Bruce's Blog

   Currently, I have a Domino domain that is running on 8.5.1 servers, but it was originally created on version 4.5 about 10 years ago.  It's been upgraded over the years thru V5, V5, V7, & V8 on different hardware, but always running on Windows O/S.  Unfortunately, we're still running it mostly as if it were a V4/V5 domain.  We did implement transaction logging so we could enable DAOS.  We are also using a few policies.

   At this point, for a number of reasons (some political, some technical), we are thinking of creating a new Domino Domain in V8.5.1.  This will allow us to implement all the new stuff (DAOS, ID Vault, Policies, etc) cleanly so we know that we aren't carrying over any of the old bad habits.

   My question is, can anyone point me to some good documentation (either in existing help files, blog entries, IBM technotes, etc) that will help me set things up so the old domain and the new domain interact as seamlessly as possible during the transistion?  If we had a budget for this project, we would just bring in our local VAR, but we don't so I need to do this "on the cheap".

Thanks!

   So, my servers have all been upgraded to V8.5.1.  No problem.  I've started upgrading the first couple of clients.  No problem  I start to upgrade the mail template of these clients and an INotes-only users.  Problem.  There is not a separate version of the mail template in 8.5.1.  I know that changes were made to the template (like making it more obvious you are in your archive mail file for example).  Thankfully, I don't have the design task automatically scheduled to run.  I haven't tested whether an 8.5 client would throw errors if the mail template gets refreshed or not.  Hopefully I won't have to find out (all my clients will get updated before I accidentally update a mail template).  My biggest problem is I don't have any easy way to know which of my 20-25 mail files that were running at 8.5 have been upgraded to 8.5.1.

 Over the last week, I've been able to upgrade 9 of my 10 servers to 8.5.1 without much of a problem.  I had one server that when it wanted to be rebooted stuck on the Windows "Applying Computer Settings" screen (obviously a Windows O/S issue, not Domino).  Each upgrade took about 15-20 minutes.  The one server not upgraded yet is my Sametime server so it can't be upgraded since 8.5.1 is not supported.  Now on to the clients and mail template upgrades.  Yeah!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

   Our current Domino domain is running V8.5 on Windows 2003 servers.  It was created way back in the 4.6 or 5.0 days.  Because of this, we still manage alot of it the old way we always have.  So, this means we also don't take advantage of all the new stuff like we could.  We just started using transaction logging this year when we migrated up to V8.5 so we could enable DAOS.  We are looking to install a new Domino domain (V8.5.1 when it comes out next week).  We're doing this for 2 reasons.  The first is so we can have a clean V8.5.1 domain so we can take advantage of alot of the new functionality (DAOS, ID Vault, Policies, etc).  The second is we have a couple of sisteer companies that are currently running Exchange that we are thinking of migrating to Domino so we can have a consolidated mail infrastructure.

   Ok, with this background out of the way, I have two options.  The first is to continue to use Windows as the operating system.  The other is to make the move into Linux.  If I go Windows, I can almost do the installation in my sleep.  With Linix, I'm sure I could install it and make it work, but I don't know the best practices (disk partitioning, what services to install and/or uninstall, etc).  Does anyone know of a good "Best Practices for Installing Linux for Domino" guide that's available?  We would most likely be going with SUSE for our Linux distro if that makes any difference.

OK, so I've got my basic homepage DB created.  When you first open it, it opens an xpage element called home.  The initial content for this comes from a view of company news from another database.  I have it setup so if you click on one of the rows, it brings up the detail page of that record.  I also do a similiar thing with the company phone directory listing.  Each of these inidividual data screens is in their own Custom Control.
Now, my question is - should I :
1) have all of the custom controls in the home.xsp in separate panels where I use the loaded value to determine on what is seen based on the value of a scoped variable?
2) have all of the custom controls in the home.xsp where I use the rendered value to determine on what is seen based on the value of a scoped variable?
3) have separate xpages for each control and use regular links to load each when when needed?

What are the trade-offs of performance vs code maintenance?

   I wanted to thank David and Tim for their comments on my last post XPages Development Question.  After reading them and doing some thinking, I've decided to take a hybrid approach.  I'm going to start out with phase I of the new website taking place all within the new "homepage" db.  In here will be read-only views reaching into the older DB's.  In Phase II, I'll look to start re-factoring the older DB's with XPages so that the information can be maintained.
  My reasons are for Phase I, that's basically mimicing the functionality we have now with minimal investment of time.  With Phase II, we get added functionality on the web and by then 8.5.1 will be out and we can possibly utilize the same code within the client.
   Of course, now the hard (and hopefully fun) part begins.  The actual coding.  I'm sure I'll have lots more questions as I dive into doing this.

The question -->  Where should I do all my XPage development?

The background :

   My companies current internal website is all Domino-based.  It's running on V8.5 servers, but was developed with 4X/5X coding techniques.  In short, it sucks.  I can say this because as a full-time admin/part-time developer who created most of the mess, I know how bad the code is.   We want to upgrade the website to make it look nicer and add more functionality.

   I have started going thru Declan Lynch's Learning XPages Tutorial (great stuff!!!!), his Advanced XPages : A Nicer Logon, the XPages Blog, and the Domino Developer's Wiki.  With all this material, I've started creating my own "homepage" application.

   Initially, I want to create a main landing page with the company news (coming out of an existing 4x/5x code-stream db) with a couple of links to things like the mail redirector db, Declan's Phone Listing DB, & Elgui's TaskJam db.  One way to do this is to create an XPage in the homepage db whose data source is the view from the company new db so it looks nice without having to touch that db's code and make links that open up each of the other dbs individually.  That's pretty easy to do (in fact I've already got this part done.  I used this as what I was working on going thru Declan's Tutorial), but it doesn't look like a single, common website.

   To make it look good and seamless, I know I need to create a bunch of XPages goodies.  Going back to my question, I'm looking for recommendations on where to do this work?  Do I do everything in the central homepage db (this way I only have one copy of the layout to manage) or do I do XPages work in each db I want to have part of this(Yes I know templates makes this easier, so I only have to maintain the code in one place)?  In an ideal world, everything would just be re-written from scratch, but I don't have the time for that.

In the past, it was easy to move a Domino server to new hardware - just install the Domino server software on the new box, copy the data folder over and viola it worked.  Since I now have a Domino 8.5 server with transaction logging and DAOS turned on, is there anything special I need to know?  Do I just copy the transaction log folder and the DAOS folder over as well?  Do they need to be re-built from scratch?  Any one who's done this and is willing to share the secrets, I would appreciate it.

Currently, we have a SameTime 6.5.1 server running on top of Domino 6.5.2 on Windows 2000.  All my other servers are Domino8.5HF1 running on Windows 2003 SP2.  We currently only use the IM function.  With the certificate expiration issue this past weekend, we've decided to look into upgrading our Sametime environment.  It looks like I have a server I can use for this (it's previous function has been retired).  My question is, should I install SameTime 8.02 on top of Domino 8.02 now or wait for SameTime 8.5 so it can run on top of Domino 8.5?  How long is it going to be before SameTime 8.5 arrives?

I've read a few post on how to hide a single user from being visible in the Domino Directory.  Has anyone come up with a way to hide everyone from a single user?  We have a new business we are looking to get into.  We will have a "sales force" (they aren't our employees, they're agents or brokers or something) that need to have a company email address for our business.  Would like to have them in our existing Domino domain (so I don't have to set something new up).  They are going to be INotes only users.  We're running V8.5 on the servers.  It's almost like we have a wholly owned subsidiary where we're going to be running their infrastructure, but don't want them fully integrated into ours.

Any ideas would be appreciated!

    To set the stage.  We have been on Domino 7.02 for awhile.  Recently updated our servers to 8.02 then 8.5.  Clients are all running 7.02 with 7.02 template except me, I'm now on 8.5.  I'm the admin.  We've been using an explicit policy that used the registration and archive policy settings for awhile, bit have never implemented any of the others.  After upgrading to 8.5, I decided to started plating with all the other policy settings again.  I had another explicit policy (called test) for this.

  So far so good.  After discussion with my boss, we decided it was time to start seriously considering implementing the other policy settings.  I created a brand new explicit policy and assigned the test desktop, mail, and security settings to it.  Now for the mayhem part - I called it the same as our domino domain because after some testing, we were going to make it an organizational policy.  Looks like this is a BAD idea.  Even though all my policies were explicit, it looks like it treated the new one as organizational and rolled it out to all my users (without warning).

   So now, they were getting configuration changes made which were very obvious (like popping up new message warnings, locking client every 15 minutes, etc) and were set to not allow the individual to change them (these were test polict settings after all, not what we would actually necessarily want to use in production).  OOPS!!!!!!  To make it worse, one of those horrible bugs that is going around caught me and I've been home sick as a dog part ofg this week while we're trying to work our way out of this one.

   Looks like (hopefully) the worst is over and next week will be better.

   Hopefully this will be a little safer topic then my last two posts.  I was thinking that with the advent of XPages, all kinds of new and exciting applications are going to either be created and/or updated on OpenNTF.  I'm am currently playing with TaskJam, XPages Phonebook, & XPages Wiki on a test V8.5 server.  I'm loving what can be done with them and how they look.

   However, there is one issue I would have with moving them into my production environment (once I had a production V8.5 server that is).  The current design of all three applications (at least it looks likes it to me) is based on them being standalone websites (like IdeaJam.net is).  I would like to have some common branding across all of my internal website (which is currently Domino-based, although the code is atrocious V6 0, I hacked alot of it together so I should know - lol).  If we had some kind of central Theme Manager Application that could hold "global" css and images resources that other applications could reference it would be easier to make everything look like it was all part of the same website.

   I was thinking this would be done in similiar fashion to how a number of OpenNTF applications are now coming with the ability in the configuration of the application to choose wether to use the OpenLog application for all logging functions.  I know this would be more difficult because the application would have to be designed so it could either run as a standalone website or as part of a whole enterprise-wide website.

   I think I'll leave this idea for now and come back later with some thoughts on what the Theme Manager application would need to do.

UPDATE
My other related posts on this subject
Part 1 - Background
Part 2 - Signing Applications
Part 3 - Replicating Templates

   I have 2 questions.

   The first is I'm looking to implement transaction logging for the first time when I start implmenting Domino 8.5.  Is there any best practice/recommendation for the maximum logging size when you choose a logging style of circular?

   The second is more comlicated.  Currently, I have a 8.02 server environment that is clustered.  I want to install a new Domino 8.5 server on the Windoiws 2003 server that is running BackupExec.  This server would just have scheduled replication running to copy all the mail, archive mail, & application DB's to it so we caqn back them up.  The question is, should I put it in my existing domain even though it is not 8.5 yet or create a new domain just for this server?.  If I setup a new domain, it makes it easier to keep any of my users from accessing it, but I have to deal with drocss domain certification.

   Any thoughts would be appreciated/\.

   OK, so my last port started a little bit of a firestorm over in the IdeaJam area on OpenNTF.  If you thought that one was bad, wait for this one.  I'm actually not decided on this one myself, but I feel it's kind of a logical outgrowth of Part 2 - Signing Applications.  I'm not going to create a IdeaJam entry for this at the moment.  I should also say up front, that both this idea and the last one were meant for environments where you have experienced administrators running the show and/or a test/development environment you can use these two ideas in (not straight into production).

   So, what is the big deal you ask?  Well, how about the ability to replicate an application's template from OpenNTF to your test/development Domino environment directly.  I was thinking that this would let the new versions get to you easier.  Obviously, there would have to be alot of thought put into this (ie. who controls the replication, what is the schedule, etc).

   Well, there it is, have fun!

UPDATE
My other related posts on this subject
Part 1 - Background
Part 2 - Signing Applications
Part 4 - Theme Manager

Since I'm a Domino Administration is only part of my job responsibilites (and Application Development is even less) and we don't have anyone to do Application Development, I've had to rely on finding code and applications wherever I could find them.  The easier they are to move into production the better.  One thing that would make this process easier (for me at least) is for OpenNTF to have a single signing ID that applications are signed with before being released.  This would let me change my ECL's to allow these applications to just be dropped into my production environment (after testing) and work.

   I've added this on OpenNTF's IdeaJam space.  If you think this is a good idea, please go vote for it here.

UPDATE
My other related posts on this subject
Part 1 - Background
Part 3 - Replicating Templates
Part 4 - Theme Manager