Real World Computing

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...

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...

Recently I was asked to find a way for a HR manager to circulate a new policy and collect acknowledgements from staff members. In the domino world, we'd already have custom databases to do this (or we could whip one up in a matter of minutes) but I needed to find an Office 365 equivalent.  I put the idea to the excellent Office 365 facebook group  and got a number of good suggestions that I'll follow up later to see where they lead me. I was also reminded of the Voting Buttons in outlook which are certainly the fastest method, though not the prettiest. Since I'm determined to use mainly "the new things" in Office 365, I wanted to see if there was a really simple way to do this without getting too technical for my users. The way I found involves SharePoint and Microsoft Forms (but I'm sure that you could just as easily swap out Yammer or even Teams for SharePoint). Procedure 1. Go to a (Modern) SharePoint site that all staff members have access to...

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...

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...

It was always just a matter of time. Eventually we were going to have to make the jump from IBM to Microsoft. It's not that IBMs software isn't good. It's very good. It's simply that IBM is the Beta to Microsoft's VHS. Technically the IBM product line is far superior but on the surface, IBMs poor UI will never match the incredible pull of Microsoft's polished Office 365 offerings. We're just finishing a mail migration from IBM Notes/Verse to Microsoft Outlook, which we did entirely in-house and I thought it would be worthwhile going over the method we used. The Before Status Prior to the migration, all of our users had the IBM Notes client on their desktops. We had three production servers and two test/dev servers. All of our user mailboxes were on the IBM Cloud and we had a split with some users on Verse and some on Notes. We were also running an extensive extranet with a myriad of centrally controlled expansive security options. Our address books...

You'd think that setting rooms up in Office 365 would be a simple matter of going to the Office 365 Admin console, expanding Resources, clicking on Rooms and Equipment and then using the Add Button This works but it doesn't do everything. If you want your rooms to appear in the Room List (and to show available times), you'll have to use PowerShell to put them there. Finding Answers So... I spent a while trying to find the answers without a whole lot of luck. I think that coming from the Notes/Domino world and not being familiar with the outlook terminology hindered me a bit in this regard.  In any case, big thanks to IT for Dummies btw whose page called " Create Room List Office 365 " made very little sense to me but helped me to explain to Microsoft Support what it was that I was looking for.  BTW: Microsoft support can be reached via the Support and then Service Requests options in the Admin Center. I've found their support to be excel...

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...

For most of us, email is simply a means of communicating work.  It's a glorified, bi-directional to-do list with comments. Emails come in, we read, do and delete. Once the work is done, there's usually no need to find the email again.  That's all very true except for when something goes wrong and your company gets taken to court. Suddenly then, all those deleted emails are very, very important.  How Email Discovery could work under Litigation So, assuming that there's a legal case, such as a lawsuit, that involves your company. You could be asked to produce all the emails within a given period (say, six months) which include certain key phrases -- or perhaps all emails from a now-terminated employee. In the event that email cannot be produced, you could be fined or worse, you could lose the ability to defend your company in court.  ...and it doesn't stop there, your company might not even be directly involved in the court case but could be dragged in as ...