Uh Clem's Admin World

For some reason I pay a lot of attention to the small things in a design.  It bothers me when a GUI does something that doesn't make sense, or is just plain stupid.  For example, have you ever noticed in Notes 8.0.x when you click on a bookmark on the bookmark bar, then click on a second bookmark on the bookmark bar, it doesn't open the second bookmark, it just closes the first bookmark.  You have to click on the second bookmark twice, once to close the first one, and a second time to open the second one.   These kind of silly, stupid, easy-to-fix design flaws shouldn't occur.

On the other hand let me tell you about a good one that I just found.   I just got DirecTV after never had anything but broadcast TV, so I'm a little behind on this stuff.  But the DVR that comes with DirecTV has a really cool little feature that not only is smart, it anticipates human behavior.

Back in the old days of VCR's when I would fast forward past the commercials I would invariably overshoot my mark of where I wanted to resume play.   Well with the DirecTV DVR it actually goes BACK a few seconds as soon as you come off of fast forward.  THAT IS WAY COOL!   I will have to play with it to see if it is really smart and see if it goes further back when you are in double or tripple speed fast forward.  Now THAT would be impressive.

So some of you may be saying, "yeah, that's not news".  Well it's cool, and it's new to me, and these kind of simple little design features should be recognized, because I think all the little stuff makes a big difference in GUI design.

Do you have a favorite "small GUI design" feature that deserves recognition?

I was just reading a post on Ed Brill's blog  by Tom O'Neil from Codepress.  He talks about how he built an app in 3 hours what the .Net team has taken 1000+ hours and counting:

"I jokingly created an app in three hours with requirements from the .NET team. They are currently on hours 1000-1500 and are they are probably halfway done. Granted, their web-app was more slick than my three hour application but I completed the requirements."

Now I love these type of stories, even if they are anecdotal sometimes.  My company is in the process of making some business processes SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley act - It's a U.S. thing) compliant.   We have Notes for messaging and collaboration, but we really are just getting into creating apps.   I would love to have a handful of strories like this to really drive home how much Notes is a rapid application development (RAD) platform.

So if you have similar stories like this, please share them with the Yellowverse.

I started getting the error below when I launch my Notes 8.0.1 client.  I also get it when I try to set a different bookmark (workspace of course) as my homepage.   I searched the web and only found one posting which was ND8 feedback in the ND8 forum, but this posting related to starting the admin client first, which I am not doing.

So I tried to do the obvious and create a ClientBookmark.nsf file using the bookmark.ntf template.  This seemed to work!

Even though the problem "seems" to be fixed I'm left with some questions.   Why is there a ClientBookmark.nsf in addition to the Bookmark.nsf?   Isn't one enough?  Also, why don't I find any documentation on this?

 So we have over 120 general (MIDB) mailboxes.  You know, those shared mailboxes like "resumes@acme.com".    Well a handful of them have auto-response agents that respond to the sender with a email stating that we have received their email.   I use a simple agent using the "Reply to Sender" action triggered on "After new mail has arrived".  When you do this the Sender address of the auto-response email is the signer of the agent.

I have chosen to use an ID called "No Reply" on these agents.  However I have gotten some push back from Sales telling me this doesn't look that great to the customer.

Do you think it is accepted practice to use the sender address of "No Reply" on auto-response emails?   Do you think email users out there pretty much know what it means when they receive an email from "No Reply"?  Do you recommend a better strategy for auto-response emails?

It was always useful to easily see what point release was installed when you launched Notes.  Not anymore!

Changing the Notes password for the average user is not a trivial task.  It is way more confusing and buried than it should be.

First the user will find the "Change Password" option under "File-Security-User Security", at which point they are challeneged to enter their current password.  How many people would easily find this and know this is where you change your password.

Now the user security screen has 10 different buttons or menus to click on and the "Change Password" button is kinda lost in the middle.  For 98% of my users changing the password would be the ONLY reason they would ever go into the user security screen, so why don’t they make it more prominent?

Now comes the confusing part. When they click on "Change Password" they get a prompt asking for another password.  Now is this the current password, or is this the new password?  It is not obvious.  It is made more confusing because the user is forced to enter their current password TWICE!

How hard would it be so that when they click on "Change Password" the prompt says "Enter CURRRENT Password", and not just "Password".  I never understood why it asks for their current password a second time anyway.  If it is a security requirement, then fine, clarify the prompt.

The usability team at Lotus have done a great job on 8.x, but they need to put some energy in the nooks and crannies of the client.

 

Huh???



I'm not sure what I did to cause this.  I found it after coming back from lunch.  The details button is greyed out.

I'm surprised at how few people use email folders on their Blackberry.  It could be because they are not easily understood by the average user.  Maybe it's because they are not sync'ed with their Notes folders by default.  You actually have to configure on the device which folders to sync (RIM calls this "Redirection" ), but even then it doesn't bring in the emails already in the Notes folder.

It's also confusing that, by default, the Blackberry will show the email in the inbox as well as the folder.  They do this because there isn't a good way to tell you what folder the new email is in.

So here are a few tips (lessons learned) about using Blackberry email folders:

• The Blackberry's menu terminology is a little challenging.  For example, to move an email to a folder on the Blackberry you choose "File".  Also, on the Blackberry they call it "Folder Redirection" , and not "Folder Synchronization".
  
  
• Even setting up Folder Redirection is buried in the menu structure.  It's under Menu Key - Options - Email Settings - Menu Key - Folder Redirection.  Whoa!
  
  
• By default, messages that are "foldered" on your Blackberry will continue to ALSO appear in the Blackberry's Inbox.  To change this behavior you need to select the Menu key, then Options - General Options, and set Hide Filed Messages = yes.  However, this makes it challenging to find the new email since your only clue to a new email existing somewhere in a sync'ed folder is the new email count at the top.
  
  
• Once you have selected a folder for redirection it will NOT show any emails that were already in the folder before the redirection was enabled. If you want to get pre-existing emails to show up in a folder, there is a trick!  Move the emails to the Trash in Lotus Notes, then go to the Trash and restore them.  If you do this watch your device’s memory usage.
  
  
• Moving a message from the Inbox to a folder in Lotus Notes will also move it into the folder on the Blackberry.  The opposite is also true.  If you "File" a message on your Blackberry, it will also move it to the corresponding folder in Lotus Notes.
  
  
• This, of course, assumes that the folder is selected for redirection.  If the folder is not selected for redirection, then the foldering will not stay in sync between Lotus Notes and the Blackberry.
  
  
• It seems that the foldering feature is a lower priority for the BES server.  My testing showed a delay of a couple of minutes from the time you folder an email in Notes and the time it shows up in the corresponding Blackberry folder. 

I was not able to find ANY documentation on how Blackberry folders work or behave.  Even the RIM tech support guy could not find any documentation for me.

So do any of you have any tips or tricks regarding Blackberry email folders?  Do you know of any exiting documentation on this topic?

 

 

So I upgraded our production Sametime server from 7.0 to 8.0 this past weekend.  It went amazingly smooth.   Our 800 Sametime users use a variety of methods to access the IM.  75% use either DWA or Portal IM portlets to access.  The other 25% use either a Notes 7 (soon to be 8) client, or Sametime for Blackberry.  So I had many different clients to consider during the upgrade.  I also had Quickr integration to deal with.

Here are the key lessons I learned.  Maybe others can benefit from them:

• Don’t rely soley on your own PC for testing.  As an administrator, you probably don’t have a standard configuration.  In my case I had a version of Java (1.0.6.2) that would not show awareness status in webmail.   Other users were active and were able to confirm it was working properly.  Once I reverted to Java 1.0.5.11 on my PC I was fine.

• Review the default Sametime policies.  I was not getting the “file send” feature in the Notes 8 client.  There is a ST policy called “Allow all Sametime Connect features to be used with integrated clients”.  This was turned off by default.  By the way, if you change the policies you don’t have to restart the entire ST server.  Just restart the “stpolicy.exe” service.

• It seems they will be supporting less features in DWA8 as they did in DWA7.  Features like “Who can see me online” are removed in DWA8.

• Sametime 8 handles user privacy info differently.  This is the “Who can see me online” info for each user.  You have to run a little utility (upgrade_util.cmd) included in the upgrade to convert the user privacy info.  This was actually changed in ST 7.5.1, but I was upgrading from 7.0.

The supported list of webcams only has 3 webcams on it.  These are the 3 webcams that development actually tested.  However IBM tech support did say that any quality USB webcam that supports 640x480 and 30 frames per second should work. 

Feel free to contact me if you want more information about my upgrade experience.

It was 1993 and I was working in the IT department of a Fortune 500 government contractor in the Washington D.C. area.  Our division of 3000 employees was using DOS based PC’s tying into Novell 3.x and cc:Mail.  I can remember the autoexec.bat file we used on all machines was over 20 pages long!  I still have a copy of it.

 

We were sitting in a staff meeting one day when our division’s IT director told us about a new initiative from corporate of rolling out a new application called Lotus Notes.  It was mainly to support this new corporate app, but it also did email.  He asked for a volunteer from our team to be the lead on the project.   I just happened to be the one to raise his hand.

 

Over the next couple of years I  set up twenty-some severs running Lotus Notes 3 on OS/2, and converting everyone’s cc:mail over to Notes mail.   I pretty much ran the division’s Notes infrastructure single handedly.  In 1996 the entire company upgraded all 200 servers to V4 in one night.  I left soon thereeafter.

 

Since then I have have dabbled in other non-Notes IT stuff, like that crazy IT mangagement stuff, but Notes seems to draw me back.   It gets into your blood (bleed yellow),  which is why I titled this “How Lotus Notes Got Into Me” instead of “How I Got Into Lotus Notes.”

 

It’s amazing how such a simple act of raising your hand can alter your entire career!

 I've had a heck of a problem getting the DWA 7.0.3 to stabilize.  I have now been through 2 hotfixes.  Most of it revolved around opening attachments.   You might get the right one, or you might get a previous attachment that you opened.  It had to do with how IE saves a temporary copy of the attachment you are opening.

While I was testing the last hotfix (DWA Hotfix 281.111) my IBM Tech Support rep could not reproduce my problem.   I sent him exact instructions to recreate it, but to no avail.

After almost a month the PMR was re-assigned to another tech.  This tech somehow made a connection with a problem an international customer was having with DWA attachments.   As a lark she asked me what the Use UTF-8 for output field was set to in the server doc.  It was set to No which is the default for 7.0.3.  She told me to change it to Yes.  And that fixed my problem.

Now the UTF-8 enables the unicode character set.  Logically this should have nothing to do with my problem, but this tech somehow put 2 and 2 together.

So thank you, Emily, for making the unlikely connection, and for having such a pleasant phone voice.

Sometimes your success with tech support all depends on who you end up with.

Since 80% of my users are primarily DWA users I get feedback on the slightest thing wrong.   When I upgraded my servers to 7.0.3 last week they noticed a problem viewing emails.  It turns out there is a bug that truncates the sender address after a comma when viewing or printing an email (of course the comma is in the quoted "alias" part of the address).   Anyone else run into this?

So I submitted a PMR and, sure enough, this was a known issue.  Tech support rendered a hotfix for me for Linux (DWA Hotfix Pack 280.081) which I installed this morning.

This is the 4th or 5th DWA hotfix I've installed, and each time I'm impressed at how easy it is.  It's simply a matter of replacing a half dozen files (5 in my case) on the Domino server.  The cool thing is all you do is stop the HTTP task,  rename the old files (for backout purposes), copy in the new files,  set the attributes & file owner info, then restart the HTTP task.  That's it!

If you are new to DWA hotfixes,  I recommend you thoroughly digest the readme.txt that comes with the hotfix.  It is 8 pages long, and unfortunately it is in plain text, so all the sections run together.  What I do is delete the sections that are for the other operating systems.  This reduces what I really need to just 1 page.   I really wish they would deliver this in a better formatted file that makes it easy to decipher just the parts you need.

I'm also curious about how little I see written or referenced regarding DWA.  Not much in the blogs.   The new DWA Lite was mentioned at Lotusphere, but that's about it.  

So is anyone else out there using DWA as much as I am?

So now that 8.0.1 is out I can start planning my rollout.  The first step was to deploy it to my boss and a few IT colleagues.  Their first questions were "so what's new?"  I realized I was going to need to communicate to my users what IS new with this version over Notes 7, but with limited training time I needed to hit the highlights that mattered most to them.  So I started looking into the "What's New" docs in the readme and on the IBM sites.  I quickly discovered that a lot of these materials are a lot of fluff and stuff that my users really don't care about.  What I need is a nice, short list of the most important features that the users will really care about.

So what do you think are the most useful features that the user will REALLY care about, or REALLY like?  A few that come to mind are message recall,  new attachment handling,  quota guage, and integrated Sametime buddy list in the sidebar.

While installing Notes 8.0.1 today I was reminded how lame most progress bars are.  The Notes 8x install progess bar is one of the worst.  It must go across 50 times during the install! What use is that?

The replication progress bar is just as bad.  It is based on the the number of documents, and doesn't take into account the size of the documents.

The IBM Download Director progress bar is pretty accurate.  It's even multi level.  It shows you the progress of the current file as well as the overall progress of all files.  Now, granted, file download progress bars are much easier to build since all bytes are the same size.

So I guess the problem really lies on trying to report on the progress of processing data chunks of varying size, such as an application install or a replication.   Why hasn't someone figured this out?

 So early Sunday morning I upgraded both of my clustered mail servers from 7.0.2 to 7.0.3.  They run on SUSE Linux (which rocks by the way).  I must tell you I have gotten spoiled over the years with Domino upgrades.  Each server took about 10 minutes to upgrade, and the upgrades went perfectly.

I have such confidence in these upgrades these days that I was able to enjoy the rest of my Sunday, only needing to check in once or twice.

Now, for complete disclosure,  I must tell you that I have encountered 2 issues today.   First, a few users complained that their unread marks on their Blackberries came back.  Second,  a user noticed a display problem of the "From" address in DWA which has already been identified and a DWA hotfix is in the works.

So, maybe not so perfect, but pretty darn close.  These issues are minor in the greater scheme of things.  My colleagues don't have so much luck on other systems.

And if you say "well it's just a point release",  7.0.3 fixes 1440 issues!   Let's see.....1440 fixed issues.....compared to 2 extremely minor new issues......I'd say I'm a bit ahead.

Also, you may "ask why not 8.x?".   Well I've been waiting for 8.0.1 to come out.  I will start that upgrade very soon.  And I am looking forward to it.