Questions...

I see that I can now use special characters in the SA password in PDS 6.0. What an amazing development! Kudos to Calyx for inventing such a novel way of creating strong passwords and shame on organizations that required such things so long before Calyx labored to invent them! Can my users also have special characters in their PDS passwords?

If no, WHY NOT?????

Will a Point 5.4 client break PDS 6.0?

Can we seach for users with a partial name? Is the user search now case insensitive?

The lack of cross-version compatibility guarantees that my users will experience downtime during the upgrade. I will work to minimize it, of course, but it is going to happen. For various policy-based reasons I do not run an administrative install for all of my users. About half of them have stand alone installations.

The Point team is working on a feature called "online distribution" that will allow you (the administrator) to define which Point clients will be upgraded when a new release comes out.

Once this feature is ready, you will be able to upgrade your PDS server and instruct your Point clients to upgrade themselves automatically the next morning. 

Sorry, I don't have any schedule information, but the Point team is agressively looking at releasing this in the next year (note that this feature will work for non-PDS users as well, we might just have more options and easier configuration for PDS customers).

That will be a very welcome addition to Point.

How about my other three questions from my original post?

-Point passwords still cannot have special characters.  I don't recall this subject being brought up before so it was never on the table to be changed.  Where as the sql password was a bug that got introduced in the 5.3 version and corrected in 6.0

-Will point 5.4 break PDS 6.0? I am not sure what you mean by break.  But as with most PDS and Point releases the Point user will be greeted with an error message informing them that they are not on the same version as the server and should upgrade.  PDS however should not crash when this happens therefore I believe the answer to your question is no Point 5.4 will not break PDS 6.0

-Can we search for users with a partial name? no this functionality along with the case sensitivity Has not been changed(testing on PDS 6.0 showed that this search is currently case insensitive).  However as with PDS 5.3 you can search for users via the effective access rights reports.  When you start to type the name into the user name or user id field you will be presented with a list of 25 matching names you speed your search ( this is after you have typed three characters).

Disclaimer:  This post carries no explicit or implied warranty. Nor is there any guarantee that the information contained in this post is accurate. It is offered in the hopes of helping others, but you use it at your own risk. The author will not be liable for any damages that occur as a result of using this post.

I have brought it up, but it may have been on a phone call. I was told that the programming language used for Point was preventing Calyx from allowing special characters in the user passwords. That HAD to be a BS answer. If that really is the case, why haven't you converted to something else yet? Calyx appears to be concerned about password strength, yet you won't allow us one of the most useful ways to make passwords stronger.

Unless... maybe... hrmmm... are you writing Point on a computer that uses EBCDIC?

When I upgraded from 5.0 to 5.1 (I think), the first thing my staff did when the new Point arrived was to install it. The new Point broke the old PDS. Broke as in PDS started having problems saving and locating files, etc. There was NO WARNING anywhere obvious that the PDS server would be damaged by the new Point. I believe there was a notice, buried in the manual, that the new Point required the new PDS. Anyway... call me paranoid, but I now expect any new version of PDS to be vulnerable to a previous version of Point until I see it not-break for myself.  We no longer jump right in to a new version of Point to check it out. Instead of excitement, new versions of Point are met with a groan from the IT department. Sorry, truth hurts.

Interesting. Can we get that same search in the "List Users" page where it would be considerably more useful?

We'll see what we can do to update the userlist.

Disclaimer:  This post carries no explicit or implied warranty. Nor is there any guarantee that the information contained in this post is accurate. It is offered in the hopes of helping others, but you use it at your own risk. The author will not be liable for any damages that occur as a result of using this post.