Uh Clem's Admin World

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.

 It was a bad week for HD-DVD.  Engadget HD is reporting unofficial stories that Toshiba has given up.  Two key movie suppliers, Walmart & Netflix,  announced their Blu-Ray only support.

You would think this was bad news for me since I just bought a Toshiba HD-DVD player just a week ago.  I'm not upset though.  You see the player was only $120 US.  The cheapest Blu-Ray player is around $400 US.  Can't afford the latter quite yet, so the HD-DVD player will get me through another 9 months.   It seems that I will be able to find HD-DVD titles for a while, and might even be able to find some good deals.

Since the HD-DVD players are upgradeable, wouldn't it be cool if they figured out a way to upgrade them to be Blu-Ray compatible?  I don't know if it is technically possible, but that would rock.

Once again I was needing a good report on the mail files.  So I go to the "Files" tab of the admin client, and there is the information I need.  But, alas, no way to copy/paste or export to .csv.  Jeez, this seems like it would be so easy for admin client designers to add, yet still not there.  Now I know about the workarounds of using the web admin client, or using the console to send it to an .xml file, but I want it in my admin client.

So after being inspired at Lotusphere about our Lotus community I decided to post it on IdeaJam.   It was nice to see that David Killingsworth beat me to it by a couple of weeks. 

Go vote for this feature on IdeaJam here.

OK, remember,  I'm not a designer.    Over the years I've gotten pretty good at hacking together basic apps, and stealing lotusscript to do the things I need it to do.  However, sometimes I'm really stumped by Notes design structures.

For example.  I have an old, simple vacation database for a department to post their vacations.  The db uses a Calendar View Style.  I would love to update this view style to look like the Notes 8 mail calendar that I have in my personal calendar.  The headers are much spiffier.

But when I go surfing the design elements I don't see the Calendar View Style in there.  So where is it?  Is it part of the ODS?  Am I overlooking it?  Is it part of that "secret world" of a Notes database?   I will guess that the answer is either "There is no way to get to that." or "Here is a link that explains that."   Hopefully it is the latter.

It's curious how you run into dark corners of Notes/Domino from time to time.   Those places that never seem to be fully explained.