Tag: connections-mail

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Is Verse on prem the end of Connections Mail?

A technote has come to light – marking the end of life for Connections Mail

https://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21993196

The content states

November 2016 is the end of support for the following versions of ICM V 1.0 (for Connections 4.0), and version 1.3 (for Connections 4.5).
End of support for ICM 1.6 (for connections 5.0) will be one year from the publication of this TechNote, November 17, 2017.

We intend continue to support the latest version of the plug in, 1.7 with Connections 5.5. At this time there are no plans to release IBM Connections mail plug in with Connections 6.0.

So what will this mean for Connections Mail users? For Domino mail customers, the likely hood is that you will update to Verse On Premises (VOP) and consume mail / Connections content in the new Verse on prem UI .. for Exchange users I am not sure .. if any one has the answers please let us know.

I do use Connections mail and I actually enjoy having an overview of my inbox and calander inside connections. As we move to a VOP I can see me using the integration between my mail and Connections a lot, I use the notes sidebar plugins and the Connections desktop and office connectors – so its a natural progression for me and others I work with.

If it wasn’t for another community member posting the technote in the Connections skype chat I wouldn’t have known about this. So I am sharing it as I am sure there are others who do not know about this either. I do still have customers running Connections 4.5 who are now not supported for Connections mail.

As Connections Mail 1.7 for Connections 5.5 is continuing to be supported, it looks like any existing users are ok for now, but there will be no support going forward. Not sure how this will affect users or how many people are using Connections Mail out there in the wild, but I do have a few customers using it. Would love to know your thoughts.

 

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Odd issue with Connections Mail

I have been looking to implement Connections mail for a while for one of my customers, after finally sorting out some SSO issues we had been seeing I was ready to deploy into their DEV/TEST environment. No problem I thought – Connections mail is a very simple install a couple of config files and a quick wsadmin command to get the help to work.

Once I had deployed I was seeing the strangest issues –

Contact your system administrator:
Missing element with class=”os-site-mail-notify”

After spending a few hours trying to work out what the issue was, sanity checking myself in the Connections skype chat and much google-ing – I threw in the towel and opened a PMR. I did my usual of explaining the situation, listing OS and level, Connections versions and fixes etc and sending in a screen shot, Log files and the Connections mail config file – a couple of hours later I had a response.

It appears that something has changed between V4 and V4.5 of connections – I had customisations brought over from V4 and copied the header.jsp as it looked on first glance that there was no changes between 4 & 4.5

In Version 4.5 the span for the mail notify icons is :
–%><span class=”os-site-mail-notify”></span><%–

Previously it was:
–%><span id=”os-site-mail-notify”></span><%–

Changing this span from id to class resolved my issue.

So the moral of the story is even if you think nothing has changed – it most likely has

Big thanks to Jonathan P. Dormady Staff Software Engineer in Connections Support for finding me a solution so quickly