SvenM

seasons greetings!

2009-12-22T08:45:00.004+01:00

IdeaJam: Allow multiple mailboxes to be synced to mobile device without calendar

2009-12-01T14:05:00.003+01:00

Just as with Commontime's mNotes I would like to be able to select more than one mailfile. This way I can have multiple mailboxes on my mobile device. It should also be possible to only sync the mails and not the calendar entries.

If you have several mail-in databases that are being used by a number of people and everyone can create calendar entries, then I might be interested in the mails that are in the inbox but not the calendar entries.

The IdeaJam entry can be found here.

The Big move from Wordpress to Blogger

2009-11-25T11:56:00.008+01:00

About a week ago I started a personal blog that I use to keep track of my sporting activities.
I already have a gmail address, I use Google Docs, Google Reader and Google Calendar. Why not try out a Google Blog?
Wordpress uses a slightly different approach than Blogger and at first I wasn't sure I made the right call. My new blog uses a very simple layout and it wasn't that complex to get it up and running. So I needed a bigger challenge. That's the main reason why I converted my existing blog to this one. Then I started playing with the layout and everything and this is the result.

Moving is really easy. I found this tool that does everything for you. A very detailed description can be found here.

Thanks to the Dashboard I have a listing of all my blogs and I can easily navigate through them.
Blogger offers me a range of options that I cannot find in Wordpress without having to pay for it.
So as of now I'll be posting in this location and no longer in my Wordpress Blog. If you were subscribed to my rss feed, please update the feed.

Add Facebook Events to your Notes 8.5.1 calendar

2009-11-12T08:47:00.000+01:00

Blogger and techie Sean Bonner offers a dead simple way to keep all of your Facebook events synced up with your Google Calendar so you don't have to manage two completely separate social calendars to keep your days straight.

With the new Lotus Notes Calendar features you can do a very similar action and set this up with the Notes Client.
Even if you don't use Facebook all that often (or maybe especially if you don't), this is a nice option. Once set up, you can check one calendar (your Notes Calendar) to see what's going on with your Facebook friends and with whatever else you've hooked into your Notes Cal. Getting it set up is simple!

You can do the same with these easy steps…
In Facebook, go to your EVENTS page. At the top of that page click EXPORT EVENT.

You’ll get a pop up window with a URL, copy it.

Goto your Notes Calendar and select 'Add a calendar'.

Select iCalendar feed and paste the url. You can also choose if you want to sync this new calendar on a mobile device.

The new calendar feed will be visible as a separate calendar that you can show/hide

After performing this simple setup, you won't need to worry as much about missing an event just because you're not all that big on Facebook.

New tool in order to install Windows 7 by USB.

2009-10-26T13:35:00.000+01:00

Microsoft has created a tool that allows you to install Windows 7 by USB. A lot of netbooks often don't have a dvd-player and USB is the only way users are able to upgrade their pc.

That's the reason Microsoft has created this tool. It is 926KB and you need to use it to write an iso file to the USB key.

Click here to download the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool installation file.

This is what Microsoft says:

The ISO file contains all the Windows 7 installation files combined into a single uncompressed file. When you download the ISO file, you need to copy it to some medium in order to install Windows 7. This tool allows you to create a copy of the ISO file to a USB flash drive or a DVD. To install Windows 7 from your USB flash drive or DVD, all you need to do is insert the USB flash drive into your USB port or insert your DVD into your DVD drive and run Setup.exe from the root folder on the drive.

Note: You cannot install Windows 7 from the ISO file until you copy it to a USB flash drive or DVD with the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool and install from there.

You can find more info at the Microsoft Store.

Collaboration University - the final countdown

2009-09-24T11:08:00.000+02:00

I am so sorry I did not get a picture of Troy Reimer to add here. He is now officially my God. I should create a shrine for him.
It goes without saying that he has the best sense of humor... ever. He even told me a French joke (that I didn't get at first, sorry about that).
But more importantly we discussed a potential Quickr-project that I'm about to do and he came up with THE best solution. The way I first figured it out it would cost me a lot of coding.
And when I say a lot a mean create several agents that would do everything in order to create a place, a number of rooms, folders, pages, forms, etc...
It took us (read: Troy because I just sat there and ... waited ) less than 30 minutes to come up with a huge time-saving idea. I'm not saying that I'm home free now and can sit back and relax but I do feel that it can be done! I will still take me a lot of work but not in the same league as before.
Hopefully the project comes through and I will be blogging about this because it will be my very first Quickr-project ever. And it will be big!

Because of our brainstorm session I had to skip the first session of the day (future of Sametime by Darren Adams). Sorry about that!
In the second session Miki Banatwala talked about Quickr 8.2 but also future releases (both Quickr next that will launch in Q2 2010 and the release after that that will probably contain XPages). He showed us what has been done to improve the performance of 8.2, modifications that have been done on the connectors and also future changes. It was a true privilege to hear him speak.
More about these connectors in a later blog because I feel they deserve a separate entry.

Finally there was a recap of all sessions that were given over the last couple of days. The Sametime stuff sounded a bit like Chinese to me. I think learning Mandarin in 4 weeks would be easier than understanding what Sametime was all about.
But maybe you should've been there to get the bigger picture. I will go through the presentations and see if they make any sense at all... I know we've had some serious issues with installing Connections so hopefully the slides will guide us through it.

After lunch we got the opportunity to play with everything we saw in the design sessions. Mainly Viktor but also Troy lead us through a rather realistic scenario. They did it step by step and gave away some extremely useful (and reusable) bits of code.
I have a message to everybody who attended either Viktor's or Troy's sessions and didn't make it to the Workshop: Big mistake! You should have coughed up the extra dollars 'cause they were worth every penny!

So looking back on the three days, the quality of each session was a lot higher than I hoped for. The sessions at Collaboration University are being given by a great team and each speaker really knows what (s)he is talking about!
Thank you all for figuring this all out and then sharing this with the rest of us. I'm proud the be a 2009 CU-graduate and really hope to be back next year (I hope my boss is reading this too...)

Collaboration University Day 2

2009-09-23T10:34:00.000+02:00

So, day two has passed and it was a full day. After seven Quickr sessions I'm starting to feel the impact of all that information being cramped into my little brain. Everything still sounds logical to me right now. But I wonder what will stick around long enough until the time that I will actually be using it.
So what has passed the revue today? Or need I say yesterday because by the time I'll be publishing this it will be Wednesday.

The first session I attended today was Quickr Performance Tips: Getting more from your server by Warren Elsmore. The one thing that I noticed about Warren is that he needs to draw when he speaks. I have this too. When I try to explain something I tend to draw it out as I go. Warren was the only one who actually created a drawing. All other presentations contained all the content.
In fact the presentation was not a big surprise but more of a nice recap of things to consider about your Domino and Quickr server. He did give away some nice ini updaters that can help tune the server. Basically this session was all about LDAP performance, network factors like DNS, firewalls, load balancers & proxies that can slow things down, the network stack, Domino performance, DAOS and off course Quickr Performance.

At 10:15 I attended Troy Reimer's first session of the day: Quickr Data: In, Out, Everywhere. A wide array of approaches and tools. This session was all about interacting Quickr with other systems divided in 3 different levels.
The first is the top level (3rd party tools).
The second is the mid level (views/folder feeds, Place Feeds, REST service, web services & custom views).
The last level is the lower level which is native notes database access.

After that Viktor Krantz was back with the second part of Quickr Themes: Adding functionality with JavaScript. I really, really need to dig into DOJO asap! He showed us some code on how to add additional things to your pages or forms. This was such an interesting presentation! I really hope to get my hands on the final html file that he showed during the demo! That would be so cool!

Three sessions were passed when lunch was served. I was up to it. Halfway Viktor's presentation my stomach started making all sorts of funny noises.

After lunch Warren Elsmore was back but this time with Sizing your Quickr Servers: load testing and deployment planning. I really enjoy listening to Warren. He knows what he talks about and has the gift to bring the message to the crowd. This session was very helpful for me. I really enjoyed the Load testing part. I'll have to talk to my boss about this!

At the end of this session Rob Novak came in and talked about Going Mobile. He showed a slide with all sorts of functionalities that should be included in a mobile Quickr version. But then... right there in front of us he announced Project Jonathan: Quickr for iPhone.
He showed us the print screens and a small presentation. Everything is very new but there are already plans for the future (Domino, J2EE, Filenet & ECM support - uploading functionality from the iPhone, ...) The entire project is based on REST. If you have never heard of it, start googling because it's clear that REST will have a more important role than web services in the near future if you want data from Quickr!

Viktor Krantz was next with a session on REST and Web services APIs. All this was about getting Quickr data from the backend. He also showed us more about PandaBear and Flippr.
What's next for these products? PandaBear will also support files from Connections. Everything else that we find in Connections (profiles, activities, ...) will be in a third application. I already know its name. Please feel free to guess... It's not GoldFish, I'll give you that...
A cool announcement was that in a future release of PandaBear Viktor is going to include an option to sync a file or a folder. How cool is that?!?

The session Troy Reimer did about Quickr and Domino Apps was more of a Show 'n' Tell in order to get a grasp on the possibilities that are out there. It was in this session that I decided that Troy wins the award of most honest remark of CU2009. Before I show you I would like to tell that I have a colleague that goes crazy every time I launch certain things (or even worse turn of my laptop) when the HDD-LED is on all the time. I always tell him that it doesn't matter because it's just a LED that goes on and off to give us the idea the machine is working. It drives him crazy when I do. So, sorry Kevin...

And here's the quote:

We've put the little animated gif here so it looks like it's doing something because users are stupid ;-)

You see now? Us designers really think that way!! The mind of an admin works in a different way than that of a designer.

The last session of the day was Rob Novak explaining some of the top Quickr support issues. Based on years of experience he told us some very common things that you can do to prevent problems or how to solve some common errors. Even though this was very interesting I must admit that it was time to call it quits. My head was pounding.
Question is how much info can a person process in one single day?

I would like to thank all of today's speakers. It was a great day. Sorry Chris Miller, Carl Tyler, Stuart McIntyre and Warren Elsmore for not being able to attend your session(s). As I said before I'm here with only Quickr on my mind so no time for Sametime or Connections but I will be going over your presentations!

I do have some questions left but I'll try to launch them tomorrow before or during the labs...

Collaboration University Day 1

2009-09-22T10:56:00.000+02:00

Ok, so here I am in London attending my very first CU event. I came to this event with one thing on my mind: Quickr, Quickr and ... well also a bit of Quickr. And guess what? During my first day I was able to attend 5 sessions that were Quickr-related.

The day started with the opening session by Darren Adams. He talked about the advantages of collaboration tools but from a very personal point of view. I always love it when a speaker can bring something from his personal life so it was very interesting to me. I felt very related to the story.

Then we had a speaker preview and that was without a doubt the hardest session to attend that day. Why? Because everybody was talking about the sessions to come and I could hear the most interesting things being announced about Sametime and Connections but I'm there for... Quickr, remember? I would love to attend Chris Miller's Alphabet Soup session but unfortunately I won't be able to make it... damn!

What I did see was Chris Miller's session on Installing and configurating Quickr. It was a typical Chris-session. What more can I say. Everybody who has ever heard him speak will know what I mean. He cramps a 3 hour session in an hour and still has a few minutes to spare for Q&A... Impressive as always.

Then of to Louis Richardson who took us to the Quickr and ECM integration. I knew most of what he was talking but it was nice that the head developer of Quickr was there. He could fill us in on future releases. That means providing meta data when dragging attachments into the connector, Domino Quickr integration with Filenet thru web 2.O, ...

The next session was from Troy Reimer. He showed us 3 solutions of what you can do with Quickr Development. He only just touched the surface. To me it was more of a teaser that a actual technical session but again very interesting.

Viktor Kranz presented the first part of custom themes and server-wide extensions. Damn! I did not know all of this was possible. I spoke to a guy after the session who has been working with Quickr for about 1,5 year and he did not know most of what was said. (Note to self: I need to ask this guy's name and email address because afterwards I had a quick burger with him in a local pub and we started drinking Belgian Stella Artois and shared the funniest / embarrassing Domino-Consultant-war stories). Anyway, again very useful session!

The last one of the day was again Troy Reimer. This time he showed us the code and some tricks on how to done certain things. I love listening to Troy because he's a designer. You can pick them out very quick! The have a different way of explaining things than a sales person. And as a designer myself I can reflect to his way of thinking. This guy just knows so much about quickr development! Very impressive.

After all of this we had a welcome reception and then we were off to the pubs.

This first day was great. There was a lot of information. I still regret not being able to attend all of the other Sametime and Connections sessions but that'll be for another year I hope. More info will follow later!

Some mail rules not executing in Notes 6.5.

2009-08-28T09:35:00.000+02:00

My day was hardly started when I got the question why mail rules weren't moving the mails to their folders. I went over to this person and had a look at his mailfile. Turns out he had over 150 rules that all move mails into certain folders based on their subject.

Some enabled mail rules were not executing, others did what they intended to do.

After a little searching this is what I found on the IBM support site:

The revised rule numbering functionality introduced in the Notes/Domino 6.5.4/6.0.5 mail templates has a minor flaw. This flaw causes the unexpected value in the OrderNum field, as well as in the $FilterFormula_n field written to the Calendar Profile. This can result in the last enabled rule to internally overwrite the second to last enabled rule, and thus the second to last rule is not present to execute. This can also result in an edited rule not executing - this case only occurs when there is only a single rule present.
NOTE: This issue does not exist in the DWA iNotes template.

This issue was reported as a regression to Quality Engineering as SPR# KYOE6FMAPH. This issue has been indirectly fixed in the mail templates that ship with Notes/Domino 6.5.5.

Workarounds: In order to repair the current rules:
Disable all rules and then re-enable them from bottom to top.

In fact this just did the trick! After disabling all the rules and then enable them again one by one, it seems that the problem is solved.

Collaboration University 2009 in London: September 21-23

2009-07-01T18:27:00.000+02:00

The countdown has begun. I'm registered for the London venue of this year's Collaboration University.

This year I'll be attending the event from a development point of view. Quickr is a product that starts to become more an more popular in Belgium and probably also the countries around us. I don't think that at this point there are many business partners in Belgium that offer other services that setup and configure a Quickr server. If you're lucky they'll even throw in some SNAPPS templates.

We would like to change this as of Q4. We will be offering more that that! That's the main reason why I'm going. I'll also attend the Quickr development workshop in order to be able to really answer the future customer's needs.

I must say that I'm very happy to be able to go and I hope to see you all over there.

Unable to extend an ID table - insufficient memory

2009-03-23T10:27:00.000+01:00

Now this is nice. The database that I was talking about the other day is having a serious problem: I can no longer open the damn thing! Due to the heavy import load it seems that the ID table has overflowed. The database currently is 5.684 Mb and contains 3.393.081 documents. I still have to do 3 more imports before I can automate my weekly updates. This weekly update will be an xml file of about 11Mb.

After a little googling I found out that the only thing I can do is copy the entire database because that deletes all the view indices and all the deletion stubs but will keep the replica ids of the documents.

Here's the technote that I found.

UPDATE: A collegue of mine just opened the database without a problem! When I tried opening the db again I kept on getting the same error. I even tried on 2 different laptops. Turns out that a simple solution was right there: I removed the db from my workspace and compated the workspace. After that I could open the db again!! This saved me a lot of time and problems...

Question concerning compact task and archiving

2009-03-20T11:32:00.000+01:00

A customer of mine is implementing policy documents in an environment with about 5000 users. An archiving policy was created and by accident this policy was assigned to a large amount of users. This was not intended and these people were not notified up front. We don't have a program document that does a load compact -A. Still these users all have an archive now and they are not happy!

Somebody told me that ever since R8 when you do a compact -B the archiving process kicks in. We do have program documents that perform a compact -B.

When I take a look at the help file I find the following:

-b : Uses in-place compacting and recovers unused space without reducing the file size, unless there's a pending structural change to a database, in which case copy-style compacting occurs. This is the recommended method of compacting.

-B : Uses in-place compacting, recovers unused space and reduces file size, unless there's a pending structural change in which case copy-style compacting occurs. If you use transaction logging, do full database backups after compacting completes.

I find nothing about archiving! Can anybody tell me if this is true ??

Program docs and dircat problem

2009-03-20T11:19:00.000+01:00

We have created 3 Dircat program documents on two of our servers. One server is 8.0.1 and the other one is 6.5.1. Both servers run on linux.

The problem with these documents is that they don't run... Well actually they do but for some reason we get an error indicating that the dircat process is already running. We've modified the command line on our first program document several times using -quit, -q, just q, ... but it just won't quit!

So what I've done is I've created 3 different scheduled agents in a notes database.

The first agent is called 1. Stop Dircat. It runs every day at 3:55 and all it does is the following:

Dim s As New notessession
Dim nnServer As New NotesName(s.CurrentDatabase.Server)
Dim consoleReturn$

'Send the console command
consoleReturn$ = s.SendConsoleCommand( nnServer.Common, "tell dircat quit" )

The second agent is called 2. Rebuild Dircat. It runs every day at 4:05 and all it does is the following:

Dim s As New notessession
Dim nnServer As New NotesName(s.CurrentDatabase.Server)
Dim consoleReturn$

'Send the console command
consoleReturn$ = s.SendConsoleCommand( s.common, "load dircat names.nsf -r" )

The second agent is called 3. Load Dircat. It runs every day at 4:15 and all it does is the following:

Dim s As New notessession
Dim nnServer As New NotesName(s.CurrentDatabase.Server)
Dim consoleReturn$

'Send the console command
consoleReturn$ = s.SendConsoleCommand( nnServer.Common, "load dircat" )

I've also set my agent security to 2. Allow Restricted operations.

This seems to do the trick. Before I created these agents I wasn't aware of the SendConsoleCommand. I can already see a lot of other situations where I can use this function!

Update: here is a print-screen of the server document. This doesn't seem to do the trick. The catalog is not updated as it should be:

BLUG Sessions

2009-03-19T09:48:00.000+01:00

For several days I've been going back and foreward on the sessions that I'm going to attend at the BLUG event.

I've finally made up my mind. Since there are only 4 I can choose I will go to:

13:00 Martin Donnelly : Getting Started with XPages

14:00 Martin Donnelly : XPages Things you can't afford to miss

15:30 Theo Heselmans : Integrating Microsoft Excel into your Notes Applications

16:30 Ady Makombo : Solutions to Developer and Administrator Challenges

Hope I won't change my mind again because this means I will miss out on Daos, R8.5 Designer, Quickr, Connections, Websphere portal, ....

So many choices and soooo little time!

2 iNotes 8.5 annoyences

2009-03-18T10:07:00.000+01:00

I use iNotes a lot. Actually more often than my Notes mail.

First of all I would like to thank the people from Lotus for making such a nice web interface for the R8.5 mail client. I've been using iNotes (or DWA) ever since 6.5 and with each release I enjoy it more and more. Before R6.5 I was a regular Notes Client mail user.

2 things still annoy me though.

I still have to use a different signature for my notes client and iNotes. I use an HTML signature in Notes. This one was imported into my Preferences when I upgraded from 8.0.2 to 8.5. But when I look at the signature in iNotes, it's still the same text as before. Why can't I use 1 single HTML signature in both clients?

We have a company policy that says we have to grant access to our calendar to a certain group. Why oh why can't I grant reader access on my calendar to a group without granting them access to my To Do and Contacts. These contacts are my personal contacts. I sync my HTC through Traveler. I don't want others to browse through my personal contacts! This means that each contact I add needs to be flagged as confidential first.

I have the option to allow people acces on

Mail, Calendar, To Do and Contacts

Calendar, To Do and Contacts

None

None is not an option because I have to allow others in my Calendar and I'm not going to allow them to access my mail so that leaves me with 'Calendar, To Do and Contacts'.

Is this just me or are there others out there that have the same opinion?

Retrieving files from HTTPS site using Java

2009-03-13T10:45:00.000+01:00

If you are aware of the Six degrees of separation - theory than you know that it pays to know people because these people know other people that might be able to help you sooner or later.

A few days ago I had this problem that I posted on this blog. I needed to find a way to get a file from an HTTPS site. Now retrieving files from FTP or even HTTP in Java is something that is rather common. If you search a bit, you can find all sorts of sample codes. But that tiny litte 's' in HTTPS makes it a lot more difficult. It's not just a problem of profiding a username and password but rather a mather of getting a grip on that SSL layer.

After some digging I found a solution from ChilKat. They offer a range of frameworks and one of them is to download files by HTTPS. This can be done by Java or Visual Basic. The only minor downside is that you have to pay a small fee. I've tried the Visual Basic 30-day trial and it works like a charm. Still it's more fun to get it for free ...

And this is where the Six degrees of separation kicks in. I know a briliant Notes Developer that works at Ernst & Young Belgium, named Stefaan. The other day he told me he knows a guy from Germany, Stewart, who works a lot with Domino and Java. So I contacted him.

The first thing Stewart told me was to forget about LS2J. Now I had been playing around with this for a few days and I already came to the same conclusion.

In my previous blog I promised to post a sample database with the code to download from HTTPS if I could come up with a solution. Intead I've decided to show you Stewart's answer. Now remember I haven't tried it out just yet. But I will next week. In the meanwhile I will share the information that I was given...

Assuming you are using the firm standard 6.5.3 there is a problem in the fact that the JVM used is 1.3, and to access SSL sites (HTTPS) you need to use the Java Secure Socket Extension (JSSE) from sun. This has now reached End of Life, and it is very difficult to find on the web. Later Notes clients use JVM 1.4 and higher, where JSSE is no longer needed as it was made part of the core Java library. You need JSSE for the SSL authentication. You can get it from here: http://java.sun.com/products/jsseforcdc/download.html

When you have this file do the following:

Extract the 3 .jar files and put them in the /jvm/lib/ext directory. (you can forget about the rest)

Modify the java.security file (in /jvm/lib/security) and add a security provider : com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.Provider.
Example :
security.provider.1=sun.security.provider.Sun
security.provider.2=com.sun.net.ssl.internal.ssl.Provider - use the next free number!

Modify the java.policy file (in /jvm/lib/security) and add a permission :
permission java.util.PropertyPermission "java.protocol.handler.pkgs", "write";

Now go to the HTTPS site with IE and let the SSL certificate be installed. When you have the certificate you need to export it and save it locally to your hard disk

You need to add the certificate to the cacerts file (also in /jvm/lib/security) with the KEYTOOL (in jvm/bin) with the following syntax (of course you need to change the path at the end to where you exported the certificate):
keytool -import -keystore c:\lotus\notes\jvm\lib\security\cacerts -file c:\schtemp\dergtac.cer
The default password for this tool is "changeit"

Finally restart your notes client for this to take effect

That was the preparation. Now you can use this code as a framework for your java agent, and check before you go any further that it compiles correcty. If all the above steps have worked right, the JSSE is correctly istalled.

import lotus.domino.*;
import java.net.*;
import com.sun.net.*;
import java.security.*;
import javax.net.ssl.*;
import java.io.*;

public class JavaAgent extends AgentBase {

public void NotesMain() {

try {
Session session = getSession();
AgentContext agentContext = session.getAgentContext();

System.setProperty("java.protocol.handler.pkgs", "com.sun.net.ssl.internal.www.protocol");

String MYURL = "PUT YOUR HTTPS URL HERE";

URL myurl = new URL(MYURL);

com.sun.net.ssl.HttpsURLConnection myConnection = (com.sun.net.ssl.HttpsURLConnection) myurl.openConnection();

// now you should have an open HTTPS connection, you can do whatever you need to here

} catch (Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}

Of course this is only valid for your own Notes client, if your agent needs to run on a server you will have to do the preparation steps there, but for simplicity I suggest you try it on your local client first.

I would like to thank Stefaan for providing me Stewart's credentials and of course Stewart from E&Y Germany (whom I've never seen) for sharing this valuable information with me and for letting me post this online. It's always nice to know that there are people out there willing to help out others in the Lotus Community.

Invalid or non-existent document

2009-03-12T11:18:00.000+01:00

When I tried performing a compact –a command on a specified mailbox, I kept receiving the error :

Invalid or non-existent document

This error can not be resolved by replacing the design, performing a regular fixup or updall.

The exact sequence of command for this error is:

load compact -c -i database.nsf
load fixup -F database.nsf
load updall -X -R database.nsf

Strange archiving behaviour

2009-03-12T09:04:00.000+01:00

Get his one:

In my domain are 4 8.0.1 Mail servers on a Linux server

Mail1 and Mail3 are the main mail servers: users from the first half of the alphabet are located on MAIL1 and the second half is located on MAIL3

MAIL2 is the cluster server of MAIL1

MAIL4 is the cluster server of MAIL3

I created an archiving policy in my Domino domain, with the following settings:

-> Especially notice the indication MAIL server.

When I distribute this explicit policy to the users, and then check their archive settings:

Now see the Addressbook entry for the same user:

All users that are on MAIL-01 have MAIL-03 as their Domino Mail server in their archiving settings……

Running a load compact -a works just fine, scheduled archiving as well!

Go figure…..

Getting XML data

2009-03-09T11:46:00.000+01:00

I am working on a project that imports data from an XLM feed.

The idea is very easy: I am given an xml file, I import this file and afterwards I get a new file once a week in order to maintain the original data.

How does this work? The file contains person data and each person tag indicates what I have to do: add, delete or change

<Person id="10183" action="add" date="18-Sep-2008">

<Person id="11324" action="chg" date="25-Dec-2008">

<Person id="588334" action="del" date="26-Dec-2008">

So far, so good. The only downside of this story is that the original file (the one that I have to start from) is 626Mb. Believe me : parsing this file is very time consuming. I managed to split the file into 2 separate xml files and afther the first import (almost 315Mb) my Notes database already contained about 2.000.000 documents and was a litte over 2Gb. I'm now importing the second part (the final 312Mb).

The way that I import my data is by manually selecting a file and running my code in a Notes Client. But this has to change. In the future I should find a way to download the weekly update (a zip file) and import the data through the backend. I can calculate the name of the file because it is based on the year and month.
By now I have found a webpage that explains how to extract a zip file in Java. All I have to do now is find a way to connect to a https site, provide a username & password and download the zip file. Once I can do this I can unzip it and launch my SAX parser.

Well, my knowledge of Java is very poor. If anyone of you could tell me how I can download a file from an https site that will help a lot!

If I get this thing working I will provide you all a sample database with the 'dowload the zipfile', 'extract it' and the 'parse the xml' - code in it.

IE8 - tough call

2009-01-27T16:39:00.000+01:00

As you probably all know, you can now download IE8 RC1 from the Microsoft website, but...

it would be nice to see what I have to do in order to enable the Finish button. The text is in Dutch so I've added the English translation in red.

Why am I not sorry for using Firefox?

Don't forget to install your 8.5 Interim Fix 85IF1

2009-01-15T13:15:00.000+01:00

If you couldn't wait to install the Domino 8.5 release than you should take a look at this! Turns out there is already an R8.5 Interim Fix.

I really like this part : This fix is needed only on 8.5 servers running adminp.

My thanks go out to Chris Miller for pointing this out because when I look at the Notes/Domino Fix List there is nothing available.

Lotusphere Non-attendees UNITE!

2009-01-15T10:44:00.000+01:00

If you're like me (and apparently a lot of other Notes/Domino people) and you have to stay 'home' in stead of going to Orlando, then head over to Steve McDonagh's website and join him!

Over the last few years I've been trying to get a ticket to Lotusphere. Theo Heselmans has even made it worse because he always tells me this is THE event of the year and nobody should ever miss out on it. Last year I was told that there was a chance that I could go. All our main competitors in Belgium have a deligation present. We will be absent for the third year in a row.

So if any of you guys want to sponser me for LS10... just let me know ;-)

As for this year I will be following the Lotusphereblog and thinking of you guys...

Malware alert on Traveler download

2009-01-07T12:43:00.000+01:00

Today I tried to download the new 8.5 Traveler version from the IBM Partnerworld website. McAffee that is running on our Proxy server gave an alert that it found a new malware...

Subject: Virus detected on xxxxx!!! Importance: High

Virusscan has detected a virus on this computer!

Category: Virus detected and NOT removed Product: VirusScan Threat: New Malware.bm IP: xx.xx.xxx.160 Computer: xxxxxxx Objects: C:\DownloadDirector\C18X0EN.exe Event: file infected. No cleaner available, quarantine failed Time: 1/7/09 11:12:24 AM Rule: Virus detected

Any body else got this problem?

Lotus Foundations Stress tested

2008-12-15T14:18:00.000+01:00

Last week I had the pleasure of going to a Foundations Workshop that was organised at the IBM Forum in Brussels, Belgium.

The course itself was nothing new. By now I know how to setup and configure a Lotus Foundations Server on a VM. The fun part however was that for the first time I was able to set it up and then try and break it again ;-)

It kind of felt like playing SimCity: I was building something just to break it down again... at least I tried.

What I realy wanted to see is how well a Foundations Start server is resistant to admins.

During the original setup I used 2 hard disks of 15 gb. The first was my primary disk and the second my backup disk. This is what I tried:

I installed and configured my Foundations server and created 2 users that were able to send mail to each other

I took a VM snapshot

I removed the primary disk from the VM (without taking a backup) and changed my backup disk to the primary one. Then I created a new blank backup disk.

It goes without saying that I was unable to boot (without a full backup there is no OS on the backup disk), but I tried it anyway... no such luck ;-)

But, when I inserted the cd again and booted from cd, I noticed that all my configuration settings were still there! Now that was impressive... Ok, granted: even though the users were still known to the system I had lost their mail boxes. But I think this is very cool! I don't think that you will be able to retrieve your users and all your configurations from SBS without any backup.

In stead of trying to get this thing working again (what's the point: there were no mailboxes any more) I went back to my VM snapshot.

This time I took a full backup.

I repeated step 3. My primary disk in the trash and my backup disk as master.

Guess what? I was able to boot and after a few minutes my system was online again. The Domino server was having some difficulties getting started at first but the entire server was back online without me doing anything! All I had to do is boot from the backup disk

Now how cool is that? Some more testing showed me that you can flag a certain backup so that the system will not overwrite the data. This way I can always revert to a certain state. I was convinced that the DRC solution of Lotus Foundations was its weak point but after this workshop I feel more confident in selling this to potential customers.

It is however still hard for me not to look at Lotus Foundations as a Domino solution. In fact it turns out that other than a Domino backend, one should not even know about the presence of Domino. Changing configuration document through the Lotus Administartor will be overwritten again, clustering and replicating to a different Foundations server is not possible and when Foundations ships with Lotus Sametime (it will be calles Realtime, not Sametime) you won't be able to chat with users on a different server.
This is the only thing that I don't like! Really!! I always hoped that IBM would find a way to connect 2 foundations servers and make it possible to replicate data...

I still have 1 question left about the Tunnel Vision part. The IBM instructor told us about the fact that you can't connect 2 servers to eacht other. When you look at the popup text next to Tunnel Vision it states that it allows 'scattered servers across the internet' to connect. To do what? Can anybody tell me?

Lotus Foundations Ad campaign

2008-12-10T09:01:00.000+01:00

Just found this nice movie on Bilal Jaffery's blog.