October 2010 release deployed

The One ABB on the Web October 2010 release was deployed to abb.com today and to inside.abb.com on Thursday.

To check out what is new in the release, please see the release information on Web Center.

August 2010 release deployed

The One ABB on the Web August 2010 release was deployed to abb.com today and to inside.abb.com on Thursday.

To check out what is new in the release, please see the release information on Web Center.

June 2010 release deployed

The One ABB on the Web June 2010 release was deployed to abb.com today and to inside.abb.com on Thursday.

To check out what is new in the release, please see the release information on Web Center.

April 2010 release deployed

The One ABB on the Web April 2010 release was deployed to abb.com today and to inside.abb.com on Thursday.

To check out what is new in the release, please see the release information on Web Center.

In this release we introduced the "silent login" feature for ABB employees on abb.com. This feature may have intermittent problems, i.e. it may not work at all times for all users (the user will get a "we are sorry" error message). If this happens, you can always use the "manual" login (type in e-mail address and password) instead.

The reason to the problem are clock synchronization issues between servers. We did not experience these problems in our testing and development environments, but discovered now that there may be problems in the production environment. We are working on the issue and trying to find a solution as soon as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience.

February 2010 release deployed

The One ABB on the Web February 2010 release was deployed to abb.com today and to inside.abb.com on Thursday.

To check out what is new in the release, please see the release information on Web Center.

December 2009 release deployed

The One ABB on the Web December 2009 release was deployed to abb.com today and to inside.abb.com on Thursday.

To check out what is new in the release, please see the release information on Web Center.

We have a known issue with the new version of PIS (Product Information Services, a.k.a "automatic Data tab") in the release. The list of products on the Data tab is empty. The ABB Products team is working on the problem and trying to resolve it as soon as possible.

Websites down due to maintenance on Sunday Nov 8, 2009

Major network maintenance work will be carried out in the IBM data center in Ehningen, Germany, on Sunday November 8, 2009.

The work is scheduled to be done between 12:00 and 14:00 CET. This will cause temporary unavailability of www.abb.com, country sites and inside.abb.com. Other systems may be affected as well. Downtime of the websites will be minimized as best as possible but some unavailability between 12:00 and 14:00 is unavoidable.

October 2009 release deployed

The One ABB on the Web October 2009 release was deployed to abb.com today and to inside.abb.com on Thursday.

To check out what is new in the release, please see the release information on Web Center.

September 2009 release deployed

The One ABB on the Web September release was deployed to abb.com today and to inside.abb.com on Thursday.

To check out what is new in the release, please see the release information on Web Center.

The release was postponed by two weeks from the originally planned date due to some unexpected problems with inside.abb.com.

www01.se.abb.com server upgrade on Sep 19, 2009

The www01.se.abb.com server (Lotus Notes name: ABB-COM-HTTP10/COM/ABB) will be upgraded from Domino R7 to Domino 8.5 on Saturday Sep 19, 2009. The upgrade will begin in the morning (Central European time) and is expected to finish within a few hours.

The server will be unavailable to users during the upgrade.

The upgrade should not have any influence on applications running on that server, but application owners are advised to test their application after the upgrade.

stage-www.abb.com maintenance on Sep 12

The stage-www.abb.com server will be down for maintenance work on Saturday September 12 most of the day. The server will be upgraded from Domino 7 to Domino 8.5.

Content authors needing to do work in CAWP on Saturday are advised to work on some other server.

June 2009 abb.com release deployed

The June 2009 abb.com release was deployed today. You can read what is new in the release on the Web Center.

inside.abb.com release deployed

The inside.abb.com June 2009 release was deployed today. You can read what is new in this release on the Web Center.

Removal of inside.xx.abb.com addresses

Some obsolete addresses in the format inside.xx.abb.com where xx is a country code will be redirected to inside.abb.com end of June. Please see the article on Web Center for more information.

Information has been sent out to the country site managers and IS managers of the affected countries.

inside.abb.com release deployed

The inside.abb.com release was deployed today. You can read what is new in this release on the Web Center.

The most visible changes in this release are the new inside.abb.com Group site main page and support for threaded discussions in page comments.

May 2009 abb.com release deployed

The May 2009 abb.com release was deployed today. You can read what is new in the release on the Web Center.

The inside.abb.com release was cancelled due to unexpected technical difficulties. We are working on solving the problems and the release will hopefully be deployed mid next week.

March 2009 release deployed

The March 2009 abb.com release was deployed today. The same release was deployed to inside.abb.com already on March 5. You can read the details of what is new in this release on the Web Center.

The search problems that we had on inside.abb.com after the release on Thursday were fixed on Friday. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Problems with search on inside.abb.com

The search function on inside.abb.com is experiencing problems after the inside.abb.com release done today. In some cases users get an error message when trying to do a search. We hope to solve the issue as soon as possible, but in practice it will probably take until Friday noon CET.

January 2009 abb.com release deployed

The January 2009 abb.com release was deployed today. This is the same release that was already deployed to inside.abb.com on January 15.

You can read the details of what is new in this release on the Web Center.

abb.com server upgrade

The servers running abb.com and the country sites are being upgraded to new 64-bit servers. The first part of the upgrade was completed today and www.abb.com and half of the country sites were migrated to the new servers.

The remaining country sites are still running on the old 32-bit servers and will be migrated in the second phase in the near future.

The upgrade improves the performance of the website and offers ample capacity to meet the demands set by the growing traffic. HTTP compression is used on the new servers to accelerate the loading of pages especially from continents other than Europe.

The sites have been thoroughly tested, but if you find any issues, please contact Global-Helpdesk CAWP.

The following sites were migrated today and are now running on the new servers:

www.abb.com
www.abb.com.ar
www.abbaustralia.com.au
www.au.abb.com
www.abb.at
www.abb.com.bo
www.abb.com.br
www.abb.bg
www.abb.ca
www.abb.cl
www.abb.com.cn
www.abb.com.co
www.abb.cz
www.abb.dk
www.eg.abb.com
www.abb.com.ec
www.abb.ee
www.abb.fi
www.abb.fr
www.abb.gr
www.abb.com.hk
www.abb.hu
www.abb.co.in
www.abbindonesia.co.id
www.abb.ie
www.abb.co.il
www.abb.it
www.abb.co.jp
www.abb.kz
www.abb.co.kr
www.mena.abb.com
www.abb.es
www.abb.ch

The following sites were not yet migrated and are still running on the old servers:

www.abb.nl
www.abb.be
www.abb.de
www.abb.lv
www.abb.lt
www.abb.com.my
www.abb.com.mx
www.abb.co.nz
www.ng.abb.com
www.abb.no
www.abb.com.pe
www.abb.ph
www.abb.pl
www.abb.pt
www.abb.com.ro
www.abb.ru
www.abb.com.sa
www.abb.com.sg
www.abb.sk
www.abb.si
www.abb.co.za
www.abb.se
www.abb.com.tw
www.abb.co.th
www.abb.com.tr
www.abb.ua
www.abb.co.uk
www.abb.us
www.abb.com.ve
www.ve.abb.com
www.abb.com.vn

January 2009 inside.abb.com release deployed

A new inside.abb.com release was deployed today. The most significant change is the new look and feel which aligns the site with our new branding. You can read the details of what is included in the release on Web Center.

We have a couple of outstanding issues related to mastheads in the new design. Mastheads are not working on all pages yet. We hope to have the problem solved later today.

November abb.com/inside.abb.com release deployed

A new release was deployed to abb.com today. The same release was deployed to inside.abb.com already on Thursday.

The biggest change in this release is the new design for abb.com. You can read what else is new or changed in this release on inside.abb.com.

New branding for ABB websites

On November 8, 2008 www.abb.com and all country websites will have a new graphical design. The new design is now being tested in the abb.com Staging environment. Country site managers and content owners are encouraged to test their sites in the new design before the launch.

You can find more detailed information on inside.abb.com.

September abb.com/inside.abb.com release deployed

A new release was deployed to abb.com today. The same release was deployed to inside.abb.com already on Thursday.

You can read what is new or changed in this release on inside.abb.com.

Segmentation in SiteStat

There was a new release of SiteStat last week which includes a feature called "segmentation." While it is not exactly easy to use, my first impression is that it is a very powerful feature which allows us to get answers to questions that previously were not possible to answer.

For example, suppose you wanted to know how many visits there were to your product page. Previously you could only find the total number of visits to the page. However, often product managers want to know e.g. how many visits to that page there were from US, Germany or some other country. This is now possible using segmentation.

The segmentation function acts as a kind of a filter. I.e. instead of displaying the total visits, you specify that you want only visits from Germany.

In addition to visitor's country, you can segment the report using about 30 other criteria.

New abb.com release deployed

The release mentioned in the previous blog post was successfully deployed to abb.com today.

New inside.abb.com release deployed

A new release of inside.abb.com was deployed today. Please see the release information on inside.abb.com for the details.

The same release will be deployed to abb.com on Saturday.

Problems on new inside.abb.com servers

One of the new inside.abb.com servers is experiencing trouble. Some users will experience extremely slow response times or will get error messages. IBM is on the case.

This problem influences only sites that have already migrated to the new platform (Norway, Germany, Finland, Brazil, Australia, Italy, Czech Republic).

May 10 release postponed

The One ABB on the Web release which was supposed to be deployed on May 10 has been postponed. This is mainly due to problems we are experiencing with the login function. In this release we are switching to use the new Global DMZ Authentication service. There were some issues in integration with this service and unfortunately we did not have enough time to fix all these issues in time.

The new date for the abb.com release is Saturday May 24 (tentative, the date may change).

The new date for the inside.abb.com release is Wednesday May 14.

Always use inside.abb.com, never a specific server name!

We would like to remind you that when you are sending links to inside.abb.com by e-mail, you should never use inside.xx.abb.com or gad01-50.xx.abb.com or other "hard coded" server names in the link. You must always use inside.abb.com.

The reason is that only the address inside.abb.com uses the global load balancer. The load balancer automatically takes the user to the closest available server. The mechanism is not perfect so the server may not be the closest one, but at least it takes you to a server that works. Whereas, if you use a hard coded server name, there is no guarantee of that particular server being available.

This is not a problem only with links sent by e-mail. We see that some inside.abb.com country sites have a lot of such hard coded server references in their links. This will lead to trouble when we migrate inside.abb.com to the new web platform later this year. Therefore, please take the habit of fixing such links when you happen to come across them.

Problems with inside.abb.com server in Germany

The GAD01-50.DE server in Germany is currently experiencing problems. IBM has been working on fixing it for several hours today. We hope they can get the server back in business as soon as possible.

inside.abb.com browsing should not be affected since the load balancing automatically takes the user to whatever server is available.

New release deployed on Jan 26

A new release of One ABB on the Web and CAWP was rolled out today. The deployment went smoothly and the site seems to be running fine on the new version.

For details on what is new in this release, please read the release information page on inside.abb.com.

CAWP to no longer support Notes R5

Beginning with the March 15 release CAWP will no longer support Lotus Notes client versions older than R7. If you still have R5 (or R6), please make sure you upgrade your client now.

Preview working again

The Preview function should now be working again.

If you find any problems, please report them to Global-Helpdesk CAWP/NOABB/ABB. Please include the following information:

• Which page in which database you were trying to Preview (provide a screen shot)
• Which server you were using the database from (check in File - Database - Properties)
• What was the date and time when you were trying to preview

Problems with Preview

Since early Thursday morning we are experiencing problems with Preview of abb.com pages. It seems as if the error is caused by a bug in Microsoft .NET but we are not yet sure.

A possible work-around has been identified and we are waiting for IBM to implement it. Preview should be available again within a couple of hours.

This problems concerns only the Preview for abb.com pages. Preview for inside.abb.com pages is working normally.

Error rate on site higher than normal - why?

We have previously learned that the "error 500 rate" is the best overall health indicator of the operational status of the website. The error 500 rate is the number of HTTP 500 errors logged divided by the number of page views logged within a given time period.


Since our release in September the error rate on abb.com has been higher than before. The error rate figure for last week was 0.11%. We are still struggling to understand why. What makes things difficult is that we have not been able to reproduce these errors ourselves. It seems the problems are either intermittent (one time when you click a link you get an error, the next time you click things work fine) or that they plague only users with certain browser versions, browser settings or language/country preference settings.

If you have experienced these errors on the site or have heard from customers who have had trouble accessing certain pages on the site, please let us know.

New release deployed on Nov 17

A new release of CAWP and One ABB on the Web was deployed on November 17. Details on what is new in this release can be found on inside.abb.com.

The stock ticker on inside.abb.com has not yet been updated to the new version. It will be updated during the course of the day.

New release deployed on Sep 8

A new release of CAWP and One ABB on the Web was rolled out on September 8. You can read what is new in this release on inside.abb.com.

There are a couple of known issues that have been discovered after the release:

• Sitemap does not work on all sites (at least http://www.abb.com.cn/ and http://www.abb.co.in/ are having problems)
• The stock ticker on inside.abb.com was not changed as described in the release notes because of a problem with the link in the ticker
• Some problems with Preview have been reported. Some pages fail to preview for some people but preview fine for others. It seems that in most cases the problem can be solved by deleting cookies and temporary files from Internet Explorer and restarting the browser.

These problems are being addressed at high priority.

Motors, Drives and Power Electronics tree split

The Motors, Drives and Power Electronics tree split was implemented in the Products & Services section of abb.com over the weekend. The old product tree level 0 "Motors, Drives and Power Electronics" was dissolved into three separate level 0s: "Motors and Generators", "Drives" and "Power Electronics." Essentially, what used to be level 1s in the tree were promoted to become level 0s, and the old level 0 was removed.

The split was done during the weekend since a lot of changes needed to be done to the structure in the CAWP database. During business days a lot of content providers are working in the database, so the job was better done outside normal working time in order to avoid replication conflicts and the like. We also wanted to do it during time of low traffic on the website, in case some hiccups would arise.

The transformation into the new structure went fine and there were no bigger issues. It did take a significant amount of work, though, mainly due to the need to clean up the structure first, and because there were 18 language versions to update (some of which are not yet published). The old structure in the database had accumulated all sorts of minor errors that had to be rectified before the structure transformation could be done.

The three new level 0s can be found inside the same old "Motors, Drives and Power Electronics" database, so content authors can work as they used to. The old M,D&PE level 0 page can also be found in the database but it is no longer actively displayed in the navigation on the site. There are still a lot of pages linking to this page so it will be kept for a period of time.

See:
http://www.abb.com/drives
http://www.abb.com/motors&generators
http://www.abb.com/powerelectronics

The old shortcut URL http://www.abb.com/motors&drives leads to the old level 0 page, which, as mentioned above, will be kept for a while.

New release and problems earlier this week

A new release was rolled out to abb.com and all country sites today. On inside.abb.com/webcenter you will find the details of what is new in the release.

Unrelated to the release, we have had some problems on the site on Wednesday and Thursday this week. First the search function stopped working because the Google Search Appliance had a crash. Then some product pages started failing to load. This turned out to be a problem with some content databases reverting to an old design for no apparent reason. There was also a problem with the amount of data in the Medium Voltage Products database growing too large for Domino to handle. Not to mention a disk failure on IBM's monitoring system and problems with our web statistics tools. All this within 48 hours. And this wasn't yet the full list of problems we had.

Most of the problems we were able to fix quickly, minimizing the impact on visitors. But it is quite a coincidence that so many unrelated problems occur almost at the same time. Thus quite a lot of time this week was spent on fire-fighting these issues. Luckily not all problems affected visitors of the website.

After the new release things are looking bright again. Error rate on the site is low and everything seems to be working fine.

Problems with search today

We had problems with the search function on abb.com between 10:30 and 13:30 CET today. It seems the abb.com Google Search Appliance has had some kind of failure. We have switched the search to use a backup Appliance until the problems with the abb.com Appliance have been solved.

New release rolled out

The new release was rolled out to abb.com and all country sites on Saturday June 16. The originally planned release date was June 2 but as you have read earlier on this blog, we had to postpone the release by two weeks.

You can find the details on what is new in this release on http://inside.abb.com/webcenter.

Together with the release we did some changes to the infrastructure in order to have more redundancy as well as more capacity to cope with more traffic in the future. These changes caused temporary unavailability of the site for a short period on Saturday around noon (CET).

Server problems in production

We're currently (wednesday afternoon) experiencing problems on abb.com and the ABB country sites. Error rate is far above normal and quite a few connections time out. The hosting center is investigating the problems.

UPDATE 18:10; Problem fixed, caused by overload of Domino server, root cause being analyzed.

1ABB release 2.2 has been postponed

The 1ABB release scheduled for June 2 has been postponed. Over the last week we have experienced stability problems on the Production servers as well as on the Domino Stage server. We have decided to postpone the release because:

• The problems on the Domino Stage server may be related to the new release which we have been testing in Stage this week, or they may be totally unrelated. To be on the safe side, we don't want to deploy the new release into Production until we know what has caused the problems.


• We want to solve the stability problems in Production before deploying the new release. If the problems in Production should continue, we cannot be sure if the problems are "new" (caused by the new release) or "old" (caused by other issues that have been causing problems last week).

Currently the new tentative date for deployment is June 16. The deployment must be done on a weekend when traffic is low. The previous weekend (June 9) is not possible for the IBM hosting team in Germany due to a public holiday.

Web authors must change settings after installing Notes 7

When you upgrade to Notes 7, the client is by default installed with options that will cause links in CAWP to break on pages you edit. To restore your setting, follow the instructions on inside web center. (The link will only work if you are connected to ABB's corporate network.)

Problem with Italian product pages now solved

We've had a problem with some Italian product pages since early May, and it took quite some investigation to find out why. The reason turned out to be some new translations of document categories that the Library team had introduced. In one of the categories they had used a special character that was misunderstood by the web platform and caused the page to fail. As a result, anyone trying to open one of these pages would get an error message.

A fix was deployed to production by Wednesday noon, and the server error rate immediately dropped from 5 to below 2 per 1000.

Hotfix deployed this afternoon

This afternoon we deployed a hotfix to abb.com. The purpose is to reduce the load on the database servers that have had trouble handling all the traffic since the 1abb 2.0 release in early February. The fix has next to no effect on the functionality of the site, the only small difference is in the automatic navigation pages in Products & Services, where we will no longer show summaries in English where translations are not available.

The deploy it self went smoothly with no effect on users. The fix is expected to result in a significant reduction of CPU load, but the full effect will not be known until we have full traffic load on Monday.

Disappearing inside pages - Part 4

On Friday we were sure we had fixed the problem with the disappearing inside pages (see below) - but alas. This morning it started happening again, but now at least Group IS knows why.
We thought there was something wrong with the so-called global load balancing server in Germany, but unfortunately it was not that easy. When the German server was closed down, all traffic was redirected to the Swedish server, which started showing the same problems as soon as traffic increased. So the problem turns out to be a general one, i.e. it happens when the load balancer receives a lot of traffic. You might say inside is a victim of its own success!
Group IS will have a meeting later this week to try to find a permanent solution to the problem. Let's keep our fingers crossed!

New release deployed today - no disturbances

Today we deployed a new release (1ABB2.1b) with some minor but urgent updates to abb.com. The most important is the ability for logged-in users to access restricted documents from ABB Library. We also fixed some of the most visible bugs; Images on additional pages are no longer displayed twice in the same page and the problem were the body text was displayed in the margin of some additional pages is solved. The problem with Library links in the Service Guide is also fixed.
The best news is that the deployment was done without causing any significant disturbances to users. This has been a recurring problem with earlier deployments, so let's hope we avoid seeing them again - ever! We're planning another minor release next week hoping to significantly reduce the load on the database servers that has caused us so much headache since we launched version 2.0 in February this year.

Disappearing inside pages - Part 3

It seems the house wizard's clever little trick did the job. Based on his info Vladimir Kirillov in Group IS managed to find the culprit; Apparently the global load balancer in Germany, that was directing 90% of the inside traffic, had gone bananas. When that server was retired things went back to normal, i.e. users are now sent to their nearest inside server rather than on a round-the-world trip.
If the same problem - that old versions of a page start re-appearing - should come back, here is what to do: Open this page on inside and copy the content into a mail. Then do a ipconfig /all using the command prompt and copy the result into the same mail. Send it off to Global-Helpdesk CAWP/NOABB/ABB explaining how long the problem has persisted. Ask you local help desk for assistance if needed.

Disappearing inside pages - Part 2

We've done some further investigation into the "vanishing" inside pages that I described some days ago, where published updates suddenly disappear. Our house wizard Niklas has developed a nifty little script on an inside page, so that every time the page is opened he can log which server gave him the page.
The test was done from Finland, where the closest servers are in Sweden. But to his surprise - and mine - the three Swedish servers in total had only a third of the traffic. The most used server was in fact in China, followed by Italy. The page was at times also served from the US, India, Singapore, Brazil and Poland. No wonder that updates disappear, as it takes time before a change is replicated to the most remote corners of the corporate network.
We have passed the "evidence" on to the network guys in Group IS and are eagerly awaiting their response.

Server stability problems again yesterday

We had an incident with a higher-than-normal error rate on the abb.com site again yesterday. Apparently some bug in .Net triggered the problem and one front-end server was at times doing odd and unpredictable things. This caused e.g. some links to be written in incorrect format, producing errors when users clicked on them. Once discovered the problem was quickly fixed by clearing the .Net cache and restarting the IIS server on the affected front-end.
We are soon introducing better monitoring for the websites. Until now we have used the standard Group IS monitoring tool but this fucuses only on slow server response. The page view error percentage seems to be a much better indicator of the general health status of the site so we plan to constantly track that error rate to generate alerts.

Waiting for your page to refresh?

You have updated your home page with time critical information like the quarterly results but nothing seems to happen on the site for ages? Or perhaps; Your colleague can see the updated page but you can't?
The reason is caching; Pages on the server are updated only every half hour to make it possible for the servers to handle the huge traffic we have on the site. As we have three so-called front-end servers, each of them refreshes it's cache individually so results may differ depending on which server you are connected to. Refreshing the page will not take you to a different server, you need to close your browser and restart Internet Explorer to have a chance of hitting another server.
We could theoretically empty the cache manually when important news is posted but currently that means removing the whole site from the cache which would cause a severe strain on the servers once they is restarted and need to rebuild all pages; This could make the whole site go down. We're looking at whether it will be possible to empty the cache of individual pages and hope to have a solution included in our May release.

Disappearing inside pages

Have you experienced updating a page on inside, checking that everything is fine and then suddenly discover that the previous version is shown? Not a pleasant surprise, especially if you are handling time critical content.
The reason why this may happen is that Group IS have set up a so-called global load balancer, and when they say global - they mean it. A load balancer distributes traffic among several servers to make sure you get the best possible connection. This means that traffic under certain circumstances can be routed to any inside server in ABB, so a US visitor could end up in Brazil, Poland, Singapore or even China. We've had the same issue here in Zurich, where we have replicated important content to all major inside servers, but still experience "old" content because traffic is sent to some remote server in the network where content has not yet arrived. Reloading the page does not help, but closing and restarting the browser may.
We have obviously raised the issue with IS several times, but they ask us to document these instances, which is difficult as these problems appear intermittent and it is sometimes impossible to find a pattern. Also, currently there is no way to find out what server you have been sent to, so documentation is difficult.
We discussed this in a meeting with the inside developers this morning, and agreed we should look into whether it would be possible to have the inside server "stamp" its name as a page is served. This would at least make it possible to investigate where traffic is re-routed and will hopefully help Group IS in finding a solution to these problems.