Real World Computing

I've upgraded my client to Notes 8.5.2, sure it took a couple of goes and I ended up having to completely uninstall and reinstall - but I got there. I've since done an upgrade on a different PC (but that one didn't have designer) and I didn't have the same problems - so, maybe it was just a glitch on my PC. So... What's new in IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.2? Well, if you really want to learn the answer to that question, ask IBM . There's something about XPages too I think but the really important bit is ... the icons.. no, really... We've been waiting ages for this. Let's hope it won't be another 18 years before we get 64x64 icons. So... the first thing I did in the 8.5.2 designer was upgrade my Smurf. Yep, the database that I've had as my best friend for the last 15 years of my working life has an excessively blue smurf as its icon. A "choked smurf". I decided to restore him to normal colour - and it's easy. All I did was; Find a new 3...

I've just finished the IBM/Lotus renewal cycle for the year and either IBM has made some changes for the better or I'm losing my grip on my sanity. Whatever the reason, this year the process actually made sense . The Cost and the TCO We're actually quite a small domino shop but our annual renewals would have covered the cost of a 4WD vehicle from a reputable dealer. This is at least in part due to our office technology mentality. We have our main domino server which is capable of running pretty much everything and we have a second server that we use to run one of our more intensive apps (which I'll talk about in another post). On top of all this, we have an offsite business continuity server which we've never actually used "for real" - only in test situations. Domino is too stable for it to be a necessity and it's really only there to guard against ISP or "location" failure. Then we've got a development server and a test server. These a...

There's now a great new OpenNTF document management plug-in for Notes. I'm interested in seeing if I can move away from MS Office and this little utility seems to me to be the best way to start. It allows you to work on documents in folders while still keeping things available for users who prefer to access folders directly. The only caveat that I've found so far is that it wants everything to be stored in OpenDocument format and will convert the imports accordingly. So... I've just installed this plug-in and in typical "dumb-user" fashion, I had to ask a number of questions of the authors. I thought that to save others a bit of time and to illustrate the whole procedure, I'd make the procedure available here. Even if you're not interested in this particular plug-in, you might be interested in some of the others which are available. (like the awesome FileNavigator project). These steps might just be the ticket to installing them. My instructions w...

Thanks to everyone who responded yesterday. I've considered and tested the responses to find the method which will be simplest for our users. What follows is a set of instructions.... We start our instructions by identifying the file we want to link to. Often for me, this will be a MPEG, AVI or giant PDF (because why else would you link rather than attach?) but in this example, I'm just using a MS Word Document. You can see my path here is: M:\Dept\IT\2010\Development\ExtraNet\Concepts and my file name is Proposed Extranet Login Systems.doc Thus; my entire path and filename would be; M:\Dept\IT\2010\Development\ExtraNet\Concepts\Proposed Extranet Login Systems.doc Already by working the actual filespec out we're stepping slightly beyond the boundaries of the typical user. Next, we type our email and highlight the words we want to link to a file; Then we click the new "LINK" icon in Notes 8.5 This gives us a nice little box in which to type our URL. If this was ...

Yesterday I found myself explaining to a new but technical user that Notes/Domino is, like Blackberry. An amazingly powerful and capable piece of software capable of everything that the competition is capable of - plus a whole lot more. ....and hampered by what is still one of the worst user interfaces in the world. Sorry Notes UI team - I know you're doing your best. The same goes for the blackberry team. I know that they're doing their best too. It's just that the user interfaces have so far yet to go. So, this morning, the same user asks me how to send a link to a file on our common drives without sending the attachment everywhere. He's already cleverly tried attaching the .LNK file, but our policies don't allow that as it's considered to be an executable file. I said to him that I didn't actually know. 18+ years of using the product and I still really don't know how to do this. I know several workarounds but I don't know of any one all-enc...

I really want to direct your attention to the following article which appeared today; Malicious widget hacked millions of Web sites Parked sites hosted by Network Solutions spread malware since at least May http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/081610-malicious-widget-hacked-millions-of.html?source=NWWNLE_nlt_security_2010-08-17 Essentially the article says that up to 5 million web sites have been serving up malware for at least the last three months - and nobody noticed. Even worse, it appears that nobody was safe; "The widget turned every infected domain into a drive-by attack site that launched the multi-exploit "Nuke" toolkit against users running Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Opera" Typically, the malware seems to only affect Windows PCs. Roll on Chromium OS! I'm not sure how much longer I can continue to support windows environments for anything other than games. There's also the fact that the cleanup hasn't been completed. "Although...

In certain computing circles, "clustering" is a dirty word. I've heard of situations where, far from providing business continuity peace of mind, it creates more work and greater risk than it would if it were not involved. This is not the case with Domino clustering. Done properly, it is extremely reliable Our Problem Recently, our cluster seems to have "picked up a slight flutter". Actually, I think that perhaps the rules behind it may have changed sometime around our 8.0 or 8.5 migration. So, first I want to cover off basically what our cluster looks like; Ok, this is quite a simplistic view and there are servers missing. I'm concentrating on the problem area only. We have an onsite and offsite clustered Lotus Domino server, both running Lotus Domino 8.5 HF 1021. We'll call them "Onsite" and "Offsite" for ease of reference. The servers are quite a distance apart because we're clustering for business continuity purposes. The th...