How upgrading to R7 breaks webmail access for Windows Vista users and why IBM won’t fix it.
I’m sure some of you are reading this and wondering why the @#$@ are you upgrading to R7 instead of R8.02 or R8.5. In short, we are trying to stabilize our 6.5.6 FP3 HF63 servers with the least amount of effort and impact to the users while we run a migration to Exchange.
After applying 3 or 4 hotfixes to 6.5.6 FP3, I have FINALLY convinced my team to upgrade at least the server to 7.0.3 FP1. I spent two month testing and designing a plan to upgrade all of the servers. When they finally got around to seeing how it would be beneficial (due to BES servers crashing and on at least 3 occasions IBM told us to upgrade to Domino 7.03 when we created PMRs) I ran through all the testing procedures.
The one thing I didn’t test, was webmail access on Windows Vista because neither one of my machines is Windows Vista. That happened to be the one thing that broke when we upgraded our servers.
We are using the OpenNTF1.7b mail template which is based on DWA6 (6.5 version). We haven’t upgraded any mail templates because we didn’t want to impact the users in any way.
We previously had a hotfix for Domino 6.5.6 FP3 called Hot Fix (470.141). This fixed webmail access for both Internet Explorer and Firefox on both XP and Vista. Without this hotfix (at least on Vista) users receive a “Red X” in the body and attachment fields instead of a white box where they can type and attach files in Internet Explorer.
After the upgrade, we found that these files from Hot Fix (470.141) were overwritten by the Domino 7.03 install. After the upgrade and since the files were overwritten, the issue came back. We have found that the issue only occurs if the user is using Internet Explorer on Windows Vista. Internet Explorer on Windows XP has no problems and Firefox on either operating system has no problems.
So the result is that after we upgraded to Domino 7.0.3 FP1, we have a regression where users with DWA6 mail templates using Internet Explorer on Windows Vista receive a RED X instead of a body and attachment field when trying to create new message, reply, reply to all, etc.
I created a PMR with IBM and they told us that it was a known issue and that the recommendation was to upgrade the mail template to DWA7, or we could try re-applying the 6.5.6 FP3 Hot Fix (470.141) to the 7.0.3 FP1 server and see what happens.
Incidentally, here is a breakdown of the DWA6 files from both the Domino 7.0.3 FP1 native files, and the Domino 6.5.6 FP3 HF (470.141).
When we apply Domino 6.5.6 FP3 HF (470.141) to a Domino 7.0.3 FP1 server, the problem is fixed for Internet Explorer on both operating systems, but we start to see the same issue as SPR: YQWG7END6H: Firefox3: The word is 18 size and bold by default on the first line of the body on both operating systems.
I have asked IBM to ask the developers why the DWA6 files for Domino 7.0.3 FP1 are much older than the DWA6 files that are included in (470.141) hotfix? and what causes the behavior of SPR: YQWG7END6H to appear in Firefox when we apply (470.141) to a Domino 7.0.3 FP1 server? Is there any way we can fix this for both Internet Explorer and Firefox?? I know the recommended approach is to use the DWA7 template, but this seems trivial to fix.
There is a hotfix for DWA7 that addresses about 10 SPRs including YQWG7END6H and I have applied it, but all of the files in the hotfix are for DWA7 only, they don’t affect DWA6 files.
6 Responses to “How upgrading to R7 breaks webmail access for Windows Vista users and why IBM won’t fix it.”
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“We are using the OpenNTF1.7b mail template which is based on DWA6 (6.5 version). We haven’t upgraded any mail templates because we didn’t want to impact the users in any way.”
I have a hard time imagining your users are so fragile as to have trouble adjusting to the trivial UI differences between DWA 6 and 7, particularly when the affected users are expected to adjust to the transition from XP to Vista (nevermind the planned switch to Outlook).
Considering the straightjacket that has been placed on Domino in your organization it’s little wonder there exist plans for an Exchange migration. Show off iNotes 8.5 by signing up for a free Lotus Greenhouse account (https://greenhouse.lotus.com/home/login.jsp) and see how *positively* your users might be impacted by change.
it is a shame that you cannot upgrade the servers and mail files to 8.5 , when the users get migrated to exchange they’ll all go “what was the point of that?”
“We are using the OpenNTF1.7b mail template which is based on DWA6 (6.5 version). We haven’t upgraded any mail templates because we didn’t want to impact the users in any way.”
I have a hard time imagining your users are so fragile as to have trouble adjusting to the trivial UI differences between DWA 6 and 7, particularly when the affected users are expected to adjust to the transition from XP to Vista (nevermind the planned switch to Outlook).
Considering the straightjacket that has been placed on Domino in your organization it’s little wonder there exist plans for an Exchange migration. Show off iNotes 8.5 by signing up for a free Lotus Greenhouse account and see how *positively* your users might be impacted by change.
This exact issue came up recently with a VERY large bank we support.
I had them go to R8, luckily.
Their problem was they only recently, believe this or not, approved IE7 to be rolled out.
Of course the Notes team was not involved in the testing. ARGH!
Upgrading to R8.x just isn’t going to be the answer in all organizations. The one reason that we chose not to upgrade all of the user’s mail files in this situation is that when we unified everyone on OpenNTF1.7b about a year and a half ago, we had an enormous amount of problems using the mail convert command.
Months later, I find this technote titled ‘Load Convert’ causes frameset corruption of Domino 6.x database which describes the problem we had with load convert on clustered mail servers.
On Monday morning when we came into the office after upgrading all mail templates, any user who was on a clustered mail server, had to have the local cache.ndk deleted and client restarted. It was a total nightmare.
So we are left with very cautious management that is busy planning a migration to Exchange, doesn’t want to hear anything about R8, and is gun shy about upgrading mail templates, while, I am at the same time, trying to push for upgrading the servers to R7 to stabilize them a bit while we are busy planning, designing, and implementing the migration to Exchange.
In other words, not a fun place to be.
hi… you migrate to exchange?? you fix the problem listed in the post?
i´ve the same problem!!