Excellent summary.

For #2, I would to state that I am very frustrated by this, since this was not the behavior in 8.3. Each column profile had its own attribute(s).

[ColumnProfile]ProfileName

It appears that the 8.3 attribute is retained on the user profile, but there is a new attribute set for column profiles that has a relatively meaningless name of "data".

[XmlColumnProfiles]Data

From my perspective, this move provides much less flexibility, resulting in a poor user experience. I used this to create column profiles that most users would need in various situations. This made training as easy as ever!

It also provided a starting place for users to modify them and save their own custom column profile. That means the "workaround" is rather challenging as most of my 200 users now have their own profiles.

Also, any updates I made to the "everyone" profiles was easily made and pushed to all users. This is a big step backwards and I am sorry I didn't catch this in testing. I might have delayed the upgrade (and forgone business processes) because of this.

Can someone explain why these attributes were changed? 

(I can move this discussion into a separate topic, if desired.)

Hey Kenny,

We changed the attribute mainly for performance reasons. We combined all of a user's profiles into one attribute and split them up using XML nodes. This means less server calls to fetch attributes, meaning faster performance and loading of the index.aspx page.

You mention that you find this approach less flexible, but i'm not sure I understand why. The format itself shouldn't have any impact on the actual functionality- it's just the way we store the information.

Were you creating your column profiles in the admin console? We generally anticipate that, if you want to push out a column profile to other users, you would simply save the profiles through the UI using a test user, then push them out to the individual users/everyone group by copying the attribute from that test user in the admin console.

If you prefer to build the attribute out in the admin console itself, you can certainly still do that too. Just paste the XML into your favorite text editor and follow format in place. Here's an example:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-16'?>
<columnprofiles generatedby='Laserfiche Client 9.1.0.310'>
  <profiles>
    <profile name='ProfileName'>
      <columns>
        <column Width='335' ColCode='N' Type='System' />
        <column Width='64' ColCode='G' Type='System' />
      </columns>
    </profile>
  </profiles>
</columnprofiles>

See more info on XML columns here.

That being said, I totally understand your frustration with the bug blocking users from accessing profiles saved to the everyone group. It does make the administrators life harder. I've spoken to the team lead for Web Access 9.1 and he confirmed that a fix is coming soon. In the meantime, I'm sorry for any inconvenience.

Let me know if you have any more questions on the issue Kenny.

The lack of flexibility has to do with my assumptions about how column profiles can be added.

My assumption is that the only way to add column profiles to every user (if they already have a custom profile) is to modify every individual's XML. This is not practical.

The previous method was to export the column profile attribute and add it to the everyone group.

Actually creating the profile is done just as you said: log in as a test user, create the profile and use those attribute.

Are the steps I described accurate? If so, how do the engineers expect administrators to disburse column profiles to users without editing the attributes for every individual user?

Hey Kenny,

I think I misunderstood the first part of your previous comment. It sounds like once issue 2 is taken care of, it should alleviate your primary concern (not being able to push attributes out through the everyone group). As mentioned before, this issue is bug in the software that we intend to fix in a future release and hotfix.

Now that issue #2 is supposed to be fixed in 9.1.1 service pack 1, how would I go about adding a column profile to a small number of users' profiles without messing up their current profiles?