@IsGoodDomino

From My Inbox and I Need a Job

2010-10-14T08:50:00.004-04:00

Typical marketing crap telling me how much I love my iPhone and I can easily add another line. The problem is I dropped ATT and moved to Verizon over a month ago so I could get a

Droid x. Funny stuff. Apparently the ATT marketing machine is out of touch with the actual status of thier customers. On a more serious note, The company that I have worked for over the past 9 1/2 years is closing it's doors and I am in need of a job. I am not looking to move from Southern Maine so if you know anyone who needs a Notes/Domino Admin/Developer in Southern Maine or Southern NH, Let me know.

Goodbye iPhone, Hello Android X

2010-08-02T05:59:00.006-04:00

My contract on my iPhone 3G is up in 6 weeks, but I decided about a month ago that I will be moving to an Android phone. For the most part, I have been happy with my iPhone over the past 23 months but I will be purchasing the new Android X for several reasons.

1. Said simply, I think Apple has an attitude problem. They have accumulated so many customers that will believe anything that Steve Jobs says (the whole "magical device" thing with the iPad was way over the top for me) that they no longer feel it necessary to earn business and customers.

2. The proprietary nature of everything apple just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, overpriced hardware, only one carrier for the iPhone, it all screams that Apple knows what is best for me and I just need to trust them to make decisions for me.

3. There are places that I travel to in Maine where I get no service available with ATT, yet users on Verizon's network have great coverage in those areas.

4. Lotus is in the process of supporting Android devices with Traveler.

I think there are many people who feel the same as I do here because Android activations are at 165,000 per day and rising. Bottom line is that Apple is it's own worst enemy and Apple's attitude has lost this customer. Read more here.

iPhone Problems Continue

2010-07-13T06:39:00.002-04:00

Consumer Reports cannot recommend the new iPhone.

Sorry Apple

2010-01-28T08:07:00.003-05:00

So I watched the whole iPad announcement from yesterday and I am not convinced that I will ever need one of these new devices. My iPhone gives me The Internet and Mobile apps in my pocket, my laptop gives me The Internet and all my applications in my backpack, the iPad will give me The Internet and mobile apps on a 10 inch screen. Tell me again why I need this "Magical" new device? I just don't see the value. Gadget envy will likely sell many of these devices, some will buy it just because Apple made it. I won't be buying one.

Can your users be trusted with delete capability?

2009-11-29T09:18:00.005-05:00

It did not take me long to realize that something drastic needed to be done after we started getting accused of fielding applications that randomly deleted documents. Given what was involved with recovering these documents, it is probably the best code I have ever written in terms of cost savings. Consider what needed to be done when a user accidentally deleted a document from a 50 Gig database.

Step 1. Email to backup dude to create restore of said database.(typically 2 days until available)

Step 2. Be ready to change the replica ID of said restored database lest it replicates and causes more problems.

Step 3. Find document, copy to production, delete restored database.

Two people over two days and a lot of email in between because some users can't be trusted with delete capability. We tried turning on soft deletions but it could be several months before someone realized that someone has actually deleted something that should not have been and keeping soft deletions around for that long in the production database was not practical.

The answer to this problem was to create a "Recycle Bin" database and take away actual delete capability from everyone except developers. The code is simple really, it just renames the form to "deleted"+Form name and writes an entry to the audit trail so from the users perspective, they have deleted the document(s) just like they are used to but, it has really just fallen off of all the views that a user sees. Once a week, a scheduled agent moves these pseudo deleted docs to a Recycle Bin database for safe keeping and or recovery later. Go figure, we are no longer accused of writing code that randomly deletes documents and when someone asks "what happened to the report for abc company from 2005?" we can tell them who deleted it and when but, more importantly, we can restore that document in minutes rather than days and having to depend on the backup dude to create a 50 Gig restore. I can not tell you how much time and aggravation this has saved us.

How not to talk to a developer who you want help from

2009-11-28T08:20:00.007-05:00

As a developer, you will eventually come across a customer or user that will try to use you as a scapegoat. It is unfortunate that there are people like this but it is part of the job and is many times the reason we are forced to play the CYA game. You know the type. The code you wrote 7 years ago that has worked exactly as specified, went through User Acceptance Testing, and was QA'd is now suddenly "broken" because one new manager does not like the way it behaves.

You get the email/phone call that says there is a bug in your code and when can you have it fixed? This my friends is not the way to win friends and influence people. A much better approach would be to say "We have re-evaluated our business rules for the xyz application and we would like you to help us change the code to adhere to the new rules". For some reason there are still people out there that don't realize that you can attract more flies with honey than with vinegar.

iPhone Report Card 14 Months Later...

2009-11-10T15:28:00.004-05:00

I gave up my Blackberry and bought my iPhone 3G during the first week of September 08. I was somewhat of a rebel as I was the first person in our office of 10 to get one (we were a BES shop). There was quite a bit of interest from others in the office surrounding the cool new phone but people wanted to see what my experience was like before anyone else was willing to get on board.

In the first weeks I was able to produce a working proof of concept by porting the application we use for Project Management and recording time to the iPhone. This took me about 15 hours total and it demonstrated the ease with which a Notes application could be delivered to the iPhone.

Fast forward 14 months and now every smart phone user in our office has an iPhone. They all sync using Traveler (IBM took their time but, the got it right with Traveler), and two more plan on getting iPhones when their present contracts expire. Everyone I know that has one is very satisfied with this device and it remains for me, the best mobile device I have ever owned. Unless something dramatic happens in this market between now and next September, I will own the next generation iPhone as my next mobile device.

8.5.1 Installation

2009-10-14T14:20:00.010-04:00

One of our early adopters paid the price when upgrading his client from 8.5 to 8.5.1. The client would nsd every time on launch until he uninstalled and re-installed. Heeding his warning and those of other bloggers, I uninstalled 8.5 first. then installed the 8.5.1 client. I did not have many problems as a result. I do have some clean-up to do apparently as it is moaning about some widget provisioning problem but other than that everything seems OK so far.

I will say that it took 1.5 hours to uinstall 8.5 and install 8.5.1 so this is the most time consuming upgrade I have ever done on a Notes client.

Mad Props to Lotus (Traveler)

2009-09-01T03:13:00.004-04:00

The level of anticipation here around the ability to sync our iPhones with our mail, calendar and contacts has been so great that I went ahead and applied to the managed beta program for 8.5.1. Last night I installed 8.5.1 and Traveler on our production mail server and the process was what I have become accustomed to with Domino upgrades, Smooth, very smooth.

From the time that I typed "quit" in the console to the time that I was syncing my iPhone was 35 minutes. That includes installing Windows updates, upgrading Domino to 8.5.1 beta, rebooting, installing Traveler, bringing Domino back up, and configuring my iPhone. What I really like is that I was able to send a link to our other iPhone users that simply said, "Follow this link in your iPhone browser and follow the instructions". It was never that easy with BES and Blackberry devices...need your PIN, activation failed, resend service books,activation failed again, etc. etc. That straightforward, intuitive process that allows end users to configure their mobile devices so easily and quickly is really appreciated by me. Thanks Lotus!

To be a fly on the wall....

2009-06-03T15:20:00.003-04:00

and witness the reactions of the folks at IBM as they view the demo of Google Wave. Do you think they are saying "Oh Crap" or "We can do better than that"?

Subform Performance

2009-04-28T12:51:00.003-04:00

Last week I added a computed subform to a form that was already using 4 computed subforms. For a reason that I still don't understand, this change caused the form to go from taking about 5 seconds to open to over 1 minute. Even stranger is that this delay was only present in the ver. 7xx client and there was no problem using the ver. 8xx client.

The fix I found was to add "Option Explicit" to all the subforms that load with that form. I would really like to know why adding this subform that had no LS in it caused the problem, but sometimes it is enough to know the cure.

UI Debate or Fix - a - Fight Friday

2009-04-10T14:13:00.003-04:00

We have an application that has been in production for eight years that makes extensive use of roles. Until now, when we created a new action that was only to be available to users with certain roles, we just applied a hide-when that hid it from users who did not have the correct role. It has now been suggested that this behaviour is confusing to the users and that a better method would be to display all actions, hotspots, and buttons to all users and if they don't have the correct role, we give them a prompt when they click on it that tells them that they are not authorized to perform that action or something similar.

When I heard this suggestion for the first time some weeks ago, I thought to myself that it was a request that would be complete waste of time. If I put myself in the role of the user, and I click on an action and it tells me that I am not authorized to do that, my first reaction would be "Why the hell did you waste my time by showing it to me then"? Keep in mind that some users who now see 6 actions on form would now see 10.....4 of which would just tease them into clicking on them just to be disappointed. Can you say "Psych"!

Two weeks of dwelling on this and in my mind I still cannot find any value in showing users things that will not work for them. Do you think there is value in showing users actions/hotspots/buttons that will not work for them?

Two Birds, One Stone

2009-04-07T08:23:00.004-04:00

Yesterday, I had two users having different problems after updating their clients from 8.0 to 8.02. The first user would click to open a mail message and it would launch the browser to view the message. This never happened before and only started when she went to 8.02.

The other user could not open mail received via SMTP. If he clicked on it, it would just sit there and the lightning bolt would continue to flash like it was actually going to do something, but after waiting 10 minutes, the user would control - break out of frustration. This user had recently installed IE 8.

Adding "BrowserRenderDisable=1" to each user's notes.ini solved both issues.

Use Windows credentials to access Domino web content?

2009-03-31T10:19:00.003-04:00

I have been instructed to find a way for Domino web users to be able to use their Windows credentials to access Domino databases. They want to be authenticated automatically without having to login (ever) to the Domino server. No cookies, no lpta tokens, just allow the user to be authenticated with their Windows credentials automagically. I know there are several directions I can go with this but I thought I would throw this out there to see if anyone has set this up before and what works best.

I found the secdom.dll at nsftools which seems promising. I would need it to run it on a 64 bit Windows server so it would take some work there to either create a wrapper or something.

Anyone doing something like this now?

Keeping an eye on things or why you should be careful with those event handlers

2009-03-12T07:15:00.005-04:00

We use a hybrid approach to monitoring things in the Domino environments that we are responsible for. We use OpManager to keep an eye on some things, DDM and event handlers on other things, and even have some agents that email us a summary of what the agent did when it ran. This is a story of how an event handler can actually crash a Domino server.

Here is the situation. A client has a Domino server that runs an application that we built for them. This application has about 700 users and generates about 300-500 email notifications a day to users on events that occur in the application. The IT dept at this client does not allow this server to route mail directly to The Internet, we must forward it to their Exchange relay host and from there it goes on it's way.

On this server I have an event handler that sends me an email whenever something fails on that server. Well when this customer decides to take the Exchange box down for maintenance (this seems to happen quite a bit), and our application attempts to send out a notification and it cannot reach the relay server, that is a failure. Can you guess what happens next? You got it, my event handler attempts to send me a failure notification message which will also fail because the relay server is down. So the Domino server just keeps generating these cascading failure notifications that can't go anywhere except it's own mail.box. I recently caught this server starting to scream about not having enough memory because there were about 250,000 of these cascading notifications stuck in the mail.box with no where to go.

So the moral of the story is "be careful with your event handlers", under the right circumstances, they can actually crash your server.

Can this be correct?

2009-03-11T13:21:00.003-04:00

I am looking into pricing a new Domino server for a client who presently has two Domino servers. They purchased their existing Enterprise server licenses for $1,975.00 each back in 2002. According to the IBM web site, in order to buy one Domino server license for a mid-range piece of hardware (2 Quad core proc Dell 2950). I have to multiply 50 times the number of processor cores to get to the point value which for a dual quad core box would be 400. Now multiply that by the price of the software ($40.25 per point).

In order for these very nice people to add one more Domino Enterprise server to their fold, the server license will be (8x50) x $40.25 = $16,100. Can this be correct? Do I really have to tell this customer that a Domino server license has gone up over 700% in 7 years?

Bigger Than Big (A Lotus Notes Success Story)

2009-02-27T05:17:00.008-05:00

I have worked with my fair share of Notes applications over the past ten years. The biggest Notes application I have ever worked with has been growing steadily for about 7 1/2 years now. It is an example of how well Notes/Domino applications can scale. This particular application started as a single db and has grown to a suite of 13 databases which presently hold 135 Gig of data (33Gig in archive db). As you might imagine, that original database is the biggest in terms of the number of design elements, here are some stats from that database.

Framesets 25
Pages 45
Forms 78
Views 206
Outlines 4
Sub forms 45
Agents 152
Script Libraries 53
Images 251
Files 49
Style Sheets 8

I am sure there are some of you who have worked with bigger applications than this, but the fact that the client can continue to grow this application year after year shows the strength of Notes/Domino as a platform.

Sorry... DDE is just too damn slow

2009-02-13T06:46:00.006-05:00

I tried, really, I did. I have been attempting to use the 8.5 Designer client for several weeks now but it is just too painful to use. I consider myself pretty accommodating when it comes to software. I will take what the software gives me and not worry about what it does not, but the DDE client has forced me to to retreat to my 8.0.2 client on my VM too many times.

We work in an environment where everyone works off of the databases on the server and waiting for things to load in the DDE client is not practical. Sure, it is fine if you can work off of a local replica but that would be quite a departure from the way we work. The reasons we work on the server are many. A couple are....

1. Large apps with many dependencies on other DB's on the server.

2. We use design locking rather than source control to prevent each other from trying to modify the same design element at the same time.

So I am giving up on DDE for now. I will use it locally to learn about xpages but, at this point, it is safe to say that either we are not ready for DDE or DDE is not ready for us.

Create calendar entries on the iPhone that display in your Notes client

2009-02-10T14:21:00.006-05:00

I did this on a whim because someone in my office was complaining about not being able to create calendar entries from the iNotes Ultra lite that runs on the iPhone. Yes, I know IBM is working on the whole active sync thing and that it will be available some time in 2009. Did you notice that Google did not really say much about their active sync support until it was live and available for use? IBM could learn a thing or two from Google. Quit hyping the technology months/years before it will be available.

1. Add your Google calendar as an overlay to your Notes calendar. See instructions here.

2. Set up Active sync from your iPhone to sync your iPhone calendar with your Google calendar.

Now when you add a calendar entry on your iPhone, it will display in your Notes calendar via your Google calendar overlay.

Note: You will find that when you attempt to edit one of these calendar entries from your Notes client it will open your google calendar automatically.

Try this with anything but Domino

2009-02-05T05:51:00.008-05:00

I woke up this morning feeling somewhat motivated so I thought I would upgrade some servers before the business day started. I had already pushed the 8.5 install and the fixpak to three servers so I just needed to RDP to each box and run the install on one mail and two application servers. The fact that I was doing these upgrades remotely is something I would normally shy away from as I like to at least be in the same building when performing upgrades (these servers are 150 miles from my home office).

If you are a Domino Admin, you know the rest of the story.....everything just worked and in less than 30 minutes, I had upgraded three Domino servers from 8.0.2 to 8.5 HF1, no muss, no fuss, it all just worked exactly the way it should.

Thanks IBM.

Profile docs vs. configuration docs....We use both

2009-02-04T09:47:00.004-05:00

One longstanding argument in the Domino community revolves around whether to use profile docs or config docs to store lookup data. Lookups to profile docs are faster but changes are not seen in the client until the client is closed and re-opened. Config docs are slower but changes can be seen immediately by the user.

We use both of these methods in our applications because sometimes the data is fairly static and it is not necessary for users to see edits immediately and other times a user needs to see the change right away. By using both methods we can store the lookup data based on the needs of the user.

I need a tool....

2009-01-13T08:48:00.004-05:00

that will allow me to edit the table properties of every table in over 200 forms (probably 500+ tables) to go from "fixed width" to "fit to window". I really don't want to have to touch each individual table. Anyone know of a tool that will allow me to do this?

HTTP Web Server: Invalid POST Request Exception

2009-01-03T08:07:00.008-05:00

Last week I had an 8.0 server in a customer's data center suddenly in the middle of the afternoon one day start throwing this error when users attempted to save a document. This one can be tough to troubleshoot because it can be caused by many different things. In the past, I have seen this when a user tries to save an attachment that exceeds the size limit in the server doc, or some code calling a missing design element, but I verified that this was not the issue here. This application has replicas on two other servers in another data center that did not experience the problem. I suspected that something had changed with the customers firewall but before I approached them with this, I had to do some testing to ensure that it was not our code.

I was able to RDP directly to the server through a VPN connection and launch the browser directly on the Domino server and verified that there were no problems when I saved documents directly on the server. I should also mention that this application uses jquery script libraries that are loaded from a separate database. This Technote suggested that "In one case, the customer resolved the issue by making changes to the firewall being used."

Turns out that the firewall vendor had implemented a new rule designed to prevent SQL injection attacks and was blocking the save of the document. The vendor put in an exception for this server and all was well again. Hope this can save you some pain if you have to troubleshoot this error.

Is Sears Like Lotus Notes?

2008-12-18T08:38:00.006-05:00

I still have some Christmas shopping to do. I will be doing it at Sears. Sears is a bit like Notes in a way...Analysts have been talking about their impending death for years, yet they keep rolling along.

Last night I saw this on the news and it got my attention. In a nutshell, Sears, the store my mother dragged me into every August to buy my school clothes as a kid is doing something that would not make much business sense to many people. They are spending millions to treat the 552 employees who are presently deployed in the military like they are still sitting at their desks every day. Thank you Sears.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

TCO Blackberry Storm vs. iPhone (Updated)

2008-12-11T06:13:00.008-05:00

I am still very happy with my decision to go with the iPhone back in September. This is without a doubt the best phone I have ever owned and now that the 3G network is active here in Maine, I love it even more. In this economy, we must examine all of our expenses and save where we can so I was wondering how I was doing compared to if I had waited on the Blackberry Storm. Here is the TCO comparison to a Storm from Verizon. Keep in mind that I have the 450 minute voice plan from ATT and 200 text messages a month. This comparison shows what it would cost me to get the same service from Verizon with the Storm. The iPhone saves me over $1588 over the 2 year contract vs. the Storm. Looks like the iPhone was the right choice for me.

-Update

My apologies for some bad information. After doing some more digging on the Verizon web site I discoverd that the Storm has exactly the same TCO over a 2 year contract as the iPhone. I had to actually put the storm in the shopping cart to uncover this information. The corrected numbers are above.

Full Text Searching

2008-11-11T10:27:00.003-05:00

I recently added the following to our development server's notes.ini to test the impact of allowing the server to return more than the default 5000 docs.

FT_Max_Search_Results=50,000

A couple of test searches where the result would be 50,000 or more took approx 1.5 minutes to return the list. 50,000 may be too much and your mileage will vary depending on your hardware, but other than searches taking longer, there do not seem to be any adverse effects.

My Favorite Notes Error Message

2008-10-17T06:50:00.003-04:00

If you work with Notes/Domino long enough, you will encounter this one. It occurs when you are doing a @DbLookup to get a list of values and the list is too long for Notes to handle. We see this quite often because we work with some very large databases.

We generally deal with this by breaking up the data so that you are only looking up a subset of the data or write an agent that allows the user to use a Picklist to get the list of values to choose from (PickLists do not suffer from this limitation). How do you deal with this limitation?

Web Forms For The iPhone

2008-10-10T04:57:00.005-04:00

My first Domino application for the iPhone was moving right along until I started on the forms. Developing forms optimized for the iPhone presents some interesting challenges. My approach so far has been "simpler is better" but sometimes it is hard to keep it simple.

Managing screen real estate is one of the biggest challenges here. The acreage is limited so getting the most out of the form means balancing the desire to display as much as possible without forcing the user to scroll too much while at the same time maintaining a comfortable distance between the inputs because "a finger is not a mouse". My pain du jour is finding a date picker that displays large enough so that a finger can be used accurately to select a day from the month being displayed. Ideally I would like to invoke the date picker built into the iPhone itself but I have not been able to manage that yet.

Notes Pro 1.1

2008-10-09T12:25:00.003-04:00

I have installed the new Notes Pro 1.1 available for the iPhone and it seems to work for mail and calendar but fails for Contacts and To Do's. If anyone solves this one, please let me know

The Importance Of Idle Session Timeout

2008-10-08T09:51:00.005-04:00

I know that providing users with a link to log out of a Domino web application is the correct thing to do, but I also know that they will rarely use it. In fact a recent log review showed that less than 1% of the sessions were ended by using the log out link. This tells me that users are just closing the browser window and leaving it up to the server to log them out.

This means that with session based authentication enabled it is important to find the right idle session timeout interval on your servers. Domino defaults to 30 minutes but my experience is that users will complain if it is left at 30 min. We have most of our servers set to 90 minutes to appease the users. The downside is that more sessions are open at any given time waiting for the server to close them thus consuming resources needlessly. What do you set your Idle session timeout interval to and how did you arrive at that number, or are your users more disciplined about actually logging out?

My Servers Are Telling Me Lies

2008-10-01T08:44:00.012-04:00

Now why would some of my 8.0.2 Domino servers tell me that they are not replicating these important databases when they are in fact replicating? The server clearly knows that they are replicating because it is logging the replication events to the same log file. I hate it when my servers lie to me....

Like Peanut Butter And Jelly

2008-09-19T08:47:00.006-04:00

Thanks to the work done by some very bright guys, Joe Hewitt, developer of iUI and Jeff Gilfelt developer of iUIview, my first Domino application for the iPhone is coming along nicely. Jeff's code is extremely fast and flexible and is great for navigating categorized views on the iPhone. Once this is complete I will put together a detailed description of the process and perhaps a little video demo.

As a consultant working for an IT services company, I need to choose carefully the new skill sets that I develop. God knows I have wasted many hours working with technology that never panned out or caught on in a way that brought any meaningful projects my way. If you drink the Apple Kool-Aid and believe that there will be over 90 Million iPhones out there in the next four years, it stands to reason that developing web apps for this device will be worth my time to learn. The fact that so far, Domino and the iPhone go together like peanut butter and jelly doesn't hurt.

Developing Domino Web Apps For The iPhone?

2008-09-17T04:24:00.013-04:00

I am in the process of developing a web app and optimising it for the iPhone. Here is a cool tool that will turn FireFox into an iPhone emulator so you can see exactly how your app will look on the iPhone without using the iPhone.

First, you need the User Agent Switcher, this allows Firefox to impersonate other browsers. Next you need to add a new agent that will make your web server think firefox is the Safari browser on the iPhone. Go to Tools -> User Agent Switcher and and create a new agent called "iPhone" with this string "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3B48b Safari/419.3". Now you can switch to your new iPhone agent in Firefox and test your web application.

Day Two With The iPhone

2008-09-14T19:07:00.002-04:00

It has been a long time since I have been excited about a cell phone, but the iPhone lives up to the hype. Everything I do with this device just seems easy. Easy to navigate the menus, easy to set up Bluetooth, easy to set up Wi-Fi, easy to configure mail settings, everything just flows. I appreciate the large, high res screen. Battery life looks better than I was led to believe it would be and I am using Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. I have no complaints about the iNotes Ultra-lite interface. No, it does not give you everything native apps would if they synced with Notes but it works for me. So far I am very pleased with this device. Anyone want to buy a Blackberry 8700c?

Why I went from a Blackberry 8700c to the iPhone

2008-09-13T15:57:00.005-04:00

I stopped by the ATT store today and finally did what I had been thinking about doing for several months....I bought an iPhone. Why did I do it? Simply put, I ran out excuses not to do it. I knew I wanted one the minute I saw iPhone 2.o and my contract with my Blackberry 8700c was over this past April.

My 8700c served me well for 30 months and if you are a heavy email user, I still think BB is the way to go, but for me, mail on the BB was overkill. I will never compose long emails on a mobile device, I will never file emails in folders from a Mobile device, I just need to to be able to read my email and occasionally respond to an email, view my calendar and contacts on a mobile device so I really did not need all the capabilities the BB gave me. They were wasted on me. I did need an enhanced browser experience and the 8700c just did not do it for me. I went as far as to install Opera mini on the 8700c but it was just too slow and too many sites that I visit did not render properly in any browser I tried on the 8700c.

As a Domino Admin/Developer I need to receive email notifications when I am away from my desk and I also have become accustomed to accessing my contacts, calendar on my mobile device so as soon as Domino 8.0.2 was available, I was out of excuses not to switch. I have only had the iPhone for about 5 hours so my impressions are few. Let me just say that setting up my iNotes Ultra-lite was a snap compared to the hoops BES forced me to jump through. It literally took me 5 minutes to be interacting with my mail file on the iPhone after I got home. Stay tuned, if it turns out that the iPhone does not fill my needs, I will tell you and I will tell you why, but so far, it looks very promising.

Actions, Embedded Views, and Right Click Menus

2008-09-10T14:42:00.004-04:00

One of my colleagues was having a problem getting a shared action to display in the right click shortcut menu so I had a look at it today. Did I say I really appreciate that Lotus gave us this functionality? Thank you Lotus. Anyway, if you want this functionality to work on an embedded view, make sure that your embedded view properties are set to "Show action bar" or it won't show up in the right click menu.

Sometimes it is the little things....

2008-09-09T14:56:00.005-04:00

I recently had a conversation with a Notes user who was complaining about email notifications sent from an application containing a doclink. The specific complaint was that when she opened a document via a doclink, she could not navigate within the application that contained the linked to document. This person has been using the Notes client for over six years and was completely unaware that the "Go Up to Parent View" action on the toolbar even existed or what it does. I asked her to open a document via a doclink and then told her to click on the action. She was astonished. I was astonished that you could use the Notes client for six years and not know what 90% of your options on your toolbars actually did. Needless to say we will be having some toolbar training very soon.

If You Ever Come To Maine...

2008-09-04T16:09:00.005-04:00

This past week has been a great one for vacation here in Maine. The weather has been perfect and the crowds that were here a week ago have now largely gone home so I was persuaded to partake in some activities that I would normally be dragged to kicking and screaming.

On Tuesday, Lynn and I boarded the Odyssey for a very pleasant, 5 hour cruise viewing minky whales, harbor seals and dolphins. Had we gone a week earlier, this boat would have been jam packed but by waiting until after the Labor day weekend (the unofficial end of summer here), the boat was only 1/3 full which made for a very pleasant trip.

This morning we left the house at 2:30 AM and made the three hour drive to Cadillac Mountain to view the sunrise (another very touristy thing to do here in Maine) and enjoyed a very colorful sunrise. We then had a very nice breakfast in Bar Harbor and spent the rest of the morning strolling along the waterfront. The crowds were not bad because the cruise ship passengers were just starting to come ashore.

The point of this is that Maine is a wonderful place to visit and it is even nicer without the throngs of people that come here all summer long. If you ever come to Maine for a vacation, come in the first two weeks of September. The weather is great, the summer folk have gone home, and the leaf peepers have yet to arrive.

Clean Water

2008-09-01T08:46:00.003-04:00

Lynn and I are on vacation this week and planned on going out to dinner this evening. We will eat in tonight so we can give $33 to a worthy cause.

The September Campaign Trailer - www.borninseptember.org from charity: water on Vimeo.

8.0.2 Install Problems

2008-08-27T13:00:00.002-04:00

There is no doubt that I have been spoiled by the easy upgrades that Notes and Domino gives me but this morning I upgraded to 8.0.2 and the client would not start. I got the splash screen, saw the progress bar go to the end and then....nothing, the splash screen closed and nothing else appeared on the screen. It was doing something in the background because the hard drive was churning but after waiting for 20 minutes for something to happen, I elected to un-install and re-install. The second time though everything worked as expected. My co-worker did not have any issues so I suspect it was something about my config that it did not like.

What does "Mission Critical" Mean To You?

2008-08-26T04:08:00.001-04:00

It never ceases to amaze me that in 2008 there are still people who believe that you can call any system "Mission Critical" without building in any redundancy whatsoever. I have personally sat in design meetings where the application being discussed was labeled as "mission critical" yet when you tell them what that means in terms of implementation i.e. clustering, fail over, redundant Internet connections, etc. their eyes glaze over and they quickly decide that the application may not be "Mission Critical after all.

I believe that the term "Mission Critical Application" describes any application that needs guaranteed uptime whether that is just normal business hours or 24/7. It is just that simple. The way that an application achieves "Mission Critical" status is to be deployed in an environment that has the correct amount of redundancy built into it. The pieces necessary to provide such an environment can differ depending on the situation but it will almost always require another server and some form of clustering/replication in order to achieve automatic fail over.

Do you know someone who considers their Notes mail "mission critical" yet it sits on one server, their idea of backup is that the users have a local replica, and can be brought down by any number of things. Internet connection, hardware failure, etc? My new rule starting today is that you don't get to sit in a meeting with me and call anything "mission critical" unless you are willing to take the steps to make it "mission critical". I will call you on it every time. Perhaps these people believe that by telling the development team that they consider the application you are building for them to be "Mission Critical" you will include the magical code that will guarantee the application will be available 24/7 without adding any additional cost to the project. Anybody have an example of that code? Neither do I.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Virtual Computing

2008-08-25T08:02:00.001-04:00

I am not a fan of using VMs for production servers. When I was going to school for my degree in Computer Science, we were taught that Administrators should always work to minimize the number of single points of failure in any system. Virtual Machines by their very nature, multiply SPOFs and for that reason, I do not like to see VMs used for production servers. I also have a distaste for products like MSFT SBS for the same reason but that is another post. The bottom line is that VMs encourage people to put a bunch of eggs in one basket and that can cost you dearly when the host OS/hardware has a problem.

Having said that, I Administer some Domino servers that run on VMs. One is a production mail server and another is a production Sametime server. There will be more and every time I install a production server on a VM, I wince because it means that someone has chosen to ignore my advice. I don't get excited about it....I just hold on the email where I advised against it.

VM's however, do have their place and in fact, I use them every day. My everyday work PC is a Toshiba Satellite laptop that has Windows Vista Ultimate as the host OS. I have two Windows XP VMs that I run as well on this machine and they serve me very well. The first I use because I need to access several VPNs and some of the VPN client software is not supported on Vista, I have the 7.o3 client on that one. My other VM is used to evaluate and test software. I have the Notes 8.5 beta 1 on there. The beauty of these VM's is that they allow me to have three different versions of the Notes client installed and running at the same time on my laptop and I don't have to jump through any of the installation hoops required to run multiple versions of the client on the same host. Another great thing about the VMs is that if they ever get completely borked, I just delete it and copy it back down from the backup that I keep tucked away in a safe place. Another reason I run VM's on my workstation is that one of the VPN's that I connect to almost daily does not allow split tunneling. This means that when I am connected to them. I am limited to accessing only network resources on their network and I can't get to things like my mail file on our Domino server. The VM allows me to be connected to them with one VM, while the host OS and other VM is not locked into their network.

VMs will be part of the IT landscape for the foreseeable future, but I still hate to see them used for production servers.

Software I Use Daily

2008-08-24T08:31:00.005-04:00

One tool that I use on a daily basis is Royal TS. A friend turned me on to this one a couple of years ago. I need to access many machines via RDP and Royal TS helps me keep those connections organized. Check it out. It is a great utility for anyone who manages many servers via RDP.

How Much Rebranding is Enough?

2008-08-22T05:44:00.009-04:00

First let me say that this post should not be construed as me taking shots at the Lotus/IBM marketing strategy. God knows there are enough folks out there doing that already and quite frankly, I think they are doing a better job of marketing their products today than in my previous 11 years of working with them . This is just me wondering out loud whether or not there may be some marketing types with a little too much time on their hands.

In the summer of 2001, I was in the midst of an Exchange to Domino migration for an Engineering firm here in Portland and I was moving them to the first version of Domino that had iNotes. I remember that iNotes was the one thing that eased the minds of the users who where being forced to move from Outlook because they were bought by a bigger company from the mid-west who used Notes/Domino. I don't remember when it happened, but at some point, Lotus decided that iNotes needed to be rebranded as Domino Web Access. All I will say about that desicion is that I never stopped calling it iNotes and now apparently it is being rebranded again as iNotes. I wonder how many people and how many hours went into this rebranding decision. One thing is clear, Lotus/IBM seems to enjoy these rebranding efforts because they seem to happen quite often.

Do you remember when Sametime became something else for a while before being changed back to Sametime? Ya, I can't remember either what it was, but I never stopped calling it Sametime, nor did anyone else I know. It is easy for me to sit here and play the role of monday morning quarterback citing what I consider to be needless rebranding efforts by Lotus/IBM, I am sure there have been some that have been considered successful (read they have not had to change the name back). I will not pretend to understand reasons behind the rebranding efforts that occur with these products. It is entirely possible that these efforts overall are more successful, than not. Personally, I would be happy to see the time and effort that goes into these rebranding efforts, redirected into developing the product vs. the product name, but I am an Admin/Developer, not a marketing guy.

Domino vs. Spam

2008-08-19T09:21:00.005-04:00

Domino has many built in features to help with filtering spam. White lists, black lists, mail rules, etc, but we use none of these. In fact none of our customers use any of these features even though many use Notes/Domino for mail.

We, like almost everyone we know of, use some flavor of Internet Gateway product that filters all Internet traffic, scans for viruses, blocks spam, does content filtering, etc. We use and sell the Astaro Security Gateway, many others use the Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance, Barracuda, etc. There are many players in this market.

Do you choose to use the spam filtering features in Domino? If so, what do you do to protect your network from other threats at the gateway?

Email Notifications And Distributed Applications

2008-08-18T05:14:00.001-04:00

Part of every Notes/Domino application I have been involved in is the requirement to send email notifications when certain events occur in the application. Sometimes you can get away with sending the email in the QuerySave event but what about when the notification needs to be sent on a new document and the new document is being created on a local replica?

What happens is the help desk starts getting calls because the link that you sent in the email to the document does not work. Why? Well, lets say that the users replicate on a schedule of every 30 minutes. A user creates a new document and on the save, the email is generated with a link to the new doc. The user may be working on a local replica, but if they can connect to the server, the mail will go out immediately. The problem is that the link points to the doc on the server but the doc has not replicated to the server yet. Now a user gets the email, uses the link, and gets an error because the doc is not there yet.

I have dealt with this by running a scheduled agent on the server (hourly) and I don't generate the notification until the document has arrived on the server. While this method lacks the immediacy of emails generated on the save of the new document, it guarantees that the doc will be on the server replica when the recipient uses the link in the email.

How do you deal with the challenge of notifications generated for new documents in a distributed application?

Creating Video Demos/Tutorials

2008-08-17T05:57:00.002-04:00

Over the years I have been required to create video demos/tutorials that show some piece(s) of functionality that I have added to an application. Sometimes these are included as help in the application, sometimes they are just a quick demo to show a proof of concept before beginning a project. I have used several different packages to create these, starting with Robo Demo (Now Macromedia Captivate), Camtasia, and I have even tried the open source route with Wink.

Back when bandwidth was a big concern, I used Robo Demo because it was able to create very small files, Today I use Camtasia Studio 5 mainly because of it's "Smart Focus" feature that allows you to record full screen while the software automatically zooms in on the area of the screen that you are working with so I no longer have to reduce the size of the window I am recording. The other thing I really like about Camtasia is the choice of formats I can output my screen movie to:

MP3
iPod video
Flash (SWF and FLV)
AVI
Silverlight compatible WMV
QuickTime (MOV)
RealMedia (RM)
Animated GIF
Executable (EXE)

Recently, I created a 12 minute tutorial with audio and rendered it as a .wmv file that plays in Windows Media Player and the files size was only 11 MB. Not too bad. I could have reduced the resolution and produced an even smaller file but 11 MB is not bad considering that with streaming video, the user can start watching the buffered portion while the rest of the video downloads in the background.

I know there are other products that you can use to create Demos/Tutorials. Do you create screen movies for your applications? If so, what software do you use?

The Domino Web Services Gotcha

2008-08-15T05:45:00.010-04:00

Hopefully, this tip will save you some grief. I know we struggled with this for a while and once we solved it, we were happy yet angry at ourselves for not figuring it out sooner.

Recently another developer where I work was writing a new web service in Java that would allow vendors to retrieve their risk control assignments through the web service vs. logging into the web site. Although he could invoke the web service by submitting a URL with this syntax:

http://host/database/webservicename?OpenWebService

He was unable to get the code in the web service to execute, he tried a multitude of things before he got me involved and it turned out to be something simple (isn't it always the way)?

Turns out that anything initiated by Java that causes disk I/O is considered a restricted operation by the Domino server. Setting the runtime security level to "2. Allow restricted operations" solved the problem.

First Post, New Blog

2008-08-14T16:08:00.006-04:00

My name is Curt Carlson and I have been working with Notes/Domino since 1998. Although my certification is in Notes Administration, these days I do more development than anything else. I work for an IT services company in Portland Maine where we specialize in creating/maintaining Risk Control systems for the insurance industry.

Like many Admins/Developers that work with Notes/Domino, there are days when you love it and others not so much. The bottom line is that Notes/Domino has fed me and my family for going on eleven years now and I have never encountered another single product that can do what Notes/Domino can do. Chances are good that I will not be a prolific poster, but if I have something of value to add to the community, this is where you will find it.

Recently I installed the 8.5 beta 1 of the Notes client, mainly to get a look at DCT. I used it to run a few scans against some of the servers that I admin and I have to say....DCT ROCKS! This tool will discover things that would take you quite a while to uncover manually. I can't wait for Beta 2! If you Administer any Domino servers, do yourself a favor and check out the Domino Configuration Tuner!

Many thanks to the group responsible for creating this awesome tool!