Real World Computing

Our "Uncrashable" Notes Server has only crashed a few times in the last five years. Once it was due to an Archiving agent having issues with a corrupted mail. Every other time has been due to incompatibilities between the Symantec MailSecurity package and Windows. When we first got this package, we were very impressed and indeed it performed quite well for a number of years. The first really "WRONG" step, was when symantec lazily decided to get their premium Anti-Spam product to run from the Microsoft SMTP Service rather than from within Notes. This is not a technical issue. It's a cost cutting measure. Over the years, this one decision has caused us no end of grief. The final straw came a couple of months ago when we were about to go live with our second website on the same server. obviously we needed to move our configuration settings to site documents. Everything went fine until the reboot. Following the reboot, the Premium section of the Symantec MailSecu...

I was a little stuck for new Notes material for this blog until I read the brilliant Alan Lepofsky's article on creating Signature files for Lotus Notes . Full URL of his Article http://www.alanlepofsky.net/alepofsky/alanblog.nsf/dx/creating-a-simple-html-signature-file His article provides a simple step-by-step guide to creating a signature using HTML and is very easy to follow but, as Notes Administrators and Developers, I feel that we have greater responsibility to protect our lower-level users from any kind of programming, so I'm going to post some code that I've been using. Where to put the Code Originally, I had this code built-in to our corporate mail template. You can do this if you want but the problem with building things into the mail template is that you have to remember to carry them through to the any new templates whenever you upgrade. A more elegant solution IMHO is to put the code into an instruction manual. My Instructions The following are the instruction...

I'm a big fan of RSS and I think that it's something that people running extranets and other sites should try to incorporate as much as possible. Recently I decided to try and add RSS to a Domino Database manually. The steps are below. I've simplified them to make this more suitable for "beginners", and you can add other RSS Fields as you see fit. PART 1: The VIEW Create a view for your database with a selection criteria similar to the following; SevenDaysAgo := @Adjust(@Now ;0 ; 0 ; -7 ; 0 ; 0 ; 0) ; SELECT ((Form = "Document")& @Modified The Form would obviously point to the type of form that you use in your database. Column 1: The first Column in your database would probably be the date (@Modified) You should make it sorted in Descending order to put the recent items to the top and you should make it hidden. Column 2: Here is what I have in column 2 - I'll explain it below... NOTE: I can't use HTML Codes Here, so I've replaced the bra...

I'm in danger of spending too much time praising google and no enough time on Notes/Domino, but here goes anyway. The Latest Google Toolbar I'm currently testing the latest google toolbar. There's a lot of new features in this one which are really quite useful. Bookmark Wonders This has to be my favourite part of the new toolbar. In fact, I think that this could well be my favourite computing enhancement in a long time - but.. since I've blogged about it before, I'll just shut up about it now. The Buttons Sure, the toolbar has had buttons on it for a long time - what's a toolbar without buttons anyway? These buttons are different. 1. Anyone can create them. 2. They can be hosted elsewhere and updated with a couple of clicks. 3. Google is building a library of them (they're not creating them, but they are testing them). 4. The buttons aren't simple one-click items, they work off the search field and can include RSS Feeds. I'll post a lot more about...

Last week, we needed to set up a secondary web site hosted from the same server. We did this by migrating from the standard Domino web setup to a configuration which used site documents. All worked well... Mail routed successfully, the old and the new web sites worked and everyone was happy. This morning, I applied the Microsoft Updates. Now these, being Microsoft products, required a server restart, so I dutifully complied. When the server came back up, no mail was routing. The Culprit After a bit of searching around (not very much searching really because I now tend suspect the Symantec MailSecurity services FIRST), I found a message saying that; "The Symantec Premium Anti-Spam service could not be started because you are using a site document". I rang Symantec and following a relatively quick game of telephone lotto, I got transferred to the right person. Yep, they confirmed it... Sorry - It's not supported. End of story. I disabled the service, but still mail did ...

Google Toolbar I'm sure that most people are well aware of the google toolbar by now. If not, you should certainly give it a go. You can access all of the google tools here (note that this is the Australian site, and that you may be better going to the google site for your country and clicking tools on the menu if you live elsewhere). You can download the the google toolbar by clicking the large button on the download page but did you notice that there's a smaller link underneath it which allows you to download the beta version of 4.0.629 . I've been running this for weeks now, and I've had no problems. The best bit though, is the new "bookmarks" feature. You can bookmark a page from the menu (as you would adding it to favourites). At the same time, or later if you wish, you can allocate categories to it. For example, my favourite online DVD shop is under DVDs and Shopping, while other things may just be under shopping. Effectively, this causes the bo...

These days it seems that Microsoft simply can't keep up with the competition, though I think they've simply been making too many enemies recently. I suppose that if I were to compile a list of the top competition for MS, it would look something like this (in order of danger); Google All those little niche things and web applets are really starting to take their toll. Google's desktop search is much better than the Microsoft Windows search and it beat their new search engine (coming real soon - on day - sigh) by a couple of years. Google's Gmail is heaps better that hotmail and beat the Windows Live Mail service (almost live now - sigh) by over a year. IBM (including Lotus) One of the worst things that Microsoft has done lately has been to annoy IBM as it has caused them to embark on a series of quite damaging "Move to Lotus" and "Move to the Penguin" campaigns. IBM is the second largest software developer in the world (after Microsoft) and their ...