Real World Computing

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 ...

This is probably a bit of an "oldie" but I have been asked about it a lot recently, so I figured it was worth documenting.  Why would you use this? There's a few reasons why you might need to do an email mail merge. You've got an email that you've got to send to a few people, perhaps it's an invoice or just a seasonal greeting. Whatever it is, you don't have a group to send it to and you don't feel like just pasting everyone's email address into the BCC field. You need to reference specific pieces of data in your email -- data attached to an individual. For example, on an invoice reminder run, you might have a due date, an invoice number, an amount and a project code.  The Procedure 1. Create an Excel Spreadsheet with your people's details in it.  You should use the first line to have column headings like Name, Email and FirstName.  You only really need name and email but if you want to refer to other things (eg: like th...

Office 365 Groups are No Longer Automatic Mail Groups Until recently, if you created an office 365 group (usually by creating a Teams or a SharePoint site), you would also be able to send that group mail directly via outlook. Unfortunately, with everyone having the ability to create teams and sites on demand -- and very few people following good naming standards, it's very easy to get your corporate address books cluttered. Microsoft received a lot of feedback about this clutter and as a result, they disabled the functionality. Existing Office 365 groups are unaffected but if you create a new one, you'll find that you can't locate them in the typeahead when you want to send mail. You can however, still have your cake and eat it too. You just have to use PowerShell. Procedure Since this is an admin feature and I'm presuming that all admins should be on Multi-Factor authentication now, the instructions are for MFA.  If you're not using MFA, you mig...

Depending upon your settings and circumstances, there's a chance that groups created in Microsoft Teams might play so well together.  Specifically, your team might not be available for email.  As it turns out, the teams ARE available... they're just hidden.   and a little PowerShell is enough to coax them out.  Our Example In our example, the site is called Application Redevelopment and you can see from the screenshot that it appears in teams but not in outlook. The PowerShell Commands Session Setup The setup is as per usual; Start PowerShell in Administrator Mode. Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned Press Y and Enter. $UserCredential = Get-Credential Enter your user name and password. Create the session. $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection and activate it. Import-PSSessio...

Nesting Groups has been a bit of a pain in Office 365 for a while now but there's apparently a few answers (and some updates on the way).   Here's a PowerShell method.  The Setup To start with, we're going to create a group in Office365 Admin. It should be a mail enabled security group . In our example the group will be called; GRP MotherGroup and it will have an email address of MotherGroup@mydomain.com (obviously the domain will be different at your location). For the purposes of this exercise, you'll also want to create several groups to be nested. These are distribution groups and their names and emails for the purposes of our demonstration will be; GRP BabyGroup1  babygroup1@mydomain.com GRP BabyGroup2  babygroup2@mydomain.com GRP BabyGroup3  babygroup3@mydomain.com GRP BabyGroup4  babygroup4@mydomain.com The PowerShell Commands As usual, you'll want to run PowerShell in Administrator Mode. Set-ExecutionPolicy Remote...

It's not an unfamiliar scenario with all of the rebranding that's happening these days. Your Office365 group has the wrong mail domain and now you want to change it. It's the kind of thing that you'd expect to be able to change via the admin portal. After all, there's a neat little domain selector box on the page. Alas, that's not how Office 365 groups work. You need PowerShell for that one. PowerShell to the Rescue PowerShell, the interface you have when you don't have an interface...  Here's how to change the domain on your group. Run PowerShell as an Administrator and type the following commands; Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned $UserCredential = Get-Credential $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection Set-UnifiedGroup -Identity " Group English Name " -PrimarySmtpAddre...

Attaching files from SharePoint has gotten a little easier of late. I'm not quite sure when the changes happened but they're very welcome.   The new functionality is available in the outlook client and outlook web access. It's available for most SharePoint groups right now, with SharePoint groups created via Yammer following at the end of May 2018. Attachments in the Outlook Client Use the following steps to attach a file via the Outlook client; Create a new Email On the Message Tab, click Attach, Below the list of recent documents, click Browse Web Locations When this expands to show a list, choose Group Files You should see your SharePoint libraries appear in a list. There's a few reasons why you might not see all of your libraries.  If this is the first time that you're using this feature, or if you're using a new installation of Outlook, it may take a while (up to 20 minutes) to fully populate the list of sites. You don't have to w...

In the Domino world, we used to just change the access controls on NSFs and copy or replicate them directly from the server to a PC but since we've moved to Outlook, and specifically  to Office 365, getting those mail files from the cloud has been an increasingly difficult business.  To be fair, this was difficult under IBM as well, once we moved into the Verse cloud.  Your Current Procedures aren't Working When I first started trying to get backups of files, I had a lot of people tell me how easy it was. I followed their advice -- and yes, it was easy.  After all, there's a menu option inside outlook that lets you export directly to a PST file. It was too easy. I was suspicious though. Suspicious that a person with a 10 year occupation could have a mail file that was a mere 400 MB. I looked into it and sure enough, the outlook method only gives you a recent subset of your data. If you've been backing up PSTs from the cloud using outlook, you're missing a ...

Last time on Real World Computing, I talked about migrating mail from IBM Notes and Verse to Microsoft Office 365 . Now it's time for Part 2.  Mail Routing We did routing in two parts. Initially we had MX records for both IBM and Microsoft with Microsoft having the higher number (which means lower priority). After the cutover date we switched the priorities so that Microsoft Office 365 had the higher priority. One of the cool things about Microsoft’s setup is that they give you two domains, one is your own and the other is an @mycompany.onmicrosoft.com one. When we first saw this we thought it was a “bit wanky” but as it turned out, it was very useful indeed.we quickly discovered that we couldn't send mail to our internal colleagues on outlook from notes and that all of the agents in our Domino applications were only delivering internally. Changing these to point to the onmicrosoft addresses fixed that problem. As far internal mail, we just added a mail rule to f...

So, all the newcomers in your company want to use outlook? IBM have put a lot of work into making the Notes client look and feel like outlook and they've given us Verse which is an acquired taste but if you like Google's inbox, it's good.  Unfortunately, there's just just no pleasing some people.  If you don't have Notes and Domino apps, then there's nothing at all holding you back. Nobody without Notes/Domino applications (or perhaps a huge investment in IBM Connections) should be using IBM's mail offerings. On the other hand, if you do have apps for which there's no equivalent in the Microsoft world, here's another option that you might want to try... Give your users Outlook but point it to their Verse Mail. That way, you can concentrate on either migrating your apps to another environment or webifying them to the extent that there's no reason to use the notes client.  In this post, I want to discuss how to access Outlook mail - Not...

Today's world is all about cloud.  We have email in the cloud, document storage in the cloud, data, applications and even development in the cloud. Why Cloud is Best From one point of view, cloud is an excellent choice. You no longer need to worry about; Physical servers which can suffer hardware failures. Storage and rack space for servers Local services, such as Air Conditioning and the Water Supply in the computer room. Local environmental factors, such as storms which can directly impact your infrastructure. Local backups, which can take hours and require special software Tape management (or streaming backup services) Server failover -- this is managed by the cloud sites. Hotfixes and patches to operating systems and applications. Most of the cloud systems offer some pretty good restore functionality too. For example; IBM Connections has some great version control tools which allow you to roll back to previous versions of your file.  This means that if...

We've recently rolled out IBM Verse and we're trying to get our staff members to use it (willingly) rather than mandating the change.  One of the issues that we've come up against is the humble Mailto link.  If you go to any web page that has a mailto link and click it, it goes to Notes. Obviously we want those links to go to Verse. It's a simple fix, here's how to do it. How To Open IBM Verse in Google Chrome (it might be possible to use other browser but I haven't tested them). Click on the Service Handler Icon in the Address Bar (Right hand side) A dialog box will appear asking if you want to allow Verse to open all Email links. Choose Allow. Click Finished. That's all there is to it.  Now you can browse around and find a mailto link like this one and click it.   and here's a picture (click on it if it's too small).

The Simplest Email Signatures are often the Best These days, email is arguably the most common form of “first contact” with a potential customer, client or colleague. People spend quite a bit of time refining the content of these communications, pushing them through both public relations and legal departments and checkpoints but very few people bother to check beyond the content, specifically ... their signatures.  The aim of this post is to, Prompt you to do some basic checks.  Give you some ideas on how you can improve your signature Document how to create a Signature in IBM Verse. Ask yourself…  When was the last time you sent a work-email to your Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo account to see how the signature looks and to find out what your signature looks like with any legalese added by your corporate gateway?  When was the last time you checked out how your signature renders from a mobile device.  Have you recently checked all phone, mob...

About this Post I'm a  big fan of Google Apps for work. Of the three major solutions I use on a regular basis (IBM Connections, Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps),  it's easily the simplest to set up. In fact, I'd recommend it as the number 1 solution for small to medium sized companies.  I haven't tried it in a large company setting but I suspect it might be a pretty good fit there too. A Little about Timing In the recent past, getting established on the IBM ecosystem (IBM Connections), took about a week, while getting onto Microsoft's systems took more than two weeks (and it still causes a lot of daily pain). By contrast, you can get yourself established, without needing any help, on the google ecosystem in less than an hour -- yes, it's that easy. Here's How 1. Go to the Google Apps for Work Site ( https://apps.google.com/ - or in Australia, https://apps.google.com.au/ ) and click Start Here. 3. You'll be prompted to create your firs...