Academus 2.0.8 Patch Release Notes
This document is the online and most up-to-date version of the Academus 2.0.8 product release notes. In the first section, Issues Resolved for Academus 2.0.8, this document enumerates issues in Academus 2.0.7 resolved for this 2.0.8 release. This may be of particular usefulness in highlighting changes for current Academus 2.0.7 deployers. A second section, Issues Resolved in Prior Academus 2.0.x Releases, highlights issues previous Academus releases that are resolved in Academus 2.0.8. This section is cumulative across Academus 2.0 releases and so may be useful for deployers upgrading from versions of Academus earlier than 2.0.7. The third section, Known Issues in Academus 2.0.8, enumerates known issues affecting Academus 2.0.8.
Issues Resolved in Academus 2.0.8
Discussion Forums
While replying to a post if the user uploads a file that exceeds 2.86MB, an error message is generated with return link to the post reply page. When the user clicked on the link, the screen refreshed and did not take the user to the reply page. This issue has been resolved to take the user to the reply post page.
Fragment Manager
Fragment Manager previously did not retain the width of the columns for different width settings. Now the Academus implementation of Aggregated Layout Management persists fragment columns widths and saves the settings on a per fragment basis. Previously a user's choice of default selected tab would persist only when saving a fragment via the Fagment Manager. For consistency, in Academus 2.0.8 user preferences handling was changed such that all users' choice of selected tab is persisted with preferences. Some Academus deployers may regard this as an improvement. However, this behavior is easily removed if it is not desired. This issue is discussed in the known issues section.
PAGS Group Search
Searching for PAGS groups in Portlets displayed only partial results instead of all the groups. For example if there were 5 groups under PAGS root only 3 displayed during the search. This issue was resolved to display all the users.
Polls
A user can publish a poll without giving a Poll name. When the Polls are not given a name and published, the user does not have the ability to toggle to them when reviewing results. This issue has been fixed to display the name of the survey if no Poll distribution name exists and if there are similar names than time of distribution is displayed to distinguish between them.
Screen Reader
Users that are using screen reader browser will see/hear a link to disable CSCR which when selected will disable CSCR. This link will be seen only when the CSCR cookie is set. In other browsers this link will be invisible. (NOTE: Customers patching to 2.0.8 from an earlier version of Academus 2.0 will most likely need their skin updated to make this link invisible. See here for more information on how to update the skin for this.)
uPortal Template User
In previous releases a failure to update group membership for a user on template user change prevented the user from logging in to the portal. This issue has been resolved to allow the user to login to the portal and removing the user from the old groups.
Web Content Portlet
WebContent Portlet in the guest page login layout previously did not display the content unless the user logged in.This has been fixed to allow rendering of WCM Portlet on guest page (before login).
Issues Resolved in Prior Academus 2.0.x Releases
Address Book
Searching the Address Book for addresses generated LDAP error message even though LDAP was not configured. This Address Book has been fixed to not to generate any LDAP error messages if it LDAP is not configured. In focused view sometimes extra characters such as ‘>’ appeared as the first character in the channel content due to a serializer problem. This was observed in several other channels including Bookmarks and My Notes. This issue has been resolved by fixing the html and xhtml serializers.
Bookmarks
When a folder was added to the Bookmarks channel without a title the channel just refreshed without giving any warning or error messages. It has been improved to generate a warning message advising the user to enter a title.
Briefcase Portlet
When a shared folder contains a folder within it and if the shared folder was moved using the Move button, it failed to generate the Warning message “PROBLEM: One or more folders / subfolders is shared. Sharing information will be lost on moving”. This happened only if the shared folder contained one or more folders. This issue has been resolved such that the intended error message now appears. If a user publishes multiple Briefcase Portlet instances to the same tab, actions taken on the second instance would be repeated in the first Portlet (Ex: Click Open a folder etc.). This issue has been resolved such that actions will take effect only on the intended Portlet. While attempting to remove users from the shared LDAP folders, the channel would fail to render when the ‘Remove’ button was clicked after selecting the user. This issue has been resolved. In the briefcase folder view, when the ‘Size’ column link is selected to sort the folders and files contained in the selected folder, only the files were sorted and not the folders. This issue has been resolved such that both folders and files are now sorted. When a Briefcase Portlet drive was deployed with owner access and drive sharing turned off (sharing button disabled), the portal would fail to render when a folder is edited in that drive. This issue has been resolved. When a folder was shared to two different groups and each group was granted identical shared permissions, the channel would fail to render for users who were members of both groups when they attempted to copy or move files or folders within the shared folder. This issue has been resolved.
Calendar
In the Calendar preferences mode, when a user added a new Composite view using an Internet Explorer web browser and then pressed the Enter key instead of clicking the OK button an exception was generated. This issue has been resolved. When a user added an event to the Calendar, invitees who were invited through the "By email address" field did not receive emails if both the email and notification boxes were checked. This issue has been resolved and invitees now receive their emails. When a user imported a Task List, the time stamped on the task would always state 12am, even when the actual Task times were different. This issue has been resolved and the correct times are now stated. Previously when a Calendar event was sent to multiple groups, users that belong to more than one group would receive multiple notifications for the event. Users now receive only a single notification when they belong to multiple targeted groups. When a user shares a calendar with an LDAP user and grants write access, the LDAP user was not able to write to the calendar. If the user selected ‘Everyone’ instead of a specific LDAP user, the LDAP users were able to add entries. This issue has been resolved such that LDAP users receive write access when granted.
Campus Announcements
Email links in the Campus Announcements text box did not open a email window when the link was clicked even though it displayed as a hyperlink. This issue has been resolved to open an email window.
Campus News
Parent Topics were not displaying while viewing articles under different topics. This issue was resolved to display the topics correctly.
Channel Manager
When a new channel was published and added to the “All Categories”, the system would position the channel outside all the categories within Preferences. The user could not add this channel to a tab. This issue has been resolved.
Classifieds
When approving a classified, approvers are allowed to enter text up to 200 characters in the “Message to Author” field. If the user entered 100 or less characters in this field, the system allowed the user to approve or deny the classified. However, if he or she entered over 100 characters in the field, the system returned them to “Classifieds Pending Approvals” page and the classified was still listed as pending approval. This issue has been resolved and approver can enter up to 200 characters in the “Message to Author” field when approving or denying classifieds When selecting people to add as approvers for classifieds, individual names were duplicated if that person was in multiple groups. This issue has been resolved.
CMS
While adding a note from Notepad Channel, a blank page is displayed while using Firefox 1.0.4 browser. The page has to be refreshed every time a note is added to see contents. This was a browser-related issue specific to Firefox 1.0.4 and has been resolved in Firefox 1.0.6. While launching a Chat window from the CMS chat link, an instance of the CMS channel window opens instead of the Chat window. This was noticed in Firefox 1.0.4, Netscape 7, and Mozilla 1.7.8 browsers and the issue has been resolved to display only the chat window. In the discussion forums the edit and delete icon for the forums created was displaying incorrect mouse over text as forums instead of edit and delete. This issue is resolved to show correct text.
CMS Forum
When canceling a post within CMS Forums during the creation, the channel fails to render. This issue has been resolved.
Collaborative Groupware
The roster channel would fail to render when importing a roster XML file without an enrollment status. This issue has been resolved.
Customize Portal
While subscribing to Channels/Portlets during Customization, the Channels/Portlets were not listed in alphabetical order under categories. This issue has been resolved to display the list in alphabetical order.
Discussion Forums
The Discussion Forums channel would fail to render when cancelling a post. This issue has been resolved.
Gateway SSO Portlet Security Fix
The Gateway SSO Portlet implements a “store and forward” approach towards credentials, causing the end user’s web browser to submit credentials to the target application without the user having to retype username and password. In the default case, when a user single signs-on using the Gateway SSO Portlet to another application the Portlet provisions the credentials for form submission directlyinto the response from portal to browser. End users viewing the source of the Gateway SSO Portlet HTML response can observe these credentials, and the credentials may be cached to disk with the web response in some browsers. After the user has logged out of the portal and the web browser the user’s username and password may remain resident on the local machine in the browser’s cache or temporary files allowing subsequent users of the machine access to the same. Two improvements have been applied in this patch to address this issue. Firstly, headers on the portal response to the web browser have been enhanced to suppress caching of the response on more web browsers. This is sufficient to resolve the issue on many browsers but not on present generation Internet Explorer. Secondly, a new Gateway SSO Portlet configuration mode has been introduced wherein the Portlet makes a JavaScript (AJAX) callback to provision the credentials into the Portlet rather than receiving these credentials on initial Portlet rendering. This prevents Internet Explorer from caching the credentials to disk. Adoption of AJAX is an optional configuration of the gateway Portlet, with the default behavior unchanged. Refer to the Configuration Guide for more information. The Academus 2.0.8 release includes changes to the portal web.xml and to the httpd.conf file to make available the handler of the AJAX callback. When the Gateway SSO Portlet is accessed over an insecure connection (http: rather than https:), username and password can be cached on any proxy servers that client uses to connect to the internet. This issue is resolved by only presenting this Portlet over SSL. In general applying SSL to your entire Academus instance is an important best practice for preventing general session hijacking as well as interception of credentials on login and on usage of the Gateway SSO Portlet. SSL-enabling any applications at which the Gateway SSO Portlet is targeted is necessary to prevent the credentials from being intercepted on that submit.
Group Chat
While accessing a Group Chat channel to launch a Chat window as a PAGS group user that belongs to the group that has been given the access, the screen displays a message that the user has been removed from the group. This has been resolved to give the user the access.
Guest Layout
When on Guest page in Academus and a channel changed to focus view, there was no means to return the user back to the portal view of the Guest page. This issue has been resolved by adding a “Return Home” link located in the top left corner of the page.
Offering Administration
In the enrollment drop down list SIS is spelled out as “Student Information System”. Previously it displayed as ‘sis’.
Personal Calendar
When adding a new event and inviting an attendee by entering their email address in the “By email address” field and clicking the “Notify Attendees by Email” box, the attendee receives the invitation by email. However, if the event is edited or deleted and the “Notify Attendees by Email” box is selected again, the attendee whose email address had to be manually entered does not receive the notice. This issue has been resolved. In the Preferences after saving, the save button was still active even after successful save message is displayed. This was removed as not to confuse the users. Calendar event search functionality has been fixed to return task entries along with events. While importing a VCS formatted file, ERROR_INVALID_FILE message used to be generated. This issue has been resolved to correctly display the event the calendar. Exporting an event and than importing it back into the calendar changed the priority of the event. This issue has been resolved to maintain the priority. When importing a vCalendar file (.vcs), the events were being recorded in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and not properly converting the event time to the proper time zone. This issue has been resolved in this patch release and now events are recorded using the local time zone. Add Event icon in Shared Calendar appeared active even though the user with no write access accessed the channel. Clicking on the icon did nothing. This issue has been resolved to show the icon grayed out. Add Event icon in Shared Calendar appeared active even though the user with no write access accessed the channel. Clicking on the icon did nothing. This issue has been resolved to show the icon grayed out.
Sakai
When a user logged into Academus and accessed the Sakai Gateway Portlet, they needed to click the Login link and enter their Sakai username and password. If the user logged out of Sakai using the Sakai logout link, they needed to click the login link again the next time they accessed the channel and had to re-enter their credentials. This issue has been resolved. When the user/admin changed the password of a user who previously signed onto Sakai through Academus, the user would need to his old password to single sign into Sakai. This issue has been resolved.
Single Sign-Out
Single Sign-Out capability has been added to the Academus. Upon logging out of Academus, users will also be logged out of other portal applications and any pop-up windows that had been launched from the portal will also close. This function is currently available to Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Firefox users, but does not support Netscape or Safari users.
Survey Author
When creating a survey and not entering a Survey title, the following message was displayed: “Please Specify the Form Title” The word "Form" was replaced by “Survey” to make the message more intuitive. While creating a personal or a shared survey, if the user cancels the survey without saving in step 2, it generated an exception. This issue has been fixed to cancel a survey without generating error messages. The Save button in Step 2 was replaced by Continue button and the Cancel button was removed. To cancel the survey in Step 3, the user must click on the “Go back and edit survey” link to return to the Editor page and click on the Cancel button.
uPortal Security Fix
Web Proxy, RSS and XSLT Channels were vulnerable to a ChannelRuntimeData exploit whereby a malicious user could potentially view arbitrary server file system resources by passing specially crafted URLs to uPortal. This release patches this vulnerability using code vetted by the uPortal community. No configuration is necessary to enable the patch. Administrators can consult the Portal User Guide for instructions on allowing these Channels to proxy user-specified file system resources at runtime, but such configurations are strongly discouraged. This patch modifies the Channel Publishing Documents (.cpd) files defining the workflows for publishing CWebProxy, RSS, and XSLT channels. Academus deployments having customized these files will need to re-apply their custom workflow configuration in consideration of the new workflow steps.
Web Content Portlet
The Ajax SSO callback feature was not implemented in the earlier version for WCM Portlet that affected the deep linking feature in RedDot content management. This issue has been resolved.
Webmail
This Academus patch introduces a new alternative Webmail channel implementation. The pre-existing (Default) implementation remains in this patch unchanged. New is a Nested Folder Webmail implementation supporting nested IMAP folders. Portal administrators can choose among these implementations using a simple change in channel configuration. Refer to the Configuration Guide document for details as how to switch implementations. This patch introduces a new class package for the new implementation and introduces a new properties file “Unicon_webmail.properties”. This file may be safely ignored unless the new implementation is desired.
Default Implementation
This is the standard existing implementation that supports only email folders and folder-folders, and comes with the default configuration.
Nested Folder Implementation
Originally the Webmail channel implementation (default) supported only folders-containing-email-messages and folders-containing-folders, but not folders that contain both folders and messages. The channel treats message and folder-folders as folder-folders, ignoring the messages in the folders. This issue has been resolved by introducing this new Webmail implementation supporting IMAP folders that contain both messages and folders, both rendering the messages in the folder and making the folder available for navigation. While creating a new folder sometimes a duplicate folder is created in the folder listing. The duplicate folder disappears when the user logs out and logs back in. This issue has been resolved with the new nested folder implementation. Emails sent out of Webmail did not maintain paragraphs or line spacing resulting in one single block of words. This issue was resolved to properly maintain the email format allowing paragraphs, line spacing and signatures as it was created. When multiple new emails were received, opening and reading one email would change the status to “Read” for all emails within the Inbox, making it difficult for users to tell which emails were actually read. This issue has been resolved.
Known Issues in Academus 2.0.8
Academus WCM
Refer to Red Dot CMS 7.0 Release notes for browser limitations.
Blogging Portlet
In Windows/SQL server environment when a user creates a Category a root directory is duplicated and the Category name is not displayed. Then when a user adds an entry, the entries are duplicated in the entire duplicated root directory.
Briefcase Portlet
The web application name in the download URLs generated in the Briefcase Portlet is hard coded. All download URLs expect that the Briefcase Portlet and downloade servlet will always be deployed within a web application named “AcademusApps”. If the name changes, the download links will be pointing to an incorrect location and they will not work. Academus deployers are recommended not to rename the components of Academus. In a windows environment some special characters like “| : “ < > . ? \ / “ cannot be included in a folder name. An error message is generated when a user attempts to use unsupported special characters. In the briefcase folder a user cannot view the available disk space for a shared, LDAP and Network folder. When editing the name of a folder or a file and only changing its case, the changes are not saved. For example, if a user edits the name of a folder from "academus" (all lower case) to "Academus" (initial letter capitalized), the name does not change. The help files for Briefcase Sharing folder with members screen is not updated to latest. This issue will be fixed in the next release.
Classifieds
While assigning Classified Permissions, if the user is granted the delete permission only, Classifieds does not allow the user to delete any posted classified. Users are able to delete classifieds only if also granted the permission to manage classified topics.
CMS Forums
When there are eight or more posts within one forum and a user clicks on the “Mark All as Read” link, the status is change to “Read” for only the first seven posts.
CMS Gradebook
The CMS Gradebook only supports a single activation. When multiple activations are created in the Gradebook, users will only see the link to the first activation entered. In some instances, the activation link may update to the subsequent activations but in most cases the activation remains linked to the first file posted.
Collaborative Groupware
If a duplicate user exist within the LDAP server and both users appear on the same page when adding users to a roster the enroll link does not work. There is no error displayed in the log. Some Firefox browsers users may have difficulty viewing the Gradebook column headers. These users should download the flash plugin from http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/central.html.
Expanding Menus (QuickLinks)
Under the Academus theme and skin, the QuickLinks feature (tab dropdowns) only functions on Mozilla-based browsers.
Fragments
Fragments may only be published targeting groups and not individual users even though the group selector allows the individual users to be selected when publishing. The CFragmentManager channel simply ignores any users that were selected. Fragment Manager times out with large data set when loaded with large amount of fragments (Example 2000 fragments). This is caused because on each screen rendering each fragment is reloaded one by one regardless of whether it’s going to be utilized in the workflow. Excess PersonDirectory queries are being generated by Unicon services during user login. This behavior is particularly prevalent when more aggregated layout fragments are added.
Group Manager
While creating a non-local group (such as a PAGS or LDAP group), if the portal is not restarted after the group has been created then in some channels like Briefcase and Notification Portlets where the user queries for individual user while adding recipients using the substring that matches the group names that were created will cause the channel to fail. Example: “P” or “AG” etc.
Landing tab preferences persist
Academus 2.0.8, unlike prior Academus releases, persists end user preference as to selected tab with other user preferences. This results in users who are able to customize their layouts being able to select a different "landing tab" (tab selected on login) than the default. If you do not desire this behavior, there is a workaround for removing it.
LDAP
In the Change LDAP Password channel, if the new passwords (New & Confirm) do not match an error message is shown but the password is changed to what was entered in the “New password” field. The Change LDAP password channel also supports Active Directory only for flat directory structures. There is a knowledge base article which contains a patch.
Live Text SSO
While using Netscape 8.0 selecting Logout or Help link will take the user out of Academus. To get back into Academus the user has to click on the back button on the browser window.
Notifications Portlet
While creating a notification, adding recipients searching through the groups and if one of the groups names has “-“ character in the name than clicking on the next link in the bottom will cause the channel to render since Academus API implementation user “-“ as a group separator and it incorrectly constructs the group path it uses to lookup the group. To avoid this group names should not contain “-“in them.
PAGS Group
PAGS group users will not receive email whenever a Calendar event is added or a survey is published to the PAGS group. The user will receive notification and will be able to access the event and survey when they access the respective channels.
Personal Calendar
In Personal Calendar a user can use export function even if no events exist. Calendar events and tasks can be imported or exported in a tab delimited format or iCalendar (iCal) format for Palm. Academus does not support export in vCalendar (VCal) format but only in iCal format, however it supports importing of vCalendar (VCal) files. The label for export is mislabeled as VCalendar and file extension as .vcs instead of .ics.
Survey Author
Within the Survey Author channel Results Summary, the information provided in the “Sent” field can be misleading. This field does not represent the number of individual users to which a survey was distributed when distributing to groups. Rather, it shows the sum of the number of individually selected users and the number of groups, regardless of the actual membership of those groups. If a non-administrator user publishes a shared survey created by a different user then the publishing user cannot see the survey results.
Tab Limitations
Based on the custom skin for your institution there will be an upper limit to the number of tabs that can be displayed properly and the length of the names for the tab. For reference the default Academus 2.0 skin can support the presentation of 15 tabs for a single end user and tab names of up to 20 characters.
Webmail
When composing an email within the Webmail channel, you can enter an improperly formatted email address in the To, CC and BCC fields. For example you can enter "xyz" in the ‘To’ field and Webmail will convert it to xyz@unspecified-domain. In preferences, setting the folders displayed to 10 or any other number has no effect. All folders are displayed. When composing an email and adding an attachment that exceeds the 2929 Kb limit, the page refreshes and no error message is provided.
Default Webmail Implementation (Classic)
While creating a new folder sometimes a duplicate folder is created in the folder listing. The duplicate folder disappears when the user logs out and logs back in. This issue has been resolved with the new changed folder implementation.
Nested Folders Webmail Implementation
In preferences, configuring access to external pop or imap mails like yahoo or hotmail in some instance may generate errors. Available workarounds include using the Default Webmail (classic) implementation either exclusively or in concert with the new implementation.
