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.

IE 7 Automatic Rollout Has Started

Yes, Microsoft has started the automatic roll-out of IE7. While IE 7 has been available as download now for several weeks, they have started pushing the upgrade via the OS automatic update utility as of late last week. Their plan is to have the roll-out completed within 3 months. I personally think this is a bit ambitious, but the reality is that by the end of Q1 2007 the majority of IE users will have been upgraded to version 7.

What does this mean to you? If you haven't done so, start testing your web site(s) and any web based applications to ensure they work with IE 7. If not, time to start fixing them before the clients start calling.

For more information on the rollout, read the following article from Yahoo News http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20061113/tc_pcworld/127851

WebTrends & IE7 Fix Available

WebTrends has just released a hot fix for the problems that Internet Explorer was causing. These WebTrends fixes mean IE7 is now a supported browser and also include a fix so you can use the WebTrends SmartView plug-in for IE 6 and with IE 7.

For those using WebTrends on Demand, WebTrends has already installed WebTrends version 8.0b which includes the support of IE7, but not the fix for SmartView. The good news about these hot fix is that WebTrends has decided not to wait until they make version 8.0b available to the general public and instead issued the hot fixes.

I just got these links directly from WebTrends and haven't had the chance to test them. However, WebTrends assures me they will work.

So here is the links to the fixes:
SmartView - ftp://ftp.webtrends.com/WRC/80a/IE7/SmartViewUpdater.exe
WebTends - ftp://ftp.webtrends.com/WRC/80a/IE7/8.0a_IE7_Solution.zip

Be sure to follow these instuctions
1) Log in to WebTrends as an administrator.
2) Select Service Health under Administration | Monitoring.
3) Click the Shut Down System button.

4) After the system is shut down, extract the 8.0a_IE7_Solution.zip into your installation directory (e.g. "C:\Program Files\WebTrends"), overwriting existing files.

4a) If WebTrends is installed in a Distributed Architecture you will need to overwrite the files on each system WebTrends is installed in.

5) After this completes, start the WebTrends system database, if stopped (for example, the "WebTrends - MySQL" service in a MySQL environment)

6) Next, launch SmartViewUpdater.exe. After the installation completes, your WebTrends server will have an updated version of the SmartView in the component repository.

7) After the files have been overwritten and the SmartViewUpdater install completes, start the WebTrends system. To start the system, run “SystemShutdown.exe mode=start” from the command line when in \modules\analysis under the installation directory.

The next time users run SmartView from an updated server, they will be informed that a newer version is available and asked to upgrade. Once they select "Upgrade" the new SmartView client will be downloaded and installed over their previous version. The new version includes support for both Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

Good luck and please post a response if these WebTrends fixes for IE 7 work for you.