Sanity Check

(If you don't have hair, substitute whatever equivalent expression would be appropriate e.g. how to avoid unnecessary bashing of your head on the desk)

I love Quickr, but we'll continue just dating for now because there just a couple annoyances that made me question my sanity until I understood that they were predictable, avoidable bugs. Learn from my pain and be happy with Quickr. Note that we are using the Domino release of Quickr, currently 8.1.0.1 and connectors 8.1 HF8

1. Do not create folders in a place that are one character (e.g. don't do A, B, C, D....Z). After E, you'll find that they show in the Web Browser, but not in the connectors. There is a technote I stumbled across that says to use more than one character.
   
2. Do not use any special characters in a place name (like apostrophes and ampersands) -Using HF5 version of the connectors, we had no issue, but as soon as we upgraded to HF8...well let's just say the results were not pretty. Upgraded users seemed ok, for a while, but new users could not see all their places in the connector. The solution was to rename the title of places that had special characters (e.g. Marketing's Place, Operations & Support) then use QPTool to unregister and register these places. 

Anyone else have a list.

When you send a file by email, the access control to that file is intuitive. Only those you send it to can read it (ignore that fact that it could be re-forwarded by the recipients to someone else...this is alway a possibility regardless of the solution).

Now when you install Quickr with Lotus Notes connectors and you attempt to send a file, you are prompted if you really really want to send the file or let Quickr store it in a place. Great that works except if the file is considered "sensitive" you have to think, "Which place do my recipients have access to, and who else in that place could also read this document?". Then you say, fudge that, I'll just send the attachment. BUT, what if that Quickr dialog box had a checkbox that says, "Limit access to the recipients" and the connector then put the file into your place of choice, even a Quickr Entry place (enhanced), and automagically sets the access control of the document so that only your recipients are readers? Now that would be cool and remove all that extra thinking about who can access what.
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Finally, with 8.0.2 and its significant improvement in performance (it really is true) I believe we have a Notes 8 Standard Client we can roll out to most of our users. Some users will require more RAM, but that's not going to be a problem. Interestingly, the number one request from users so far is: "Make my unread mail RED".

This should be trivial, and it was in 8.0. and 8.0.1 with the notes.css file. But in 8.0.2 its a little more complicated because:
(a) notes.css is buried in a JAR file which has a strange version number.
(b) there appears to be a theme tool out there, but without any instructions on how actually to use it to deploy themes to users.

References

Themes Widget:     (look great, but none of these have red unread)

Themes customization Widget

Its just not visible on passport yet...
I guess the BP's get first crack at it. Here's hoping its all its reported to be...faster, less buggy.

For years my company has been using DLI.Uploader for several of our intranet applications to enable efficient, reliable multi-file upload and downloads. One can select a hundred JPEG files for download and then let the download continue in the background while working on other pages. The product works great and we have been very happy with it, especially the ease with which it integrates into Domino applications. However, it is ActiveX based technology and thus restricted to Windows system and IE in particular. We are beginning to incorporate Macs into our environment and we would like a cross-platform solution, probably a Java applet.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? Anyone know if the Download Director Java app that IBM uses for the Passport site is licenseable or where they got it if its not an IBM-native applet?

I have 4 Domino servers running on one LPAR of our "i" (System i, i5/OS, AS/400). I upgraded the Quickr server to 8.0.1 because that is what Quickr 8.1 requires and we are supposed to be able to run multiple version of Domino in the "i".

But now HTTP won't start on the upgraded 8.0.1 server because the error message has informed me of what I missed in the release notes that I need to update to Java 5. However, the release notes say Domino 7 requires Java 4. So my question to IBM was should I be able to upgrade to Java 5 and have my Domino 7 and 8 servers all get along? They said probably, but they were noncommittal as you'd expect saying "There "might" be some issues with the HTTP server for the Domino 7 servers...no guarantees". So has anyone tried it? Are there any issues that I need to be concerned about?


 

Since version R5 when the Welcome/home page metaphor was added to Notes (replacing the workspace), many orgs have leveraged the function by deploying a customized Notes' corporate home page.  In our case, our home page is an NSF that functions as a roles-based portal providing each user with the links and applications they require depending on their profile. Notes 8 breaks this convention of always having an always-open home page tab.

If we roll out Notes 8, our users will be a somewhat disoriented and will not appreciate having to re-find the home page by clicking on the Open button then scrolling down the list.

One of the claims for Notes 8 is backward-compatibility, but this major change to the navigation scheme is an exception. We need an option (driven by an Admin policy would be nice, but not required) to control if the Home page is closeable, or at least make it so you can't close it accidentally.

Alternatively, some have suggested making a prominent Home icon beside the Open button. This would be my second choice.

Comment and vote here

Well  its happening...an employee today received a DOCX file from a supplier via e-mail and is asking around IT about how he can open it. We told him to tell them, as they are a supplier and we're in control, to resave the document in Office 2003 (.doc) format and send it back to us. This time it wasn't the CEO, but its inevitable that pressure will build over time to provide a native solution for these file types.

Now from what I've heard, there are no plans for Symphony, embedded in Lotus Notes 8, to support OOXML files even for importing. This is strange as Sun is adding OOXML support to their OpenOffice with the logic that if we can get documents into an ODF editor, we can save them as ODF for long term storage.

In a similar vein, for years we received those pesky windat files from misconfigured Exchange servers and after the old "tell them to fix their server" explanation grew thin, we were able to use utilities to extract the email and attachments, and finally in Domino 7.0.2 IBM relented and now windat's are intercepted and decoded at the server.

Will IBM make an about face "in the fullness of time" by providing an OOXML import filter in Symphony? And will they make this too late after we've already been told by the CEO to go out and buy Office 2007 for everyone?

Sticking your head in the sand, pretending that OOXML files are not going to land in your Inbox is simply naive and not a winning strategy IMHO.

What do you think?