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Category Lotus Notes and Domino Tips
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I just discovered that you can now see and manage all private views inside NSF file using Domino Administrator client. Not just your private views, all private views including those that belong to other users as well. I'm not sure when this functionality was added, I must have missed this announcement. In the past, we used to have to use some tricks, (like creating new view and saving it without any name), or scripts to extract info about other user's private views.

Now, you just need to open the server in Domino Designer, click on Files tab to list the files on that server, turn on Full Access Administration, right click on any file and select Manage Views form the pop-up menu, and voila!



You should see something like this (I'm using Domino Designer 8.5.3):

Posted by Bodek Frak At 02:35:56 PM Location Windsor - U of W | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Lotus Notes and Domino Issues Just Venting
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I just LOVE to try all the new stuff that gets added to each maintenance release of Lotus Notes. It makes me feel like a kid opening Christmas presents. I savour and enjoy each one of them. And I appreciate the effort that the IBM put into improving their product and listening to the feedback from their customers. I really do. But I also hate when I discover that some things that were available in previous versions are no longer working properly, or worse, have been removed purposely without any notice or fair justification. Especially when it is something as useful  as the Screen Capture tool built into the Sametime Contacts pane in the Sidebar, which I was using practically every day, I was very disappointed to find out that after upgrading my Notes client to the latest 8.5.3, this tool is no longer available to Sametime Entry users. The icon for it is now greyed out, just like the icons for sending files, sending broadcasts, inviting to a meeting room, and inviting to instant meeting (which they were from the beginning).


Fig. 1 Sorry to say this, but this screen capture was taken using Microsoft Windows 7 Snipping Tool.

Yes, I know. If we get the full version of Sametime, I can continue to enjoy this wonderful feature. But we are not getting it. It's something beyond my control, which just adds to my desperation. We have been using Sametime Entry ever since it was released and bundled/integrated with the Notes client. That is since the release 6.5 in 2003. For eight years the Screen Capture tool was there and available to the Sametime Entry users like me. Not anymore.

I contacted IBM Tech Support to get an official answer on this back  in November, although I suspected I knew what the answer will be. Sadly, I wasn't wrong.

IBM: "I got a response from dev about a similar PMR, and unfortunately the change is most likely fixing a "bug" where the screenshot button was not greyed out in situations when it was supposed to be."

Me: "I will be honest with you and tell you that this makes some of us here very upset. I was fearing this scenario, and it seems like it came through... I think that it is a really bad move on behalf of IBM that you effectively take away something that has been made available for many years! It does not matter that this tool was made available to Sametime Entry users unintentionally, you should not make the users to pay the price for IBM developers' mistake. If the goal was to alienate many loyal long-time users and supporters of Lotus Notes like me, then MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! But is it really what IBM-Lotus needs these days? "

IBM: "I understand your frustration, and I will pass your comments along to my manager. Thank you for using IBM Lotus Support."

Sorry for being so negative, but things like this really get to me. There. I got it off my chest. Now, let's focus on something positive, like Lotusphere 2012 and the announcements that will surely come with it. Can't wait! I'll be there...

Posted by Bodek Frak At 01:31:18 PM Location Windsor - U of W | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Undocumented Domino Features Lotus Domino 8.5.3
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Back in 2008, we found this great blog post on eknori.de on how to "Tweak The Auto-Populated Groups Feature In Domino 8.5". It describes a very elegant solution that does not require any modifications to the existing design elements in pubnames.ntf. Although most likely not supported by the IBM, this works great and we have implemented it in our environment with great success. By the way, I'm still unclear why IBM does not include this in their template..., maybe someone knows the reason?

We are now testing out the new 8.5.3 release and I noticed that after upgrading our test Domino server to this new version and replacing the design of the Domino directory with the new template, this stopped working. Although the subform "Custom | Autopopulate99" is still in there, the Group form no longer offers "Custom" as a choice in the "Auto Populate Method" field".



After comparing the new and the old form and subforms embedded in it, I noticed the following differences:

1. Formula inside the computed hidden field "SubformsList" on the "$GroupInheritableSchema" subform has changed from SubformsList (field was referencing it's own value) to "Home Server|1".

2. Postopen and Postmodechange events on the "$GroupInheritableSchema" subform no longer contain this code:



...although the Sub  GenerateSubFormsList is still in "(Globals") without any changes to its code from the previous release.

Once I made these two changes to "$GroupInheritableSchema" subform in our customised uwinpubnames.ntf, the "Custom" auto-populate option was back and working again. So that is one way to fix it. Unfortunately, we are now forced to make changes to the existing design element in the original Lotus template (sorry, I meant IBM template). Luckily, this was not an issue for us, because we are not using an out-of-the-box pubnames.ntf. We actually have implemented many more modifications to the original directory template over the years, and we use our own customised version of it. Yes, this means every time new release of Domino comes out, we have to port all these customizations after creating another copy (not replica) of the newly released pubnames.ntf, but it doesn't realy take up that much time. The drawbacks associated with this extra chore are outweighed by the benefits of our customisations.

In the end, I removed any code from the Postopen and Postmodechange events on the "$GroupInheritableSchema" subform so that Sub  GenerateSubFormsList will NOT be called to populate the "SubformsList" field (I explain why in the last paragraph). The only change that I made to the 8.5.3 version of  the "$GroupInheritableSchema" subform was to replace the formula in the computed hidden field "SubformsList" on the "$GroupInheritableSchema" subform from  "Home Server|1" to  "Home Server|1" : "Custom|99"




So the question is why was this changed by IBM in the 8.5.3 pubnames.nst template? I think the answer may lay in this IBM technote:

LO56189: ADD GROUP AND EDIT GROUP PERFORMANCE SLOW, TAKES 30+ SECONDS TO COMPLETE
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg1LO56189

I suspect that the culprit of the slowness reported by some customers was the code in  the Sub  GenerateSubFormsList, that's why in the new template IBM decided to bypass it.

Posted by Bodek Frak At 02:41:02 PM Location Windsor - U of W | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Lotus Notes and Domino Issues DAOS
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Help file in Domino Administrator 8.5.2 says:

"Minimum size of object before Domino will store in DAOS : The minimum total size, in bytes, of any attachment to be consolidated (the default is 4096 bytes). Enter a number. Consolidating attachments of very small size is not worth the processing effort because it does not yield much disk space saving."

4096 bytes is 4 Kbytes, and that's what we have used to configure DAOS on our servers from its introduction in release 8.0. However, after installing one of the maintenance releases on the server (currently at 8.5.2FP2 on AIX 5.3 64-bit), it now displays this message on the console after starting up:

"Warning: DAOS object minimum participation size = 4096, which is below the minimum recommended value of 64000".

After some digging, I discovered that the help file fails to mention that the default value in this case is not the recommended value (ie. not anymore). That's a bit odd, because usually you want your default to be the recommended value. In this case, the default value is the minimum allowed value, according to the Notes and Domino Wiki entry on DAOS:

"“Minimum size of object before Domino will store in DAOS” (bytes): The default is 4096. 64,000 is recommended."

I contacted IBM Tech Support on this, and this is what they told me:

"Originally the recommended minimum size to use for the 'Minimum size of object' was 4096 bytes, however in later releases this has been increased to 64000 bytes as it was found that in most cases the gains from storing such small attachments was not enough for the processing required. So, for your version of Domino the recommended value for this setting is "64000" and the help file is out of date at this time. Also, please note that this value is set in bytes, meaning that 4096 bytes equates to 4KB,  similarly 64000 is for about 64Kb attachments. "

Note the "about" before "64Kb" because it's 4096 bytes that comes to exactly 4 Kbytes, while 6400 bytes comes to 62.5 Kbytes, if you are using 1 Kbyte = 1024 bytes conversion factor. If one wants to go for exactly 64 Kbytes limit, then the actual number would be 65536 bytes.

We used DAOS from the day it was introduced and we went with the original default/recommended value of 4096. Back then, enabling DAOS gave us some very good results (see my original "DAOS Rocks!" post), and I guess we were lucky not to get any noticeable performance degradation resulting from setting our  minimum size of DAOS attachments to such a small number (as per today's updated recommendations).

Recently, we had to temporarily disable DAOS on two of the three mail servers in the cluster so that we could copy all mail files to another server at the OS level. This gave me another opportunity to compare the "before" and "after" DAOS numbers. This time we went with 1 Mbyte limit for DAOS inclusion (ie. 1048576 bytes), instead of the original setting of 4 Kbytes (4096 Kbytes), and later lowered it to 0.5 Mbyte (524288 bytes).

smail:  552 files (shared mailboxes)
mail: 2,943 files (personal mailboxes)

File system		DAOS off, all attachments stored inside NSFs		DAOS on, with 1 MB limit		DAOS on, 0.5 MB limit
path	total allocated	free	used	free	used	free	used
/opt/lotus/notesdata/mail	707,788,800	163,260,780	544,528,020	334,571,836	373,216,964	376,573,016	331,215,784
/opt/lotus/notesdata/smail	63,963,136	14,276,104	49,687,032	27,849,784	36,113,352	32,015,724	31,947,412
/opt/lotus/DAOS	340,787,200	340,734,816	52,384	253,309,740	87,477,460	228,316,596	112,470,604
TOTAL (Kbytes)			594,267,436		496,807,776		475,633,800
TOTAL (Gbytes)			567		474		454

These results show that by setting the minimum size of DAOS attachments to 1 MB, we recovered 93 GB of space. By lowering the limit to 0.5 MB, we recovered additional 20 GB.


More Info on DAOS:

DAOS Best Practices - Optimum Minimum Size For Participation
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/dx/daos-best-practices#Optimum+Minimum+Size+For+Participation

Posted by Bodek Frak At 11:40:57 AM Location Windsor - U of W | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Lotus Notes and Domino Issues
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Recently, we had a serious failure of one of the three Domino servers in our cluster. We had to move people to another server using "Move to Another Server" tool in Domino Administrator 8.5.2. Later, we had to move them back, and we took this opportunity to split all our user's population evenly between the three servers in the cluster. In the end, we used this tool on every one of our 2,917 users.

Once I updated their home server assignment using Domino Administrator, the next time they log into Notes, a process called Dynamic Client Configuration runs on the client and it supposed to update their location settings to match those in Domino Directory. Around the same time we changed people's home server assignment, we started getting reports of users being unable to run Notes because they were getting "Warning: unexpected MIME" error on start-up, and when they clicked "OK", Notes would shut down. We run Notes and Domino for 10 years+ here, and I never encountered this error message before. Thanks to Andy's blog post "Another Weird MIME Error", I was able to quickly determine that the culprit was a corrupted location document. Unfortunately I was not able to find a relevant IBM's technote on this...

I suspect that for some reason the Dynamic Client Configuration process may be corrupting user's active location document in some cases. The good news is, that I used this tools to update 2,917 users, and so far the number of calls related to this issue is less than 10. That's less than 0.3%.

Posted by Bodek Frak At 10:24:49 AM Location Windsor - U of W | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category BlackBerry BES 5.0
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I always assumed that when BlackBerry gets connected to a BES server running in Lotus Notes/Domino environment, it will synchronise both contact and group documents between the device and Lotus Notes address book (aka Contacts database/application). Just recently, I became aware that this is not the case. Unless your BlackBerry uses device software version 5.0.x or greater, the group documents will not synchronise between your desktop and your device at all. Even with device software 5.0.x, and the latest version of BES (ie. 5.0.2) there are still several limitations in this area that RIM needs to address in future releases:

1. When you add a new group document to your address book in Lotus Notes, it will eventually sync to your device. But when you add a new group document on your device, it will never sync back to your Lotus Notes address book. This is by design.

2. Despite the fact that both Lotus Notes' address book, and BlackBerry's address book allow you to create groups (aka e-mail distribution lists) and populate them with members (that is they both use the same concept), Notes groups are not equivalent to BlackBerry groups. Groups created on your device will appear with a rectangle icon with a few stripes on the bottom (not sure what it depicts....), and they are referred to as "Groups" or "BlackBerry Group Contacts". Groups created in Lotus Notes and synced to your device will appear with a suitcase icon, and they are referred to as "Multipurpose Personal Distribution Lists".

3. When you create a group on your device, you can edit it later and add/remove members to/from the group. When you create a group in Lotus Notes, and open this group on your device once synchronisation took place, you will not even see the members list, never mind being able to edit it. That's despite the fact that when you select it in the view and push the menu button, you will see "View Distribution List" on the menu. when it opens, all you see is "*Contacts Unavailable*".

All this is not document anywhere, at least I was unable to find any reference to it other than this brief mention of "personal distribution lists" in the BlackBerry Enterprise Server for IBM Lotus Domino, Version: 5.0  Service Pack: 2 on page 34:

"Users with BlackBerry Device Software version 5.0 or later can view personal distribution lists in their contact lists. Users can send messages to the personal distribution lists and delete personal distribution lists from their BlackBerry devices. The BlackBerry Enterprise Server synchronizes only the Multi-purpose and Mail only personal distribution lists."

The last sentence is not even correct because Notes 8.x no longer uses "Group Type" nomenclature in personal address book. Terms like "Multi-purpose" and "Mail only" are only applicable to groups in Domino directory on the server.

It is also worth mentioning that my device was using 5.0.0.862, yet none of the Lotus Notes groups would sync to it via our BES 5.0.2 server. I had to delete Desktop [SYNC] and Desktop [ALP] service books on my device, and resend service books to my device form BES in order for this one-way sync to start working. This could be because my BlackBerry was moved from a 4.1 BES to a 5.0 BES using BlackBerry Transporter.

Posted by Bodek Frak At 01:48:55 PM Location Windsor - U of W | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category BES 5.0 BlackBerry
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Recently, we have deployed a new BES server with the latest available version of BES, that is 5.0.2. While I was ecstatic about all the improvements that RIM put in there (compared to the BES 4.1 that we have been using up until this point), I was disappointed when I realised that some key Lotus Notes and Domino features that have been around forever, are still not supported in the latest version of BES. Some of these were not very obvious, and in case of the "Return Receipt" feature (as it is known in Lotus Notes world) aka Read Receipt, I actually got a false impression that it may be supported in the new BES after seeing the extra option in my BlackBerry mailbox settings.



I could swear that this option was not there when my device was still attached to the old BES 4.1 server. Or maybe it was added after I upgraded my device software from 4 to 5. In either case, after seeing this I got the impression that Return Receipts feature is now supported on BES for Lotus Notes/Domino platform. Unfortunately, I could not get this to work, so I called RIM's tech support thinking there is some option somewhere in BAS on the BES that I need to turn on. After a rather lengthy e-mail exchange, they stated unequivocally that this is still not supported and pointed me to the following technote:

Article ID: KB12252 indicates this is not supported:
Title: Receipts for read email messages are not generated by the BlackBerry smartphone
Link: http://www.blackberry.com/btsc/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=KB12252

They also said:

"SDR125029 is the tracking number for this feature enhancement we have added your case number to the list of people who have indicated they would like this feature implemented if possible in a future release. However no such update is currently scheduled."

The issue that I now have is why put that option in there, if it is not going to do anything for "desktop" (ie. Lotus Notes/Domino) messages? It is just going to confuse the users, like it confused me. I asked RIM that same question, and the answer I got was:

"Device can also be setup to work with webmail accounts and BlackBerry internet service accounts, this issue does not affect Exchange mail platforms either, hence the option is there as devices do not use an OS that is mail file specific. "

While I can see their point, this statement is not entirely correct in my opinion. In fact I have two BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) mailboxes added to my device (one of them is Hotmail), and I can see that the settings for them (Messages Options - Email Settings) are kept in separate profiles from the settings for "Desktop" mailbox, that is Lotus Notes/Domino.



While "Send Read Receipts" setting appears in each one of the three, there are other similar settings that only appear in one but not the other. For example, "Send Delivery Receipts" appears when I selected one of my BIS accounts, but not when I selected 'Desktop'. Makes sense because this is supported with BIS but not with 'Desktop'.



So the device software can see the difference and does not offer all the same options based on which mailbox profile I am editing. At least when it comes to BES (Lotus Notes/Domino aka 'desktop') vs. BIS (Hotmail, and IMAP accounts).

Now, they are also saying that within 'Desktop' profile, BlackBerry's device software is not able to distinguish if it is talking to BES for Exchange, or BES for Domino... Why is that? And most of all, why this works with BES for Exchange, but not BES for Domino? If the feature set offered for Domino platform is inferior to the one for Exchange by design, shouldn't the device be able to tell which platform it is on?

"However no such update is currently scheduled."   Disappointing :(

Posted by Bodek Frak At 12:00:00 AM Location Windsor - U of W | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Just Being Sillly
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Note the yellow lining, and the NSF extension..... Hmmmm....

Posted by Bodek Frak At 10:45:36 AM Location Windsor - U of W | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Lotus Notes and Domino Issues
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IBM released FP4 for Domino and Notes 8.5.1 on August 5. After downloading it and trying to get it installed on three of our Domino servers, I run into the same issue on each one of them. It takes about 5 minutes for the installation, until it gets to the last stage. It first shows that it is 100% finished (fig 1), only to jump to the next screen that says "Updating patch information" (fig 2). It goes south from there..., on the last server it took about 1 hour and 25 minutes for the top progress bar to move from 30% to 100%. I tried Googling "Updating patch information" but did not find any hits yet... Is it just me?

Posted by Bodek Frak At 09:44:02 AM Location Windsor - U of W | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Lotus Notes and Domino Issues
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It's common sense that tor the survey to be truly anonymous, the name of the person taking it cannot be stored anywhere inside the document after it was saved/submitted by the user. This applies to both visible and hidden fields. The same is true for an on-line voting application, and other similar applications that are advertised as "anonymous".

Things are easy for the developer when the user who submits the on-line form on the Web was not required to authenticate ("Anonymous user") in order to participate. But what about the situations where authentication is a must in order to establish person's identity to see if this person is eligible to participate? And what about Lotus Notes users where there is no such thing as "Anonymous user", since every Notes user is authenticated from the moment Notes is launched?

Even if the developer will not add any fields to the form that are designed to capture user's name, for the survey to be truly anonymous steps must be taken by the developer to address the $UpdatedBy field. This is a special hidden item (ie. field) that Domino/Notes adds to every document automatically. It is a multi-value item designed to store a list of people who have updated a design note (eg. document), with its first value being always set to the original creator (aka author) of the document. The item returns Anonymous as the user only if:

• • A document is created by a Web user with Anonymous access to the database (as per ACL) in which the user is creating the document, (assuming no prior authentication took place in the same session).
  • A form is set to “Anonymous Form” by the developer in the Form properties box, which tells Lotus Notes and Domino not to record names of people who create or edit documents.
  
  
  
  
  
  The example below, shows document properties for two documents created with the same form in Lotus Notes 8.5 client. The first one (first row in the screen capture) was created when "Anonymous Form" property was turned off (ie. box not checked). The second row shows a document created with  "Anonymous Form" turned on (ie. box checked). As you can see, when Anonymous Form is enabled, Lotus Notes no longer adds $UpdatedBy item to the document, and instead it adds a different item called $Anonymous with a value of "1" (data type text string).
  
  
  
  
  Strangely, when you enable this option on the form, it will do what it is designed to do if you create a new document with this form in Lotus Notes, but when you use a Web browser to create and submit your document with Anonymous Form property enabled, Domino just ignores this setting. User name will be captured and stored in $UpdatedBy just as if "Anonymous Form" was not turned on.
  
  A quick search for the "Anonymous Form" on the Web pointed me to the IBM on-line documentation for Lotus Notes and Domino 8. According to this publication, anonymous forms are NOT supported on the Web... (?!?!):
  
  
  
  I didn't give up and decided to contact IBM Technical Support to see why. Their answer was a bit surprising, because according to the reply I got, this feature IS actually supported but an extra step needs to be taken by a developer in order for this to work the same way on the Web as it does in Notes:
  
  "After researching our source, I found one alternative approach we can adopt to circumvent this issue. We can force the HTTP task to honor the "Anonymous Form" setting by explicitly creating a text field named "$Anonymous" in your form ("Anonymous Form" setting should be checked) and setting it's default value to "1" (text)."
  
  It works!
  
  I was informed that this issue have been reported to IBM's quality engineering for further analysis in SPR# PCHE83KQTL. I asked for a new technote on this to be created, since I was unable to find one, and I was told one is being created. I will update this post once I know the technote number.
  

Posted by Bodek Frak At 03:40:52 PM Location Windsor - U of W | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBacks (0)