Mac OS X Java Update Causing Problems with Java Web Start?

The most recent Java auto-update through OS X (Leopard) is causing some problems with Java Web Start, the program used to launch the My Docs Transporter program. If you've gone through the update and your Java Web Start is no longer available it means that the update wasn't completely successful.

A symptom of this is trying to launch a Java Web Start Application (Transporter for My Docs users) and having it open something that looks like a text file.

Fortunately there is a fairly simple solution to the problem. You can manually re-install the Java Update from this Apple location:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/application_updates/javaformacosx105update4.html

Let us know through the comments here if this doesn't work for you.

Planned outage for this coming Saturday April 17th

We've got some new hardware that needs to be installed this Saturday, April 17th. The addition of this new hardware will cause at least one outage of about 45 minutes and there may be other brief outages as well. The outages are scheduled for our least busy time of the week, on Saturday between the hours of 11:00am and 2:00 PM EST.   Of course we will do everything we can to keep them as short as possible.

Thanks for your patience as we continue to improve your user experience with My Docs Online.

Mysterious escape characters explained

We received the following question from a customer earlier today.  The question was something that many people are curious about so we've posted both the question and the answer below.  

Q - Is there any way to keep a space from changing to "%20" or "#" from changing to "%23" in a file name that's being uploaded to MDO through web folders or in the Public Folder?

A - The short answer is "No", and there are other special characters as well.

 

Using web folders means each file has to have a web URL and web URLs cannot include certain characters because they are used in HTML itself. "#" is one. Also blanks are not allowed. When a file name includes one of these characters they get replaced with an "escape" character which will start with % and a 2-digit code (%23 = # %20 = blank).

 

This is a web/internet thing, not a My Docs Online thing. All you can do is avoid using them in file names.

 

Here is a complete list (many of them aren't allowed in filenames in any case):

 

Table of URL Escape Characters
Character	Escape Character	Character	Escape Character
Space	%20	#	%23
$	%24	%	%25
&	%26	@	%40
'	%60	/	%2F
:	%3A	;	%3B
<	%3C	=	%3D
>	%3E	?	%3F
[	%5B	\	%5C
]	%5D	^	%5E
{	%7B	|	%7C
}	%7D	~	%7E

 

Scheduled outage for Saturday March 7th

We've got some new hardware that needs to be installed this Saturday, March 7th. The addition of this new hardware will cause at least one outage of about 20 minutes and there may be other brief outages as well. The outages are scheduled for our least busy time of the week, on Saturday between the hours of 2:00 and 5:00 PM EST.   Of course we will do everything we can to keep them as short as possible.

Thanks for your patience as we continue to improve your user experience with My Docs Online.

New Feature: Account Activity Logging and Reporting

We're pleased to introduce a new feature for Enterprise and Transcription Edition accounts that logs account activity and generates a daily report for the account administrator.

If you've ever wondered "when was this file uploaded" or "who deleted that folder" this new feature could be for you.

Each My Docs Online interface (browser, web folders, Transporter, etc) is now able to log key events like file upload/download/deletion, folder creation/deletion and many other events. Included in each log entry are time and date, login ID, and the IP address of the user.

We deliver the reports to account administrators by creating a "comma separated values" (CSV) file at about midnight for that day's activity, with the file generated and deposited in a special folder named "\Logs\Activity".

Using CSV files means each day's report can be downloaded to Excel for data manipulation like sorting or searching.

Currently this feature has to be configured by My Docs Online Support Staff, so if you are interested in using it contact support@mydocsonline.com and include your administrator ID, and we will turn the feature on for you.

Webfolders Instructions for Vista

As you may have noticed Microsoft's WebFolders works somewhat differently for Vista. We have added some very specific Vista related configuration instructions on our WebFolders page which can be found here under the section header Windows Vista: Creating a Webfolder.

As always if you have any problems at all please let us know and we are happy to help with Webfolders configuration.

If you have a Mac or an XP machine the Webfolders implementation is unchanged.

MDO user statistics

Some interesting statistics (at least to me :)) on how people are accessing the My Docs Online website.  These figures do not include Webfolders access, they are just related to the website itself.

Operating Systems

Windows 95%

Mac OSX    4%

Others               1%

(Interestingly the leading candidate in the others category is the Apple iPhone.  One other interesting note is that we have users accessing the website through the Playstation Portable gaming devise.)

Browsers

Internet Explorer 82%

Firefox 14%

Chrome 1%

Others 3%

It's not surprising that the largest percentage of our users accessing using IE but the Firefox numbers were a bit of a surprise.  Most of the people that we talk with on the phone are IE users.  

Other points of interest:

98.3% of our users have Java Enabled which is wonderful since Java is required to use the Transporter product.  If you haven't tried the Transporter you should.   Click here to download and test with it. 

Internet Service Providers (ISP) information - My Docs Users are very diverse when it comes to ISP usage.  The leader, as you might have guessed was Comcast, but they represent only 7.1% of our visitors.  Next is Road Runner, then Cox Communications, Quest and Bellsouth.    Last month our users accessed the website through over 3,500 different Internet Service Providers.

In terms of connection speed nearly all users access the My Docs site through some type of high speed connection.  Cable modem usage is the most popular with DSL running a fairly close second.  Amazingly enough 2% of our users still use dial up connections to connect to the Internet.  If you are one of those dial up users you will definitely want to consider using the Transporter.

Search Results - 80% of the people who find us via search find us using Google. The most popular search terms are different variations and spellings of My Docs Online.  Nearly 30% of the people who find us via search are looking specifically for My Docs Online.