Jan Schulz

There are a lot of people who argue for a "personal edition" of notes to get some enduser promotion. In its current form, this won't be a good idea:

Yes, you gain LiveText, nice email-environments like eProductivity and maybe even some personal apps. But I haven't found any apps yet, which will satisfy a casual user! Password store? Keepass is better (ever used strg+v to autopaste a user/pw into a browser window?). Note taking? Personal journals might be eligible, but there are apps like evernote which sound better. And I can't think of any other apps which might be interesting to a *normal* end user!

Any then there are things like this, when you use notes as a pop3/smtp client:

• No Spam handler: you need to setup your own.
• 20+sec startup time and 500MB downloads just to open email (thunderbird is 5 secs away and a tenth that size)
• preferences for email all over the place and much to cryptic for "normal" emailusers: smtp.box, location docs, smtp & pop3 accounts, "replication" instead of "send and receive", File->Preferences overload.
  
• lots of features, which are no use to a normal user: sametime, replication, ID management, ...
• Strange behavior uncommon to other clients: for example no warnings that pasted images are not attached if the email is sent as plain text. You can edit received mails. Folders vs. Views.
  
• I also don't think that the code for POP3/SMTP in the client was much used:calendar invitation don't work: You can't send replys because of a bug in the code (the From is sent to your emailadress and the replicator expects a NotesName -> reported to IBM, reproduced, waiting for action: PMR 67543SGC724, SPR MALZ7Q249V).
  

Notes strength are the easy collaboration features with a client attached to a domain and servers. As a standalone product all these strength become weaknesses because they are too complex for a enduser and to heavy (and in most cases useless) to be convinient.

Some examples: in a company you use connections, replicated doclibraries, KM and CRM Apps to collaborate. But as a enduser without a server? Excel + dropbox. Secure and replicated storage of notes? Textfiles and Dropbox. Webpages or blog on a domino server? much easier with LJ/blogger.com or even some html files uploaded via ftp. Chatting via Sametime? Again not useable without a  server, so I use skype.

So I think that releasing (and promoting) notes as it is now as a enduser standalone tool will result in much disappointment and negative feedback/ publicity.

Maybe if vulcan becomes available and it integrates facebook/Xing/StudiVZ (german facebook clone), doodle, skype, sharepoint, and whatever there is to become a "universal inbox, calendar, todo and contact manager" for everything. And gets a enduser open server in the cloud, so that your data is replicated and secure.

Since a few days, I get my private mails delivered into my Notes mailbox, so that I can process my private mails as well as my normal "company" mails with eProductivity. But most of this article is not specific to eProductivity, you can do this with the normal mailfile as well.

There are great instructions how to setup notes to get the mails from a POP3 server on the "Lotus Notes 8.x Tips" blog. If you get mails from both a domino server and a POP3 server, I recommend to first create a new location and switch to it and then run the described wizard... I had to recreate my normal (-> mail goes out via Domino Server) online setup afterwards.

Anyway: this works really well apart from one point: up to now I read mail my private mail in Thunderbird and used ThunderBayes to filter out spam. Notes, unfortunately does not have a spam filter, but this is how you can work around this limitation. Another limitation is, that notes does not process mailrules for POP3 mails, but there is an OpenNTF project for that. So here is the setup to fight spam in POP3 mails delivered to the Notes client:

1. Setup SpamBayes
2. Configure Notes to use SpamBayes
3. Setup POP3 mailrules
4. Configure a Mailrules to filter Spam
(5. Train the filter)

Setup Spambayes
I use SpamBayes, which is a baysian/learning spam filter which acts as a proxy beween the POP3 server and your mailclient and classifies the mail as ham (=good), unsure or spam (=bad :-) in some custom mail-header.  Just download the windows version and install (make sure it is started automatically as a service!). Do a restart of windows, to make sure you have the service running... Afterwards point you webbrowser to http://localhost:8880/config and configure SpamBayes to connect to your current POP3 server and a local port number (the rest of the options are ok for now :-). You don't need to input your username/password into SpamBayes.



Configure Notes to use SpamBayes
Now configure your Notes POP3 mailsetup as you would before, just with "localhost" and the local port number and Notes would get the mail through SpamBayes. If you have already configured it: the config is in the personal adressbook under "Advanced -> Accounts". My final setup looks like this:


Now you should already get mails delivered into your mailaccount which have the new mailheader: Open a new mail, goto "View -> Show -> Page Source" and you find something like this:

Setup POP3 mailrules
No we need something to filter on this. Go to the POP Mail Rules OpenNTF project and get the latest release. It has a nice Install instruction, but for the impatient: copy the rules.dll next to your notes.ini file and add a "EXTMGR_ADDINS=rules.dll" line to your notes.ini (if there is already one, read te instructions...). Restart Notes and your POP3 delivered Mails will be filtered by your mailrules.

Configure a mailrule to filter Spam
Now we have only one problem: how to get a Mailrule to filter on the "X-Spambayes-Classification:" Header? This is also done by a trick: the new extention has some extra capabilities, which can be accessed when you build a rule based on the BCC field: instead of you adding the string you would filter, you add "header:string" and the rule engine will base the filter on that header instead of the BCC field or better that field in the final mail document in your mailfile. There is unortunately a difference beween header names and fields: notes converts '-' in headernames into '_' in fieldnames. So if we want to filter by Mail with "X-Spambayes-Classification: spam", we need to add a BCC rule with a "contains"-String of "X_Spambayes_Classification:spam" (and move that mail into the junk folder (in eProductivity, Mailrules are under E-Mail -> Tools -> Rules):

And that was it: from now on, every classified spam mail should be filtered into the Junk folder.

Train the filter
On problem remains: how to train the filter. This is best done via the webinterface at http://localhost:8880/review: just classify the daily mails there and train the filter with that data. After a few days, it should get better and better until you get less and less false classified mails. For this to work, you need to cache messages in SpamBayes (see SpamBayes webinterface -> Configuration -> Storage options). The other option, to send messages to "spam@localhost" or "ham@localhost" does not work, as Notes does not send every old mailheader. Also, we haven't configured notes to send maisl through spambayes.

Happy emailing!

Opening weblinks in notes does not work, if you have opera set as your default browser. This is unfortunately still so in the 8.5.1 beta client.

Today I found the solution after looking at the registry values when firefox is the default browser: notes seems to miss a '%1' string in the returned registry value. Adding that to the registry lets Notes open URLs in my preferred browser.

before:
C:\Programme\Opera>reg query HKCR\https\shell\open\command
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\https\shell\open\command   <NO NAME>   REG_SZ  "C:\Programme\Opera\opera.exe"

After:
C:\Programme\Opera>reg query HKCR\https\shell\open\command
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\https\shell\open\command     <NO NAME>   REG_SZ  "C:\Programme\Opera\opera.exe"  "%1"

So, just edit that registry key and add the "%1" (with quotation marks around both strings!) and you are done...

Why Notes can't handle default browser which do not register themselves in that way, when every other programm can.... I've filed bugs both with opera and IBM (in the beta forum)...

And just to be on the secure side:
Disclaimer: IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and Lotus Notes Traveler 8.5.1 is prerelease code and there are no guarantees from IBM that the functionality presented or discussed will be in the final shipping product.

Ok, seems that I was quite pissed off yesterday. Sorry to anyone who felt offended by it, but it really feels good to "go out and scream" sometimes...

... the problem with notes and opera ...
Anyway, afterwards I tried for some time to get an idea what notes expects as an browser and even compiled a "null.exe" (AutoHotKeys: one line to "run , %1%" -> opens the parameter (webpage) in your default browser. Autohotkeys is a really great tool!), but didn't work.

And then after giving up and working some hours, it magically worked. And I couldn't get an idea "why": ProcMon just didn't spit out anything, just the call to the browser. Until I changed my webbrowser preference in my location document to an invalid value and voila: Notes gave an error. Now I have an situation where Opera opens the page, but with completely the wrong preferences:

Instead of using the operating system preferences, it uses the old style location preference.  Even deleting the "notesdata\workspace" folder and recreating it with one from a completely new installation gives now the same result: it opens the link with that browser.



[UPDATE, an hour later: Now it is back to null.exe and not working at all. &§$&$§! Has anybody of you a switch and tries to make me look stupid and bewildered?]

Notes -  when everyday mysteries (or miseries) are not enough...

... some thoughts about support ...
I got a second email from lotus support (seems to be higher up), saying exactly the same: "Opera not supported". Ok, I give up.

Not sure how to rate this: yes, we have paid only for "supported platforms", but browsers are deeply integrated into my and I think everybodies personal productivity and only supporting the big two and only in certain versions is a pain in the a**. For me it's another small sign that IBM really only cares about big companies, where such a requirement can be satisfied, but not the 30 people startup where "no, you can only use IE 6/7 or F1.5/2" is just not possible. FF is at version 3.5, IE at version 8 and notes8.0.x will be arround for some more years: when will it happen that you can't build a "supported" system anymore, becaus both MS and Mozilla don't support their old browsers anymore?

Having such strange behaviour on "not supported" environments is in my opinion a bug and should be reported to the developers. Just imagine a browser crashing your domino and getting a  "sorry, that browser is not a supported browser"? Even if nothing will happen in the current code stream, such a "put into our bugtracking system" message is better than just replying "not supported", even if it is strictly following what you paid for. "Not supported" without any other explanations is just another way to say "piss off", at least in my mind.

Jan
PS: Not supporting different browsers can cost you some big money, as some hardware manufacture found out the hard way...
 

Ok, I admit, I'm pissed off right now. Big time. This is a rant about "not supported here", operating system defaults, Webbrowsers and making it extra hard to use something else... and IBM Support.

I use the opera webbrowser as a system wide default. I set the notes basic preferences in the location documents to opera and links open beautiful in opera.

Now enter the new standard client, version 8.0.2 FP2. Set "Use the Browser I have set as a default for this operating system" in the webbrowser preferences. Set opera to the "operating system default". Click on link. tata. Nothing happens. Fun, a preference, which doesn't work.

Ok, I'm nice, I debug this. Using ProcMon from Sysinternals, I get this:

[more successful (!) trys to get the Browser value]
"19:21:51","notes2w.exe","1276","RegQueryKey","HKCR\https\shell\open\command","SUCCESS","Query: Name"
"19:21:51","notes2w.exe","1276","RegOpenKey","HKCU\Software\Classes\https\shell\open\command","NAME NOT FOUND","Desired Access: Maximum Allowed"
"19:21:51","notes2w.exe","1276","RegQueryValue","HKCR\https\shell\open\command\(Default)","SUCCESS","Type: REG_SZ, Length: 62, Data: ""C:\Programme\Opera\opera.exe"""
"19:21:51","notes2w.exe","1276","RegCloseKey","HKCR\https\shell\open\command","SUCCESS",""
"19:21:51","notes2w.exe","1276","QueryOpen","C:\Programme\IBM\Lotus\Notes\framework\rcp\eclipse\plugins\com.ibm.rcp.j2se.win32.x86_1.6.0.20090219c-200906101703\jre\bin\null.exe","NAME NOT FOUND",""
"19:21:51","notes2w.exe","1276","QueryOpen","C:\Programme\IBM\Lotus\Notes\null.exe","NAME NOT FOUND",""
"19:21:51","notes2w.exe","1276","QueryOpen","C:\WINDOWS\system32\null.exe","NAME NOT FOUND",""
"19:21:51","notes2w.exe","1276","QueryOpen","C:\WINDOWS\system\null.exe","NAME NOT FOUND",""
"19:21:51","notes2w.exe","1276","QueryOpen","C:\WINDOWS\null.exe","NAME NOT FOUND",""
[more tries to open "null.exe" in %PATH%]
"19:21:51","notes2w.exe","1276","QueryOpen","C:\Programme\IBM\Lotus\Notes\framework\rcp\eclipse\plugins\com.ibm.rcp.j2se.win32.x86_1.6.0.20090219c-200906101703\jre\bin\null http:\www.xyz.com/something.nsf/0/id?opendocument.exe","NAME INVALID",""
[and again try this pattern in all %PATH%

This smells like a bug: why isn't notes using the default value in the registry? It looks like Notes is actively searching for Firefox and IE, but discarding everything else. And why is it looking for null.exe in several %path% entries? So I'm a goo citizen and open a IBM PMR and putting in all this information.

What do I get as a reply? A nice standard Mail with "Opera not supported".

WTF?

I won't change my default browser, the productivity hit is just not worth it. Also wouldn't matter, as both IE and FF in current versions are not anymore supported. And:

• Why do you name the preference "default browser of the operating system" if you discard the value and only accept certain values? Why make it extra hard to impossible to use something else? There is a difference between "not supported" and "impossible".
• Why don't you just try to send the link to this value: it's an "operating system default" because every f**** browser (even lynxs et al) understands "browser URL". Especially because you just do that in basic mode.
  
• Why don't you handle the situation, when there is no "default browser" and show an error message? FF3 and IE8 get an Error message, but why not Opera?
  
• (Another question is if it is a proper error message if it says "Unable to locate program" like it currently does when I switch to FF3.5/IE8 as default...) 
• Why do you code like this and make it impossible to use current (or at the time of coding: future) browsers?
  
• Why do you search for "null.exe" in the complete system %path%? Imagine someone places a 'del /s /f "%USERPROFILE%"' in such a file... And every user can change the default browser and also the %PATH% values...
  
• Why does the IBM Support only read "opera" and pastes it's default "not supported" text instead of reading the complete PMR and the "null.exe" problem?

Thank you IBM, for giving me another reason to stay with the basic client.

Can someone please tell me this is fixed in 8.5(.1)? Or that someone at IBM makes sure that this will get fixed? And please also in the 8.0.x stream?

Kind regards,

Jan, looking into how to exploit the null.exe to do the right thing...

That's at least the impression I get after reading all the blog postings about xPages and the new 8.5.1 client. Forms, Pages and so on are out and the future UI will be done in xPages for both the notes client and web.

(Disclaimer: I've not yet seen the new DDE and xPages as a design element and also not the 8.5.1 closed beta with client side xPages)

I'm in two minds about this development. My only impression of xPages are the webpages, which came to life in the last month and I find them horrible from a technical viewpoint: no valid HTML, no accessible build in, wastefull source code, JavaScript is needed to get basic functionality. Bah! Thats not one step backward in web development, but several miles in my opinion. Something like replacing something horrible with something new and then only getting half the way and getting the buggy alpha version (=80s html coding with tables and without css) instead of something state of the art (clean css layouts, progressive enhancement, accessible).

On the other hand I'm currently trying to build a translated web 2.0 UI for the notes client and that's a pain. You need one hack after another to get the experience right, some things simple don't work, (re)styling the whole UI is tedious at best (even with CSS or tools like NotesHound or Ytrias suite) and you get a lot of "strange" behaviour (or bugs? I'm too tired to reproduce and report all the small things along I discovered while playing with @Elements in HideWhen and uidoc.refresh from "on event postsave" of another document. First would be that the debugger only "sees" one opened doc...). Even translated GUIs are a big hack and not every element is translatable (the "subaction"-action in the action bar always shows the name, not the label -> looks like a bug; View lables not at all, buttons only by using Client JavaScript).

So getting a new, clean and probably proven development model and interface (I guess, that a browser is used to display client side xPages and not another GUI interpreter) is a good thing, even if I would need to start from zero again with Notes development.

Another good thing is, that this way a "hip" technology gets into notes development: web-development with html, css and javascript. This will lower the entry barrier for new developers coming from that direction, which is especially important for my (student) organisation with new people every two years: now someone with some web developer experience can hack together some new feature without getting to learn a complete new technology (and note sis new, because there is no "personal" use for notes). With some luck they wouldn't even need to code twice, as xPages should work the same in the web and in the client.

And it still go all the great technologies like security build in, replication, ... just with new, better and fresh UIs, which do not look like last century anymore. Finally a wiki in the client! Yay! So one reason less to complain about Notes :-)

So I think, that xPages and SSJS will replace LS and all the "old style" design elements or at least put them into deep maintainance mode. Which is itself the second negative point: I don't believe that all the bugs and shortcomings in the old style design elements will be fixed and so the only way going forward is redoing it all in xPages.

But overall I thing that xPages are great news for lotus notes: it gets rids of the weak point while keeping the strong points.

If the resulting html-code wouldn't be so "old style". Please, IBM, fix that! And you, dear reader, go vote on that :-)

After reading Chris Toohey's Quickpoll about Framesets vs. Web I started to think about rewriting a typical Notes Interface (outline to the left, views on the right) to be more "web 2.0" friendly with a landing page. To complete the challenge, the UI should be translateable and, of course, nice looking. The first problem: the typical landing page has "call to action" buttons: big, shiny buttons with an icon and some text. So, how can you do that in Notes? My tries:

• Buttons: can be translated via onLoad events and "document.forms[0].Button.value = document.forms[0].cfdField_LabelForButton.value", no icons possible
  
• HTML pass thrugh Computed text (=translateable) with <input>s -> just plain ugly.
  
• HTML pass thrugh Computed text with <button>s -> Does not work, as the notes internal html parser does not recognise the button tag
• Notes Table (with nice looking background + rounded corners) and a hotspot -> does not work, as the hotspot can't be set around the table and also because I haven't found a way to vertical center text in a table cell.
  
• Outline with one entry, styled with rounded corners, translateable the UI (lables are computeable), mouse over effects for the text. Only problem: setting width to "fits to content" has no effect, which means that the translations must be as long as the original text (seems to me that this is a notes bug).

Here is a screenshot:


The last one with the styled outline entry seems to be the best idea up to now, but the "fit to content" problem is bad :-(

Anybody with some ideas how to get nice, translateable, hover aware buttons with icons on it in the notes client?

Here is the demo DB...

This is mainly here so that I don't have to google another half an hour...

The Policy setting to get the install menu back is in "Desktop policy settings -> Basics -> Provisioning -> Allow User initiated updates"

Additional buzzwords following:
com.ibm.notes.branding/enable.update.ui=true, plugin_customization.ini, 8.0.2, install, update, updatesite

Thanks to Henning Kunz, where I finaly found this.