2006-12-27

WebTrends 8.0C Upgrade - Is it worth it?

One of the questions I'm frequently asked is "Should we do the incremental upgrades of WebTrends?" This question is a difficult one to answer as many of these types of upgrades fix very little and the problems they address may not be impacting your particular use of WebTrends.

So now with 8.0c out I'm being asked this again. First off I always tell everyone you should do every upgrade and keep current. It just makes sense. However, since many clients' installations are managed by their IT departments and performing a WebTrends upgrade, needs to be scheduled well in advanced accompanied with copious amounts of paper work, the answer may not always be that easy.

So here is my answer to the WebTrends 8.0c question. Check the list of fixes and decided if you really need the patches and fixes contained in 8.0c. Here are my two reasons for the upgrade:

One, WebTrends 8.0c includes the upgrade to allow WebTrends to work with IE 7;

Two, from my perspective, WebTrends has addressed one of my concerns with the product and the "Report Designer" module. In the past when you granted user permissions to all report templates, the Designer Module would appear in the navigation and when clicked on it appeared that you could change some of the Options settings as the screen would open up with editable fields. Fortunately, the save button was grayed out. On several occasions I'd have users asking what this was and why they couldn't save changes.

Well in 8.0c, WebTrends has addressed this to a certain degree. While the Report Designer menu item still appears, the link to the "Options" screen is no longer present. Access to the list of report templates and dashboards is still there, but only a list of these items appears when the links are clicked on. I still wish that WebTrends would stop this entire module from appearing unless a user has edit privileges, but I'll take what I can get.

All in all, WebTrends 8.0c is worth the upgrade especially if you're planning on rolling out IE7 in the near future to your organization.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello,
do you know something about a Upgrade for Linux? I did find only the .exe Files.

Unknown said...

WebTrends dropped support for Unix versions of its software when it moved from WRC 6 to WebTrends 7.

Last version to run on Unix systems was WRC 6. There are no upgrades or patches. One year ago they even dropped technical support for the product.

All my clients have now migrated from version 6 on Unix to the Windows based version.

LordJezo said...

I sure wish they would get Geotrends working, we are always having issue with an unknown contry problem, it can never resolve anything on it's first pass but if we then go back and run a whole month at a time everything works fine.

Unknown said...

Lordjezo,

I've run into that issue before and there is a simple fix. You need to check some settings in WebTrends to ensure it is caching the DNS look-up.

As well check your local DNS server to make sure it is letting the WebTrends agent do the look-up. Did you install WebTrends to use a domain account or a local account.

If you need some help give me a call by clicking on the BitWine logo.

Unknown said...

Does 8.x run on linux? I thought that discontined that, or is it only markering warehouse that runs on MS only?

Unknown said...

As I mentioned in a earlier comment, WebTrends Reporting Center no longer supports Unix. It will only run on a Windows environment.