"DoesNot"Workplace Services Express Problems Persist

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Well, I think I’ve pretty much given up on version 2.0 of Workplace Services Express and I am just going to wait for a month or so to see if they’ve cleared things up in version 2.5. There are just too many bugs (in addition to Domino LDAP just NOT WORKING) that I can’t recommend deploying this. In fact, I already have re-deployment plans in place for the box if 2.5 doesn’t fix enough stuff.

Oh, and I found something else out that was fun, and by fun I mean really annoying. Some of the initial portlets that show up on the main screen are only 30 day trials. Yup, Weather, Stocks, and News from Market Watch (formerly Pinnacor) are all only 30 day trials. To keep them going you have to pay up. How much I’m not sure yet. I spoke with a rep there and he was supposed to send me some info including pricing. If I ever hear anything I’ll let you know.

Anyway, here are the issues I encountered. And this was on a clean out-of-the-box install, your mileage may vary.

  • Searching by name to add member access to teamrooms and such didn’t work. I couldn’t search by first name, or last name, or full name. If I searched for * then I got results.
  • Searching in a teamroom for a certain document actually found it but clicking on the search result just took me back to the document manager, not to the document itself.
  • The persistent chat rooms screwed up names of posters. I was testing on the same machine with three different ID’s, My Name, Test User and WSE Admin. No matter which one I logged in and posted as, it always showed up as from My Name. Probably a cookie thing, but if access was working based on the login, I expect the chat to as well.
  • If I signed in with any ID other than the admin, the discussion area in a teamroom showed nothing but Java.lang errors. If I signed in as admin, it looked and worked fine.
  • When you upload a document in the document manager, you have to fill out some meta data, click the Browse button choose the file and then upload. Well, doing it with large file attachments would just churn for awhile and then come back to the same screen with all of the meta data fields blanked out. No error, no completed upload. Upping the JVM Heap Size for each server (Portal, Workplace and Cloudscape) helped somewhat, but it was still flaky.
  • When I signed in as the admin, I couldn’t see teamrooms built by other people. The admin SHOULD be able to see all of this info right? I could still go into the Administration area and change some fundamental things about the Teamroom, but in the Teamrooms area itself, it didn’t show up.
  • Also, when in the administration area and wanting to choose a teamroom, it was very bizarre because the list of rooms was cryptic names, NOT the name given to it by the creator. For example, my IT Team teamroom showed up with some random letters and numbers, so choosing the right one was a crap shoot.
  • The aforementioned 30 day expiry on certain portlets.

Good timing today as Volker posted one of the best names ever for this software package. Simply IBM Lotus DoesNotWorkplace.