When Things Go Wrong

While I can recommend K4 v6 I am finding a number of rough edges that need to be sanded down. A mark of well done software is how well it works when users do things go wrong. K4 falls short on this front.

There is a problem of clearly communicating problems to the user. Error messages are often full of technical terms but do not state anything useful about the cause of the problem and how to solve it.

One problem that came up last week was caused by a user undoing the task acceptance of another user. Or to use the K4 v5 terminology, last week an editor undid a designer’s checkout of an article so she could edit it. Unfortunately the layout the designer was working on never got the message. So when the designer attempted to check in the layout, he kept getting messages that he couldn’t check in the articles, which prevented the layout from being checked in. He couldn’t check in the articles because his checkout was undone. So he was left in an impossible situation, K4 wouldn’t allow him to undo any of his checkouts so he ended up force quitting InDesign. I am finding that the K4 database and clients do not seem to communicate well when something goes wrong and the client information differs from the server’s.

In a similar vain, on a few occasions an InCopy user has received an error message on checking out an article. The message is vague, saying something about some objects not being available. The InCopy window opens, but if you look closely the Query Panel does not show that the article was checked out. This is not usually noticed so the editor edits the piece and gets a vague alert when attempting to check in the article. They can’t since the K4 Server didn’t think it was checked out. Saving the editor’s work is then my job.