Real World Computing

I've been meaning to write this post for at least a year but these days I'm always too busy for blogging. Last year, we embarked on a project in which we wanted to regularly exchange data between Domino and a SQL server database on Azure.  We looked at several third party options before realizing that HCL Domino had what we needed built-in and out of the box - even better, HCL also had a "codeless" solution (Foundry) available to us to do the whole transfer.  This post will most likely be the first part of a series that covers the REST API and a bit of Foundry. I'm no expert on either but there's not a lot of information out there so anything is better than nothing.  Prepping the Environment Before embarking on our API journey, we upgraded our servers to Domino 12.0.2. It's something of a sore point with me that people think that it's fine to leave Domino on much older versions, for example, release 9. It isn't. Old versions of any software have se

Lotus Notes is old software and I should know, I've been using it for 30 years. It's so old that it pre-dates the internet and it's considered to be one of the first popular "email" platforms. It's still widely in use today but many users simply don't want to talk about it. A Quick Apology I want to begin with a quick apology for the inflammatory title and the use of the word "Lotus". After all, we don't call PowerPoint "Forethought Presenter" anymore do we? There's a very specific audience that I'm talking to with this post and if you're not calling it HCL Domino, then that's you.  Wormhole Image generated by Stable Diffusion AI Are you still on the platform? A lot of people who believe that they migrated off the Notes/Domino platform many years ago are still using the software. It's so capable that it's hard to replace. It's quite often still running major operations from dusty unloved servers in back r

Yesterday, I posted about attending a Domino Jam for the first time in six years and my feelings on how HCL has turned the product around. Today I want to touch on the security aspect discussed at the Jam and add my thoughts to the mix.  Secure by Design Immediately following the roadmap presentation, the jam looked at Domino's legacy and where it is today. One of the key takeaways from this was a discussion of the incredible security in Domino. We have seen this in our organization but it was nice to hear HCL and other organizations (via quotes and stories) saying the same thing. There are many good reasons for the high security score but two of the best are  Multi-layered security from the very beginning of the product. Domino being "on-prem" rather than web hosted.  There were a couple of interesting stories and observations, including one about a penetration test on one of the new tools (Volt) where the auditors talked about the many layers of security in the Domino

 If you'd told me back in 2018 that I'd be attending a Domino Jam in 2022, I wouldn't have believed you - and yet, that's exactly what happened.  Even more incredibly, I left the jam feeling reinvigorated and excited for the future of this 30+ year old system. I've talked before about how our departure from the platform was fueled by largely emotional reactions to the dated mail UI and a resistance to change for new users unused to anything but Microsoft Outlook. We picked the low hanging fruit (mail migration to outlook) and we also tried converting a more complex system.  See:  New Year, New Directions (January 2017) Our Domino State of Play 2022 (February 2022) Far from abandonment, our strategy for moving to Azure demonstrated the versatility, reliability, security and ROI of domino and resulted in recognition of its value as a platform and an abrupt U-turn in our strategy.  Fresh out of the Sydney Domino Jam, I want to talk about some of the revelations for t

We've just emerged from a week of hell in which Azure and Microsoft have completely lost my trust. It's raised a lot of questions about Azure and Marketplace and came very close to making front-page news.  There are obviously certain details that I can't talk about but I'll say this. The upper echelons at Microsoft were made fully aware of the damage they were causing and the impact that our five day outage was having on several very large players and also on hundreds of individuals. They were completely ineffectual and did nothing to resolve the solution.  Image by dexmac from Pixabay A Word About Billing I don't think I've talked about how bad Microsoft's billing systems are, so it's worth spending a little time here. I've dealt with billing from hundreds of companies over the years but nothing has ever approached the complete obscurity of their billing.  It's not just the big things that are obscure either. Even when you obtain a small pay-as

I'm not a big fan of HTTPS. Don't get me wrong, I agree with all of the security and comfort that it provides. I just hate the whole renewal process. Domino 12 introduces a new way to do HTTPS and it's apparently much easier going forward.  That's great news. Unfortunately, we hit a couple of snags on the way in, and I wanted to warn everyone about them - especially since the workarounds are so simple.  Domino Needs to Generate the CSR You're probably thinking that that this is pretty obvious but if so, you're not thinking about wildcard certificates. We use a wildcard certificate *.mydomain.com.au - This allows us to use it across multiple systems, including Domino, Azure, some WordPress websites and a Drupal Website. We also use it in conjunction with several hosted services. The wildcard certificate allows us to use the same certificate on different subdomains. For example: www.mydomain.com.au domino.mydomain.com.au azure.mydomain.com.au othersite.mydomain.co

It's been five years since a decision was made to kill Notes and Domino at our organisation. Like many other organisations, we left for the Azure shores of Microsoft. Several changes of leadership later and Domino is still at the heart of our organisation and we're moving towards tighter integration with it than ever.  It occurred to me that now is as good a time as any to reflect on how our journey went.  The Low Hanging Fruit The low hanging fruit of any domino migration is mail. Email is an easily identifiable application which can generally be swapped out one-for-one. In our case, Notes client (and the lesser used Verse web application) for Outlook and Outlook Web Application (OWA).  We investigated several applications before finding one that worked and converted all of our .NSF mail files into .PSTs, then we imported these into outlook. Along the way, we discovered that Verse didn't safeguard our older mail quite as well as we'd hoped and we discovered that folder

SharePoint lists are a great way to build quick "applications" and registers.  If, like me, you've migrated from IBM Domino, and you were wondering where the Office 365 development functionality is, this is where it starts.  For everyone else, who has never heard of domino, don't worry, I'll explain what SharePoint lists are and why they're a great tool for you.  What Are SharePoint Lists? SharePoint lists are essentially a "cloud way" to store data that you want to share and search. You can put documents into lists but the best use of lists is to store and update "data". Essentially, SharePoint lists are a kind of database. They're not incredibly powerful, like SQL server but they're usually going to be powerful enough to replace a lot of the things you might have in Microsoft Access. One of the easiest ways to determine what applications are a good fit for SharePoint lists is to look at your spreadsheets.  Spreadsheet

Over the past few months, I've been looking at a whole range of options to do with file storage on the basis that Microsoft's OneDrive simply doesn't do what we need. The whole time of course, I've been unable to shake the feeling that Microsoft should be offering something that already covers this space. After all, file sharing is one of the major "tentpoles" in most Windows networks.  As it turns out, SharePoint is the answer to this - and it works well if it's playing nicely with OneDrive.  My initial investigation of SharePoint was flawed for a number of reasons. Firstly, it appears that I was looking at an "old version".  The "new" version has really only started to come out over the last few months but it's light years ahead of its predecessor. The second reason that SharePoint was overlooked was because I really didn't have a great understanding of how (or why) it works. I was trying to compare it to IBM Domino a

I was having a conversation recently and there was a couple with no kids who were annoyed that their friends were saying “the club scene is back!” when in their mind, it had never left.  They pointed out that it was the other couples who’d left the scene to raise children and that now that those kids were old enough to stay home on their own, they were able to return to the club scene. It was not “back”, THEY were back. It’s like the concept of object permanence doesn't apply. People assume that things are long gone, simply because they personally are no longer using them. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard IBM Domino pronounced “dead” over the years and yet it keeps going. People move to all-Microsoft companies and then they start at ours and say "I thought Notes was dead." No, it's not dead... in fact, we’re still developing in it now and its future today is much more assured than it was five years ago.  The fact is that the model st

One of the best reasons to move to the new IBM Connections Cloud is IBM Sametime.  Until recently, we were using the "free" bundled IBM Sametime 7 offering. This was a useful feature but of course, some of us were spoiled by the chat options available in other software (Google Hangouts particularly). The version 7 feature has not aged well.   We looked at upgrading the functionality some time ago, only to be told by many people that "the new SameTime is too complex to set up". It also required considerably more investment in hardware and software. Essentially it wasn't going to be economical to use and we had ditched the product.  The plan was to eventually install a replacement, but in the meantime, we were learning to live without it - after 6 months, our users had stopped complaining. Then along came the IBM Connections version of Sametime.... and it's good. Very Good.  Cloud: The Fastest Way to Get up and Running The fastest way to get up and

Last September, when renewing our Notes and Domino Licences, IBM offered us a trade-up to IBM Connections SmartCloud.  Essentially, there we were presented with two options; 1.  50%  of our licenses upgraded to the full services (S1) 2.  100% of our licenses upgraded to a subset of the services (S2) I chose the first option, knowing that either way I'd have a struggle on my hands with management when I wanted to take advantage of the full services but also knowing that it's easier to justify getting the other half of the organisation onto the new service than it is to widen services for the whole organisation.  We're still only half there but I'm very hopeful - it's the first time in years that I've had real confidence in IBM's direction.  So What is this Connections thing Anyway? It's weird but IBM seems to have come full circle in the Domino product line. They spent years barking up the wrong tree with ideas like the ill-fated "workp

Update: Thanks to everyone who commented to point out that this was fixed.  We were all so focussed on Poodle that we only applied the fixes to the servers that serve HTML.  Turns out that IBM Domino 9.0.1 FIX PACK 3 is a good fix to have on all of your servers.  KILLER AGENTS !  Just a fun tidbit we discovered today (fortunately on the test, rather than the production server). It seems that bug has been introduced in from Domino 9.0.1 which doesn't like having the agent manager restarted.  Specifically, via the commands; TELL AMGR QUIT and LOAD AMGR Under normal use, you'd probably have no reason to issue those commands on your server console but if you had a runaway agent or if you were testing/debugging, you might. Shortly after agent manager loads (in our case, in under 10 seconds), the server will start to report things like; AMgr: Console command 'LOG.NSF' is unknown AMgr: Console command 'admin4.NSF' is unknown The actual name of

I had a very interesting conversation with IBM last week (more on that in later posts) and at one point we discussed the current status and the future of IBM Notes and Domino.  It's a discussion which seems to be largely ignored at the IBM events these days but it's certainly a question that IBM's customers want answered.  The answer from IBM was quite interesting. First of all, we were assured that IBM Domino was not dead - far from it. It was alive, kicking and thriving. It's no longer being considered "sexy" or "new" but is seen as a mature product which does exactly what it needs to do.  IBM made it clear that they didn't intend to over-engineer notes by adding functionality simply so that they could bring a new version to the market. IBM weren't subtle about it either, pointing the finger at Microsoft Word and asking "how many more features do you need in a word processor"?  It was a good point, well made. After all, ho

In my last post, I discussed the steps required to get your Domino 9.0.1 server patched against the poodle bug which exists in both SSL 3.0 and TLS.  At the end of the post, I mentioned that I still had one server which was refusing to apply the patch. This is how I got around the problem.  The Server that Wouldn't After taking the patches all the way back to Fix Pack 1 and slowly patching forward one-by-one with reboots in between, I realised that whatever was affecting my server had been installed for a long time. There was no easy way to resolve the problem and obviously I couldn't roll back forever.  I just had to accept the fact that the server would not take the patch and take some more drastic measures. Backup First Of course, before taking any drastic measures, you should always backup first. Personally, I like to have a proper backup as well as a local copy of the main domino files.  That way I don't have to worry about streaming and tapes. I manu

There's been a lot of talk lately about the Poodle Vulnerability and IBM have provided a rather slow and confusing response full of similarly named files across multiple web pages. We've mostly gotten our systems sorted now but as it was a difficult process, I thought I'd share some of the things I've learned.  If nothing else, I'm sure that other people could benefit from the fix lists being in the one place.  Huge thanks to the guys in the IBM Notes groups on LinkedIn who provided most of the best insights here. The poodle vulnerability isn't a new thing (it's 15 years old) but recently browser vendors, particularly Mozilla (and soon Google) have have issued upgrades which block access to vulnerable sites by default. I guess that means it's time to deal with it.  This is what the Firefox error message looks like. One more thing.... In case you've already dealt with poodle and you think that your system is safe because Mozilla Firefox is