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Academus 2.1.0 Release Notes

This document, the Academus 2.1.0 Release Notes, is the online and most up-to-date version of the Academus 2.1.0 product release notes. This release notes page was last edited Thursday, 9 August 2007, and may change if additional description of the Academus 2.1.0 release proves necessary.

We welcome your feedback about this new support website and these release notes. If you believe you are experiencing an issue with the Academus 2.1.0 release not discussed here, we would especially appreciate your letting us know by creating a support case or otherwise contacting Unicon.

Contents

Enhancements and New Functionality Introduced in Academus 2.1.0

Issues Resolved for Academus 2.1.0

Supporting Hardware and Software

uPortal Framework Upgrade

Known Issues in uPortal Framework 2.5.3

Known Issues in Academus 2.1.0

Enhancements and New Functionality Introduced in Academus 2.1.0

Additional Browser Support

Academus has been enhanced to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and Firefox 2.0.

Briefcase Portlet

Briefcase Portlet will now attempt to recover in the case that one or more of the "drives" it is configured to display is inaccessible or misconfigured.

Customization

Screen reader users can now disable CSCR

Client side channel rendering (CSCR) is an Ajax-like frame technology included in Academus that improves performance and user experience but introduces many additional frames to the page markup. Academus deployments can disable CSCR entirely using a property file. In Academus 2.1.0, end users can also disable CSCR via a link that appears at the top of the page in screen readers.

Improved user experience for fragments

Fragments are now identified as such as viewed in the preferences user interface.

Delete tab link disabled for pushed fragments

Since end users cannot delete pushed fragments, the delete tab link is now disabled for these fragments.

Database

Finer granularity connection pool configuration

Database connection pools for the portal, AcademusApps, and blojsom portions of Academus can now be independently configured. This creates new performance tuning and monitoring opportunities.

Connection pool configurability and documentation

Database connection pools are now configurable in a way similar to that employed by other Java Servlets web applications and the configuration options are better documented.

Reduced usage of ANSI SQL reserved words

Usage of ANSI SQL reserved words in the Academus database schema is reduced, which should result in fewer database compatibility issues.

Documentation

Academus product documentation has been significantly revised for this release.

Groups Manager

Warning on administrative attempt to de-categorize a channel

Administrative UI now displays a warning on an attempt to fully de-categorize a channel using the groups manager. De-categorizing channels is not recommended as this will make them inaccessible from the Channel Manager and can lead to other unexpected behavior. Prior to de-categorizing a channel, please contact Academus Support to discuss alternatives.

Suppress display of user login passwords

Groups Manager will no longer display to administrators the value of the "user.login.password" user attribute to administrators.

Handle groups from missing group stores as children of local groups

The Groups Manager better handles the case where a Group Store (such as PAGS) is enabled, one of its member groups is added under a local group, and then that group store is disabled. The orphan groups are now simply not displayed. It is still a best practice not to disable a Group Store once it is ever used in an Academus instance to avoid orphan data in the first place.

Help

Academus help is now included with Academus as deployer-editable HTML files allowing Academus customers to annotate and locally customize Academus help. Help was included in Academus 2.0 distributions but it was less straightforward for Academus deployers to customize it.

Logging

Academus 2.1.0 ships with an updated version of log4j and Commons Logging supporting distinquishing DEBUG and TRACE level logging. Logging in Academus is modestly improved throughout for troubleshooting and support.

Notifications

Emails to multiple users now sent using BCC: rather than To:

Notification emails sent to multiple users will now use the BCC: header to address the users and populate the To: header with the sender's address. The previous behavior was to include all recipients in the To: header and thereby expose their email addresses to one another. Notifications sent to single users generating email will continue to be sent using the To: header.

Filtering notifications to exclude those sent before user initial login

Users now only see notifications created after their initial login date. For example, a new faculty user will not be inundated with a deluge of many long-past notifications.

Permissions Manager Channel

"Deny"s now have consistent effect

Previously, explicitly "Deny"ing a permission to a group would have effect in AcademusApps permissions management but would not have effect in permissions managed via the Permissions Manager Channel or Permissions Manager Portlet. Now, "Deny" will have the effect of blocking inheritance of permission in any of these environments consistently.

Portal User Metrics

Academus now records the date of a user's first login to the portal in the Academus database. Portal administrators may examine this data for a better understanding of portal usage patterns.

RSS Channel

Reduced configuration requirements

Academus 2.1.0 adopts a universal RSS stylesheet by default which will, in many cases, allow consumption of an RSS feed without first determining its version.

Survey Channel

Look and Feel Improvements

The potential for skinning of the Survey channel is improved.

Warning on blank distribution title

The survey channel now warns users if they create a survey with an empty distribution title, but continues to allow empty distribution titles.

User Administration

A database connection leak in handling the user deletion event was fixed.

Versions Channel

Academus is now able to report through the administrative user interface the version numbers recorded in the Academus database.

Issues Resolved for Academus 2.1.0

Personal Calendar

Labels for export now correct

Export capabilities previously mislabeled as "VCalendar" and yielding files with a ".vcs" extension are now properly labeled as having to do with iCalendar and yielding ".ics" files.

Groups

Group Namespacing

Academus 2.1.0 includes fixes to subtle group namespace and identifier collision bugs. Groups are now differentiated by namespaced IDs rather than by keys.

Group Membership Update Synchronization

Synchronization is improved in new and update user operations to avoid invalid group object updates.

Group Names Containing "-" Now Work

While Academus users are still recommended to use only alphanumeric characters when defining group names, the previously reported known issue preventing use of the "-" character in group names has been corrected.

Webmail

Ineffectual Number of Folders to Display Preference Removed

Webmail was not honoring the user's preference of number of folders to display. This preference has been removed from the user interface for Academus 2.10. All folders are always displayed.

Supporting Hardware and Software

Refer to the Academus 2.1 Technical Requirements guide for information about supporting hardware and software.

uPortal Framework Upgrade

Academus 2.1.0 is built on uPortal 2.5.3, the latest available uPortal release as of February 2007 when Academus 2.1.0 entered final release quality assurance. uPortal 2.5.3 includes many improvements over uPortal 2.4.2, upon which Academus 2.0.x was built.

Improved JSR-168 Portlet Support

uPortal 2.5.3 supports more JSR-168 features better than uPortal 2.4.2 did; therefore Academus customers developing or installing portlets for their Academus instances will enjoy improved capabilities, performance, and compatibility. File uploads in more third party JSR-168 portlets will work properly with these changes. Expiration caching is now supported for improved and more configurable portlet performance characteristics. The portlet adaptor channel is now more performant and robust with threadafety fixes.

Java 5 / JDK 1.5 support

uPortal 2.5.3 adds Java 5 support. Academus 2.1.0 standardizes on Java 5 for improved stability, performance, instrumentation, and superior language features for extension, channel, and portlet development.

Memory Leak Fixes

Memory leak fixes in uPortal 2.5.3 improve performance and platform stability.

WSRP Consumption

uPortal 2.5.3 supports basic WSRP consumption.

Core performance enhancements

uPortal 2.5.3 is more performant at instantiating channels and at other frequent portal tasks.

Stability and robustness enhancements

uPortal 2.5.3 handles channel errors more thoroughly, defends against bad "useragent" request headers, and includes threadsafety fixes improving stability.

Improved data access performance

Adjustments to uPortal data access code results in improved data access behaviors.

Improved logging

uPortal 2.5.3 has improved logging practices and messages which, along with the Academus logging improvements for this release, contribute to the monitorability and supportability of the system.

Improved IChannel APIs

While much custom development is now undertaken as JSR-168 Portlets rather than custom IChannels, uPortal 2.5.3 does include improved APIs for developing custom IChannels facilitating this approach to adding components to Academus.

Known Issues in uPortal Framework 2.5.3

The JA-SIG uPortal project documents its releases via a Jira issue tracking system and a Confluence wiki. A page in the wiki dedicated to representing uPortal 2.5.3 includes the latest information about known issues in uPortal 2.5.3. Academus includes a modified uPortal 2.5.3 core such that some issues in uPortal 2.5.3 do not affect Academus.

One of the most important known issues in uPortal 2.5.3 affecting Academus 2.1.0 is described here:

UP-1040: Portlet preferences are unreliable when a portlet is multiply published in Channel Manager or multiply subscribed by an end user. Workaround: Ensure a 1:1:1 mapping of portlet declarations in portlet.xml, Portlet channel publications in Channel Manager, and portlet subscriptions in end user layouts.

Known Issues in Academus 2.1

AcademusApps (Portlets)

The "displayPreferencesTo" variable in AcademusApps portlet configuration no longer has any effect and has been removed from the example configurations.

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.

Groups Manager

While creating a group in the Groups Manager that are not local like PAGS or LDAP, if the portal is not restarted after the group has been created than 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.

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 ignores any users that were selected.

Fragment Manager times out lloaded with a large quantity of fragments (for example, 2000 fragments). This happens because on each screen rendering each fragment is reloaded one by one regardless of whether it will be displayed in the workflow.

Excess PersonDirectory queries are being generated by Academus services during user login. This increases the data source hits even more when aggregated layout fragments are added.

Removing all user owned tabs leaving only ALM managed PAGS published tabs causes future login problems. This is documented in this KBA, which provides a patch that resolves it.

Briefcase Portlet

The web application name in the download URLs generated in the Briefcase Portlet is hard coded. At the moment, all downloaded URLs expect that the Briefcase Portlet and downloaded servlet will always be deployed within a web application named “AcademusApps”. If the name changes, the download links will be pointing to an obsolete location and they will not work.

In an windows environment some special characters like “| : “ < > . ? \ / “ cannot be used to name a folder. An error message is generated.

In the briefcase folder a user cannot view the available disk space for a shared, LDAP and Network folder.

When the user tries to copy or move a folder, or files within a folder, shared among two or more groups, the channel fails to respond.

Contents of a Shared Folder cannot be copied or moved to the “My Files” directory. When a user attempts to copy or move the contents (files or folders) of a folder share to them to their “My Files” direct, the Briefcase Portlet will fail to render. A patch to fix this issue can be found in Knowledge Base article Why can't I copy shared files to the My Files directory of my Personal Files drive in the Briefcase Portlet in Academus 2.1?

Notification Portlet

While composing a message, uploading any attachment file that is above the configured file size limit will not generate any warning message. The compose page displays and the file is not uploaded.

Calendar

In Personal Calendar a user can use export function even if no event exist. An error message notifying the user will be added in the next release.

While importing a Task List, the time imported is always 12 am when the actual Task time is different.

While adding a composite view to the Personal Calendar and the pressing the “Enter” key on the keyboard instead of clicking on the OK button on the screen generates a java warning message.

While creating a calendar event and sending notifications, if the users email is entered directly in the Email field and than notification and email checkbox is selected, the email users will not receive the email. This works only when the email checkbox is selected.

Classifieds

When selecting people to add as approvers for classifieds, individual names are duplicated if that person is in multiple groups.

While assigning Classified Permissions if the user is granted the delete permission only, it does not let the user delete any posted classified, instead it works only if the user is granted the ability to manage classified topics.

Survey

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 a survey was distributed to when distributing to group. Currently, it only show one if distributing the survey to one group, two if distributing the survey to two groups, if individual recipients are selected by name for a distribution then each of those individuals will be counted

Collaborative Groupware

In the roster channel, importing a roster XML file without an enrollment status makes the change fail to render.

If a duplicate user exist within the LDAP 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 plug in from http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/central.html

PAGS Group

PAGS groups will not work properly in Academus 2.1 with first applying a patch. Please refer to this KBA for more info as well as the needed patch.

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.

Sakai

When a user logs into Academus and accesses the Sakai gateway Portlet they will need to click the Login link and enter their Sakai username and password. If the user logs out of Sakai using the Sakai logout link they will need to click the login link again the next time they access the channel and re-enter their credentials - so the behavior is not that of a true single sign on. Unicon is currently investigating changes that can be made to the Sakai application or customizations to the Academus gateway Portlet to accommodate the Sakai limitations for a more consistent SSO experience.

After the user has signed on to Sakai Portlet through Academus, if the user/admin changes the password, next time the user logs into Academus and single signs into Sakai, the user has to use the old password. New changed password is not recognized by Sakai.

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.

LDAP

In the change LDAP password channel, if the new passwords (New & Confirm) do not match an error message is thrown but the password is changed to what was entered in the New password field.

Academus WCM

Refer to Red Dot CMS 6.1 Release notes for browser limitations.

IPAC Server Integration

Academus 2.1.0 relies upon an updated unicon-sdk.jar compiled under and requiring JDK 1.5 / Java 5. IPAC server instances integrating with Academus 2.1.0 must use this same .jar. The optional IPAC server component has not yet been integrated with this updated .jar file and so IPAC server integration is not yet available for Academus 2.1.0.

Outlook Web Access

After a user has signed onto Outlook Web Access through Academus, if he or she logs out of the Outlook Web Access application, he or she will also be logged out of Academus. Clicking on a link within Academus after logging out of Outlook Web Access will render the Academus Login page.

If you are aware of an Academus issue affecting Academus 2.1.0 not reflected in these release notes, please do open a support case or otherwise contact Unicon so that we may continue to improve these release notes.