After my last entry, I went ahead and filed PMRs with IBM Partnerworld Technical Support about the limitations I had supposedly discovered. Today, I am writing about standing corrected on one of those limitations – the ability to add a component to the component catalog available to the team place manager. I was corrected by a co-worker (Derek) as well as by IBM support.

Just to make clear what I wanted to do is to customize the list of components that are available to a team place manager when the manager chooses to customize a Quickr place. The figure below shows a manager having the option of adding a custom component called “photo book” to the place.

Essentially the component picker is defined by a JSP inside the Quickr theme – /IBM/Quickr/wp_profile/installedApps/xxxx/wps.ear/wps.war/themes/html/QPG/pageHeaderContent.jsp. To add a new component, search for the div with an id of customizePage2. and add a list item with information for the new component -

As I had mentioned in one of my earlier entries, I have recently become interested in IBM Lotus Quickr 8.0 Services for WebSphere Portal. It looks like a great team collaboration software with a very appealing Web 2.0 UI, ease of use for end-users, team site managers, and administrators, connectors for several popular business applications enabling access to Quickr content without a user having to switch from their current application, and team site templates enabling users to create new team sites in a few simple steps. However, today I discovered a rather basic Quickr limitation with respect to the customization you can do while creating templates.

Quickr Services for WebSphere Portal comes with a set of OOTB components – library, blog, wiki, announcements, project tasks, feed reader, and contacts. A team place manager can use these components to customize a place. I was looking through the Quickr documentation to find the procedure for adding a new component (for example, a custom list component such as faqs) to the component catalog available to the team place manager. However, suffice it to say that I was disappointed – I did not find any such documentation. It seems to be a fundamental limitation of Quickr as far as I can tell that you cannot customize Quickr by adding customer-built components. Not only that, on searching for component on the Quickr support site, I found this technote – Templates based on place components that use a customized presentation template. The gist of this technote is that if you create a template based on a place that contains a component using a customized presentation template, the customized presentation template is not used by any places based on this template. The default presentation template is used instead. Supposedly this is a known limitation of Quickr. I find this far from acceptable given the goal of making “place creation using a template” easy. If anybody from the Quickr team is listening, then both these limitations (customer created place components and templates that can use customized presentation templates) need some fixin’!

Hey, my persistence finally paid off and I managed to resolve my failed Quickr 8.0 services for WebSphere Portal install! I could not go to sleep with this issue bugging the heck out of me. I started to dig deeper into the failure and found that during the install, it was trying to connect to the database at jdbc:db2://kingfisher-adam.ausnq.com:50000/wpsdb. And suddenly it dawned on me that maybe my issue was a potential port conflict at port 50000. Now I had gotten lazy when installing Quickr – I had decided to install it on a VMWare image where I had earlier installed Microsoft Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM). I had created two ADAM instances – the first used the standard LDAP port of 389, while the second one was set up with a port that I could not remember but 50000 sounded suspiciously familiar. I tried telnet localhost 50000 and sure enough the connection succeeded. Then it did not take me long to verify that the second ADAM instance was actually listening on 50000. Shutting down the two adam instances and re-trying the install has got me well past the failure point (action-create-db-mp) and I suspect the install will now succeed.

However, this brings forth the issue that it would have been nice if the Quickr installer could check whether the ports that it intended to use were actually available of if there was a conflict. Even if it could not dynamically change the ports used by Quickr, if the installation error was more specific that would have avoided the pain I went through. It certainly would be doable for the installer to perform the port check and I think a worthwhile enhancement! Now off to dreamland and playing tennis in the morning!

PS: WordPress.com which has been extremely reliable went down when I tried to post this at 1am in the morning! I am finally up from dreamland and so is WordPress. BTW, a quickr update that the Quickr install did complete successfully. Whew! Now onto playing with it on my own install instead of on Lotus Greenhouse (another blog entry merited).

No, I have not yet solved my failed install issue! I thought I was onto something with resolving the issue when I read the IBM technote titled Restrictions on ID that is used to install Lotus Quickr. The technote is about a scenario where the install fails during the database create step and this is precisely where my install seems to fail, though I did not see the exact error message mentioned in that technote. Anyways, I figured it was worth a shot – so instead of installing with a Windows user named admin, I tried with another Windows user named LocalQuickr but had the exact same failure yet again -

(Aug 24, 2007 9:29:59 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdOut: action-create-database:

(Aug 24, 2007 9:29:59 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdOut: Fri Aug 24 21:29:59 CDT 2007

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:00 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdOut:

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:00 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdOut: check-db2-driver-type:

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:00 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdOut: Fri Aug 24 21:30:00 CDT 2007

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:00 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdOut:      [echo] isDb2DriverType4 = true

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:00 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdOut:

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:00 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdOut: action-create-db-mp:

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:00 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdOut: Fri Aug 24 21:30:00 CDT 2007

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:00 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdOut:      [echo] Trying to create database for dbdomain 'release' on 'db2'

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:00 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdOut:

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:00 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdOut:

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:00 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdOut:   [sqlproc] action: exist-database

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:00 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdOut:   [sqlproc] _________________________________________________________

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:00 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdOut:   [sqlproc] DbDomain: release

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] Could not connect to database

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] com.ibm.db2.jcc.a.DisconnectException: [ibm][db2][jcc][t4][2030][11211] A communication error has been detected. Communication protocol being used: TCP/IP.

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] Communication API being used: SOCKETS.  Location where the error was detected: Reply.fill().

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] Communication function detecting the error: InputStream.read().  Protocol specific error codes Insufficient data, * , 0.  Message: null

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at com.ibm.db2.jcc.b.a.a(a.java:362)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at com.ibm.db2.jcc.DB2Driver.connect(DB2Driver.java:163)

...

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at com.ibm.wps.config.SqlProcessor.process(SqlProcessor.java:212)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at com.ibm.wps.config.SqlProcessor.process(SqlProcessor.java:146)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at com.ibm.wps.config.SqlProcessorTask.validateDbExist(SqlProcessorTask.java:730)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at com.ibm.wps.config.SqlProcessorTask.execute(SqlProcessorTask.java:333)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at org.apache.tools.ant.Task.perform(Task.java:341)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.Sequential.execute(Sequential.java:117)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at com.ibm.wps.config.If.execute(If.java:75)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at org.apache.tools.ant.Task.perform(Task.java:341)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at org.apache.tools.ant.Target.execute(Target.java:309)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at org.apache.tools.ant.Target.performTasks(Target.java:336)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeTarget(Project.java:1339)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.Ant.execute(Ant.java:397)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.CallTarget.execute(CallTarget.java:143)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdOut:   [sqlproc] _________________________________________________________

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at org.apache.tools.ant.Task.perform(Task.java:341)

...

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.Ant.execute(Ant.java:397)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at org.apache.tools.ant.taskdefs.CallTarget.execute(CallTarget.java:143)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeTargets(Project.java:1255)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.runBuild(Main.java:609)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.start(Main.java:196)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at com.ibm.wps.config.WpsConfigMain.process(WpsConfigMain.java:739)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at com.ibm.wps.config.WpsConfigMain.main(WpsConfigMain.java:207)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:85)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:58)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:60)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:391)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at com.ibm.ws.bootstrap.WSLauncher.run(WSLauncher.java:219)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] 	at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:570)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:   [sqlproc] (ErrCode=-4499, SqlState=null)

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr:

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr: BUILD FAILED

(Aug 24, 2007 9:30:02 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr: file:../config/actions/db_cfg.xml:140: ERROR: Error while checking database existance...

Looks like I might be filing a PMR after all!

I remember a time when installing IBM WebSphere Portal was quite a challenge requiring the right alignment of all trhe stars for you to get a successful install – this was back in the v2.1, v4.1, v4.2 days. You had to have the LDAP and the database properly configured and specify a ton of settings during the WebSphere Portal install , and you could easily mess up one thing or the other to end up with a failed install. With newer versions of WebSphere Portal, IBM switched to an archived install that did not require configuring an external LDAP/database, and as a result you always ended up with a successful Portal install. Along comes Lotus Quickr v8.0 Services for WebSphere Portal, and here I am again in failed install land!

I was trying to perform the simple Departmental/Express installation that supposedly enables you to install a single server running IBM^® Lotus^® Quickr™ in the shortest amount of time (per the InfoCenter). There has been nothing quick with this so far. I have installed twice on a VMWare instance running Windows XP SP2, with the install failing each time at the same point -

(Aug 24, 2007 3:16:35 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr: BUILD FAILED
(Aug 24, 2007 3:16:35 PM), Quickr.install, com.ibm.wps.install.ExternalCommandAction$OutputWatcher, msg2, StdErr: file:../config/actions/db_cfg.xml:140: ERROR: Error while checking database existance…

Essentially it seems to fail to create the release database in DB2 and then fails to verify its existence, and the Quickr install fails! Bummer!

I have checked the install instructions in the InfoCenter and do not see anything obvious that I am doing wrong. There isn’t much to the install to begin with – I have verified that my OS does meet the requirements, that my user ID has the right privileges, there is enough disk space … I have searched the forums and don’t see anything there either. Given the repeatability of my failed installs, I would have expected others to have run into it. I have looked through the IBM Quickr support site as well but not seen anything yet – need to look more thoroughly though.

I just hope we are not regressing to the dark ages again in terms of installs! The fact that the Quickr install relies on a bundled DB2 install does worry me as that is where the point of failure is in my case. Will be back with an update once I figure this out – hope it is quick as in quickr!

Lately I have been looking into IBM Lotus Quickr – the new generation of Lotus QuickPlace that was launched in late June. It is a Web 2.0 version of team collaboration software that enables groups of people (aka teams) to collaborate and share content. One of its winning features is the concept of templates that enables you to quickly hit the ground running. And another reason why I am now interested in this is the availability on the WebSphere Portal platform – while it still cannot be installed into an existing WPE install, it at least offers an opportunity to utilize the team collaboration functionality without relying on Domino. I am fairly intrigued by Quickr and hope to look into it some more in the near future – will be back with my findings.

Some useful Quickr resources include -

• Quickr Templates: http://templates.snapps.com/
• Rob Novak Blog: http://www.lotusrockstar.com/blog/robblog.nsf
• Quickr DeveloperWorks Site (limited stuff right now): http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/products/quickr/