Uh Clem's Admin World

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.