What's covered
There are eight modules, or chapters, each with multiple-page sub-chapters. The Preface covers conventions used in the course such as meanings of the different symbols, setting up a bookmark, and accessing information on the TLCC website. Module One poses the question of "What is Lotus Notes and Domino" and includes information on the difference between Notes databases and relational databases. It ends with a simple demonstration showing the differences between a traditional application seen in the Notes client and a browser, then showing the same database displayed using XPages.

Module Two starts by introducing you to creating databases from templates. Then the Designer client is introduced, complete with a roadmap to identify the different frames. Module Three goes into designing forms and includes a handy section detailing information on Field values. From there you go to designing views, get an introduction to XPages, programming in Domino Designer, and deploying applications. The final module covers certifications and courses to help you get ready for the tests, with links to TLCC's website.

Tap here to read the rest of the article. Plus there's a cat on a keyboard.


NEW! LEARN NOTES AND DOMINO 8 AT YOUR PLACE AND PACE!
Try a free course at www.tlcc.com/dompower8

]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00048237.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00048237.html Mon, 15 Mar 2010 04:00:00 GMT Mick Moignard

Over the past few weeks, I've shared with you my observations, opinions, and analysis of Lotus' direction in 2010 and beyond. This week, I wrap up the series with a look at application development and a recap of some of the social (as in people, not networking) joys of Lotusphere.

Application development
So let's talk application development. As was mentioned when we discussed Vulcan, Lotus have a refocus on application development and app dev tools. A whole keynote session discussed application development.

The key focus is that the application of the future will broadly be a Web application, or rather one that is based on Web standards. It will be delivered not just via a conventional browser, but on mobile platforms, both sometimes-connected local apps as well as via a mobile browser, and also through rich clients like Lotus Notes itself.

Read the rest.


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Integra generates Notes data to Microsoft Word, Excel, and Lotus Symphony, allowing end users to analyse and present data using Graphs, Pivot Tables, Filters, etc. Supports Mail Merge and Labels. No installation required, on the end user's workstation.

Through the optional use of Integra's event driven model, it provides a depth of access to data & computational capability, which is unique in the industry.

Tap here for more information.

]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00048144.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00048144.html Sun, 07 Mar 2010 04:00:00 GMT Mick Moignard

From the Sametime and Web 2.0 products perspective, like the Notes one, 2010 is to a greater or lesser extent a year of reflection, given that both Sametime and Connections have recently had major releases delivered.

Sametime
Sametime 8.5, has the instant meetings and Unified Communications features seen last year. Futures in Sametime include more in-house and cloud convergence. More mobile capability was promised, with Nokia and Blackberry being mentioned specifically. Sametime functionality is also expected to be embedded within other Lotus products -- and partner products -- to enrich the collaborative opportunities.

Of particular interest was the hint about real time translation --not only of Sametime chats but potentially even phone calls handled by Sametime!

We should see some of this in late 2010.

Connections
Connections 2.5 pushed forward in 2009 with the 2.5 release, and work now, for a release expected towards the end of 2010. Lotus is concentrating on making the social analytics we've already mentioned a reality, to help manage information overload and provide recommendations of what's of most interest.

Tap here for the rest of the story.

]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00048057.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00048057.html Sun, 28 Feb 2010 04:00:00 GMT Mick Moignard

Yet again, the Innovations lab, and the breakout session given by Irene Greif and David Millen showed off some of the ideas and research efforts from IBM's Centre for Social Software.

Historically, there's been a strong track record where items shown here would eventually appear as part of Lotus products later, so it's always fascinating to go and see what's on show.

Very cool projects
Among the more than 20 projects on show was Concord, slated to be available in LotusLive labs this year. It will offer cloud-based collaborative document editing functions, letting teams work simultaneously on the same document, with each participant's work being seen as it happens.

In the vein of shared editing, Planet showed how Lotus Connection activity content can be visualised and edited in a calendar-based paradigm by more than one person at a time, while Workboard showed a different way to visualise team and project issues and work with them.

Visualizing text showed how the data analytics of ManyEyes -- itself first seen in the Innovation lab a couple of years back -- can be used to analyse blocks of text in various ways. The demo showed how legislative bills can be analysed to highlight pieces that are out of context, for example.

Then there was a project looking at the mail triage process that many smartphone users do already. I know I do. I'll often preview email on my Blackberry, delete some, answer quick questions and then remark unread those items that I want to handle later. The project showed a model of how that might be supported on an iPhone.

Agora came back as Agora Next, adding the ability to search and tag recorded meetings, and able to collaborate around snippets from those recordings.

Most intriguing, to me as writer and blogger, was Blog Muse. Blog Muse adds huge power to the collaborative value of Lotus Connections blogs. It offers a mechanism for blog readers to ask for subjects to be covered, and for bloggers to search for potential blog subjects from the requests made -- all to help stimulate greater engagement with the blogging process and improve in-company collaboration and expertise spreading.

Next up: Sametime, Quickr, and Symphony updates.

Mick Moignard has been working and traveling with Lotus Notes since Release 2.0 in 1991. Mick is a DominoPower Senior Technical Editor and a Principal CLP with Unipart Expert Practices, a Lotus Advanced Partner in the UK. If you want to discuss anything to do with this article, or indeed anything else to do with Notes and Domino, contact Mick at Mick_Moignard@unipart.co.uk. Unipart Expert Practices will also happily discuss any opportunities you may have with any Notes and Domino application development or infrastructure projects you need help with. Unipart Expert Practices can be found at http://www.unipartep.com.

In the meantime, the individual product lines continue to move forward, and I'm sure you'd like to know what's coming up next.

Getting your fix
For Notes and Domino, the immediate future is consolidation and tidy-up, rather than new features. Firstly, there's 8.5.1 Fix Pack 1, imminent. So imminent that by the time you read this, it may well be available. [It is, here's the download link. --Ed.] There are some Windows 7 and Mac OS X-specific fixes, a long list of client and server fixes, a few Designer fixes, and a bunch of iNotes fixes. All are considered "low-risk, high-impact fixes to help customers safely avoid known issues."

And here's something interesting, as well:

This is the first Domino Fix Pack to include iNotes Client fixes by incorporating a new Forms85.nsf file. In prior releases, due to localization of Forms85.nsf, iNotes client fixes could not be included. As of Domino 8.5.1, all localization is self contained in Forms85.nsf allowing iNotes client fixes to be included in Domino Fixpacks for 8.5.1 and above.

Features in 8.5.2 and beyond
There's Traveler for Android coming along at some point, as I already mentioned last week.

Then there's 8.5.2, due later this year. Ed Brill tells me that this is a bug-fix maintenance release only, no new features. But in one of the XPages sessions, a number of new XPages/Designer items were announced, though to be fair, most of these are aimed at making Designer more functional and useable than they are new XPage runtime features.

Tap here for the rest of the story.


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Find Unused Groups will check your ACL, mail, multi purpose and server groups to help you determine if they are used, and who uses them.

Learn how to easily clean up your address book.

]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00047889.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00047889.html Sun, 14 Feb 2010 04:00:00 GMT Mick Moignard

This article continues our series on Lotusphere 2010. Last week, we discussed overall changes at Lotus and Project Vulcan. This week, we're looking at mobility and collaboration.

There's another theme that was big at Lotusphere: mobility and smartphones. Not only were there a bunch of Lotus and partner announcements, everywhere you went, you saw people using them. Even while standing around having a conversation, most participants had a phone in the hand, too, probably checking the 'Sphere twitter streams.

This trend isn't going away, and there were even some prophets suggesting that the smartphone will replace the laptop as the weapon of choice for many people, and as the prime interface for many business applications, too.

I'm not sure I subscribe to the former idea. I can't see the current awkward two-thumb typing interface on a small device replacing a keyboard, but then I could also be wrong, and maybe voice will become the large-scale data entry vehicle with future smartphones.

But as was obvious from both products and sessions, custom mobile business apps, and partner apps that work on mobiles are here to stay. For example:

• BlackBerry launched their new Quickr and updated Connections products just before Lotusphere. Pity they appear to need another back-end server to support them, though.
• Teamstudio announced an XPages toolset, Voyager, that will you to use XPages to design apps for Blackberries, and which will support offline as well as online capability.
• Lotus said that a future release of Traveler (oh, how I hate the American spelling!) will support Android phones, starting with the Nexus One, in the second half of 2010. I'd speculate that this will come with Notes/Domino 8.5.2.
• Lotus have a new iPhone product, Traveler Companion. This is free, already available and, by all accounts, a popular download on the iPhone App Store. It adds encryption capabilities to Traveler on an iPhone.
• Lotus also announced future Nokia Symbian features, including Sametime presence awareness and Sametime Unified Telephony integrated into the device's address book, to be available sometime towards the end of 2010.

Can we talk?
Another pervasive theme was collaboration itself. That's not a new theme to Lotusphere by any means. After all, it's one of the founding tenets of Notes itself.

But there was much more emphasis on the value, and indeed the whole point, of collaboration from a more social perspective. It can't be lost on Lotus that having started the whole collaboration software business, their lead has been somewhat eroded recently by things like Google Wave, and even SharePoint.

One way they plan to do that is via social analytics, which will pervade the product set in the future as the promise of project Vulcan starts to be delivered. This is the analysis of what interests you, taken from your profile, and who and what content you collaborate with.

There's a new initiative that's aimed at helping customers "get it" in terms of how collaboration is now a critical differentiator between companies, in how they interact with customers and suppliers and how they work internally to deliver more value, faster and better, through collaboration.

There's new Collaboration Agenda initiative, a consulting offering -- which partners can also get involved in -- aimed at helping companies to transform how they operate by liberating the knowledge and expertise they have.

Through workshops, customers can see how, by changing processes to become more collaborative and connecting people and technology in the right context, they can start to rebuild themselves. The workshops teach customers how to work more effectively with people inside and outside the firewalls, becoming more expertise-led enterprises, and "raise the collective intelligence of the organisation by allowing all members to easily tap into it".

Or, in other words, just "get it".

Lotus product updates
In the meantime, the individual product lines continue to move forward, and I'm sure you'd like to know what's coming up next. That's next week.

Product availability and information
Learn more about BlackBerry apps for Lotus.

Learn more about Teamstudio and Voyager.

Mick Moignard has been working and traveling with Lotus Notes since Release 2.0 in 1991. Mick is a DominoPower Senior Technical Editor and a Principal CLP with Unipart Expert Practices, a Lotus Advanced Partner in the UK. If you want to discuss anything to do with this article, or indeed anything else to do with Notes and Domino, contact Mick at Mick_Moignard@unipart.co.uk. Unipart Expert Practices will also happily discuss any opportunities you may have with any Notes and Domino application development or infrastructure projects you need help with. Unipart Expert Practices can be found at http://www.unipartep.com.

The changes at Lotus had trickled out just a few days before the show opened. Bob Picciano, who has done so much in reinvigorating Lotus in his two years at the helm, has been promoted upwards within IBM. He's now Director of Worldwide Sales at IBM Software. Long time Loti, Alastair Rennie, has taken his place as Lotus General manager.

Mike Rhodin, Bob's predecessor at Lotus has also been promoted within IBM, which means that the last two previous Lotus GMs are now in positions of influence in the IBM hierarchy -- which can't be bad in ensuring that the Lotus brand stays in the forefront of IBM's thinking.

At the Opening session, once all that had been dealt with, and Bob had given the usual upbeat state-of-the-nation remarks on Lotus in 2009, we had four customers on the stage to tell their stories, rapidly followed by five business partners, all with good stories.

Read Mick's full report.


NEW! LEARN NOTES AND DOMINO 8 AT YOUR PLACE AND PACE!
Try a free course at www.tlcc.com/dompower8

]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00047672.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00047672.html Thu, 28 Jan 2010 04:00:00 GMT David Gewirtz

We'll have a lot to talk about in the coming weeks about all the Lotusphere announcements. This week, let's take a look at five trends you'll be talking about all year.

#1 LotusLive
Lotus has come out with a full-barrel cloud strategy and it's a good one. Making hardware someone else's problem is compelling for many companies and LotusLive may be far more compelling that Workplace ever was.

#2 Making a living as an IT pro in a cloud-centric world
With a lot of the configuration and server responsibility going back to IBM, how do IT professionals make a living? Those with the ability to cross disciplines, create mash-ups, and deal with heterogeneous environments will win.

#3 Being an ISP in a cloud-centric world
This, too, will change for many IBM business partners. Look more at plug-ins and add-ons to the LotusLive environment, plus some added hassle as you have to wind your way through possible approval and distribution contract challenges.

#4 Eliminating the hardware
With Lotus' announcement that Domino will be available as an image in the Amazon EC2 cloud, even more opportunities open up. Now, it'll be possible to scale without investing in more and more hardware.

#5 The logic of Vulcan
IBM announced Project Vulcan and "opened the kimono" to show us their vision of Notes and the future of enterprise collaboration. Nothing will change in 2010, but as time moves on, the interconnection between services in a loosely-coupled environment could allow for greater flexibility and on-the-fly responsiveness.

So, there you go. A short dispatch. Stay tuned for in-depth analysis over the coming weeks.

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.

Joe Dolittle pointed out that Domino has an automated log database deletion mechanism, controlled by the Log= entry in the Notes.INI file. He noted that should your server not have such an entry, then 7 days is used as the default deletion interval, so you will always have some automated deletion process in place.

I'd also point out that the log deletions managed by this parameter are, in fact, all deleted at once -- so if the retention period is set to 7 days, the server will delete all log entries older than that. The deletion stubs generated by those deletions are then purged according to the standard purge interval formula, which does do things by thirds.

In this article, I'll add some more to this discussion: look a bit deeper at what causes log databases to get large, look at some of the information that's recorded in the log,nsf, and then add some more ideas about how you can deal with it.

Tap here to read Mick's full article.

]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00047511.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00047511.html Thu, 14 Jan 2010 04:00:00 GMT David Gewirtz

Welcome to a new and exciting aspect of the DominoPower experience: DominoPower TV. Every month or so, we'll have a new episode, featuring interviews with some of the most interesting and well-informed members of the Lotus community.

Special thanks go out to Teamstudio for helping us put together Episode 1. They welcomed us into their offices and let us watch and film a confidential strategy session where they explore issues facing staying with Notes or migrating to another platform. Here's the full video:

In this video, Teamstudio Product Manager Mike Wetherbee hosts a discussion between Notes superstar Paul Mooney and a Megan Taylor, Teamstudio's HR Director, who plays the role of a CEO facing a tough decision.

Megan is grappling with the decision to stay with Notes or migrate to MS Exchange, and Paul walks her through the pros and cons on both sides of the fence. Is the grass really greener on the other side? Does Megan stay or does she go?

Product availability and resources
Visit Teamstudio.

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.

We're done. Ten years have gone by since we all worried about Y2K and we're still not driving flying cars.

What has ten years of tech bought us? Are there colonies on the moon? Can we "beam" from New York to San Francisco in seconds? Have we cured cancer?

Nope. Instead we got Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Seriously, that's what we got out of ten years. We've learned we can be inane 140 characters at a time. Special.

Craigslist and Google have teamed up to kill newspapers. Bloggers are bashing magazines. And e-books are causing print publishers to both lose revenue and hair.

So, yeah, we got the iPhone. We've learned that Apple can be petty, capricious, and completely non-responsive in all new ways. Yay?

Computers are cheaper, which is nice. You can buy a low-end desktop or netbook for under $300. But Windows and Mac users are still bitching at each other, Linux is still not the top dog, and while Firefox and Google's Chrome are nice browsers, they just don't seem like they contain a full decade's worth of innovation.

Ten years also brought us a huge increase in computer and network threats. Viruses have morphed into rootkits, DDoS attacks, and 'bot nets. Every time you turn on your computer, you put your financial identity at risk. We thought spam was a problem at the turn of the century, but now it's become a complete and total hassle, with many messages carrying nasty payloads.

Well, bummer, right? Not entirely.

If anything, the Uh-Oh's have been a decade of incremental improvement. The Internet has solidified its hold on society, which is both a good and bad thing. But there still aren't flying cars and we still aren't wearing silver suits (which is probably a blessing).

While the last ten years haven't resulted in any super sci-fi wonders, we have managed to link more members of our society together online. We have managed to get Internet speeds up to a point where it's possible for family members across the world to see and talk to each other.

We've managed to tap the power of crowds in amazing ways, creating wonders like Wikipedia. Then there's Twitter, which almost single-handedly saved Iran -- and probably would have, had Michael Jackson not died right in the middle of the mess.

What about the next ten years? What will we see in 2020? Personally, I'm still hoping for flying cars.

If it's going to be good, it's up to us. We have all these amazing toys. We have the technology. We can be better, stronger, faster. Let's make the next ten years the best darn ten years, ever! Happy New Year!

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.

Plus, you'll get an introduction to Teamstudio Undo (formerly known as Teamstudio Snapper).

Tap here to get started!

]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00047316.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00047316.html Mon, 28 Dec 2009 04:00:00 GMT Joe Dolittle

DominoPower Reader Jelani Ngabidj writes:

I'm starting to worry about my log.nsf file. I've never really paid much attention to this thing, but I recently did a scan for big files on my server and discovered log.nsf was more than 11 gigabytes!

We've been running the server for a long time, but I just don't feel good about a log file that size. Shouldn't the server be purging the file on a pretty regular basis?

Jelani is right. Your log.nsf file should never be that large. In fact, your log file should be purged on a very regular basis.

Log file purging is generally managed by the "Log=" parameter in Notes.ini. A few weeks ago, we gave a Site of the Month award to lntoolbox.com's .ini reference and today, I'm making use of it to answer Jelani's question.

According to the .ini reference, the format for the "Log=" parameter is:

Log=logfilename,logoption,0,days,size,days2(optional)


The fourth parameter, "days", is what's important here. Most often, you'll see that set to 7, for 7 days. Sometimes, you'll see it set to 30. But either way, you shouldn't have more than about 30 days in your log.nsf file.

So, the first thing to do is check your Notes.ini and see if somehow that parameter is inflated, for example, if it says something like 365 or even 20000. If so, then your log isn't being purged because Notes has been told not to purge it.

By the way, if it turns out you don't have a "Log=" parameter, that doesn't mean the log file is allowed to grow. The default setting for log file purging is 7 days, so if you have no "Log=" at all, 7 days is the assumed value.

One thing to note is that Notes doesn't purge the entire log at once. According to IBM:

Purging is done at one-third of the purge interval time. (i.e. If the interval is set to 30, then every 10 days, all deletion stubs older than 30 days are purged from the database)

It's also possible that the "Log=" parameter is being ignored in Notes.ini. There was a problem in Domino 6.0, 6.5, and 7.0 where Domino ignored the parameter under certain circumstances. I honestly don't know if the problem still exists in current releases, but I haven't seen any mention of it, so it might have been fixed.

There is a workaround. Find the Replication->Space Savers tab and look for the checkbox "Remove documents not modified in the last N days". Check it. This should help you get around the problem.

Good luck!

Joe is a ZATZ associate editor. Prior to this job, he was customer support manager for the FileFlex database engine.

As you might imagine, the author of that analysis was less than thrilled (I get that a lot) and he sent me a a sternly-written follow-up email (I get those a lot, too). I've posted his letter below, and then I'll follow it up with some of my comments (which will likely result in yet another sternly-written letter...sigh).

Email from Adriaan Bloem, Analyst
Hi David,

First off: I'm not very charmed by the continuous suggestions that CMS Watch, or myself, would have any agenda to promote SharePoint over Notes/Domino. It feels like an easy vilification of anyone that dares criticize the Notes/Domino platform.

Of course, I shouldn't have suggested that the platform is going away. We've apologized profusely over that though.

But what surprises me is the assumptions in "The next part that frustrates me is when someone makes technical criticism based on something they know nothing about." Really. I do know. I've been there. And anyone who has done anything meaningful in Notes/Domino has been there. So I'm sure you're well aware you can't do @dblookups in a view column.

So it seems a bit disingenuous to pretend the problem doesn't exist.

Sure, you could say the way I put it was simplistic. It's much like saying you can't multiply in 8-bit Z80 assembly. (Of course you can; you just have to write the routine yourself.) Likewise, I remember quite a few of the workarounds. (My most ambitious one, if I recall correctly, involved something like running a nightly agent that would load the two views in separate arrays, loop through them, store the results in a third array, and then writing it to another view). And yes, now you can do that relatively easy in Xpages, and since 8.5.1, you can even do that for Notes (not just the web). But "relatively easy" is just that, because writing Javascript versions of @formula language to run as server-side webscripts (...and then using that in Notes?) is not, well, the most elegant of solutions. And yes, you could use views on a database instead, but that's sort of overkill for most of the simple uses you'd want to do those lookups for.

In short, it was just an illustration to show Notes/Domino isn't meant to be a relational DB. It really does treat documents as documents: that's also it's strength. That's probably a more interesting thing to focus on. And I would have preferred to hear more rational explanations of Notes/Domino's specific strengths. That's why I ended the blog post with "I'd welcome any additions or corrections."

Cheers,
Adriaan M. Bloem
Analyst, CMS Watch
Get the Real Story: Evaluations, Education, Advisory Services

David replies
Short answer: I think Adriaan played fast and loose with his analysis to the detriment of a group of dedicated IT people and an exceptional enterprise IT platform. The problem has been that this same fast and loose analysis has been repeated over-and-over by other analysts, creating a false sense of doom and gloom for an excellent product line and fostering a sort of conventional wisdom that's neither accurate nor wise.

Lotus is not phasing out Notes. Domino is a fine product. And SharePoint is not the be-all and end-all of collaboration systems.

Some of Adriaan's concerns about the capabilities of native views are relatively valid. However, that's not what he wrote in his analysis. Analysts, like journalists, have a level of responsibility that goes beyond that of the typically opinionated blogger. When you set yourself out as an analyst, the assumption is you did some analysis. When you represent yourself as an expert in a field, you are expected to be able to actually demonstrate expertise in that field and not just make stuff up.

When, as an analyst, you suggest a platform is going away, that's a very dangerous statement to make without serious corroborating evidence. Adriaan claims to offer "the real story" and then he pretty much invented a story, one that's hurtful to a lot of people, and represented it as real, considered analysis. Apologies after the fact just don't cut it.

Perhaps, in the future, when Adriaan posts something that he calls "analysis," he'll actually support his assertions, display the nuance that one expects from carefully considered analysis, and consider carefully before blindly supporting one vendor at the expense of the ecosystem of another vendor.

Product availability and resources
Read Sloppy analysis at the core of another Domino vs. SharePoint report.

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.

In this case, we're looking at an article called "The Difference between SharePoint and Lotus Notes" over on CMS Watch ("Get the real story"). I hate picking on these guys because somewhere on their site, I'm quoted as recommending one of their products -- but not this one.

Tap here and read where David rips 'em a new one.


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]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00047049.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00047049.html Mon, 07 Dec 2009 04:00:00 GMT Joe Dolittle

We got a fun email this week from Bastian Wieczorek in Dortmund, Germany. Bastain tells us:

I wish to get this famous "DOMINOPOWER SITE OF THE MONTH" award for my website ;-).

The Web site http://www.lntoolbox.com lists all known (and a lot of unknown too) notes.ini options. There exist also a tool on the website which allows you to analyze your Notes.ini file and/or compare it with another Notes.ini file.

How could we deny Bastain's quest for fame, especially when he does have quite the rockin' Notes.ini database? In fact, it's the Notes.ini reference that convinced us to make his lntoolbox.com site a DominoPower Site of the Month, as shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A

We give Bastain Wieczorek's lntoolbox.com site the "famous" DominoPower Site of the Month award.

We decided to give him a quick test, though. As you know, there are new .ini settings introduced with most releases of Notes and Domino. Some of the more obscure for Release 8.5.1 are the iNotes options INOTES_WA_DISABLE_WEBSTYLE_SEARCH and iNOTES_WA_EnableOpenLinkInEditor. So we checked them out.

As you can see in Figure B, Bastain does indeed show these new .ini items in his database.

FIGURE B


You can find almost anything you want at Bastain's .ini reference. Click picture for a larger image.

We particularly liked the "by release" and "by category" reference options and fully expect to be visiting the "by category" database on a regular basis ourselves.

And so, that's why we give Bastain Wieczorek's lntoolbox.com site the "famous" DominoPower Site of the Month award.

Product availability and resources
Visit Bastain's .ini database.

If you want your site to be considered for a DominoPower Site of the Month award, please contact editor@dominopower.com. Please be sure to include DOMINOPOWER SITE OF THE MONTH in the subject and explain to us exactly why you think your site is worthy of this fabulous honor.

Joe is a ZATZ associate editor. Prior to this job, he was customer support manager for the FileFlex database engine.

My pointy-hair is getting on my case because our Domino server keeps crashing. I know what the problem is, it's one, relatively small database that keeps corrupting. I'm not yet sure why it's corrupting, but I'm working on it.

Anyway, the thing is, once the server crashes, I make like a good girl and do a database reindex. Unfortunately, this usually takes about four hours and my boss is now threatening to fire me (!) if I keep taking the server down for so long in the middle of the work day.

I need this job (although I could honestly do without this guy as my boss). Anything you can suggest to help me rebuild this database faster?

Wow! I certainly feel for Chloe. Clearly, the right answer is to find out what's causing that one database to corrupt regularly. I can't help much, because she didn't provide us with much detail on that problem.

But I did notice a couple of key words that might help Chloe's time-for-rebuild problem. She mentioned "one, relatively small database" and also said the reindex takes "about four hours".

Now, relatively small is a relative term, but I'm going to assume that she's got a few relatively big databases and this relatively small one. I'm also going to guess that when she does a database reindex, she's not just reindexing the small one, but all the databases, which could take time.

Most Notes administrators know about the updall task, and many who use it call it this way:

Load updall -r


This will reindex all the databases. But there is a way to tell updall to only reindex one database, as in the following:

Load updall [database-name] -r


Just replace the optional [database-name] with the name of your database.

Chloe, my guess is that if you tell updall to only reindex the one database you know is corrupted, you'll save a lot of time and probably keep your job.

Just one question: are you sure it's only one database? You should definitely get to fixing what's causing the problem right away.

Joe is a ZATZ associate editor. Prior to this job, he was customer support manager for the FileFlex database engine.

My boss has decided to do the IT equivalent of crossing the beams. He wants to make Domino work with IIS. Worse, he wants ME to make Domino work with IIS.

Is this even possible?

Will it cause permanent damage to the fabric of the universe (or my career)?

As it turns out, you can use IIS as a front-end to WebSphere Application Server and Domino. You basically need to install the WebSphere plug-in into IIS. This is neither all that hard, nor unsupported. In fact, Lotus has documented the steps you're going to need to follow.

Here you go:

• To install the WebSphere plug-in on an IIS server
• To configure the WebSphere plug-in
• To configure the Domino server to work with Microsoft IIS
• Setting up security for Microsoft IIS
• Details of Microsoft IIS security options

Tanith, it's always good to know how to do more things, and if you've got experience bridging two worlds, that's always a valuable career point. All life as we know it will not stop instantaneously and every molecule in your body will not explode at the speed of light. So, you're safe for now.

Joe is a ZATZ associate editor. Prior to this job, he was customer support manager for the FileFlex database engine.

And while Lotus has always had helpful online resources, sometimes you really need to dig around to find the good stuff. I was talking to a developer the other day, a guy who'd been involved with Lotus products for years, and when I mentioned how helpful the Lotus wikis are, he looked at me, turned his head sideways, and asked, "Lotus has wikis?"

Lotus has a lot of wikis, and they're great. His question got me thinking, and I realized that we'd never spotlighted the Lotus wikis in DominoPower before. If Jamal hadn't heard of the Lotus wikis, maybe some of you hadn't either. And that's why, without further ado, I present you with some serious link love.

Here they are, the Lotus wikis:

• IBM accelerators
• IBM Composite Applications
• IBM LotusLive
• IBM LotusLive iNotes
• IBM LotusLive Meetings
• IBM Mashup Center
• Lotus Connections
• Lotus Domino
• Lotus Domino Designer
• Lotus Expeditor
• Lotus Forms
• Lotus Foundations
• Lotus iNotes
• Lotus Instructor Community Courseware
• Lotus Mobile Connect
• Lotus Notes
• Lotus Notes Traveler
• Lotus Quickr
• Lotus Sametime
• Lotus Symphony
• Lotus Web Content Management
• Lotus Workforce Management
• WebSphere Dashboard Framework
• WebSphere Portal
• WebSphere Portlet Factory

Click in, contribute, learn, and enjoy!

Joe is a ZATZ associate editor. Prior to this job, he was customer support manager for the FileFlex database engine.

Here's what he told us:

I'm ahead of the game and behind everyone at the same time. We're installing a brand-new install of Domino 8.5.1 on an ancient and rusting System i machine. I know. But hey, the machine is unstoppable.

Unfortunately, I can't say the same of 8.5.1. As soon as we started it up, we began getting errors of the form "Notes .INI setting JavaUseClassicJVM in use".

The thing is, I know the classic JVM is in use. And so, apparently, does Domino. So why doesn't it seem to like me?

Well, Fredrik, don't you just love it when something that used to just work just stops? Welcome to the world of "progress". Fortunately, I know what your problem is (at least, what this problem is) and I can also share with you a relatively easy solution.

It turns out those slappy, happy, dappy Domino developers at IBM have decided to move on, at least when it comes to the Java virtual machine. There's an old Java virtual machine, known as "Java Developer Kit 6". And there's a new Java virtual machine, called J9, also known as "Java SE 6 32 bit".

Now, here's where you're affected. the old JVM hasn't been tested or supported for Domino 8.5.1, and IBM is going to stop supporting it in the System i release after 6.1. What you're seeing is a message telling you to switch Java machines.

Fortunately, it's a relatively easy fix, at least in terms of configuration. Obviously, any time you change a virtual machine, there could be some residual incompatibility, but that's not your immediate problem.

For now, simply go into your Notes.INI and either delete the setting:

JavaUseClassicJVM=1


or change it to:

JavaUseClassicJVM=0


Restart the server, and as long as you've got J9 installed, Domino will start using it.

Joe is a ZATZ associate editor. Prior to this job, he was customer support manager for the FileFlex database engine.

My involvement with Notes started in the early 1990s, while Notes 2 was out. I wrote Lotus Notes 3 Revealed! (shown in Figure A) As I recall, that the second book ever written about Notes and the first to focus on Notes business related issues.

FIGURE A

Lotus Notes 3 Revealed! showed some amazing case studies for Notes, even then.

And no, the dude on the cover isn't me.

Of course, since the mid-1990s, Notes has come a very long way. IBM bought Lotus in 1995 (which means IBM has had Notes for almost 15 years -- Holy Cow!) and shortly after, Release 4 came out in 1996. It's also hard to believe, but before Release 4, there was no LotusScript.

Since then, Release 5 came out in 1999, 6.0 in 2002, ND7 in 2005, and, of course, Release 8 in 2007.

If you'd like to read an excellent overview of the history of Notes going all the way from PLATO to Release 8, I recommend this month's Site of the Month, The History of Notes and Domino on IBM's developerWorks.

For newcomers, it's a fascinating read. For those of us old-timers, it's a walk down memory lane.

Product availability and resources
Visit The History of Notes and Domino,

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.

Those of you grey-haired enough to remember back to Notes 2 and 3 will recall that it always was, in that the Notes client of that time always included the ability to create and edit design elements. Notes 4.6, I think it was, introduced the separate Domino Designer program, and the extra charge for it.

So why have Lotus now made Designer more freely available, or at least, made it available at no initial cost?

Read Mick's full analysis by tapping here.

]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00046424.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00046424.html Wed, 14 Oct 2009 04:00:00 GMT Bernard Grenville-Jones

I'm Bernard Grenville-Jones, working in systems and operations at OAC Actuaries and Consultants (OAC plc). We're a medium-sized actuarial consulting company with around 30 staff, based in the City of London, UK. We've always operated -- since inception in 1994 -- as a virtual company, with our employees based at their homes, no head office, everything managed simply and as lean as possible, using Lotus Notes as a major part of the glue that holds our systems infrastructure together.

Running a business like this has a variety of challenges: keeping costs down, yet ensuring that the business is efficient and flexible. We've found over the years that paying attention to the simple things has always been important to enabling our business to grow and prosper. One of these simple things is how to handle inbound old-fashioned post coming to a company address, and then being able to get that mail quickly and securely to the right people to handle it.

We've been scanning mail into a Notes database for years, but as the company grew, the manual process was increasingly untenable, and we had to find a better way. And so we did.

Apart from running the business, we like cooking. We saw the solution to these issues like cooking; use the best ingredients, simple and fresh, and cook them together carefully until you get the perfect dish. So let's follow that through, and look at how we cooked our inbound post process -- which combines scanning, barcodes, and Lotus Notes. Let's start by looking in a bit more detail at the ingredients.

Tap here and read the entire article.


MARK YOUR CALENDAR FOR IN-DEPTH LOTUS TRAINING, MAY 12-14, 2010, BOSTON
Register by April 10, 2010, to save $200.

]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00046345.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00046345.html Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:00:00 GMT Joe Dolittle

It looks like our little DominoPower Q&A series has sparked off a trend. The good news is that it seems to really be helping people, because we get more and more letters asking for help.

The bad news is that most requests seem to fit a similar pattern:

I/we use Notes/Domino and I/we also use [fill in the blank] and sometimes also [fill in the blank]. How do I/we/my users/those dweebs in accounting use Notes, [filled in item 1] and [filled in item 2] together?

Sometimes, though, there's a twist. This time, I had no idea what our reader was talking about. Here's the letter from Xui Li:

We use Notes and Domino, but we also use BlueTwit to communicate on projects. Is there any way to integrate BlueTwit with Twitter.

Learn what BlueTwit is, and if Xui's question can be answered by tapping here.


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Integra generates Notes data to Microsoft Word, Excel, and Lotus Symphony, allowing end users to analyse and present data using Graphs, Pivot Tables, Filters, etc. Supports Mail Merge and Labels. No installation required, on the end user's workstation.

Through the optional use of Integra's event driven model, it provides a depth of access to data & computational capability, which is unique in the industry.

Tap here for more information.

]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00046221.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00046221.html Mon, 28 Sep 2009 04:00:00 GMT Joe Dolittle

David's hard at work finishing another chapter in his upcoming book, so he's asked me to answer another DominoPower reader question. This time, reader Kimberly Arechiga asks:

I work for a major, national research laboratory and we've brought Quickr in as a test for a few projects. It's pretty impressive, but the scientists here need the ability to format equations properly, and I can't figure out a reasonably easy way to do that in Quickr.

Right now, we're using a standalone equation editor, grabbing screenshots, and pasting them into postings. But there's got to be a better way.

Please tell me there's an equation editor plug-in for Quickr.

Well, Kimberly, you're in luck. There is an equation editor for Quickr, shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A

You can edit equations in Quickr

It's part of a bigger plug-in, EditLive for Quickr, from Ephox. EditLive adds all sorts of style formatting to Quickr, along with tables, forms, change tracking, and even a thesaurus.

The only gotcha is the solution might be a bit expensive. We don't have pricing information on the product, but EditLive comes in a Professional version and an Enterprise version. The equation editor (and the thesaurus) is only provided in the Enterprise version.

It sounds like you're a pretty big organization, so that probably won't be much of a problem for you, but we'd encourage Ephox to put professional features like equation editing and thesaurus into the Professional version and keep the more enterprise-level features, like change management, in the Enterprise variant.

Product availability and resources
Learn more about EditLive's equation editor.

Joe is a ZATZ associate editor. Prior to this job, he was customer support manager for the FileFlex database engine.

I noticed you've started answering reader questions and I was hoping you'd help with one of my mysteries.

My boss insisted we install Alloy and then later insisted we uninstall it. While that's a mystery in its own right, the real problem I'm having is with the email templates.

Once you uninstall Alloy, I'm still getting Alloy templates and its screwing things up. And, of course, my pointy-hair is on my case to fix it, even though he's the one who caused the problem.

For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Alloy is an IBM and SAP product that allows you to integrate SAP business processes with Lotus Notes and Domino. Cool stuff.

But what our reader asks (we'll call her Joy) is how to undo the Alloy installation. When she originally installed Alloy, she replaced users' master mail templates design inheritance with one provided by Alloy, usually one that pulls Alloy elements from NDERPmail.ntf.

To fix the problem, she's got to replace the Alloy template with the original version from Notes or Domino. I'd recommend going back to mail8.ntf.

Doing so is pretty straightforward. In the Database Design section of the mail application's properties, find the Inheritence section. Change the template name field to point to mail8.ntf.

Choose Replace Design and you should be good to go.

Oh, and make sure you type or choose the .ntf file. I mistakenly typed .nft and it took me an hour on a Sunday afternoon that I could have devoted to watching MacGyver reruns to figure out what had gone wrong.

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.

I don't care about using Skype. I like my regular phone. But I really love Trillian because I can IM to all different kinds of IM clients. Except Sametime. What can I do to add Sametime to Trillian?

Fortunately, programmers will be programmers and there was someone out there who also wanted to create a link between Sametime and Trillian. We're not big Trillian users here (IM is a big distraction when you're a writer), but we did find STPlugin, a Sametime plugin for Trillian.

See the link below and let us know what you think. It seems pretty full-featured. The only thing it lacks, apparently, is Sametime's private messaging capabilities. So watch what you say, and enjoy.

Product availability and resources
Download STPlugin.

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.

Find Unused Groups will check your ACL, mail, multi purpose and server groups to help you determine if they are used, and who uses them.

Learn how to easily clean up your address book.

]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00045951.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00045951.html Mon, 07 Sep 2009 04:00:00 GMT David Gewirtz

This appears to be our week for Skype questions. Readers Jeb Hayfarmer and Yeva Hourig both wanted to know about Sametime and Skype integration, but from different directions. Jeb wanted to know how to make it happen and Yeva wanted to know, essentially, why bother.

Let's first look at Yeva's question:

Bunch of my users are always at me to make Sametime work with Skype. I tell them Sametime better than Skype, but they don't listen. They insist. Why don't they listen? Sametime does voice and it does text and all the rest.

Well, Yeva, long experience has told me that our user constiuencies want what they want and it's often hard to dissuade them from something once they're set on an idea. But I think I know what's going on.

Sametime is an excellent enterprise-level messaging and collaboration platform, but the key here is "enterprise". There are a lot of people in the world that don't use Sametime, either because they've never had the pleasure of using it, or because they're just not part of an organization that would field something as powerful and flexible as Sametime.

On the other hand, Skype is free, easy, and everywhere. My guess is that your users want to connect with Skype users, and don't really want to install Skype and manage both user directories in separate applications.

And that brings us to Jeb, who asks:

Is there any way to integrate Skype with Sametime. I know there are different protocols, but if we could even just merge the directories, it'd be a start.

As far as I know, there's only one way to integrate Sametime and Skype, and that's with a Sametime plugin from Pentos in Munich.

They offer a neat little program called Sametime 2 Skype that puts the Skype contact list into the Sametime window, and lets you initiate virtually all of the Skype services directly from the Sametime window.

There appear to be some caveats, though. First, every computer with Sametime and the Sametime 2 Skype plugin will also need the full Skype installed as well. Second, it doesn't look like you can set up audio chats or text message chats as a conference with some members using Skype and some using Sametime. Hopefully, we'll see that sometime soon.

Product availability and resources
Learn about Sametime 2 Skype.

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.

In "Managing production Notes deployments," I described a lot of steps, which take time and effort to do and get right, and which often need to be done out of hours, which then adds to cost. This is where Teamstudio's Build Manager product comes in.

Build Manager is intended to provide their customers with something that enables Notes application changes to be pushed along a path from development to test and from test to production, with whatever nuances of environments that exist, and do it in a consistent and error-free manner. As we've seen, this isn't a trivial operation, and should not be perceived as such.

Now, I'm not going to do a traditional, detailed review of Build Manager here, for two reasons that are intertwined in each other. The first is that it's a complex piece of software that requires careful setup and configuration, as well as integration with your development process. That requires time, effort and several environments to do properly.

Secondly, whatever environment I had will be different to yours, which means that what works well for me may not be what you need. So what I did instead was talked to Teamstudio's Technical Director, Simon Peek, here in the UK about how Build Manager works and how you get the best from it.

To read the rest, tap here.


MARK YOUR CALENDAR FOR IN-DEPTH LOTUS TRAINING, MAY 12-14, 2010, BOSTON
Register by April 10, 2010, to save $200.

]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00045772.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00045772.html Sun, 23 Aug 2009 04:00:00 GMT David Gewirtz

In this latest installment of our venerable series, The DominoPower Interview, I had the opportunity to interview one of the Lotus community's favorite sons and two-time DominoPower author, Bruce Elgort.

David: We've known you around the Lotus world forever, but what's your actual background? Tell us about yourself.

Bruce: I started with Notes back in 1993 when I was asked to create a "paperless" office for Underwriters Laboratories Inc. Notes was (and still is) the perfect solution for creating mission-critical applications for enterprises.

In 2001 I helped co-found OpenNTF, the Open Source community for Notes/Domino. In 2007 I retired from OpenNTF to start Elguji Software, LLC -- the makers of the award winning IdeaJam idea managment software.

Julian Robichaux and I host a podcast which can be found at http://takingnotespodcast.com. We are approaching show number 100! I also co-host another podcast called "The 1352 Report" with Carl Tyler, Jess Stratton and Sean Burgess. I even have a dog named "Domino Designer". [See Figure A. --Ed.]

FIGURE A


Domino Designer's no dog. Well, actually, yes. Yes, he is. Click picture for a larger image.

David: Seriously? You named a dog "Domino Designer"? Let me guess...at night, you call him "Eclipse". Tell the truth: beer was involved, wasn't it?

Learn the rest of the story by tapping here.


MARK YOUR CALENDAR FOR IN-DEPTH LOTUS TRAINING, MAY 12-14, 2010, BOSTON
Join experts and peers May 12-14, 2010, in Boston for educational and networking events that deliver real-world Lotus training so you can increase productivity and efficiency in your company, advance your skills, and squeeze the most from your current environment. One registration gets you into THE VIEW's Admin2010 and Lotus Developer2010.

Register by April 10, 2010, to save $200.

]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00045680.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00045680.html Sun, 16 Aug 2009 04:00:00 GMT Mick Moignard

Many years ago, when I was a mainframe developer, I looked after the application system that we used to put changes to other applications into production.

We were in an IBM MVS environment, where an application tended to be made up of a large number of moving parts, all of which needed to be properly coordinated to be sure that the system would continue to function. We'd have Cobol and PL/1 programs, usually from a number of separate source files, IMS database description elements, display screen formats, Job Control Language and so forth.

These applications basically ran the company -- stock controls, parts ordering, you get the picture. Getting such implementations right first time was important. I had more than a few late nights and callouts when things went wrong, and the odd one or two overnight shifts when large and extra-important implementations were happening.

Some of these might have had upwards of 500 things to be compiled, linked, assembled, or just syntax checked along the way, and a single failure would abort the whole process. While this process might have seemed onerous and complex, it actually made life a lot easier for us, because it defined a set of rules as to what could and could not be done, and because it all went through a testing environment, helped to ensure that components didn't get forgotten, and steps didn't get overlooked.

It's a big job. Tap here to learn all about it.

]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00045585.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00045585.html Sat, 08 Aug 2009 04:00:00 GMT

NEW! LEARN NOTES AND DOMINO 8 AT YOUR PLACE AND PACE!
Try a free course at www.tlcc.com/dompower8

]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00045437.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00045437.html Tue, 28 Jul 2009 04:00:00 GMT DominoPower editor-in-chief David Gewirtz channels Sigmund Freud as he explains how to recreate a Notes ID file. All we can say is we're sorry. Somehow the boss has managed to mix completely inane with incredibly useful. It's a gift. It scares us, but it's a gift.


TEAMSTUDIO EDITION 25 HAS SHIPPED
It's finally here! Now that Teamstudio Edition 25 has shipped, listen to our latest Tool Time audio program to find out what's changed. Updates to all your favorite Teamstudio tools will be discussed.

Plus, you'll get an introduction to Teamstudio Undo (formerly known as Teamstudio Snapper).

Tap here to get started!

]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00045347.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00045347.html Tue, 21 Jul 2009 04:00:00 GMT Joe Dolittle

DominoPower readers run the full range, from true-blue Lotus loyalists, who won't run anything that's not Lotus or IBM-branded, to those who run highly heterogeneous environments, often mixing IBM, Microsoft, and even Apple solutions.

For those falling into the second camp, IBM's announcement last month that it'll no longer be upgrading DAMO is somewhat disturbing. DAMO stands for Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook and was one of Lotus' particularly interesting efforts to create interop between the Microsoft camps and the Lotus camps. Unfortunately, per a June 19th statement:

The development teams at IBM responsible for the Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook (DAMO) functionality currently plan to continue to support and maintain the functionality. There are no plans to add new features or functions to the technology beyond those that have been developed and tested. Issues brought to IBM Support where it is determined that the functionality is not working as designed will be addressed.

The latest version of DAMO is built on the 8.0.x code stream and there are no plans to bring it forward to a more recent version of Notes. DAMO has been tested and its use is supported with a Domino 8.5.x server. DAMO is a feature of Notes and Domino 8.0 and will continue to be supported for the life of those products.

As with any IBM program, however, the foregoing reflects IBM's current plans and directions, and are subject to change by IBM at any time based on IBM's then-current business requirements.

We've asked around and as-yet, we haven't seen that Lotus plans a substitute offering. But we could be wrong. David's often said we have the world's largest peer review body, so if I'm missing something, don't hesitate to tell me. But a few Lotus customers have brought this to my attention and, frankly, I'm a bit bummed.

While there may never be an easy way to pry Outlook out of the hands of some users, DAMO was a great way of replacing the back-end, without Microsoft end-user loyalists being any the wiser. It was a great way to get better security, better data management, and better scalability into an organization, without tearing away the Outlook clients that some users hold so dear.

But now, it looks like IBM's giving up on DAMO. Of course, never say never again. DAMO works and is supported under Domino 8.5.x and ND9 is some time off, so there's no immediate damage to this announcement. That said, we strongly, strongly encourage IBM to include at least the equivalent of DAMO functionality in future versions of Domino.

After all, can't we all just get along?

Joe is a ZATZ associate editor. Prior to this job, he was customer support manager for the FileFlex database engine.

Benefits of staying with an all-Domino solution
For many of you, this represents the most cost effective option for document management. There are some serious benefits to staying within Domino.

Leverage your existing Domino infrastructure
There's no additional infrastructure (and associated cost) required.

Flattens the learning curve
You already know the backend. You already have the Domino admin and development skills, so you just need to focus on the nuances of the application.

Even if you don't have the skills, the costs to obtain will be less than the equivalent J2EE resource. This is unlike the scenario we discussed last week, where you would have had to learn both a new backend (DB2 and WebSphere) and the document management application.

Quicker and easier data migration
You're going from one Domino app to another. More specifically, you're migrating from one Notes document to another. Customizations could be easier to move as well.

Tap here to learn lots more.


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Experience Reporting, Dashboards, and Analysis INSIDE Notes!

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]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00045063.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00045063.html Sun, 28 Jun 2009 04:00:00 GMT
]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00044965.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00044965.html Sun, 21 Jun 2009 04:00:00 GMT David Gewirtz

Last week, we did a little diddy on What to do if the LotusScript debugger won't single-step over code. This week, we continue our debugging the debugger series with a solution to a vexatious debugger bug.

You're in Notes and you've enabled the debugger. Now, you attempt to debug a form or view action. It looks like your code executes, but the debugger is nowhere to be found. Looking carefully at your workspace, you notice a strange little message in the status area: "Debug request ignored. Source code hidden."

Fine, so just unhide the code. Hmmm... but the code's not hidden. And yet the debugger still doesn't debug. Sigh. Maybe the best approach is to rebuild the view (or form, or page, or action). No joy. So, next you try to delete the whole thing and just write it all from scratch. Still no joy.

Tap here and we'll tell you how to get around this weirdness.


NEW! LEARN NOTES AND DOMINO 8 AT YOUR PLACE AND PACE!
Try a free course at www.tlcc.com/dompower8

]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00044875.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00044875.html Sun, 14 Jun 2009 04:00:00 GMT David Gewirtz

My first programming language was FORTRAN -- and we entered and tested our programs by typing up punch cards, individual paper cards for each line of code. It was the dark ages for programmers back in the 70s. The first time I encountered a symbolic debugger was when I was programming C in 64K on CP/M systems.

Strangely enough, last week, I installed Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008 and instead of it running in 64K, the compressed ISO alone was almost 4 gigabytes. Talk about bloat. But like the C compiler of old, Visual Studio has a symbolic debugger -- and as a programmer, I love debuggers.

Notes, of course, also has a debugger. And while I love debuggers, there's one thing I don't like: when debuggers have bugs. If you've been attempting to debug LotusScript, particularly a piece of LotusScript with shared fields, you may have noticed that the Notes debugger itself needs a little debugging.

In my experience, the code stepper doesn't always step through the code. I've found that sometimes it'll skip form events, sometimes it'll skip subform events and it also might skip events with shared fields.

This is not a new problem. Although I no longer have a Notes 5 installation on anything, I do have some VM images of Notes 6.0, 6.5, 7.0, and 8.0. The problem occurs on all of them. I was hoping 8.5 would fix the problem, but no such joy.

There is one way to diagnose the problem. If you're trying to single-step your way through code, check to see if you have any shared fields. If you do, then you might want to consider using a standard field -- which the debugger will actually debug.

It's actually not that frustrating -- once you know what to look for.

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.

Do you have what it takes?
If you're toying with the idea of jumping into the Lotus consulting arena, get a clear picture of whether or not you really have the proper tools to thrive in that role by answering true or false to the following statements:

• I am a take-charge kind of person.
• I can influence most people.
• I enjoy the thrill of taking calculated risks.
• I am proactive and prefer to set my own deadlines versus have someone impose them on me.
• I have excellent health and lots of energy.
• I like the challenge of facing obstacles and solving problems.
• I have the emotional ability to bounce back after failure.
• I can make sound decisions in a hurry.
• I have the staying power that enables me to keep at a project despite obstacles or discouragements.
• My friends and family are supportive.
• I know how much money I will need to carry me through until I am self-supporting.

If you've answered false to most of the above, running your own consulting businesss is probably not for you. If just have a few false answers, these are indicators of where you can focus your energy to build a consulting practice. And if you answered true, nothing's going to stop you!

Now that you've identified if consulting is for you, here are ten steps to launch your practice, maintain your business and eventually grow it further. To help you along, I've used song titles from The Beatles, to help you remember each tip.

Tap here and you can start with a little help from your friends.

]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00044650.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00044650.html Thu, 28 May 2009 04:00:00 GMT Nancy Hand

Like so many problems, it started with a new computer. It didn't like my old operating system. Rather than fight to install the old operating system, I upgraded to OpenSuse 10.3. Notes is at 8.5-ish and OpenSuse's at 11.1, but I installed what I had sitting around. Life is like that, sometimes. You use what you got.

The Notes 8 installation went smoothly, lulling me into thinking everything was fine. I started up the client, answered the configuration questions, and watched it open. Then, instead of seeing a Getting Started page with information on Notes, I saw an ugly grey box, like the one in Figure A, with the message "org.eclipse.swt.browser.Browser: No more handles [Unknown Mozilla path (MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME not set)]".

FIGURE A


No more handles means no Notes love. Click picture for a larger image.

Since OpenSuse 10.3 wasn't on IBM's list of supported operating systems (they support the enterprise edition, but not the community variant) I couldn't just ask for help. There were several items on Notes.net referencing MOZILLA_FIVE_HOME. But, for every fix posted, at least one person had replied to say it didn't work for them. I didn't have any better luck. So I kept looking.

Want to know how to make the ugliness go away? Tap here to read the rest.


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Register by April 10, 2010, to save $200.

]]> http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00044593.html http://www.dominopower.com/newsitems/00044593.html Thu, 21 May 2009 04:00:00 GMT