Is anybody currently using version 6.6? I wanted to see what your impressions are on it. We are new to Rhythmx and are currently working on version 6.6.
Kind of a follow up message here… Out of interest, have many existing 6.5.2 customers upgraded to 6.6 or have you stuck with 6.5.2 for the time being?
Upgrading to 6.6 (should be) very simple and I’m wondering if people have tried upgrading? I guess the quoted 37% improvement in publishing times, together with the assemble-then-deliver model are compelling reasons to upgrade for 6.5.2 to 6.6.
I’m interested in hearing peoples experiences in upgrading to 6.6, or reasons why you’ve decided to hold back (despite the benefits)…
We are staying with 6.5.2 for the time being, mainly because the upgrade from 5.7 was a total nightmare (turned out to be a total redesign and rebuild), so I daren’t mention upgrading Rx around here for a while!
Our publishing times are already very fast… around 30 mins for a full publish of over 13500 items so other than a few bug fixes and minor enhancements I can’t see much point in upgrading until winter time, realistically
I actually had a discussion with Percussion a couple of weeks ago about moving from 6.5.2 to 6.6.
I am getting ready to have Percussion run our first public website, and I wanted to move to 6.6 before I did that so as to not have to teach users one interface, and then have to go back and re-school them on any changes 6.6 introduced.
Short story long, the Percussion folks basically told me I should stick with 6.5.2 for now until other folks have had a chance to work through 6.6 and a few patches have been released. I am a bit surprised they didn’t hold off on the full announcement of 6.6 if this was going to be their policy to existing customers, as it is a bit of a tease from my perspective.
Anyway, I would love to hear from others who might be running 6.6 what their experiences have been. I am thinking about pushing back and getting 6.6 anyway (since the active assembly interface has supposedly been improved), but want to know if there are any show stoppers that would make this a bad idea.
We haven’t upgraded from 6.5.2, probably for the same reasons we still haven’t moved from XP to Vista (I’ll let you guess what the reasons are, but they certainly aren’t that the older version is too good.)
We’re running 6.5.2 in development, pre-production, and production. We’re testing 6.6 both as an upgrade from 6.5.2 and as a base installation. Basically, we’re going back through all our TARs from 6.5 and 6.5.2 to make sure that the security concerns we raised in the those versions have been handled in 6.6. We also have a number of custom mods that we need to verify. We anticipate moving all of our systems to 6.6 by the end of July.
I am a little confused by the “branding.” 6.6 is being billed as “Percussion CM System,” but the actual GUI is still branded as “Rhythmyx.” I’m kinda wondering when/if that will change.
The re-organization of the publishing tab in 6.6 is a welcomed change. Finally, it’s easy to find a pub log. We run an incremental every three hours for each site, with 58 sites. That’s 464 pub logs a day, so in 6.5.2, that made sifting through them a pain.
I’m also glad to see that the Related Content search (for slots) has been made consistent with the Active Assembly search. And Active Assembly looks like it got cleaned up a bit w.r.t. proper use of
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tags.
I’m especially interested in their use of quartz for scheduled tasks. I can finally get rid of all those crontab entries for publishing, and in 6.6 you can dispatch an email on publishing failure.
One thing we haven’t tested yet, but I’ve seen others report… Moving an item out of Public and immediately Purging the item still results in the filesystem object not being removed. We currently run a hack to clean up those wounded soldiers. I’d hoped that’d be fixed in 6.6.
In summary, there are some definite improvements over 6.5.2, but until we really dig in and test everything, the jury will remain out.
Short story long, the Percussion folks basically told me I should stick with 6.5.2 for now until other folks have had a chance to work through 6.6 and a few patches have been released. I am a bit surprised they didn’t hold off on the full announcement of 6.6 if this was going to be their policy to existing customers, as it is a bit of a tease from my perspective.
I joked with one of my learned colleagues that we’re Beta testing version 7. (Percussion folks, don’t take offense.)
[QUOTE=vtdarrell;7692]One thing we haven’t tested yet, but I’ve seen others report… Moving an item out of Public and immediately Purging the item still results in the filesystem object not being removed. We currently run a hack to clean up those wounded soldiers. I’d hoped that’d be fixed in 6.6.
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This case is covered by 6.6. Testing here found it working. Maybe some special case doesn’t work?
Any new opinions and insights on 6.6 now? We’re planning to do a fresh install on new servers (Red Hat and MSSQL) and we’re thinking about going to 6.6. It would involve no extra learning curve, since I’m the only one involved who’s already used to 6.5.2.
We just upgraded our development and pre-production instances from 6.5.2 (patch 14603) to 6.6.1 (patch 15408). Patch 15408 has a problem with the Ephox editlivajava.jar where the digital signature expired in mid-May. We have an open ticket with Percussion about that (same problem with patch 15407 for 6.5.2).
We also ran into a problem when we attempted the initialization of Lucene search indexes (failed on several fields for almost all of our content items); open ticket with TS about that as well.
The default PermGen space specified by the RhythmyxServer.bin.lax (128m) wasn’t sufficient when we attempted to initialize search indexing. Had to up it to 512m. We’re running a 1G heap space.
We’re also seeing a problem with Ephox and IE8 both in 6.5.2 and 6.6.1 where a user can not use any of the buttons that insert inline templates or images. Open ticket with TS about that.
Those are the problems we’ve had so far… Several other bugs that we filed against 6.5.2 have been fixed in 6.6.1, so we’re happy about that.
We have several in-house projects concerning sites that will require the advanced publishing features of 6.6.x, so we’re anxious to move forward. We’re scheduled to upgrade production on July 5, but if our issues aren’t resolved soon, we’re going to have to put off the upgrade (possibly until Thanksgiving or Christmas - academic calendar is the controlling factor).
Please share any issues you have with your upgrade. I’ll investigate the possibility of adding higher ed users into our internal bug tracker. Those of us at ed institutions probably have a lot of the same concerns.
We’re also trying to figure out how to programmaticly create quartz scheduled events. Editing 76 scheduled publishing tasks is gonna be a pain if it has to be done manually.
I am very interested in hearing other experiences with moving from 6.5.2 to 6.6. The changes on paper all look positive so far, however we have learned the hard way while upgrading from 6.0 to 6.5 that things can go wrong. My director would like to stick with 6.5.2 for now since we currently have many initiatives to bring different pieces of our site into the CMS. Our first implementation was successful and now it seems like a free for all to get as many sites into the system as possible… This is a little scary since our current project is bringing online 30+ communities. I would like to have confidence in supporting the upgrade to 6.6 on our systems as soon as possible, like others said, to keep retraining to a minimum number of users.
According to a PDF linked to from the Percussion home page, there is now a version 6.7. At least that is what the title says, and the quote from someone at Autotrader.com, but the rest of the text refers to “6.6.2”. No mention of “content tsunamis” in this document.
Andrew,
As I’m sure you’re aware, 6.7 is what we used to think would be 6.6.2. Release numbers are the province of marketing, and they decided (at the last minute) to change the number. Everything we’ve told you in the past about 6.6.2 now applies to 6.7.
Obviously, they have missed a few spots, and I’m sure this will be corrected over time.
Dave
For those of you that have upgraded already, how drastic was the change for your end-users? Was retraining needed?