ImageRight 5.2 Growing Pains – 2 Bugs, Almost 2 Fixes

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, the recent upgrade to ImageRight 5.2 was highly successful, though we did find several bugs and oddities. Most have been resolved with calls to ImageRight support and some, while interesting, just aren’t critical. But I’ve got two tickets open that have been escalated to official defects and are worth noting.

Bug 1: Annotation Wrapping and Resize I’ve mentioned the annotation wrapping issue before and this stems from the new 5.x feature where you can control the ability to wrap and resize annotations on a per-annotation basis. This is no doubt a great feature that adds a lot of flexibility to annotations and stamps.

In our 4.x environment, we have several long annotations that were resized and wrapped to fit specific areas of a page. In 5.2 version, those 4.x “legacy” annotations are no longer wrapped, often spanning off the printable page area. This stems from the fact that the older stamps do not have the “wrap” and “resize” flags activated, something that is controllable whenever you created an annotation in 5.2. Upgrading from 4.x to 5.2 should have automatically defaulted the existing annotations to have those flags, as that is the native behavior of annotations in the older versions.

This will be corrected in the next revision of 5.3, but a hotfix is also expect to be available soon. It’s important to note that if a page has an affected annotation and a “new” 5.2 annotation is added to that page, all legacy annotations will be “frozen” and not corrected when the fix is applied.

Bug 2: The Red X – Desktop Can’t Display a Page Image When you see this red X in the viewing window instead of the page you selected from your file, you know you have a problem. The big error message thrown by ImageRight Desktop that can close the application also makes it clear something is amiss.
Turns out some documents can have a DPI issue related to when annotations are placed on a page. As I understand it, some third party import processes can put in images at a different DPI than expected and when annotations are added it makes the 5.2 software unable to load them in the viewer. We’ve had some odd DPI issues in the past that were caused by our small Canon desktop scanners and I suspect these are the same images that are unable to be loaded by the viewer now. We’ve been able to recreate the issue using the desktop scanners, so this issue is not only a legacy problem, but an ongoing one.

It’s possible to export the page to PDF and view it that way, so there is a temporary work around for viewing the page, but the user can’t annotate the file without printing that PDF copy back in. This may be acceptable in some cases, but the document would then have a disconnect with the annotation history that might not be acceptable.

The fix for this issue is expected in version 5.3.29.1350, but a hotfix is also planned for release.

Round Up: September Events and Windows Resources

As the summer draws to a close, here are a few thing that have caught my eye. Check them out and see for yourself.

First up, a comprehensive article on Redmondmag.com by Greg Shields on “Avoiding Active Directory Disasters“, particularly with Windows 2000 and 2003 versions of AD. It might just be time to do a little end of summer health check for an important component of your network.

PacITPros will be holding their monthly meeting tonight starting at 6pm. It’s not to late to RSVP and get in on the action. Compellent will be presenting on their data storage solutions and there will also be a presentation on the latest and greatest with Microsoft’s OCS.

On 9/30, don’t miss out on the Springboard Series Virtual Roundtable on migrating from IE6 to IE8 on Windows 7, starting at 9am. This virtual, interactive discussion will cover migration strategies, standards, and support for organizations moving from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 8.

Finally, check in with the folks at TechNet on 9/22 when they host an in-person event on Deploying Windows 7 at the Microsoft downtown office in San Francisco. Learn more or register at TechNet Events Presents: Deploying Windows 7. This event will also be held in Irvine, CA on 9/20 and in Los Angeles on 9/21.

Network Clean Up: Don’t Forget About Your LAN

“The network is slow.”

Probably the worst complaint a Systems Administration team at any small to mid-sized office can get. The end users often can’t pinpoint what “slow” is or when it happens, it’s seemingly random, or they report it after the fact when there is nothing to actively troubleshoot.

I am not a networking “guru” by stretch of the imagination. Like many small offices, our NetOps team consists of several people who may have some areas they enjoy or “specialize” in, but are mostly jack-of-all trades, ready to jump in and sort things out whenever things need attention. I enjoy the variety, but sometimes the ongoing project list leaves you in a situation where certain areas of your “kingdom” are left until they cry out in pain.

The LAN in my office was one of those lost souls. Sure, I’ve got my Network+ training, I used to have a valid CCNA certification, I know the difference between a hub and a switch and I can find enough of the settings in my HP and Cisco switches to assign IP addresses for management access and use some basic features. And then my skill set drops off there – because small networks are often “set it and forget it”.

We think about collecting SNMP logs and monitoring traffic and all that cool stuff and then reality sets in: I wish I had the time to spend installing and learning enough about those tools so they can be really useful when someone comes knocking with a “slowness” complaint. But I don’t. So finally I brought in someone who actually looks at networks every day. Someone who knows the settings on network gear and can look at how they work together. Yes, I can pull out some crossover cables and make packets move from point A to point B, but I wanted some advice from someone who really understood how it all worked.

It was eye-opening. My switches that linked the users workstations to our servers were all connected, but they were naturally oversubscribed without taking advantage of trunking any of the ports together to pass traffic to core switch over larger pipe. Spanning tree was configured incorrectly and not at turned on all on some switches.

The end result was that while my Layer 3 setup looked fine to me, the Layer 2 traffic was actually taking an extra hop through a switch that was accidentally acting as the spanning tree root, adding unnecessary delay. After correcting that issue and ordering up some gig modules to add trunking up to our core switch, upload/download speeds of files to servers appears to be coming close the maximum available from the desktops.

Next up – increasing the speed of our internet connect by switching from frame relay to fiber from our ISP and subscribing to a bigger pipe on that end.

Recap of the ImageRight Connection Tour in Las Vegas

I had a great time catching up with some of the ImageRight staff and some other ImageRight administrators in Las Vegas last week. While nothing beats the bigger ImageRight conference that happens every odd year, this was a nice chance to chat about a product with others who enjoy some of the same benefits and experience some of the same pains as I do.

Below are some features and changes you can look forward to in v5. While I don’t do the workflow design and administration for our system, I’m happy to bring back some new workflow features to share.

Deadlines can be added to manual steps to help prevent tasks from stagnating in task lists if someone is out of the office.
“Split and Rendezvous” allows a single task the capability to break into sub-tasks that then don’t move forward until they all come together as completed.
“Authorized user checking” can help prevent tasks from being assigned to a user who can’t view a document.

Another great session was the “Tips and Tricks” for what’s new the “New Architecture” (versions 4.x and 5.x).

Attributes can be added at the document level, as well as at all other levels. These attributes can also be used for reporting purposes.
The “thumbnail workpad” was replaced by a combination of the ability to launch additional viewers in new windows and to collect and reorder pages from multiple documents using the “send to” feature.
Redaction adds the ability to blackout information in a file that applies to all view of the document, even printing or copying without annotations, based on user rights.
Electronic signatures can be used to digitally sign versions of documents.
The new Outlook interface and the web desktop will bring new ways of easily accessing ImageRight without needing the full desktop program available.

Hopefully we’ll be able to make use of some of these new features in the coming months to help our office make ImageRight an even more useful part of our company’s day to day operations.

Can Your Certification Exams Go Further?

Looking for the chance to have that latest Microsoft certification do even more for you? How about counting towards college credit?

In case you missed this post from the Born to Learn Blog, 21 Microsoft certifications and exams, including several of the new MCITP or MCTS certifications can be added to your transcript with the American Counsel on Education. This transcript can then be submitted to other traditional institutions for review toward a computer science degree.

I was excited to see that even the older MSCE certification can count, but only if you’ve achieved it in the last 3 years. In addition to the Microsoft Technical Certifications, there is a selection of Microsoft Office Certifications that can also count towards credit.

The process to register and submit your exams for credit is pretty straight forward, just follow the instructions in the post by the Born to Learn Blog. Go forth and study!

ImageRight 5.2 FYI – Some Issues and Defects

If you are looking to move from ImageRight 4.x to 5.x, here are two bugs we’ve found post-upgrade that have made the official ImageRight defect list. One is totally minor but interesting to know and the other is more of a big deal.

Window Size Changes after “Printing” in a Document
The ImageRight Desktop application has two main windows, the “image view” which displays whatever page you are working with and the “file manager” which allows users to navigate between different files, documents and pages within them. If you have multiple monitors and happen to like to have the file manager window maximized to fill one monitor, you’ll notice that if you print or import a new document into the application when the “Import” confirmation/configuration window appears, the file manager window will change size, reverting to whatever size it would be if you had clicked the “restore down” button in upper right side of the window header bar.

Current workarounds include clicking the “maximize” button again to make it fill the screen, or to just make the non-maximized version of the window larger and not use the Windows maximize feature to fill the screen. This currently affects version 5.2.42.5220.

Annotations Resized/Wrapped in 4.3 Are Not Wrapped in 5.2.42.5220
The ability to annotate or add “stamps” to documents in ImageRight is one of the greatest features of the product. In 4.3, it was possible to have the text of an annotation wrap to another line by resizing the text box. After the upgrade to 5.2, annotations that were previously wrapped in this manner essentially “unwrapped” themselves, running the full text on one line. This line of text could then cover valuable information on the orginal page or cover over another annotation. Sometimes it even runs off the printable area of the document itself.

While it’s possible to turn hide the annotations in order to see the complete original document, users generally place annotations in a way so that do not disrupt the ability to read the document. Also, if any documents need to be exported or printed for another purpose the annotation may be a critical part of the document history and need to be rendered correctly.

Workarounds are currently setting the Image View windows to “Fit to Height” which will show annotations that run off the page to the right, or resize the view window to allow for more viewable area on the right side. This is a handy temporary fix so that you can see the complete annotation text.

The second suggested workaround is to promote a previous version of the document (or create a new document copy without annotations) and re-apply the necessary annotations. While this might work for some documents, if you use annotations as part of a workflow where you generate several by different people or your stamps are considered part of your audit trail for official documents, this workaround is simply not acceptable.

Our company extensively uses annotations for approving invoices for A/P processing, complete with dates that line up with check runs and batch numbers. Not only would simply redoing annotations be impractical as we have thousands of potentially affected documents, it’s simply doesn’t pass muster from an audit standpoint – all the annotations would have a new date history.

This issue has been given a “Priority 1” status at ImageRight and I hope to see a fix for it soon.

The Web is Dead? Maybe We Just Can’t Get There.

Wired magazine published an article in this month’s issue that argues that the “Web” is dead. The “Web” being defined as the “dub dub dub” (www) part of the Internet, which is viewed and interacted with using a web browser.

The Internet is transport method for a variety of protocols and components that make the system work and help people communicate and share information. Email and FTP are still alive, even though they may not be the most popular mechanisms for younger users. Over the years there have been many predictions of things being “dead” that are still very much alive. Check out this great post – The Tragic Death of Practically Everything, by Harry McCracken, to see what I mean.

Its true that the Internet has evolved in many ways over the last 15 years or so. It’s used as a transport mechanism for phone calls, music and an endless supply of information that people access using very specific apps – not always using a web browser. But for many, that traditional “web” presence is still very real. Just about anyone with basic access to a computer and the Internet can set up a free website or blog. Apps might be the current big thing, but the skill set required for setting up a basic website is far less daunting than developing a phone app.

A bigger issue facing the future of “www” is accessing it in the first place. Any device that connects to the Internet needs an address and the current IP addressing system (IPv4) is quickly running short of these valuable addresses. It’s estimated that these addresses will be completely depleted within the next year. IPv6 is the next generation of addressing for Internet connectivity and it has not yet been widely adopted. Its important that those involved with managing networks and providing connectivity to the Internet stay up to date and plan for the conversion to this new addressing scheme.

Cool apps and new tools will always make the Internet a more exciting/useful place to be and there will be a place for the traditional web for a while to come, assuming you can get there.

ImageRight 5.2 Has Arrived!

Over the weekend, I worked with Vertafore support staff to upgrade our ImageRight installation from 4.x to 5.x. While it wasn’t a flawless process, it was successful in the end. The support techs had to reinstall several of the server-side components twice, but this could have been related to the fact that our 4.x system was an upgrade from a 3.x version and there was a lot that needed to be cleaned up.

Outside of that hurdle, any other delays or issues we ran into over the weekend stemmed purely from a “documentation” standpoint. For example, I was provided with the “Installation and Upgrade Guide” which I reviewed before the upgrade. There were a couple things to note in there that weren’t the case when we were actually doing the implementation.

The application server software lists Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 (Not SP1) as a requirement, but SP1 was okay to have.
It was noted that there were two new functionality rights for the enterprise scanner software that needed to be enabled – “Scanner – Scan to File” and “Scanner – Scan to Workflow“. However, “Scanner – Source Menu – Scan Batch” is also required. There are several new scanner related functionality rights that control other options that you might need to enable as well, depending on what features your scanner operators already use.

When tackling the client desktops there were a few more road bumps. I was missing the very important “ImageRight Desktop Installation Using Push Technology” that provided some key information for getting the desktop application deployed with Active Directory group policies. For the 4.x version, we only had to deploy the desktop MSI file. This time around you need two policies to deploy some prerequisite components that the manual installation process automatically call, as well as a transform file to make sure your application server and authentication information gets in the local configuration files on the workstations.

All of that (and more) is detailed in the “Push” guide – I didn’t even use all the recommendations because I thought they were a bit too lenient for GPOs just used for software installation. Also, it was recommended that we completely uninstall the previous components from the workstation, so we pushed a different script first to remove all the ImageRight software and then applied our new GPOs.

Finally, we do have a post-upgrade issue with annotations not displaying correctly when “wrapped”. There were some added features related to annotation control, specifically the ability to control if an annotation can be resized or not. Many of our users resize boxes to automatically wrap the text in a text box or stamp, so it’s likely this display issue stems from that feature change. Hopefully we’ll have a good resolution for that shortly.

At any rate, I’m looking forward to joining other ImageRight users at the Vertafore Connection Tour next week in Las Vegas. I’m sure there will be plenty to talk about!

Take-Aways from a Breakfast Event on Exchange 2010

Yesterday, I spent the morning at an event hosted by Quickstart, EMC and ExtraTeam on Exchange 2010 and Unified Communications. Not only did they have a great breakfast laid out for those of us who attended event, I picked up a few tidbits about the new versions of these Microsoft products. The Exchange portion of morning was lead by Mike Sneeringer, who is currently the only person in the world holding both the Microsoft Certified Master in Exchange 2010 and Office Communications Server 2007 – very cool.

If you are an Exchange administrator, you’ll appreciate some of these features:

Role Based Access Control – enables administrators to delegate permissions to responsible users based on job function without giving them access to the entire Exchange management interface. Tasks such as performing multi-mailbox searches no longer have to be the sole responsibility of Exchange Admins, allowing your organization take better advantage of features like legal hold and mailbox searches without involving the IT department.
Multi-Mailbox Search – allows designated users (like a legal team) a web-based tool for searching across mulitple mailboxes. This applies to online archive as well as the main mailbox.
Legal Hold – A legal hold preserves deleted mailbox items and records changes made to mailbox items. Deleted and changed items are returned in a discovery search.
Improved Transport Rules – will allow for greater control of how mail flows both within your organization and to outside contacts.
Online Mailbox Moves – this is available for 2007 to 2010 migrations only, but will allow users access to their mailboxes during migration from one database to another. For migrations from 2003 mailboxes must be taken offine.

In addition to some great improvement from the mail administration side, end users will appreciate some of these improvements:

Delivery reports – provides access to message delivery information for both end users and administrators to help answer questions common questions about mail status. Great for offices that have multiple locations and multiple email servers.
MailTips – I can’t describe how helpful mail tips can be any better than this blog post by the Microsoft Exchange team. You’ll never accidentally “reply to all” for an email you where were BCC’d again.
Online Archive – Instead of using PSTs to store archive mail, users can take advantage of an online archive separate from their regular mailbox. With SP1, that archive can even be stored in a different database.
List Moderation – Allow designated moderators to approve messages before they are sent out to common distribution lists. This combined with MailTips will probably reduce a lot of common interoffice email mistakes!

Finally, Unified Communications Server can bring your teams together more than ever before, as well as make it easier to manage voice mails and emails together. With the ability to integrate with other common applications like Office and SharePoint, knowing the “presence” and availabilty of other coworkers can streamline communications and improve productivity.

Overall, the event was a morning well spent. While the Unified Communcations offerings aren’t something I’m looking at, the Exchange 2010 features just make me look forward to getting there sooner. Also, EMC has some additional features regarding eDiscovery with their SourceOne product that could complement your Exchange infrastructure depending on your needs.

Windows 7 Keyboard Shortcuts

Came across some handy keyboard shortcuts for Windows 7, courtesy of Brainstorm, Inc. Check out their website for some other free Windows 7 tips.

Windows Key – Opens and closes the Start menu, so its a quick way to get to Instant Search
Windows Key + Left or Right arrow – Snaps the active windows to the right or left side of the screen
Windows Key + Home – Minimizes all but the active window
Windows Key + M – Minimizes all open windows
Windows Key + Shift + M – Restores all open windows
Windows Key + D – Shows the desktop
Windows Key + R – Opens the RUN dialog window
Windows Key + U – Opens the Ease of Access Center
Windows Key + T – Scrolls through items on your Taskbar
Windows Key + (+/-) – Zooms in/out; opens Magnifier
Windows Key + L – Locks the computer

Some keyboard shortcuts use keys that are embedded on a laptop keyboard (like HOME), I tend to avoid. It doesn’t seem like much of a shortcut when I have to deal with the “Fn” key. As for that Windows + L combination? It’s going to take a long time for me to break the habit of using Ctrl-Alt-Del.