Thanks Doug, for the detailed explanation of what has been a nagging problem here for months.
The IE9 performance problem made a widespread appearance because we are in the process of rolling out Windows 7 with IE9 all over campus, and while we initially recommended firefox instead for ITSM that stopped as soon as we found the un-solved bug in Incident Management where editing or pasting into the Work Info loses everything after a line feed. Support finally acknowledged it after we sent them a movie of it. There was also truncation by the active link, but we put a band-aid on that. So the helpdesks went back to IE or chrome. They are not going to revert to an outdated and no doubt unsecure version of flash, so they simply avoid the Next Stage and Resolve buttons and the process flow bar and work manually on the Incident form. At least the best practice form is much easier to operate manually than the classic was. This is the main problem with browser-only clients – there is something wrong with every one of them. We were unable to implement RKM 7.6.04.01 primarily because the search results do not display at all in Safari or Chrome (which is still not fixed in SP2), and we had to keep our ARS 7.1 system in production just to support RKM 7.2. Christopher Strauss, Ph.D. Call Tracking Administration Manager University of North Texas Computing & IT Center http://itsm.unt.edu/ From: "Mueller, Doug" <doug_muel...@bmc.com<mailto:doug_muel...@bmc.com>> Reply-To: "arslist@ARSLIST.ORG<mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG>" <arslist@ARSLIST.ORG<mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG>> Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2011 12:53:35 -0600 To: "arslist@ARSLIST.ORG<mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG>" <arslist@ARSLIST.ORG<mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG>> Subject: Re: BMC's Future on the horizon.. IMHO ** Everyone, What Chris describes here is a new discovery that is unique to IE9 where something has changed in the IE implementation. As part of the model that BMC uses for the AR System, we support the specified versions of products "or later". In this case, IE9 was not available when the current version was released (7.6.04 was released in January 2011 and IE9 in March 2011). The product is fully functional with IE9. However, we have discovered an interaction issue that causes a performance problem with IE9. We are working with both Microsoft and Adobe on this issue to see if can be resolved. In addition, some redesign of the approach has mostly eliminated the problem from the next major release (but that strategy cannot be backported to the current release). So, enough of the overall philosophy, let's look at this situation. There are a number of UI features that we added in recent releases. Some of them were not supported on specific browsers so we had to find alternatives for supporting the capability. Specifically, there are three features: rounded corners, gradient colors, and vertical text. These three capabilities could not be supported in IE natively because the capability was not present. To allow these capabilities, we incorporated the use of Flash for IE. All of the other browsers – Safari, Firefox, and even the other used but unsupported browsers like Chrome – have the necessary support. So, the workaround was used only for IE environments. Everything works fine for IE6, IE7, and IE8 but with IE9, something has changed so that there is now a performance cost for the workaround. This is what we are working to find out what the issue is with the other vendors. Now, there are several options: 1) The performance issues is not really affecting you so do nothing 2) Use a browser other than IE 3) Use a version of IE before IE9 (for example, use IE8) 4) Use FlashPlayer 10.2 or earlier (the problem has been isolated to the combination of IE9 using FlashPlayer 10.3, or later unless a fix is added later) 5) Go to the System config settings and set the option that turns off the use of Flash for these three capabilities – you will not get rounded corners, vertical text, or gradient colors but you will not loose any other functionality or capability within the system. It is a cosmetic affect So, in summary…. This may affect you ONLY IF you n Run IE9 as your browser n Use FlashPlayer 10.3 or later n Leave the system config setting to use Flash for these features turned on (the default) Otherwise, this issue does not have any affect on your system. And, it will affect only users that have this combination as their client – other users on the same system without this combination will not be affected. There are several options (which may or may not be possible in your environment) to eliminate the problem immediately. BMC is continuing to work with the vendors on this problem to see we can find out why the problem suddenly showed up with this combination of technology and to see if we can eliminate the issue from future releases with alternate designs or approaches. I hope this explanation has been helpful both for this specific issue and to show a case in action of the "or later" support strategy. Doug Mueller From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of strauss Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2011 10:39 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG<mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG> Subject: Re: BMC's Future on the horizon.. IMHO ** We can hope; the dialog performance problems that we have been experiencing on production with ITSM 7.6.04.01 Incidents in IE9 have now been tracked down specifically to flash, and confirmed in my testing. ChristopherStrauss, Ph.D. Call Tracking Administration Manager University of North Texas Computing & IT Center http://itsm.unt.edu/ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of patrick zandi Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2011 12:03 PM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG<mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG> Subject: BMC's Future on the horizon.. IMHO ** http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/flash-is-dead-long-live-html5/1633?tag=nl.e539 BMC's Future.. -- Patrick Zandi _attend WWRUG12 www.wwrug.com ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"_ _attend WWRUG12 www.wwrug.com ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"_ _attend WWRUG12 www.wwrug.com ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"_ _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug12 www.wwrug12.com ARSList: "Where the Answers Are"
