Sharing address book with additional users revokes rights of existing shared users

  • 7001065
  • 30-Jul-2008
  • 26-Apr-2012

Environment

Novell GroupWise 7 Support Pack 3 Hot Patch 1
Novell GroupWise 32 bit Client
Client running in Caching mode

Situation

Sharing Address book revokes rights.
Address book re-invites revoked users.
Sharing Address book works fine in Online mode.
Sharing Address book does not work right in Caching mode.

Resolution

Engineering has developed a fix for this and it is has been placed into GroupWise 7 Support Pack 3 Hot Patch 2.
 
The problem was that the code was suppressing the lookup of the users that came from the UI. This in turn was causing the compares to fail, resulting in some users, who were actually unchanged, showing up as both deleted and added.
 
The fix is on the client side for client server and on the server side for caching mode.
This fix will not fix existing distribution lists which may already have users with missing address parts. So, even with the fix in place, some users may still get re-notified.  The steps to duplicate this problem will no longer duplicate the problem, once the fix is in place and if with a fresh share.
 
Once the owner makes changes to the list of shared users, the code takes that complete new list and creates a distribution list.  It then compares this distribution list with the one that has been previously stored in order to calculate the user who was added, deleted and whose rights where modified. The fix is to perform a lookup on each user that comes in from the UI.  So the fix is needed in both the server and the client to fully work.
 
Finally, if there is a  GroupWise 8 back end, duplicate notifications may still be seen, because GroupWise 8 structures the distribution lists slightly differently.  If there is a GroupWise 8 client and a new share, then the problem should not be seen.

Additional Information

Steps to duplicate:
  1. Set up shared Address Book with a couple of users while owner is in Online mode.
  2. Place user who has shared Address Book into Caching mode.
  3. Share the Address Book with an additional user.
  4. Check the Mailbox of the already existing user who already have access to the shared Address Book. Should now see two new mail items, one is a revocation of the shared Address Book, and a second item that informs the users, that were revoked, that they now have permission/approval to access the shared Address Book.

Change Log

Removed status as being Reported to Engineering.
Removed Reported to Engineering from Resolution and added steps to fix from Development along with expected code fix patch.