People who use both IBM Lotus Notes and McAfee VirusScan Enterprise may want to hold off on upgrading to the latest version of the McAfee software. Installing McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.5i on a PC that also runs the Lotus Notes email client can lock people out of their mailboxes, the two companies have confirmed. Lotus Notes is a commonly used email application, particularly in larger organisations. McAfee, the world"s second-largest antivirus company, released VirusScan Enterprise 8.5i late November. "The upgrade locks people out and is causing Notes errors where we can not even restart Notes, but need to reinstall," said one IT administrator for a California company, who asked not to be identified. "This issue has created a higher-than-normal demand on our helpdesk; the cost to our company due to this issue is increasing every hour."
McAfee and IBM have both published support notices on the problem. The issue affects systems running Lotus Notes versions 6 and 7, according to the notices. After working with Lotus Notes for several hours, an error message will pop up: "You are not authorised to perform that operation," according to the undated McAfee alert. The pop-up can be closed, but the user won"t be able to do anything else in Notes until it is closed and restarted, McAfee said. The same error will then reoccur later, it said.