Business Plus Upgrading fiasco

[Confused Sally]

Continuing Story!

Here goes - today i realised that products that i had added over the last few days through the network link (Business Plus) wer sitting in sequence on the tree but out of sequence on the preview and when i published yesterday they are on the web out of date sequence ( May - August Workshop Lists). I found or at least i thought i had found that i could rectify this by lifting the product and drag and propping it on to its neighbour through the main machine rather than the user. This put the preview in the correct order and although time consuming it was an answer. So effectively i was dragging and dropping to the product immediately above even though it looked on the tree like it was in the correct place. I did this with approx 6 products, on the 7th instead of re establishing the product in the correct sequence the following happened. Product A whuich i was dragging to product b immediately above turned into an exact replica of product A with the same product number. I thought this was impossible, but I am currently looking at my screen with two identical products with the same number and the same images on the preview screen.
My system is obviously completely screwed I don't know if I should continue attempting to update but i want to leave this as it is so support can actually see it. Really at end of tether!

[I-CC]

Shut down Actinic and then restart it to see if the view you are getting is cached or actually what it is holding in its db. I have found on some occasions that it has simply cached on the pc incorrectly and the actual db is correct and as desired, so give that a try and see what occurs.

[Confused Sally]

Hi Ian,
yes that helped, seems to have reordered stuff and removed duplicates. It does seem to cause problems whenever we add stuff through the user laptop. Do you know of anyone using Business Plus where it works smoothly using networked machines? I have no idea how common / unusual my issues are.
Thanks again! At least i can try and get some of the backlog done now.

[I-CC]

Generally find that its okay and does not have this cache issue.

Exceptions where it has come to light is where one or more of the machines have not been restarted (so flushed out) for a couple of days when lots of changes have been made, or when one of the machines is on wireless seems to hit a bottleneck, but generally its fine.

[leehack]

I've had this recently on a new v11 site also, duplicate products on page, in my case a close down and a database compact solved it. I don't know the exact circumstances but it evolved from either a copy-paste or a duplication of a product. Perhaps there is a certain sequence of events that doesn't quite do as expected.

[Steve G Griggs]

Lee, I have also seen this cache issue on V11, but as you say a compact and restart (usually just Actinic) cures any cache issues. It can look quite scary as it seems as if a web page is completely screwed up, and yes it seems to be associated with a lot of copy/cut and paste operations.

[Confused Sally]

Once again my customers cannot order

This continuing disaster is beyond a joke now. This is starting to cost me serious money - all my advertising is screwed, and 2 campaigns I had planned to run through the website are dead in the water. Currently my customers cannot order, I do not know why, also some areas of the website suddenly 'hid; themselves again I do not know why - this was following the refresh but I had not spotted it before I published, but it doesn't matter as the customers cannot order anyway.

I am sad to say that support are asking ridiculous questions about methods of working that we have been telling them for literally weeks now. Like which computer did you publish from (will not go into details but this has been looked at numerous times over last few weeks) I am I think in the 5th week of these issues with not much end in sight.

I hope Chris Barling is reading my posts.

[pmsupport]

Hi Sally,

I am sorry to hear about the latest error on the website. I can see when you click "Checkout now", the following error appears:

"Error: Error opening the index './acatalog/stock.fil'. No such file or directory. The web site is probably being updated."

Support are in the middle of emailing you, to let you know what to do to resolve this now.

I will keep an eye on this and make sure the site gets up and running again.

I will also chase our developers on the ongoing Multi user crashes with EPOS link.

Paul

[Confused Sally]

It is not just the crashes due to the EPOS link, it is the painful slowness of working, it is not possible to work efficiently on the user machine when the link is on, we have to switch it off in order to get any work done at all. We Have to switch it off on the Admin machine in order to turn on the laptop. We could leave them both running all the time, but that seems to cause issues with products not appearing where they are supposed to.
As I understood it the reason we bought the system was to have a constant link between all our stock on the web and on the EPOS system that was never broken, customers could not order what was out of stock and we wold be able to keep acurate track of sales - well the whole system is screwy if have to keep switching off the EPOS link on order to perform routine functions like add images.

I think my staff have spent hours on this now and so have yours with little or no progress. I can't continue to have a website that functions eratically. I have just had 2 adverts come out pointing people to my site and they can't actually buy or if they do buy we may be out of stock because the link cannot be maintained - it is doing my reputation which was previously one of good service no good at all, this is potentially long term damage.

If someone came into my shop and stopped people from buying, prevented my staff from working, tied up my computers and telephone lines and negated the use of my advertisng I would call the police and also probably sue them, I would also be looking for recompense for business interruption
All I get from actinic is the promise that Development are looking at it and we lurch from crisis to crisis with each problem generally being dealt with by me being instructed to troubleshoot, repair and refresh the website (this I never had to do or extremely rarely prior to upgrading to Business Plus.)

I would be happy to step out of Business Plus back to Actinic Business if at least that meant I had a functioning site, I would at least then have my and my staff time free (although there is a huge backlog of work now) to try and build an alternative website with an alternative supplier who didn't switch off their support 'phones at 5.30pm.

[chris ashdown]

Sally I know you dont want the extra expense but would it not be better to ask Actinic to send somebody out to you to sort it all out rather than this slow death by a thousand cuts

Should you have to No, but!!!!!!

[Confused Sally]

Chris I almost laughed when i read your post - I would have been really willing to do that a couple of weeks back, but I think even if I asked now Actinic do not have a solution to the problem. They are 'working on it' and I am sure because of my forum exposure they are working really hard, if they had an answer I would have it by now. I need someone to think 'bigger' for me and come up with an alternative to just trying to deal with one problem at a time. I suspect if Actinic thought they could deal with this by sending someone out they might have even done it by now, or at least offered the service and a quote for the job, I would consider paying it too.
Today Support plan to upgrade my site from v10 to v11 to see if that helps, we shall see!
Also they sold me something that was meant to do a job and it doesn't. it is not 'fit for purpose' so why should I pay to have it fixed?

[pmsupport]

Hi Sally,

As discussed, I have a few things we are going to do to try and resolve this problem this afternoon. We found a potential problem on the network this morning which I will address.

As soon as we find a solution we will post the solution here on the community for future reference.

[pmsupport]

Hi all,

Just for future reference, we have been working with Sally to resolve their Business Plus / EPOS link issues.

It seems one of the four changes made resolved the problem:

1) The hardwired network port on the laptop was faulty, so the laptop was using a wireless connection. An engineer fixed the hardwired network so that the network connection on the laptop was stable.
2) We changed the master PC to be the laptop as it was much newer and faster.
3) Upgraded from Actinic v10.0.4 to v11.0.2.
4) We changed the path to the sites directory on the "Slave" PC to be the UNC path, for example:

\\COMPUTER1\Sites\

Instead of:

\\COMPUTER1\SharedDocs\Actinic v10\Sites

We are not sure which solved the problem, as all these changes were made at once, but 1) and 3) were the most likely solutions or a combination of the two.