Hi all,
We've implemented DMX recently for a client with a large userbase who intend to use webdav at the office, at home and from mobile devices. We had done some succesfull DMX installations before, but setting up DMX properly for this client was a big big challenge. We had to solve quite some issues before we reached a stable situation. In this post you can find our experiences with webdav in the hope you can hopefully avoid these issues. I'll limit the issues encountered to those we couldn't find solutions for on the DMX forums. Hope it helps.
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Server 404 issues
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Setting up webdav for DMX is challenge. Normally following Peters manual will help you get through this just fine. It gets a bit more complicated if your DNN install isn't standard. We couldn't get webdav to save our documents properly. It turned out our non-static ASP.Net custom error pages we're sending 404 errors on the dmx webdav handler. Problem solved after referring back to the normal ASP.Net error pages.
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Webdav performance issues on windows 7 machines
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Performance under windows 7 was a big issue. If you don't have a slow server or your client has a slow internet connection this can easily be fixed in w7/vista by turning of "Automatically detect settings" in the Internet Explorer options under the Connections tab >> Advanced. Don't ask me why, but we saw a big increase in performance ;-)
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Browser settings overwritten by network policies
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We informed all our users about the settings they have to make in their browsers. After doing so, users reported webdav not working the next day. It appears some of our clients networks had policies in which all IE settings and cookies were reset at reboot. We ended up writing a small piece of software which is run at startup that will implement the correct settings for the user. Lesson learned, don't assume browser settings are there the next day.
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Browser settings to difficult for average user
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Our client wanted their users to work with their documents from their office and home computers. Home computers aren't managed by our clients IT staff. Many users couldn't get the settings right, causing a lot of support for my team and our clients IT staff. Our solution was a small executable the user can download and which helps them to set the proper settings in IE and the windows registry. We'll post this on our website for you to use after we have done some refactoring.
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Errors after a period of inactivity
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After getting the client settings right, we got a lot of complaints about webdav stability, broken connections, etc. This was a nasty one! It appeared that when the webserver session is expired and the webdav cookie is expired, windows can't connect to webdav anymore.
You can see this behavior in standard installations after about an hour. Open a document, open a webdav folder and leave inactive for an hour. Click on the folder and your prompted with a login, which doesn't work.
After this error has occurred it's not possible for the user to open a webdav folder or document again until they have rebooted. They can also flush the webdav mapping by the windows "net use" command, but that's not an action you want a regular user to take.
We've investigated this with Peter and it appears to be a windows issue. Peter will present a workaround for this issue in the next DMX version. In that version the cookie expiry time can be set so you can prevent this issue. For now we've implemented a hack to extend the lifetime of the dmxdavcookie.
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Windows 7 / office 2007 webclient redirector bug
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After fixing all those issues we thought we've got a pretty stable situation. Our client kept having problems with some workstations. The machines could open a webdav folder, but couldn't save an office document. The client would receive an error and after that a new webdav connection could'n be set up until after a reboot. Making things worse DMX locks the opened document after opening, but can't release the lock because of this windows bug. Other users then assume the error occurs at their machine too.
After extensive research it appeared to be a bug in the combination of windows 7 without service pack 1 and office 2007. Our client did still have a lot of those machines in place. For a complete description take a look here:
http://forums.developer.m...fice-docs-via-webdav The solution was simple, install servicepack 1 or this hotfix:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2489177 ---
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In the end it turns out setting up webdav is no trivial task, because you have to deal with server and client settings. Especially when you try to make it work in a heterogenous environment your will face a couple of challenges. I hope this post will help you to avoid the issues we've encountered.
For now we have some work to do on our webdav configuration tool, but once we have it finished you can download it from our website (www.web2work.nl). It's a bit empty right now, because we're in the middle of a rebranding.
Regards,
Jeroen