Search This Blog

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

IBM Lotus Domino 8.5.3 FP3 does not work correctly with IBM Lotus Traveler

Hello

Recently I got a task to install IBM Lotus Traveler Upgrade Pack 2 to enable ToDo's synchronization.
Since our IBM Domino server that we used for Traveler was R8.5.2 I decided to upgrade it also to be sure that we have a latest Domino with Traveler configuration.

So, I did two upgrades at once. Stupid me.

In the morning of the next day (I did all upgrades in the evening of the previous day) I became to get complaints from users that sometimes (not always) if you replay on email from IBM Lotus Traveler it got to a recipient with a broken text in the Body. I was quite surprised because all these encoding related things always worked good enough in IBM Lotus products but when I checked it myself I got confirmation that replays from IBM Traveler had issues with a content of Body. The problem, actually, was only with characters from Cyrillic alphabet.


Our configuration:
- Windows Server 2003 x32
- IBM Lotus Domino 8.5.3 FP3 x32
- IBM Lotus Traveler 8.5.3.3.200

I discovered next:
- new emails created in IBM Lotus Traveler are correct even with Cyrillic inside
- replays on emails from IBM Lotus Traveler with only English are correct
- replays on emails from IBM Lotus Traveler with Cyrillic inside have broken Body content! The interesting thing is that the same email in IBM Lotus Notes mailbox (Sent folder) looks okay but outside of Lotus Notes it looks broken. I tested it with Gmail.

So I had to fix it somehow.
Many thanks to VMWare team since I do not know how much time it would take to fix this issue without their amazing product.
I created a VM, rolled out there the same configuration just to make a double check that the issue is not related to Company's specific environment. It worked in the same way there with a broken Cyrillic inside.

First I started to downgrade IBM Lotus Traveler since I wanted to keep server as upgraded as possible.
I tried IBM LT 8.5.3.3, IBM LT 8.5.3, IBM LT 8.5.2 - all cases had the issue.

Then I tried to downgrade IBM Domino Server and almost immediately discovered that the problem was with FixPack3. When I downgraded Domino server to 8.5.3 FP2 I saw that IBM Lotus Traveler started to work correctly with Cyrillic. Keep in mind that I did not change server document or configuration document, so it is not a problem of wrong server configuration - it is for sure a bug in FP3 for IBM Domino x32.

6 comments:

  1. 8.5.3.3 IF1 fix this issue. BTW, the problem is with "home server" domino server.

    I suggest to install IF1 to fix this issue.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks Eli
    Actually, I already use Domino 9 and I do not have this issue any more.

    ReplyDelete
  3. We also experience that issue.
    Traveler Server: Domino 8.5.3FP1 + Traveler 8.5.3.2, Mail Server: Domino 8.5.3 FP3).

    Don't exactly understand Eli's comment - does he mean with "home server" the mail server the users mailfiles are stored on, not the Traveler server itself?

    Keeping Traveler's underlying Domino at 8.5.3FP1, would it just be sufficient to upgrade Traveler to the latest and greatest (8.5.3.3 IF2 at the moment) to fix that issue for us?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi

    >>Don't exactly understand Eli's comment - does he mean with "home server" the mail server the users mailfiles are stored on, not the Traveler server itself?

    Yes, I think so.

    >>Keeping Traveler's underlying Domino at 8.5.3FP1, would it just be sufficient to upgrade Traveler to the latest and greatest (8.5.3.3 IF2 at the moment) to fix that issue for us

    The issue is not with Traveler, the issue is with FP3 for Domino.
    If you want to use Domino with FP3 then you have to install IF1 for Domino 8.5.3.3. Here is a link: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21623473
    However I did not try this IF personally because I just migrated to Domino 9.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thanks for reply. Domino 8.5.3.3 IF1 has just two fixes of which one is "SPR# RFRF92V973 - In 853FP3, some Chinese characters get lost in the message sent by iNotes user". The other one is LDAP related.
    The same fix is also in 8.5.3.4 thus I assume Domino 8.5.3.4 also should do it.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hi

    Though there is no clear mention of fixing this bug in release notes of this IF it seems that it is fixed there. I think 8.5.3.4 has this fix included also.

    ReplyDelete