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Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) Support Tip of the Week #12

in Best Practices, IBM, Implementation, TBSM, Tivoli, Usability

When in doubt, “Alt-TAB it out”.

I’ve spent the better part of 45 hours of the 72 hours knee deep in TBSM v4.2 solution development. The TBSM administrator’s laptop environment was far from ideal (1Gb Mem) and he was using FF3 as his browser with Sun JRE 1.6. Throughout the course of developing the TBSM solution, we experienced many of the usual “possessed”, random and ghost like behaviors that can be experienced when working with this type of set up in a web based, Java application. I finally had him downgrade to FF2 and JRE 1.6 and this nearly eliminated many of the things we were seeing with FF3.

My current theory is that there are some significant “session”, “state” or “context” things happening when interacting with certain TBSM configuration screens, especially when additional pop up windows spring out for configuration steps. You’ll often just be unable to complete the task, the browser window will not respond, things won’t advance to next step, delete, update, etc.

What I found was that a simple “Alt-TAB” to shift the “context” away from the current browser window to something else and then “Alt-TAB” back to the same browser window and things are all back to normal. I’m not a Java guru by any means and don’t profess to be in tune with all the operating methods of TIP within TBSM v4.2, but there’s something of a “perfect storm” happening when the end user system, browser, JRE, etc. interact with TBSM that these windowing, mouse actions, etc. cause a lot of very weird, abnormal and painful occurrences for the TBSM admin and potentially a TBSM end user.

If you’re experiencing something odd like this, give the “ALT-Tab” trick a try. If things just randomly occur as I’ve described, consider your laptop/desktop environment, browser and JRE versions as a potential issue. If you can consistently recreate some weird behavior at least a few times, even after killing your browser and/or restarting TBSM, consider opening a PMR!