Lotus Notes Traveler Failures to prevent

I had posted on Twitter about it, but as it devolved into so many issues, wanted to post it for others who experience it.

To be very clear, there is nothing wrong with Traveler at all if you have installed and configured it properly. Really, it is hard to mess this up. But I did.

One of the internal servers was upgraded to 8.5.1, but someone forgot to upgrade Traveler(EDITED: 12/3/2009you MUST stay in synch with versions or you will have these problems). They backed it all up but after all went well, deleted the backup. Too soon for my taste, I like to wait 1-4 weeks depending on server.

Anyway, as I use Traveler and they use a Blackberry not surprised.

So I said I would take care of it last night. Little did I know what I was in for.

The server immediately starts throwing errors, like this when I went to synch:

> Exception in thread "CLW(50125)-4586" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/lotus/sync/servlet/TravelerServlet at com.lotus.sync.servlet.ConnectionListener.handleRequests(ConnectionListener.java:904)
at com.lotus.sync.servlet.ConnectionListener.handleHTTPObject(ConnectionListener.java:887)at com.lotus.sync.servlet.ConnectionListener$CLWorker.run(ConnectionListener.java:1018)

Now I always update Java before upgrading and knew this was not the problem. I wondered if the Java install was corrupted. Tried rebooting, nsd-kill for open threads. tried loading it manually, everything I could imagine. Nothing worked.

Then I saw this error when I thought it was finally synching:

10/21/2009 03:36:23 PM Notes Traveler: WARNING CN=Keith Brooks/O=ourorg Lotus Notes Traveler cannot process documents with FORM of 'Appointment' Template name: StdR6Mail.

And nearly fell off my chair. What kind of error is this and does this mean appointments haven't changed since R6? My template was 8.5 and now 8.5.1 although the original mail file creation was probably under R6, so perhaps a legacy error?

This just got messier and messier.

I started reading the device log and noticed the header, 8.5.0.1 was listed.
That seemed odd, surely I didn't download the older version...or did I?

I checked my local copy and sadly, yes, I had downloaded to the server the wrong version. Ugh.

Downloaded correct version and miracle of miracles all is well again.
EDITED 12/3/009: The part # to look for is CZ5SYML.

Then my device is having problems synching the 4,000+ pnab to my old HTC Wizard device. At least I can get everything else in the mean time.

Maybe Traveler should have an option to set how much of one's contacts to synch so it can get done without timing out on the server.

So what to think about when loading Traveler?

Read the info center of course for tweaks.

Update Java version

Check Traveler did not over write your default page for your server, like your mail redirector or home page of the company website.

Do not run ntraveler.exe to install

Edit the individual html files for the various devices with the Version # of where we are so anybody downloading is sure to get the correct version.

Posted an Ideajam about this here if you agree or disagree.