had this problem before synchronizing BB with Outlook and local pst files.

2) OUTLOOK CRASHES ON QUIT:
although much less than in 11.0.1, we still have a lot of crashes in 11.0.2. It appears to be a difference between quitting OL the "nice and clean" way, by File->Exit menu, and the many other ways people do in practice, ie, by clicking on the red X at the top right corner of the windows, by Alt-F4 or close when the windows is minimized on the taskbar, or just logging out or shutting down the computer. I'm not sure if this issue related to the previous one somehow, but the fact is that we are seeing the post exit message to "send a report to MS" very often, and the start OL in safe move right after. But why? I'm asking everybody to use the *clean way* to exit, but the unexplained crashes continue to happen. I blame this squarely on the connector, since we *never* had this problem before with Outllook 2003.

3) LOSS OF THE "TO:" field auto-completion history:
For a number of reasons I've been forced to re-create the scalix profile so often, in an attempt to fix problems that I can not identify the cause, trying smartcache ON/OFF, etc. Each time this is done OL forgets how to auto-complete the address of the recipients. I still don't know how to at least preserve that history/cache from before. Users have the expectation that this is a very simple problem not to have a solution, and blame the extra work on scalix.

4) WINMAIL.DAT masking attachments or inline email threads:
Several posts on this subject and no solution yet. In fact not even a good description of how things get to this point. I have a very simple way to present this issue. I can access the same scalix server in 3 ways:
a) using the connector
b) using IMAP
c) using SWA

*Only* a) shows the attachments as a winmail.dat file. So I blame this squarely on the connector. You have no idea how upsetting this issue has been for the partners. The only reason it's not on top of the list is because they can always ask their secretaries to send a copy of the attachments again, or they access the email via SWA. The majority of users are not *Premium*, so there is no need for the connector/MAPI features, so I can get away with IMAP, but *ALL* senior staff require MAPI, they are the most exposed users to these deficiencies, and they have the power of decision making, and can pretty much tell me to pull the plug on Scalix.

For me all the above are serious issues. None of them are requests for new features. I just want the *existing features* to work properly, so that we have an improved stability of the system. There are still a few days left before the next maintenance release. I request and hope that the Scalix developers give the much needed priority I believe these issues deserve.

Thanks
Jaime

PS: on a personal note, this whole thing is making me look very bad.
In the old days there was a saying: "nobody gets fired for buying IBM, doesn't matter how expensive they are".
Later on when IBM got in the business of personal computers, and started to use Windows instead of OS/2 the saying became: "nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft, doesn't matter how buggy and insecure"

[apatel]

So, just about our first month with scalix in our organization. We started with 11.0.1 and a week later we upgraded to 11.0.2 server/OL_connector. Nobody has SmartCache ON anymore.

Any particular reason you decided not to use the SmartCache connector? We are conducting a similar exercise, only we switched everyone over to use the SmartCache 11.0.2.28 - almost have all the bugs worked out and 11.0.3 should fix the last of our major issues (Outbox messages hanging occasionally)

Below is a list of *EXTREME ANNOYANCES OR BUGS*. I say extreme because in practice they affect primarily the "C's" in the company, by that I mean the *Senior Management* group: CEO, CFO, COO, CTO, and all mid-management personnel and they all use Outlook 2003. It has been very difficult for me to take the beating on behalf of scalix, in particular because I made the recommendation. That means, if I don't have a solution very soon, possibly for the very next maintenance release next week (11.0.3), I may be forced to reconsider the whole scalix exercise.

Here it goes (as I said, in order of priority):

1) BLACKBERRY:
Very often entries on Calendar/Contacts appear to be fine from OL or SWA, but when it's time to sync with the BB they choke at some point. The workaround has been to either delete the entry of "save" it again. When the choking happens at 22/25 entries it's not a big deal, since we can quickly find the problem entry by trial/error, but when we has 729/750 or 1122/1200 entries the situation is much different, because it makes the BB sync process impractical and the BB calendar useless. All senior staff has a Blackberry. I blame this squarely on the connector, since we *never* had this problem before synchronizing BB with Outlook and local pst files.

We decided to pilot Notify Link for Over the Air sync instead of direct sync. Working well for the most part, expect that the new DST change is causing some strange behavior. Will investigate further after April 1st. I think the solution to the blackberry issue is an agreement with RIM. It might make sense for some of us to request RIM to support Scalix with BES and direct sync

2) OUTLOOK CRASHES ON QUIT:
although much less than in 11.0.1, we still have a lot of crashes in 11.0.2. It appears to be a difference between quitting OL the "nice and clean" way, by File->Exit menu, and the many other ways people do in practice, ie, by clicking on the red X at the top right corner of the windows, by Alt-F4 or close when the windows is minimized on the taskbar, or just logging out or shutting down the computer. I'm not sure if this issue related to the previous one somehow, but the fact is that we are seeing the post exit message to "send a report to MS" very often, and the start OL in safe move right after. But why? I'm asking everybody to use the *clean way* to exit, but the unexplained crashes continue to happen. I blame this squarely on the connector, since we *never* had this problem before with Outllook 2003.

Check to see if this is the scalix rules wizard getting disabled, I believe there is a bug for this - this was happening to us - has gone away when we moved everyone to SmartCache.

3) LOSS OF THE "TO:" field auto-completion history:
For a number of reasons I've been forced to re-create the scalix profile so often, in an attempt to fix problems that I can not identify the cause, trying smartcache ON/OFF, etc. Each time this is done OL forgets how to auto-complete the address of the recipients. I still don't know how to at least preserve that history/cache from before. Users have the expectation that this is a very simple problem not to have a solution, and blame the extra work on scalix.

Please test this these procedures, but I think it should solve your auto-complete issues.

Instructions to migrate your auto-complete information:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlo ... 11033.aspx

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlo ... 0496931033

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlo ... 0496931033

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlo ... 0496931033

4) WINMAIL.DAT masking attachments or inline email threads:
Several posts on this subject and no solution yet. In fact not even a good description of how things get to this point. I have a very simple way to present this issue. I can access the same scalix server in 3 ways:
a) using the connector
b) using IMAP
c) using SWA

*Only* a) shows the attachments as a winmail.dat file. So I blame this squarely on the connector. You have no idea how upsetting this issue has been for the partners. The only reason it's not on top of the list is because they can always ask their secretaries to send a copy of the attachments again, or they access the email via SWA. The majority of users are not *Premium*, so there is no need for the connector/MAPI features, so I can get away with IMAP, but *ALL* senior staff require MAPI, they are the most exposed users to these deficiencies, and they have the power of decision making, and can pretty much tell me to pull the plug on Scalix.

Not sure why you have this problem, we haven't run into this, do you have a tnef route defined. I believe this should be configured by default.

For me all the above are serious issues. None of them are requests for new features. I just want the *existing features* to work properly, so that we have an improved stability of the system. There are still a few days left before the next maintenance release. I request and hope that the Scalix developers give the much needed priority I believe these issues deserve.

Thanks
Jaime

PS: on a personal note, this whole thing is making me look very bad.
In the old days there was a saying: "nobody gets fired for buying IBM, doesn't matter how expensive they are".
Later on when IBM got in the business of personal computers, and started to use Windows instead of OS/2 the saying became: "nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft, doesn't matter how buggy and insecure"

[jaime.pinto]

Hi apatel

Thanks for your reply and pointers. As it's often the case, there is always a solution or an interin workaround for a problem.

Any particular reason you decided not to use the SmartCache connector?

Not really. We have tried equally SmartCache ON and OFF for a number of users, and the perception was that when it was ON we had more crashes and behaviors that people were not used to (such as the long waits at first, and those square icons on the taskbar). From my perspective it is one less variable on the equation to deal with. Only people with Laptops on the go have it ON now, but they still report similar problems.

We decided to pilot Notify Link for Over the Air sync instead of direct sync.

We attempted to use NotifyLink as well, but hosted services at their site, rather than ours (which would require a windows server). So has that option has not worked with scalix 11.
I'm wondering if our problems with apparently good entries on Calendar (SWA and OL) that don't sync with BB are due to a "invisible" character set.

Check to see if this is the scalix rules wizard getting disabled

OK, this will be a new test. I'll keep this add-in disabled on problem machines from now on, and observe.

Instructions to migrate your auto-complete information:

Great! It works just fine!.
viewtopic.php?t=6812

WINMAIL.DAT masking attachments or inline email threads:

I still don't know why, but this affected only the *older* emails, that had been migrated from the older mail server to scalix, *using Outlook2003* to copy from the old/IMAP to scalix/IMAP. All new attachments on scalix are fine. I have also determined that if I use *thunderbird/IMAP* instead of Outlook for the migration we don't see the problem. In any case I also found another workaround: Winmai.dat Opener 1.2
http://www.download.com/3001-2369_4-10607560.html

I still hope 11.0.3 version of the connector/server will address some of these issues

I hope the information here can be of help to some. I'll give SmartCache another chance after the upgrade.
Thanks
Jaime

[a.schild]

Here some more for the list:

- When adding additional mailboxes to be opened on startup, outlook might crash.
As a work arround disable all the send/receive checkboxes for the "F9"
This one is corrected in the next release.

- Crashes of the installer when creating new profiles with outlook 2000.
This has no negative effect on the later operation of the connector.

- On some stations the smartcache does not start synching.
Currently the only solution is to create a new Windows profile for that user.
Actually it seems that the real cause is not known, so no fix will be included in the next release.

- The charset bug on serverside. Can be worked arround by changing the parameters on server side. With outlook 2000+2002 the message bodys look empty, Outlook 2003 shows wrong umlauts. Imap or webaccess don't have any problems.
A fix will be included in the next (server) release.

André

[apatel]

WINMAIL.DAT masking attachments or inline email threads. I still don't know why, but this affected only the *older* emails, that had been migrated from the older mail server to scalix, *using Outlook2003* to copy from the old/IMAP to scalix/IMAP. All new attachments on scalix are fine. I have also determined that if I use *thunderbird/IMAP* instead of Outlook for the migration we don't see the problem. In any case I also found another workaround: Winmai.dat Opener 1.2
http://www.download.com/3001-2369_4-10607560.html

Okay it is very possible that using Outlook to copy IMAP from one server to another might cause the tnef formatting issue. We used imapsync version 1.182 - this command line utility works great....

[jaime.pinto]

Hey apatel

I installed imapsync on my ubuntu system and things went as smooth as one could expect. Below is a typical command line migration syntax:

/usr/bin/imapsync --host1 oldmail --user1 demo --passfile1 /etc/secret1 --host2 scalix --user2 demo --passfile2 /etc/secret2

There were a few errors here and there but nothing major, and it was *very fast*. The main thing: attachments show up fine! no more Winmail.dat

Thanks for the lead


On another note , here is another annoyance:
"A program is trying to access e-mail addresses you have stored in Outlook ..."
viewtopic.php?t=6863
I'll try the suggestion by craig soon.

Jaime

[apatel]

On another note , here is another annoyance:
"A program is trying to access e-mail addresses you have stored in Outlook ..."

Is this happening when creating a new message or a new calendar event, or both?

[jaime.pinto]

new message only

Jaime

[apatel]

I used the setting found via thread viewtopic.php?t=6863 as you suggested and created the outlook.sec file and all is well. No more pop-up when creating a message.