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Category Lotus Notes and Domino 8
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IT seems that more people decided to try Notes 8 beta than I was initially anticipating. The good news is that I did not hear any complaints about it so far (except Craig of course....lol). I think everyone is fully aware that this is only beta and that IT Services is not supporting it in any way at this time. Having said that, I came across a document today that outlines how to report any issues with notes 8 beta directly to IBM. Please review this document if you are interested in providing your feedback in a meaningful way. This document is posted on the Notes/Domino 8 Public Beta Forum which is a great resource to search for answers and solutions. Another great posting in there is Things you need to know about the Beta Release which is a collection of links to various Notes/Domino 8 documentation.

Posted by Bodek Frak At 09:52:56 AM Location Windsor - U of W | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Lotus Notes and Domino 8
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In this 10 minute video posted on YouTube, Ron Sebastian (fellow Canadian) talks about the new features included with the New Notes 8 release.

Posted by Bodek Frak At 09:44:06 AM Location Windsor - U of W | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Lotus Notes and Domino 8
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IBM is busy working on the next major release of Lotus Notes, code named Hannover. They promise major improvements in the areas of e-mail navigation and management, calendar and scheduling, contact management, and integration of Open Document Format (ODO) with word processing, spreadsheet and presentation capabilities into the Notes client. Here's some links to the various Web postings (mostly IBM's Web site) that discuss these in greater details:

• General overview
• Hannover's home page
• E-mail improvements
• Calendar and scheduling improvements
• Open Document Format integration
• Provide input on usability and design
• "Designing Hannover" blog

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

Category Lotus Notes and Domino 8
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Some people were asking me recently about DB2 integration with Notes/Domino 8. I found this great posting on Domino Blog by Rob Ingram today that explains everything that there is to know. Check it out!

Posted by Bodek Frak At 12:00:00 AM Location Windsor - U of W | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Lotus Notes and Domino 8
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Looks like we have a concrete date: see Ed Brill's blog posting and official IBM announcement letter

Posted by Bodek Frak At 11:11:35 AM Location Windsor - U of W | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Lotus Notes and Domino 8
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It appears that the final release of Notes 8 running on Windows Vista does the same thing that beta 2 was doing. After shutting it down, two processes (notes2w.exe and eclipse.exe) remain behind in memory and need to be killed manually before Notes can be started again:



Once notes2w.exe is killed, a debug window comes up:



Just closing this debug window, removes remaining eclipse.exe process from memory (no need to kill it manually).

I posted this issue on the notes.net dicussion forum in August and Jay Rosenthal from IBM responded saying that they

are aware of a series of shutdown 'hangs'. Some have already been fixed and will be available in the first maintenance release.

Until then, Notes 8 users will have some killing to be done...

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

Category Lotus Notes and Domino 8
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I started this posting back in Orlando in January but somehow had it saved as draft until now... Here's my 10 favourite features of Notes/Domino 8 based on the presentations I attended at the Lotusphere 2007.



 More intuitive and sharper looking graphical user interface (GUI). Vertical preview pane (similar to MS Outlook) in addition to horizontal preview pane. Get quick access to your stuff using launch menu. Side bar. Multilevel undo.
 
New tool to trim the number of messages stored in the InBox folder, based on predefined settings. By default, any message older than 90 days will be removed from InBox folder but not deleted from the mail file. User can still access those messages in the All Documents view. This will address performance degradation issues caused by users who like to keep every piece of mail they ever received in their Inbox folder.

Notes activities congregate related e-mails, files, todo's, etc. (not available in beta 2).

Windows-style selection of documents. You can now use Ctrl and Shift keys to select multiple messages (documents).

Integration of OpenOffice tools into the Notes client. Notes 8 has word processor, spreadsheet and presentation office productivity tools. See: Microsoft, IBM cross swords over open document formats

Dramatic improvements to the Out of Office feature (no longer an agent, responds immediately to each message, turns itself off without you having to do it upon your return, can respond to every message not just once per sender).

Calendar improvements: you can see unprocessed meeting invitations in your calendar (so called "ghosted entries"), you can import external calendar entries (suchas as Google, HotMail) and overlay them in your calendar (example: NHL season schedule).

Inline spellchecker. No longer have to run a spellchecker before sending your messages. Notes 8 checks your spelling as you type your text and highlits misspelled words so that you can make corrections right away, just like MS Word does it.

Mail recall - administrator can now recal selected messages from user mailboxes. This could be very useful when a message was sent by mistake before it was finished, or was sent to the wrong person, or was sent without many users (mass mail) without the proper approval.

When sending a message that contains a file attachment, user has a choice to send a link to the file instead of physical attachment.


Also worth mentioning:

* New Adobe Acrobat 8 Professionalhas some Notes integration features. User can save the contents of entire folder into a single PDF file, with will also include the index of documents.

* Inclusion of Tivoli Directory Integrator license with Domino 8. Will help us to get our Domino Directories synchronized with our LDAP.

* IBM-Lotus Quickr - Personal Edition of this new software (based on Quickplace technology) will be bundled with the Notes client.

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

Category Lotus Notes and Domino 8
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...according to this post on Ed Bril's blog, and this post on Mary Beth Raven's blog.

Posted by Bodek Frak At 10:16:50 AM Location Windsor - U of W | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Lotus Notes and Domino 8
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IBM-Lotus released a second public beta (beta 3) of Notes 8 in the last week of May. I've been running it on my office PC on Windows vista for the past two weeks and I must say it works much better than the first public beta (beta 2). It does not crash as much, although I had it freeze on me on three separate occasions. It starts much faster, and I no longer have to use Notes Medic (lol) every time I want to start it.

I posted the Notes 8 beta 3 installation file in our IT Services Downloads site. Keep in mind that this is not supported by the HelpDesk and if you chose to install it on your PC, you are completely on your own.

You will find more information on Notes beta program here:
http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/product4.nsf/wdocs/betapage

... and more on Notes 8 here:
http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/product4.nsf/wdocs/hannover

There is also a discussion forum dedicated to Notes 8 beta, where you can post your feedback and look for answers/solutions to your questions/problems:
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd8forum.nsf

Posted by Bodek Frak At 08:39:23 AM Location Windsor - U of W | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Lotus Notes and Domino 8
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We got the green light to start distributing Notes 8.0.2 through the SoftwareDepot. It will be posted there shortly in place of 8.0.1. On-site Team will use it now for any new client installs. Technicians can already get it from http://www.uwindsor.ca/its-downloads

We are also finalizing the SmartUpgrade schedule for 8.0.2 distribution. This should start Nov 17 and we will be using the same schema as we used for 7 to 8 upgrade. The final schedule will be posted at http://www.uwindsor.ca/notes when it became available (hopefully next week).

See: Why should I install Lotus Notes 8.0.2 maintenance release if I'm already running Notes 8.0.1? (FAQ 89)

The really cool feature that many technicians will love is that you can now add UseBasicNotes=1 line to notes.ini after installing the standard client. This will force Notes to run basic client each time without having to update any shortcuts. This can be particularly useful in a situation where the user upgraded from 7 to 8 using SmartUpgrade and realized Notes was too slow because his/her computer did not meet the minimum hardware requirements. Once change to notes.ini and the problem is solved! This also applies to NotesMinder and 'mailto' links (Windows registry default mail client association). If this line is not in the notes.ini file, or is set to =0, then Notes standard client will run each time user starts Notes.

Posted by Bodek Frak At 03:17:45 PM Location Windsor - U of W | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Lotus Notes and Domino 8
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Please note that Notes 8.0.2 maintenance release distribution schedule has been approved and can now be accessed at:

http://www.uwindsor.ca/its/notes

... click on "Upgrading to Notes 8.x" form the menu.

Posted by Bodek Frak At 11:21:44 AM Location Windsor - U of W | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Lotus Notes and Domino 8
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That's what IBM claims. We are talking standard client here, not basic. I decided to put this claim to a test tonight on my home PC. My methods are by no means scientific but I think they are good enough for this purpose. But first, a bit about my home computer. It's not that new, and not that fast. Yet, I'm not finding my Notes 8 on it particularly slow. Sure it would be nice if it was faster, but I can live with what I have now. No complaints. Maybe because I am such a diehard supporter of Lotus Notes & Domino and my fault tolerance threshold for it is probably higher than the average user's.. :) Back to my computer: it has a Intel Celron D 340 2.93 GHz, 1 GB of PC3200 DDR 400MHz RAM. Windows XP SP3. While I still had Notes 8.0.1 on it, I started Notes and shut it down 5 times in a row ('warm start'). I then repeated this sequence except this time I rebooted my computer between each Notes restart ('cold start'). Each time, I measured the time it took for it to load the Welcome Page (no other application opening on start-up) from the time I clicked the Notes icon in the Quick Launch Toolbar. I used an ordinary stopwatch to measure the time so my results are probably +/- 1 second or so as far as the margin of error. I should also mention that my Notes is configured for single sign-on with Windows sharing the same password with it so I don't get to see the password prompt when launching Notes. I then upgraded to Notes 8.0.2 and after one trial run, I repeated the whole sequence again. Here are the results:

Warm start

	Notes 8.0.1	Notes 8.0.2	Difference
1)	0:30.80	0:22.80	-8 sec
2)	0:31.38	0:21.67	-9.71 sec
3)	0:33.25	0:21.53	-11.72 sec
4)	0:29.46	0:21.62	-7.84 sec
5)	0:29.97	0:21.00	-8.97 sec
Ave:	0:30.972	21.726	-9.248 sec (30%)

Cold start

	Notes 8.0.1	Notes 8.0.2	Difference
1)	1:14.04	1:06.84	-7.2 sec
2)	1:08.64	1:00.68	-7.96 sec
3)	1:13.21	1:00.41	-8.23 sec
4)	1:09.04	0:59.22	-9.82 sec
5)	1:24.05	1:01.16	-22.89 sec
Ave:	1:13.796	1:01.662	-12.134 sec (16%)

- all times are in minute:second.millisecond
- warm start: Notes is restarted without rebooting the computer
- cold start: Notes is restarted following Windows reboot

Conclusions:

IBM claims are justified. I takes considerably less time for 8.0.2 to start than it did for 8.0.2 on the same machine under the same conditions. Restarting Notes without rebooting Windows was about 30% faster, while starting Notes after a reboot was about 16% faster. Is it worth the hassle of upgrading if you are already running 8.0.1? I'd say yes because there are other benefits of moving to 8.0.2 besides this one. See: Why should I install Lotus Notes 8.0.2 maintenance release if I'm already running Notes 8.0.1?

Posted by Bodek Frak At 12:00:00 AM Location Home | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category BlackBerry Lotus Notes and Domino 8
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After enabling "service" in place of "agent" for the Out of Office on Our Domino 8 mail servers, we quickly discovered the hard way that you can no longer enable Out of Office using your BlackBerry device. It seems that when you enable it on your device, this change does not propagate to your mailbox on Domino server. Furthermore, no automated messages get sent during your absence.

So the million dollar question is: is it a Lotus Notes/Domino (IBM) or BlackBerry (RIM) problem? I was able to find this vague technote on RIM's Web site:
Out-of-Office service does not synchronize correctly with the BlackBerry smartphone

What struck me though, is that the technote's title is worded in such a way that implies that it is somehow Notes/Domino OOO that supposed to synchronize with BlackBerry (BES), while in fact I believe this works the other way... What also got me frustrated is the fact that RIM would release their latest BES stating it is fully supporting Notes/Domino 8, yet something as important as this does not seem to be working even though it's been quite some time since IBM released ND8 and RIM started supporting it. How did they not know that this was not working at the time RIM started officially to support ND8? Do they not run QA checks on their software before releasing it? Doesn't anybody at RIM use the Out of Office? The really depressing part is that the above mentioned technote does not offer any hope for the solution It just goes on to say "This is a previously reported issue that has been escalated internally to our development team. No resolution time frame is currently available." and suggests to go back to "agent" rather than "service" on Domino side as a workaround. That's not good enough. We need this fixed yesterday! That technote was last updated on September 30, that is over a month ago!

Posted by Bodek Frak At 12:46:26 PM Location Windsor - U of W | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Lotus Notes and Domino 8
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Today, we completed another step in our Lotus Notes and Domino 8 upgrade project. We switched the Out of Office functionality on the server side form "agent" (Agent Manager) to "service" (Router). This means that the following extras are now available to Notes 8 and Domino Web Access 8 users:

• Instant automated replies. Previously, the agent was scheduled to run every 6 hours and there was no way to change that. When someone e-mailed you during your absence, they did not get your Out of Office message right away. Sometime it would take up to 6 hours before they got it. This was happening even if you already upgraded to Notes 8.
  
  
• You now have the option to chose between sending automated reply once per sender (as it was in Notes 7 and earlier) or once per every message sent to you (1:1 ratio). Having said this, we just discovered that this functionally have mysteriously vanished from our mail template... I have an open call with IBM on this, and I'm hoping to get it back shortly. I'll' keep you posted.
  
  
• You now have the option to use Out of Office for short absences, lasting less than a day, as long as it is more than 1 hour. You should see the extra option in Out of Office preferences:
  
  
  
  
• You no longer have to worry that if you accidentally (or deliberately) set the "Leaving" date to "today", the whole world will receive your Out of Office message in a matter of minutes... (remember that it was a feature, not a bug).
  
  If you are interested in learning more about the differences between the functionality of Out of Office in Notes 7.x and 8.x, I encourage you to read the article that I wrote for the upcoming issue of Insight (Winter 2009). You will find a draft of it in on my blog in the downloads section. Feel free to send me your feedback or post your comments here.
  
  

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

Category Lotus Notes and Domino 8 Lotus Notes and Domino Issues
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I've discovered another bug in the Notes 8 standard client. The QueryDragDrop and PostDragDrop events in the Database Script object (Domino Designer > Other > Database Resources) does not seem to be working the same way as it used to in Notes 7 and still does in Notes 8 basic. This means than some of the IBM's original code in the mail 8 template that developers placed in the PostDragDrop in particular is not working as intended. For example, this piece:



... which is there to prevent people from drag & drop operations on Group Calendar documents, works correctly in Notes 8 basic, but does nothing in Notes 8 standard. This means people are able to drag Group Calendar documents to any folder. Similar code has been deployed in there by IBM to prevent people from dragging & dropping other elements, such as Mail Rules. the fact that this no longer works is a serious problem because by dragging/dropiing people can now remove rules from the Rules folder (yes, it is a folder) and put them into some other folder. Unfortunately, they cannot drag them back into the Rules folder. I believe I reported this to IBM months ago while Notes was still in 8.0 but it does not seem like this got too much attention. Their answer at the time was: use workaround that is use a basic client... How disappointing.

The underlaying reason is the fact that the sequence of execution in the source code seems to be different between basic and standard. While in Notes 7 and Notes 8 basic the "source.Documents" in this context returns a handle to the document collection representing documents that the user selected before drag & drop operation, in Notes 8 standard this is not the case. Instead this ends up being a handle to a single document that Notes shifts focus on after drag/drop operation has been executed prematurely.

To illustrate this, I put some debug code in the QueryDragDrop and PostDragDrop events in the Database Script object:





When you drag and drop documents between folders in this test database based on the Mail 8 template, you will get different results depending if you use Notes 8 basic on standard:


NOTES 8 BASIC (same as in Notes 7)



Note that when the dialogue box comes up, at this point selected document are still where they are. They were not yet moved to a target folder. This box shows document count for the Document Collection representing selected documents.

Also note that QueryDragDrop has already been executed correctly hence you see the message in the status bar from the "Print" statement I added there.



NOTES 8 STANDARD



The first capture was taken before I released the mouse button during the drag/drop operation (only drag, not drop yet). Note that QueryDragDrop has NOT been executed at all hence you see no message in the status bar from the "Print" statement I added there.




This second capture was taken after I released the mouse button during the drag/drop operation.

Note that when the dialogue box comes up, at this point selected document are no longer in their original location. They were not yet moved to a target folder (I know that from a separate test) but they were already removed form the source folder. In addition the handle to the Document Collection representing selected documents was already lost. Hence, the document count is zero. If there were other documents in the source folder, Notes would have shifted it focus to the first one and the resulting source.Documents would have been 1.

I'm not sure if someone already reported this to IBM. I intend to open a PMR for this as soon as I finish documenting it here. I will be posting the updates based on their response.

Sample database with a debug code can be found in the downloads section of my blog.

Posted by Bodek Frak At 01:04:24 PM Location Windsor - U of W | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Lotus Notes and Domino 8
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I was recently working on the implementation of the new Notes 8 functionality of the Out of Office in our environment. This prompted me to do a bit more research on it, since I was also writing an article about this for our IT bulletin inSight. I then discovered some inconsistencies between what I remembered seeing in various presentations by IBM and affiliates, what is now included in the Notes help file, and the actual feature set of the new Out of Office. In my previous blog posting on this topic (Out of Office now offers all goodies (sort of...)) I said:

You now have the option to chose between sending automated reply once per sender (as it was in Notes 7 and earlier) or once per every message sent to you (1:1 ratio). Having said this, we just discovered that this functionally have mysteriously vanished from our mail template... I have an open call with IBM on this, and I'm hoping to get it back shortly. I'll' keep you posted.

I opened a PMR with IBM to get to the bottom of this. While the initial response from them was that "it's all there, here's why I see, can't you see it?", it turned out later that there was more to it. In the end, IBM said:

{1} ..I was seeing some inconsistencies and needed to verify what was going on and needed to collaborate with my mail routing team as they handle the Out of office service. What we are seeing here is some functionality that they were trying to add to the Out of Office service that did not make it through the Beta testing process. And those documents on the web were written during the Beta project before these features were pulled. So  the field   "Addressed to " does not exist in the Out of Box template. I saw it in my mail file as I was part  of the Beta testing and still had that template applied. When I replaced the design of my mail file with the 8.0.2  out of box template,  I no longer see that field in my profile document. The reason this was removed is that there was no way to make this feature work reliably. If the sender did not expand the group name before sending the feature worked fine but if the sender expanded the group before sending,  the group name was no longer in the Sent from so we had no way of knowing for sure if it was sent to the group or not.

{2} The reply per message or reply per sender check box was also removed and the service will work just like the agent in that aspect,  only one reply per sender. My understanding is that providing that option had a major performance hit on the router delivering messages to the mail boxes so they removed  it. You probably saw a beta version of the template when you saw that check box.

The second paragraph deals with my statement:

I believe Notes 8.0.2 help documentation is incorrect as it says:

"The out-of-office notification service sends only one automated reply to each person who sends you mail while you're away, regardless of how many messages the person sends you during that time. "

...while the article on DeveloperWorks (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/notes8-ooo/)  says:

"Both the service and the agent can optionally mark the owner’s calendar as busy, support two different responses for two sets of people, and follow exception rules regarding which messages should generate a response and which messages should not. Also, they both provide an option to respond to each sender only once (this is a new feature in Lotus Notes 8)."

It turns out that it's the other way around. The current Notes help file is correct in saying that each person who e-mails you during your absence will only get one automated response from your Out of Office. No matter if the agent of service is being used. DeveloperWorks article needs to be updated.

However, The current Notes help file is incorrect in saying that:

As explained above (1st paragraph in IBM's response), this was not implemented in the final release on Notes 8 client.

Posted by Bodek Frak At 12:00:00 AM Location Windsor - U of W | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)