Write it on a Rock

I've disappeared recently because I haven't really had much to say. I am happy that Titans are 10-0 and are just a few wins away from clinching a playoff spot. The Dolphins are doing well thanks to a pretty schedule and unless something crazy happens an SEC team should be going to the NCAA Championship Bowl Game. This isn't about sports though so let's move on in hopefully a semi-coherent way.

I was looking over Planet Lotus like I do a few times a day to see what is out there and came across this post from Ed. The post itself didn't say a lot and I haven't gone to read the article but I often find value in the conversations that occur in the comments area.

I'm not some longtime Lotus advocate. In fact, when I first used the client back in 2001 I couldn't stand it. I don't really remember the exact version but it was a 5.x release. I had just started working for the company, where I am still employed, during my senior year of college as part of a Cooperative Education program. Easily the smartest thing I did in college. I was primarily doing IT Support and got hired on full-time after graduation in August of 2002. In May of 2003 I went to some training on Lotus Notes Development. Ever since beginning to do development on the platform my opinion changed entirely of the product. I saw how powerful it could actually be and everything it could, especially with how quick you could develop simple applications. All my previous development experience had been with Visual Basic, COBOL and ASP so picking up on LotusScript was easy. Since then I have been to every subsequent Lotusphere (2009 will be my 6th) as well as some Lotus Notes Administration training and The VIEW's Domino Workshop for Domino Developers. I an IBM Certified Application Developer in Lotus Notes and Domino 7. We've recently hired a second developer so everything Lotus related isn't my sole responsibility any more but it was for several years. I was the administrator and the developer.

I'm not a longtime Lotus advocate but I am a Lotus advocate. I don't think there's a product out there that can do what this can with as much ease in both installation, configuration, upgrade or developing new tools for it. Sure, it has downsides and if you just want to just focus on email there are other applications that would work better for email-only needs.

Back to Ed's post and the conversation in the comments. My first Lotusphere was the "two lanes" Lotusphere where it seems that IBM wanted to do away with Domino and everything was going to be Java and Portals and all that mess. At least that was what I thought when leaving Lotusphere and I thought it was a terrible idea and they were going to alienate part of their customer base. Namely, me.

We aren't a 100% IBM shop but we have IBM Bladecenters. We have two i5 boxes that are running 4 clustered servers. We are running Sametime, LEI, BES on Domino and I have a few Linux servers that are IBM eServers. We are a company with about 600 employees, roughly 550 are Notes users. We are a Notes client shop. We have maybe 3 web applications out of 300-400 total applications running on Domino. Portals DO NOT interest us. Web applications DO NOT interest us. XPages, while they look cool and powerful, will be USELESS to us unless they can run on the Notes client. I have no desire to run Sametime Advance on a J2EE server much less run anything on a J2EE server. The 8.0.2 Standard Client is very cool but isn't very practical here in terms of what it provides over the 8.0.2 Basic so the majority of my users are on the Notes 8.0.2 Basic client. It's much faster and does everything they want and need.

With that said, I don't have anything against any of the above mentioned things (Portal, Java, Xpages). If other people want them, hey, great. If other people do amazing things with them, awesome. All I know is that it is not essential for our business and we won't be using any of them. If this happens to be the direction IBM is trying to make things go (I doubt it is but what do I know?) then at some point we will just cease to upgrade our Lotus products. Much like if they take the Workspace away in some future version it will mark the time when we stop upgrading Notes clients. =)

While I'd like to think, and hope, that IBM isn't going to make mistakes they have made in the past there's always the chance that they will but I'm going to remain optimistic. I doubt anything I've said will influence anyone but maybe it can help somehow in some small way.

First I upgraded the Domino server to 8.0.2 and didn't have any issues there. Next upgraded the BES server. It was a very painless process other then it took some time. Since the upgrade I've been able to push the Sametime client out OTA and also the MDS Runtime to my users and that makes life a lot easier on me.

Now I just have to wait for Verizon to release a new version of the device software so we can take advantage of some of the new features. =(

I have a script that crawls the mail directory and logs the date, number of mailboxes and total space used along with writing out the user and size of their mail database on that particular date. I really don't know why I have (or want) this information but because I do have it I can tell you that on October 17, 2005, we had 461 email databases for a grand total of 69.54GB. Two year later that had grown to 532 email databases for a grand total of 219.9GB. A server program runs Mon-Fri that compacts our databases and reclaims the white space provided there's more then 10% but disk space was becoming an issue and I was very excited about the space savings potential in Domino 8.

To start taking advantage of the new compression available in Domino 8, I added the notes.ini line "Create_R8_Databases=1" to my servers on Thursday after I got LEI for iSeries downloaded and installed which brings my total to 6 out of 8 servers up and running on 8.0.1. This weekend I upgraded the mail databases by running the compact command with the -c option to bring them to the ODS48 format. Here's what our mail folder looked liked after the upgrade on Thursday and then this morning after the email databases were upgraded.




Amazing. That's about 28.3% savings with just the design compression enabled. I don't know how much I'd see with document data compression turned on as well but I'll keep you updated!

It would have taken A LOT less time had I not left a 5250 session up with the WRKDOMSVR command active but lesson learned for the next three servers on i5 to upgrade. =)

VERY excited to start upgrading a couple of mail files after some testing and marking some clustered databases Out of Service.

Still don't see LEI 8.0.1 for iSeries or system i so I can upgrade both of these clustered servers but this is a start!

I hope I'm just missing something. I see Windows, Windows 64 bit, AIX, Solaris and xSeries but nothing for the iSeries (system i). The server release for system i is queued up to download after the clients finish but not having LEI for this release for LEI will stop my planned upgrades. I can't find anything on IBM's website either but I've always had trouble finding anything I'm looking for on there.

I'm depressed.

[edit] It's in the release notes for LEI 8.0.1 that it's available for system i but still nothing on the Passport Advantage site.

For some reason, with the official announcement of Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.1 being released tomorrow, I've decided to start blogging. I'd like to try and keep this focused mainly on Lotus related topics but I'm a big sports fan and an entertainment (books, movies, music, games) fan in general, so who knows what will show up.

No surprise to anyone who might actually read this post but IBM has announced the release of Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.1 for tomorrow, Feb. 20, 2008. I first read about it here at Ed Brill's blog where he has a link back to IBM's site.

Currently I'm "managing" eight Domino servers, four on i5 boxes and four on Windows boxes, and the versions of Domino are scattered. The most up-to-date are two clustered servers on i5 that are running 7.0.3. The oldest release is the other i5 cluster running 6.5.4. Of the Windows servers, they are used as an Archive server, BES server, Sametime server and a Web Server. Our user base is around 600 with 90% using a Notes client - which are also on scattered releases.

I consider myself a designer (Nathan says we should say that instead of "developer" ) rather then an administrator but I'm lucky enough to do both. After Lotusphere this year I decided to try and start doing a better job on the administrative side and I've been waiting for this release to really begin doing that. Since I've been working with Notes and Domino we've never gone to a .0.0 release and have always waiting for a .0.1 release. This has been tough to do with version 8 as I have been dying to get Domino 8 on our servers. I've only played around a little on the Notes 8 client since 8.0.0 was released but I'm dying to start using that client as well.

As I'm sure many will do, I will be scrambling to download this release as fast as possible. Going to set one of the 7.0.3 servers into restricted mode so I can upgrade it as soon as I have the download tomorrow. Hopefully the install will be painless and I can get the other server in that cluster upgrading after some testing. I'll keep you posted.