Notes Issue in Raiser's Edge 7.96

Ray Wilson · April 2018

Hello all,

We are experiencing an issue on my campus with adding and viewing notes in RE. A user can create a new note in RE, however when they go to save it, RE locks up. When the user clicks on the Save button again they get the "Application is busy, click 'Switch To' or 'Retry' to continue" error. We are using a self-hosted solution and our current setup is using Windows 2012 Server for our database and Windows 7 and 10 with Office 2016 on the client side. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thank you,

Ray Wilson

Texas State University

Steven Cinquegrana 2 · April 2018

Hi Ray,

This is probably a support case, but some questions anyway:

1. Does this affect all users or just some? If the latter, users with which rights?

2. Does this affect all RE client machines or just some? If the latter, can you identify what differentiates them?

3. Does this affect all Note types or just some (Constituent, Action, etc.)? If the latter, which?

4. Does this affect all Note content? Eg are you copying and pasting content from, say, Word or Outlook? If the latter, what happens with directly-entered Note content?

5. Can you identify a point in time when this issue started? An RE upgrade, a Windows patch, a Group Policy change, etc, etc.

Cheers,

Steve Cinquegrana | CEO and Principal Developer | Protégé Solutions

John Heizer · April 2018

Ray Wilson:

Hello all,

We are experiencing an issue on my campus with adding and viewing notes in RE. A user can create a new note in RE, however when they go to save it, RE locks up. When the user clicks on the Save button again they get the "Application is busy, click 'Switch To' or 'Retry' to continue" error. We are using a self-hosted solution and our current setup is using Windows 2012 Server for our database and Windows 7 and 10 with Office 2016 on the client side. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thank you,

Ray Wilson

Texas State University

I haven't had that exact issue with saving Notes, but have had it with other parts of RE (particulary Media). I've found that when you get that error there is usually a dialogue box open, but hidden behind another window, that's waiting for some input. You may have to ALT+TAB and click around a lot to find the culprit.

Ray Wilson · April 2018

John - That's a good idea. I have a test machine that is having the same issue, so I duplicated it to tried and find a hidden window. The only thing I found was the "Application is busy..." window, but nothing else unfortunately. I also checked Task Manager as well to see if there was a hidden window, but no luck. But I'll keep looking.

Steven -

1) This is currently affecing some of our users, but it is spreading. I checked and the common rights amoung all of them are 'All RE Users', 'All Advancement Users'.

2) Only affects some of the client machines in our area. The machines affected are using OS Windows 7 or Windows 10 and using MS Office 2016 or 365. I can duplicate it on the affected machines using my login credentials. However, my computer is not affected when I login and use RE.

3) It is affecting all Note types now. Before it was only affecting Constituent Notes, but it is now affecting all Note types.

4) As far as I'm aware, everyone is manually entering their notes directly using the Notes editor. When they go to Save and Close, that's when it locks up and you get the "Application is busy..." window. From what I see in Task Manager (using Analyze Wait Chain in Windows 10), it is locking up both RE and Windows processes.

5) This issue started late December on one machine, but spread to three more in January. We moved up an RE upgrade in hopes that it would fix the issue, but it did not. There was an Office update that was pushed out to most client machines on campus in December. I tried rolling back those updates via System Restore, but the issue remained. I do not believe there was a Group Policy change recently, but if there were one it should affect all machines running RE.

I have created a case with Blackbaud concerning this issue, but have received no solutions so far. I've examined almost everything that could have created this issue, but found no common thread. The only odd thing is this issue is spreading to other machines. In the last couple of weeks, three computers that did not have this issue before are now affected. I greatly appreciate any help with this issue!

Thank you,

Ray Wilson

Texas State University

Steven Cinquegrana 2 · April 2018

Whew! I hate these ones!

Ray, what I would do is get all analytical about it and fully audit the machines' OS/SOE: Create a big ol' spreadsheet of every likely contributing factor (and a few unlikely ones!).

For example, you mentioned that the issue is spreading. That implies that there is a difference in the newly-affected machine now compared to when it was not affected and that something has changed (er, obviously). So, could you look at all the events (including Windows/Application logs, user access, patches, updates, etc) that occurred around the time of the change, assuming you can ascertain this?

Could you use System Restore on a newly-affected machine to roll back to an unaffected time? (Not just roll back the Office update.)

Conversely, making the issue occur might shed some light on things as well. If you have an idea that, say, it is a particular user's use of a machine that is triggering the problem, see what happens if they use an unaffected machine for the first time. Etc.

One other thing: Have you tried a restart of the DB server? Just in case there is some kind of database/record lock occurring that might be client/user-specific. That'd be a long shot but easy to try. Also, do you regularly run checks/validation on the database (eg via BBMC)?

Clearly something, somewhere is changing something to create this issue and the good thing is that you still have unaffected machines to compare to affected ones. Otherwise it'd be much harder.

I'm very interested to hear how this turns out.

Cheers, Steve

Isaac Comer · April 2018

Ray Wilson:

John - That's a good idea. I have a test machine that is having the same issue, so I duplicated it to tried and find a hidden window. The only thing I found was the "Application is busy..." window, but nothing else unfortunately. I also checked Task Manager as well to see if there was a hidden window, but no luck. But I'll keep looking.

Steven -

1) This is currently affecing some of our users, but it is spreading. I checked and the common rights amoung all of them are 'All RE Users', 'All Advancement Users'.

2) Only affects some of the client machines in our area. The machines affected are using OS Windows 7 or Windows 10 and using MS Office 2016 or 365. I can duplicate it on the affected machines using my login credentials. However, my computer is not affected when I login and use RE.

3) It is affecting all Note types now. Before it was only affecting Constituent Notes, but it is now affecting all Note types.

4) As far as I'm aware, everyone is manually entering their notes directly using the Notes editor. When they go to Save and Close, that's when it locks up and you get the "Application is busy..." window. From what I see in Task Manager (using Analyze Wait Chain in Windows 10), it is locking up both RE and Windows processes.

5) This issue started late December on one machine, but spread to three more in January. We moved up an RE upgrade in hopes that it would fix the issue, but it did not. There was an Office update that was pushed out to most client machines on campus in December. I tried rolling back those updates via System Restore, but the issue remained. I do not believe there was a Group Policy change recently, but if there were one it should affect all machines running RE.

I have created a case with Blackbaud concerning this issue, but have received no solutions so far. I've examined almost everything that could have created this issue, but found no common thread. The only odd thing is this issue is spreading to other machines. In the last couple of weeks, three computers that did not have this issue before are now affected. I greatly appreciate any help with this issue!

Thank you,

Ray Wilson

Texas State University

Some questions:

1. Once RE get locked up, what do you do next to unlock it/ get it back to usable?

2. I understand the error is reproducible, but once it starts happening on a given machine does it then, consistently *always* happen every time thereafter on that machine? I.e. when you're on a machine that has the problem, will it then *always* lock up every time you go to save a note or will it only sometimes lock up? (If "only sometimes", then you have not yet isolated the key root cause of the problem.)

3. Does it happen just for new notes or will it also happen when attempting to save changes to an existing note?

4. Has anything in the content of your notes changed since December? Are you copy-pasting from another source or typing text in by hand? If copying from somewhere else, what are those sources?

5. Do any of these computers exhibit any problems relating to Microsoft Word or other Office apps? As a troubleshooting step, it might be worthwhile to find one of the already affected comptuers that's "expendable" and try uninstalling all of MS Office from it, then try saving a note in RE again.

6. I should have asked this earlier -- is this problem affecting Constituent -> Notes or Action -> Notes? Both? I've seen a lot more weird stuff with Action Notes and Media than with Constituent Notes.

7. How's your database integrity? I mean-- is your database running ok, not having any space or size issues? In Blackbaud Mgt Console, if you have not run any of Maintenance operations in a while, (e.g. Rebuild Indexes, Check Integrity, etc) now might be a great time. (Be sure to backup first though, of course.)

Brent Barton · April 2018

Ray Wilson:

Hello all,

We are experiencing an issue on my campus with adding and viewing notes in RE. A user can create a new note in RE, however when they go to save it, RE locks up. When the user clicks on the Save button again they get the "Application is busy, click 'Switch To' or 'Retry' to continue" error. We are using a self-hosted solution and our current setup is using Windows 2012 Server for our database and Windows 7 and 10 with Office 2016 on the client side. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thank you,

Ray Wilson

Texas State University

Hi Ray,

Here are two more things to explore.

New versions of Microsoft Office and other Microsoft software are often incompatible with Raiser's Edge until Blackbaud eventually releases a patch or a new version. I have experienced situations where a new Microsoft Office version created problems with Raiser's Edge in unexpected areas (outside of the Mail function and Microsoft Office integration functions). You might want to review Knowledgebase article number 98871 (Is The Raiser's Edge compatible with Microsoft Office 2016?) which explains some limitations and known issues regarding compatibility with Microsoft Office 2016 -- for example, only the 32-bit version of Microsoft Office 2016 is compatible with Raiser's Edge 7.96 (with Patch 4 or higher patch). You might want to consider downgrading to Microsoft Office 2013 (32-bit version).

When I recently had problems with our split-hosted NetCommunity 7.1 web server and its communication with the Raiser's Edge database, Blackbaud warned me not to upgrade to .NET 4.7. I am not sure exactly what the incompatibilities are, but I guess that .NET 4.7 might cause problems with Raiser's Edge 7.96 (up through Patch 8) and communication with the database.

Best wishes,

Brent

Brent Barton, Information Systems Analyst

Loma Linda University

Ray Wilson · April 2018

Isaac Comer:

Ray Wilson:

John - That's a good idea. I have a test machine that is having the same issue, so I duplicated it to tried and find a hidden window. The only thing I found was the "Application is busy..." window, but nothing else unfortunately. I also checked Task Manager as well to see if there was a hidden window, but no luck. But I'll keep looking.

Steven -

1) This is currently affecing some of our users, but it is spreading. I checked and the common rights amoung all of them are 'All RE Users', 'All Advancement Users'.

2) Only affects some of the client machines in our area. The machines affected are using OS Windows 7 or Windows 10 and using MS Office 2016 or 365. I can duplicate it on the affected machines using my login credentials. However, my computer is not affected when I login and use RE.

3) It is affecting all Note types now. Before it was only affecting Constituent Notes, but it is now affecting all Note types.

4) As far as I'm aware, everyone is manually entering their notes directly using the Notes editor. When they go to Save and Close, that's when it locks up and you get the "Application is busy..." window. From what I see in Task Manager (using Analyze Wait Chain in Windows 10), it is locking up both RE and Windows processes.

5) This issue started late December on one machine, but spread to three more in January. We moved up an RE upgrade in hopes that it would fix the issue, but it did not. There was an Office update that was pushed out to most client machines on campus in December. I tried rolling back those updates via System Restore, but the issue remained. I do not believe there was a Group Policy change recently, but if there were one it should affect all machines running RE.

I have created a case with Blackbaud concerning this issue, but have received no solutions so far. I've examined almost everything that could have created this issue, but found no common thread. The only odd thing is this issue is spreading to other machines. In the last couple of weeks, three computers that did not have this issue before are now affected. I greatly appreciate any help with this issue!

Thank you,

Ray Wilson

Texas State University

Hi Issac,

Thank you for taking the time to respond on this issue. I greatly appreciate it! Here are my answers:

1) The only way to get RE usable again is to force quit RE in Task Manager. When I noticed that Word was locking up when attempting to save the note, I tried to just force quit the Word process, but that caused RE to become unstable and was forced to close.

2) Yes. Once the problem appears on a computer, it will always happen.

3) It happens on both. I mainly see it creating new notes, but I'm also seeing it when users try to view an existing note. They are unable to make any edits to existing notes.

4) As far as I know, most of them are typing the text in directly into the notes editor. There may be a few of them that are copying and pasting from another source, but a majority are entering the notes in manually.

5) I did this exact step right before I saw this posted and the notes in RE work just fine. This confirmed a couple of things for me: a) This is definitely a Word/Office issue related to an unknown update that was installed around December/January. b) RE is not dependent on Word to use the Notes feature. Which means that (possibly) we can force RE to use another application (Notepad/Wordpad) as the text editor. I know it will be difficult due to the Mail Merge feature, but it is a promising development.

6) It's happening to both. I'm seeing it more with Constituent Notes, but that becasue those users are reporting the issue happening there than Actions. But I will have to say it's pretty equal.

7) Our DB integrity is pretty good as of now. We have a dedicated server and VM just for our database. I believe the last time I ran any of the maintenace operations was back in January when we upgraded RE to address this issue. But I will definitley look into running that again to see if that eliminates this issue (with backups, of course).

Ray Wilson · April 2018

Brent Barton:

Ray Wilson:

Hello all,

We are experiencing an issue on my campus with adding and viewing notes in RE. A user can create a new note in RE, however when they go to save it, RE locks up. When the user clicks on the Save button again they get the "Application is busy, click 'Switch To' or 'Retry' to continue" error. We are using a self-hosted solution and our current setup is using Windows 2012 Server for our database and Windows 7 and 10 with Office 2016 on the client side. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Thank you,

Ray Wilson

Texas State University

Hi Ray,

Here are two more things to explore.

New versions of Microsoft Office and other Microsoft software are often incompatible with Raiser's Edge until Blackbaud eventually releases a patch or a new version. I have experienced situations where a new Microsoft Office version created problems with Raiser's Edge in unexpected areas (outside of the Mail function and Microsoft Office integration functions). You might want to review Knowledgebase article number 98871 (Is The Raiser's Edge compatible with Microsoft Office 2016?) which explains some limitations and known issues regarding compatibility with Microsoft Office 2016 -- for example, only the 32-bit version of Microsoft Office 2016 is compatible with Raiser's Edge 7.96 (with Patch 4 or higher patch). You might want to consider downgrading to Microsoft Office 2013 (32-bit version).

When I recently had problems with our split-hosted NetCommunity 7.1 web server and its communication with the Raiser's Edge database, Blackbaud warned me not to upgrade to .NET 4.7. I am not sure exactly what the incompatibilities are, but I guess that .NET 4.7 might cause problems with Raiser's Edge 7.96 (up through Patch 8) and communication with the database.

Best wishes,

Brent

Brent Barton, Information Systems Analyst

Loma Linda University

Hi Brent,

We did have some early issues between RE and Office 2016, but they had resolved itself with subsequent RE updates. I believe there was an update that came down from Microsoft that caused this issue. Our campus (at the time) pushed out Microsoft Windows/Office updates monthly to all machines, but doesn't require restarts. So the users that restarted to apply the Office update were seeing the notes issue first. Then, as users restarted or received new computers with all updates and MS Office 365 installed, they began to experience the issue. Downgrading to MS Office 2013 is an option, but since that application hit End-of-Life last week, our IT Security department is reluctant to let anyone continue using Office 2013 for very long. We are looking to upgrade from 7.96 patch 5 to patch 8 in the coming weeks once we are done with our current fundraising campaign. Once we do that and test this issue again, I will report back with the results to keep everyone in the loop.

Yes, we ran into that exact issue with NetCommunity a couple of weeks ago. We were able to downgrade back to .NET 4.5.x and we are running with no issues on that front. Blackbaud was not able to tell me the exact imcompatibilities with .NET 4.7.1 either. But we are planning to upgrade NetCommunity to the newest patch in the coming weeks as well.

Thank you for the advice. I greatly appreciate it!

Isaac Comer · April 2018

Ray Wilson:

Isaac Comer:

Ray Wilson:

John - That's a good idea. I have a test machine that is having the same issue, so I duplicated it to tried and find a hidden window. The only thing I found was the "Application is busy..." window, but nothing else unfortunately. I also checked Task Manager as well to see if there was a hidden window, but no luck. But I'll keep looking.

Steven -

1) This is currently affecing some of our users, but it is spreading. I checked and the common rights amoung all of them are 'All RE Users', 'All Advancement Users'.

2) Only affects some of the client machines in our area. The machines affected are using OS Windows 7 or Windows 10 and using MS Office 2016 or 365. I can duplicate it on the affected machines using my login credentials. However, my computer is not affected when I login and use RE.

3) It is affecting all Note types now. Before it was only affecting Constituent Notes, but it is now affecting all Note types.

4) As far as I'm aware, everyone is manually entering their notes directly using the Notes editor. When they go to Save and Close, that's when it locks up and you get the "Application is busy..." window. From what I see in Task Manager (using Analyze Wait Chain in Windows 10), it is locking up both RE and Windows processes.

5) This issue started late December on one machine, but spread to three more in January. We moved up an RE upgrade in hopes that it would fix the issue, but it did not. There was an Office update that was pushed out to most client machines on campus in December. I tried rolling back those updates via System Restore, but the issue remained. I do not believe there was a Group Policy change recently, but if there were one it should affect all machines running RE.

I have created a case with Blackbaud concerning this issue, but have received no solutions so far. I've examined almost everything that could have created this issue, but found no common thread. The only odd thing is this issue is spreading to other machines. In the last couple of weeks, three computers that did not have this issue before are now affected. I greatly appreciate any help with this issue!

Thank you,

Ray Wilson

Texas State University

Hi Issac,

Thank you for taking the time to respond on this issue. I greatly appreciate it! Here are my answers:

1) The only way to get RE usable again is to force quit RE in Task Manager. When I noticed that Word was locking up when attempting to save the note, I tried to just force quit the Word process, but that caused RE to become unstable and was forced to close.

2) Yes. Once the problem appears on a computer, it will always happen.

3) It happens on both. I mainly see it creating new notes, but I'm also seeing it when users try to view an existing note. They are unable to make any edits to existing notes.

4) As far as I know, most of them are typing the text in directly into the notes editor. There may be a few of them that are copying and pasting from another source, but a majority are entering the notes in manually.

5) I did this exact step right before I saw this posted and the notes in RE work just fine. This confirmed a couple of things for me: a) This is definitely a Word/Office issue related to an unknown update that was installed around December/January. b) RE is not dependent on Word to use the Notes feature. Which means that (possibly) we can force RE to use another application (Notepad/Wordpad) as the text editor. I know it will be difficult due to the Mail Merge feature, but it is a promising development.

6) It's happening to both. I'm seeing it more with Constituent Notes, but that becasue those users are reporting the issue happening there than Actions. But I will have to say it's pretty equal.

7) Our DB integrity is pretty good as of now. We have a dedicated server and VM just for our database. I believe the last time I ran any of the maintenace operations was back in January when we upgraded RE to address this issue. But I will definitley look into running that again to see if that eliminates this issue (with backups, of course).

Well, I'm glad you've got it narrowed down at least to Word/Office related. So you can probably skip the database integrity stuff.

Relating to MS Office/Word, there are two issues I am aware of that may or may not be in the Knowledgebase yet --

1. There is an app named "Skype for Business". (Not to be confused with "Skype Meetings App" or some other Skype.) I think this is actually "Lync" rebranded. Anyway, if it's installed, then certain very specific word merge functionality in RE simply will not work. At a key point, MS Word will fail to launch.

2. There is an add-in for MS Office named "Send to Bluetooth". When it's installed, under certain circumstances, an MS Office app will hang for a while or indefinitely. Instructions on how to disable it here: http://merchantstand.com/2014/03/fix-microsoft-office-programs-crashing-disable-bluetooth-add-in/

Of course it's possilbe that neither of those is your real issue. I like Brent Barton's idea of checking the .Net version. And I do think this is likely a problem where some MS update has changed some seemingly inoocuous piece of some dll of MS Office in a subtle way that's totally breaking RE. That could explain how the problem seems to be "spreading". It would also mean it's something that might be in our future.

FWIW, my system's .Net version is 4.7.1, and we're still on Windows 7. The OS is 64 bit, but our MS Office is 2013, 32-bit.

Notes Issue in Raiser's Edge 7.96

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