Bruised but not Beaten
Bruised But Not Beaten
Last week I upgraded my laptop from 7.01 to 8.02, and the design of my mail file to ND8 too. My desktop PC has been on the various flavours of 8 for a year (though not 8.5 beta), with 8.01 the only version causing any problems by seemingly corrupting my bookmarks.nsf at increasingly frequent intervals. And I've been using Symphony with increasing confidence to the extent that I have uninstalled MS Office on the desktop. With this success I have been increasingly smug to colleagues and friends about open source software and Microsoft's downfall from the collaborative and productivity suite spaces.
However, I had 3 problems in the first 2 days since my laptop & mail upgrade that left me turning the air blue;
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Last week I upgraded my laptop from 7.01 to 8.02, and the design of my mail file to ND8 too. My desktop PC has been on the various flavours of 8 for a year (though not 8.5 beta), with 8.01 the only version causing any problems by seemingly corrupting my bookmarks.nsf at increasingly frequent intervals. And I've been using Symphony with increasing confidence to the extent that I have uninstalled MS Office on the desktop. With this success I have been increasingly smug to colleagues and friends about open source software and Microsoft's downfall from the collaborative and productivity suite spaces.
However, I had 3 problems in the first 2 days since my laptop & mail upgrade that left me turning the air blue;
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1 - My desktop started having problems opening mail db views (but not documents) & local names.nsf views, giving a nasty message about server connectivity which was clearly not the case as it was on a local db and on a server that I could still access documents in. I tried killing the bookmarks & recreating it as I used to do with 8.01, but no joy. The ND8 forum had a topic, so I was not alone. However the workspace folder fix did nothing. After much too long trying to figure it out, and swearing a lot, I ended up uninstalling and reinstalling Notes, and 2 days on, everything seems ok.
2 - On the laptop, I had the security log out feature to lock the Notes clients after 15 minutes. Since the upgrade, some of the time I can't get back into the client. I can enter my password correctly as often as I want, the password dialogue will re-appear immediately, so I swear at it in the hope that works. If I type my password in wrong, I get the usual wrong password message. No other Notes dialogues appear to be open and all I can do is kill the Notes processes and restart. Needless to say, security lockout has now been disabled on the laptop.
3 - I was working on the laptop on a document. I was in The Zone for a couple of hours following a train of thought that was rich and productive to the extent I forgot to eat and I forgot to save. (You can see where this is going, can't you.). When I was finished with my document, I saved it. Went to attach it to an email. It wasn't there. I know where I saved it, I created a new folder for it and its brothers that were to follow. I searched the laptop and the network drives as re-writing that baby was not going to be simple. No luck. I then tried a couple of tests on my desktop and got the sysadmin to test it on his copy of Symphony. Same behaviour. Was it really saved? Where has it gone? Here at Teamstudio, our My Docs folders are on the network and those of us with laptops synchronise them with the network when we can, but it seems that the latest version of Symphony now won't save to the network unless it is to a mapped drive. It used to work, the desktop before the reinstall had no problems but the recent installs of Symphony in the EMEA office reproduce this behaviour. I tried looking for the temp files from the autosave feature, that is thankfully turned on by default for Symphony, but the folder was empty. With there not being a crash I'm guessing they were cleared after I restarted Notes. Shame.
Now, I know that sounds like I am unhappy with ND8 & Symphony and my experiences could put people off ND8. In fact most of my Twitter updates to date have been on these very problems. The reality is different though. I still believe that ND8 & Symphony are better than ND7 & MS Office, which were the previous apps used. In fact, I am glad that I had these problems rather than one of my colleagues who would be less tolerant of these minor software operational issues. ND8 is the Notes client we should have had years ago, yet it is still going to prove to be the best corporate mail client for the next few years at least. Symphony beats MS Office on value for money and takes it on pretty well on functionality, and in many areas on user friendliness (though I am not convinced I prefer Spreadsheets to Excel, yet).
I am looking forward to the next few weeks here at Teamstudio. We are upgrading the users from ND7 to ND8 and I'm excited to be able to help train them and gather their feedback. At the moment, partly because of error 3 above, Symphony is not being rolled out, yet. I'm hopeful that it will happen soon because I will enjoy the MS Office removal process as well as not having to save everything as .doc .xls & .ppt
2 - On the laptop, I had the security log out feature to lock the Notes clients after 15 minutes. Since the upgrade, some of the time I can't get back into the client. I can enter my password correctly as often as I want, the password dialogue will re-appear immediately, so I swear at it in the hope that works. If I type my password in wrong, I get the usual wrong password message. No other Notes dialogues appear to be open and all I can do is kill the Notes processes and restart. Needless to say, security lockout has now been disabled on the laptop.
3 - I was working on the laptop on a document. I was in The Zone for a couple of hours following a train of thought that was rich and productive to the extent I forgot to eat and I forgot to save. (You can see where this is going, can't you.). When I was finished with my document, I saved it. Went to attach it to an email. It wasn't there. I know where I saved it, I created a new folder for it and its brothers that were to follow. I searched the laptop and the network drives as re-writing that baby was not going to be simple. No luck. I then tried a couple of tests on my desktop and got the sysadmin to test it on his copy of Symphony. Same behaviour. Was it really saved? Where has it gone? Here at Teamstudio, our My Docs folders are on the network and those of us with laptops synchronise them with the network when we can, but it seems that the latest version of Symphony now won't save to the network unless it is to a mapped drive. It used to work, the desktop before the reinstall had no problems but the recent installs of Symphony in the EMEA office reproduce this behaviour. I tried looking for the temp files from the autosave feature, that is thankfully turned on by default for Symphony, but the folder was empty. With there not being a crash I'm guessing they were cleared after I restarted Notes. Shame.
Now, I know that sounds like I am unhappy with ND8 & Symphony and my experiences could put people off ND8. In fact most of my Twitter updates to date have been on these very problems. The reality is different though. I still believe that ND8 & Symphony are better than ND7 & MS Office, which were the previous apps used. In fact, I am glad that I had these problems rather than one of my colleagues who would be less tolerant of these minor software operational issues. ND8 is the Notes client we should have had years ago, yet it is still going to prove to be the best corporate mail client for the next few years at least. Symphony beats MS Office on value for money and takes it on pretty well on functionality, and in many areas on user friendliness (though I am not convinced I prefer Spreadsheets to Excel, yet).
I am looking forward to the next few weeks here at Teamstudio. We are upgrading the users from ND7 to ND8 and I'm excited to be able to help train them and gather their feedback. At the moment, partly because of error 3 above, Symphony is not being rolled out, yet. I'm hopeful that it will happen soon because I will enjoy the MS Office removal process as well as not having to save everything as .doc .xls & .ppt
Category Notes 8
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