Ever since I got the Sametime Business Cards pictures to work …
   

… I’ve started to receive a steady stream of calls from people asking me (a) ”why” their picture is there now and (b) how to update it. Today is not an exception and I got 1 call from someone asking me the usual questions … but this time the picture was not being pulled from the usual place.
   

Here’s the phone call I got …
   

[Phone Rings]

1. Marc [answers] – “Marc speaking, how can I help?”

2. Sales Rep – “Hi Marc, can you remove my picture from Sametime?”.

3. Marc [replies] – “Why”?

4. Sales Rep – “Check this out”.

5. [sound of email typing ...].

6. [new mail sound].

7. Marc [looks at email] – “Well, Mr. X, this is interesting (see modified version below)… that’s not the kind of picture HR would upload … let me check a few things… ”
   

Seriously, Where’s that Picture Coming From?
  

So, I checked the main database where our pictures are stored (an HR database). There was no picture for that employee in there. The pictures from the HR database are exported, resized and re-imported into the Domino Directory by an agent that I wrote so this is why I looked in there first.
   

I then checked the Person doc of the employee in the Domino Directory. There was no jpgPhoto field on his document. That confirmed that he never had a picture in the HR Database.
  

At this point, I was puzzled. But as I looked back at the picture, I thought it was funny looking. It looks like he’s mid sentence trying to grab his phone back … and that’s when I remembered that he’s a BlackBerry user.
   

So, I asked him to check in his Personal Address Book (names.nsf on local) for an entry with his name in it. He said that “Yes”, he had an entry for himself which he keeps some personal notes into. His entry also has his email address in it. He opened it up and … presto, there was the picture.
  

He promptly removed the picture from his own entry in his Personal Address Book, saved it and then right clicked on his name in his Sametime Contact list and selected “Refresh Business Info” … a few seconds later, the picture was gone.
  

That’s it … that’s all.
  

So it looks like the Sametime Business Cards feature in Sametime does a lookup on local first and if it finds a match on your email address, it will pull up that picture 1st. Interesting…
   

Addendum …
  

After we got his picture removed, I asked him if he remembered where that picture had been taken. Mr. X told me that it was taken during “one of those nights at the bar” during a Sales Meeting by another sales rep who had grabbed his phone on the table and started to take pictures … so that explains it.
   

Thanks for reading!
  

Marc

Summary
  

The Mail Tracking Store has been around for a while in our Yellowverse. And as an admin, you are well aware of the fact that it’s super useful when it comes to troubleshooting mail issues (with the usual requested being “I sent this to Mr. Smith but he says he never got it” and a couple clicks later you can tell them that Mr. Smith deleted it).
  

However, one weird thing about the Mail Tracking Store is that it only keeps 30 days of data by default. In case you are wondering, the number of days of data that it keeps is controlled by the field “Remove documents not modified in the last (days)” of the “Space Savers” tab of the Replication Setting panel for the MTSTORE.NSF database on your server.
  

Nothing stops you from changing that value to 60, 90, 180 days or more! But what happens when you need to update that setting on ALL your Mail Tracking Store databases on ALL your servers? It’s easy to do it manually if you only have a couple servers … but what happens when you have 10, 20, 50 or 100 servers?
  

Well, you either put yourself on “Do Not Disturb” for the next couple days and you do the update manually OR you write some code OR, better yet, you “borrow” my code!
  

So, Where’s The Code?
  

Right below … patience … because before you download it and import it into a button (or Agent that you can run from the Action menu), you need to know what it does:
  

1. The code will prompt you for the number of days.
2. The code will then try to open the Domino Directory on your server.
3. The code will then try to open the “Servers\Servers” view in the Domino Directory.
4. The code will then prompt you to select the servers to scan for a Mail Tracking Store database.
5. The code will then go to each of the selected server and check their Mail Tracking Store database settings.
6. The code will update each Mail Tracking Store “Days to Keep” to the setting you selected in step 1 (if does not match).
   

That’s it … simple as that. The code is below and you can simply click on the image below to download it. You can then import it into a LotusScript button or Agent set to run from the View Action menu to update your Mail Tracking Store settings.
  

Addendum
  

Part 1 – If you want my opinion, don’t wait until the CIO asks you to do a Mail Tracking on a “questionable” email sent by an employee 4 months ago to update your Mail Tracking Store settings … do it now!
   

Part 2 – Maybe someone else already wrote something that does that … I’m sorry if that’s the case … I was in a hurry to get this done.
  

Part 3 – However, I wonder why this isn’t controlled by a field in a Configuration Setting document … maybe there’s an IdeaJam out there for this?
   

Thanks for reading!
  

Marc

Better Late than Never …
  

Patrick and I had noticed the DominoDefrag project on OpenNTF a while ago. Patrick had said to me “when you have a minute, test it out in the test environment”. Well, that was a long time ago and yesterday I noticed a week old post on PlanetLotus.org that version 2.2 of DominoDefrag had been released. So, I decided it was time to test it out.
  

The installation instructions are quite simple and extremely well documented so getting it up and running was just a matter of putting myself on Do-Not-Disturb for a couple minutes.
  

And The Results?
  

Seriously, give Andrew Luder, the creator of DominoDefrag a medal. Give him something. Anything. The results are nothing short of amazing!
  

For example, in my test environment, the File Fragmentation went from 91% to 31% on the 1st pass. After a 2nd pass it went down to 30%. I checked and I realized that the 30% left were files that were not Domino databases so I ran the usual Windows Disk Defrag utility and it brought the File Fragmentation down to 0%. Simply put: amazing!
  

Also, while Domino Defrag was running in my test environment, I was checking the server console to see which database it was defragging. And for test purposes (because I really don’t care about the data in the test env.), I opened certain very large databases when it was defragging them. I even added/deleted documents in those databases *while* they were being defragged and didn’t notice any performance hit. Once again … amazing!
  

And maybe it’s me but the database operations, i.e. opening a database, opening views, opening documents, editing documents, etc, etc was quickr and faster … too bad I had not done metrics tests on those database operations before to compare with the after.
   

So, after doing a bunch more tests in the test environment, I deployed it to my production servers.
  

In production, my busiest server had 99% File Fragmentation. It took all weekend but on the 1st pass, the File Fragmentation went from 99% down to 30%. Again, the 30% left were files that were not Domino Databases so I ran the Windows Disk Defrag utility and it brough the File Fragmentation down to 0%.
    

The screenshots below are from my test server … but see for yourself the results in a Test environment and imagine the results in Production (they’re amazing):
   

DominoDefrag - Before

DominoDefrag - After it has ran once and defragged all the NSFs, NTFs and Full-Text Indexes

DominoDefrag - Final Result after using the Windows Disk Defragmenter to clean up all the other files on the D: drive

In Conclusion …
  

Seriously, anyone dealing with a slow server should consider installing this on their server. Of course, test it out in your test environment before!
  

Thanks for reading!
  

Marc

Summary …
  

Well, this is going a short post … nothing fancy: just a heads-up to tell you that if the Unique ID of your Person Doc in the Domino Directory changes, for one reason or another, you won’t be able to log into the BlackBerry Administration service (BAS) anymore. Your device will not stop working … it’s just that you won’t be able to log into the BAS because it uses your UNID for lord-knows-what during authentication.
  

I/we discovered this the hard way when me and Patrick were playing around with the Business Cards feature in Sametime and I ended-up doing a copy-paste of our person docs from the test environment directory into the production environment directory and deleting our “original” person documents to leave the new ones in place.
  

Soon after we realized that we couldn’t login to the BAS (at the worst time too – the CIO’s BlackBerry had stopped working … but that’s another story).
  

After opening a ticket with BlackBerry support, we learned about this “feature”.
  

Keep in mind that this only affects people who are setup to have access to the BlackBerry Administration Service … normal users who only have a profile on the BES server to sync up their BlackBerry aren’t affected if their Person Doc UNID changes.
  

The Solution …
  

Well, simply put: make sure to never to delete and replace your person document in the Domino Directory … because that will change your Person Doc UNID. If you want to try something, you can probably use ScanEZ of YTria’s o change the UNID of the new document back to the UNID of the old document (but I can’t be sure if it will do the trick or not).
  

OR … if you have no choice: simply login with the BES server admin account into the BAS and delete your user profile, re-create it and re-activate your phone. That’s what Patrick and I ended up doing.
   

However … maybe, just maybe there is a way to crack open the BESMgmt database in the back-end and figure out where that information is stored and update it using an SQL command … but I really really really didn’t want to do that.
  

Thanks for reading!
  

Marc

Summary …
  

While working on getting the Business Card feature to work correctly, I discovered that I was able to access the UserInfoServlet on my Sametime server without having to provide any credentials and “see” what Business Card information would be returned for me, Patrick and anybody in our company.
  

The important keywords here are “without having to provide any credentials”. After digging a bit more, I discovered that I could reproduce the same results when I accessed the internet facing Sametime servers of other companies. With this, I was able to get one of the phone number another famous blogger of the Yellowverse (one who happens to be a pilot to give you a hint) and the location of a famous speaker at Lotusphere (one who likes Turtles to give you another hint).
   

This. Is. Not. Good. 
  

The Problem …
 

The Sametime Business Card feature, introduced a while back, works by having the Sametime server call a servlet called “UserInfoServlet” in the servlet directory. Mr. Mikkel Flindt Heisterberg has written a very nice, and detailed, blog post (here) titled “Reverse engineering the Sametime 7.5 business card servlet” to help us all understand how that servlet works.
  

The information from Mr. Heisterberg’s blog is especially useful, for example, when you are setting up your Sametime Server and fiddling with the Business Card feature. Why? Simply because you can troubleshoot and test what the Business Card will display by accessing a URL like this:
  

http://st.uu.com/servlet/UserInfoServlet?operation=3&userid=rincewind
   

And here’s the catch 22: if your Sametime Server is configured to allow anonymous access so that your employees can have Sametime meetings with other people from the outside, the server will give you the info about that user without asking for any credentials whatsoever.
  

So, now that you know this, what’s stopping you from doing a Google search on “Welcome to IBM Sametime”, finding a server which allows anonymous access, doing a cross-check in the company’s “Contact Us” page or forums to find the CEO’s name and hitting that URL to get his phone number after a few trials and errors to get his user id right?
  

Answer: nothing is stopping you.
   

The Fix That Lotus Recommends …
   

Well, I thought I had a security issue on my server so I did what I always do: I opened a PMR with Lotus Support. After going back and forth in emails with a support rep, he said that the only solution he could think of was to put in a firewall restriction on any url with “servlet/UserInfoServlet?” in the URL. When I asked if that would break the Sametime Business Card lookups, the answer I got was “Most of the our clients do not send the information directly via HTTP directly to the HTTP server. We use the VP channel via 1533. In this case we send this information to the Sametime server which then uses this request to format the URL to call to the userinfoservlet and send this request to lookup names. In this case if you denied external HTTP access to the server, other calls (browser based) would be denied, but the client based calls should still go through.“.
  

Apart from that, he wrote that there no other solutions yet. Since there was no other solutions, he created an SPR for a future release (the SPR # is MALN82QM5M).
       

Now, just to make sure that I wasn’t crazy, I emailed Mr. Mikkel Flindt Heisterberg and he quickly replied back to me that, “yes”, this could be a potential issue depending on your viewpoint and that “yes”, the firewall workaround would be a good workaround for now. Mr. Heisterberg also mentioned in his reply that ”the servlet specification doesn’t provide any access control in the same way we’re used to with Notes and Domino so unfortunately protecting the servlet is not as easy as “just adding access control”. It will also make getting business card data from Sametime more complex.”.
  

The Temporary Fix … Until your Firewall Guys Put the Rule in Place … 
  

Since most of my firewall experts are snowed-in and currently digging their way out of their own house, I could have decided to fiddle with the firewall myself … but I decided to go another way: I created a temporary URL redirection rule for my Sametime server to prevent access to the servlet. 
  

That’s what I did for now and here’s the exact steps on how I did it if you want to go this route …
  

01. Open the Domino Directory on your Sametime server.
  

02. Go to the server documents view and open the Sametime server  document (if I remember, internet sites docs aren’t allowed for a ST 7.5 server … but if I’m wrong and you are using Internet sites documents then open the site for your Sametime server).
  

03. Once the server doc is opened (or internet site document), click on the action button “Create Web…” and select “URL Mapping/Redirection”.
  

04. Once the new document has appeared, go to the “Basics” tab.
  

05. On the “Basics” tab, select “URL –> Redirection URL” in the “What do you want to setup” field.
  

06. Now go to the “Site Information” tab.
  

07. Enter the IP address of our server in the “IP Address” field (actually, I noticed that it’s not required …).
  

08. Now go to the “Mappings” tab.
  

09. On the “Mappings” tab, go in the “Incoming URL Path” field and type this: /servlet/UserInfoServlet*
  

10. Now, click in the “Redirection URL string” field and type this: /stcenter.nsf
  

11. Click on the “Administration” tab.
  

12. Set the Owner and Administrators field to whatever is the standard in your environment.
  

13. When ready, click on “Save & Close”.
  

14. Now go on the server console and type “TELL HTTP REFRESH”.
  

15. Once the HTTP tasks has refreshed, try to access the same url as above (change the hostname to your server name and the userid to yours) to test if it redirects you to the Meeting Center instead of handing you information about your user id.
  

 
Parting Words …
 

Keep in mind that “mileage may vary” … i.e., I want to protect this Servlet and the information it returns from the outside but maybe this is a non-issue for you. If you haven’t configured the business cards feature or if your Sametime server uses a completely different directory, maybe this is not something you need to be worried about … just keep this in mind.
       

Thanks for reading!
  

Marc

My New Addiction…
   

Right out of the gate, I have to confess to something: ever since I got Smart Upgrade to work correctly, I got addicted to watching the views in the Smart Upgrade Tracking Results database.  There is something oddly satisfying in watching the results appear in the database now that it just plain works. I really can’t explain it. So while I can’t say this thing is a “sport”, I have to admit that I’m watching it often … anyhow, I thought I’d share my new addiction with you.
  

You Mentionned Something About a Fix Pack I Believe?
     

Oh yes and that’s why I’m writing about it! As you all know, the Lotus Notes & Domino 8.5.1 Fix Pack 1 was released about a week ago. The technote with the links to the various versions of the Fix Pack 1 can be found here. A few of you have followed my two previous posts here and here on how to create a Smart Upgrade kit for the R8.5.1 client and are now wondering “How can I package an deploy the R8.5.1 Fix Pack 1 the same way?”. Well, here’s how I did it.
  

The Joys of Smart Upgrading a Fix Pack
 

Truth be told, Smart Upgrading a Fix Pack is a walk in the park. It’s a piece of cake. It’s … well, you get the point. Smart Upgrading a standard client is the equivalent of undergoing root canal without anesthesia in an airplane flying in heavy turbulence in my own personal opinion but Smart Upgrading a Fix Pack is so much easier that it dosen’t even compare. Smart Upgrading a Fix Pack is like getting a chair massage in the Certification Lounge at Lotusphere when your back really really really hurts from walking around with a heavy backpack all day … maybe the guys from the special forces can do that all day long without breaking a sweat but I sure can’t … and oh … wait I just remembered there were no chair massages this year!
  

Right out of the gate, you won’t need to use the Install Shield Tuner! So, with this simple fact, you just saved yourself from a few more gray hairs. And the command line? Simple too! So, how do you Smart Upgrade a Fix Pack? Well, download the presentation to view the steps. It’s fairly quick and easy and it just plain works.
    

How to Smart Upgrade the Lotus Notes R8.5.1 Fix Pack 1
  

Writing down step-by-step instructions in this blog post would take 10 pages so, instead of boring you to death with a super long post, I offer you my usual step-by-step slides to get it done. So simply click on the icon below to download the 82 page step-by-step PowerPoint presentation with the instructions:
  

Parting Words …
  

Please note that another blogger, Mr. Mick Moignard, posted a nice entry on his blog about an error message that said “Error encountered when installing Notes Hotfix Core component” when he tried to install the Fix Pack. If you ever run into this error, make sure to read his blog post on how to get around it.
  

Thanks for reading & have fun Smart Upgrading!
  

Marc
  

I hope this helps you!
 

Marc

Been There, Done That, Got a Whole Lot of T-Shirts Too …

 
Lotusphere 2010 has come and gone and it was my 6th time in Orlando and the 12th time for Patrick. So we’re pretty familiar with the event, the place, the halls, etc. Come to think about it, being familiar with the show is very useful because you know where all the halls are, such as the “Dolphin Northern Hemisphere III” one, without having to look at the signs and without having to pull out a map. It’s awesome when you are in a hurry.
   

Anyhow, long story short: we went there with one goal: to find integration points between Lotus Notes 8.5.1 and Oracle … the result? Not so great. Oh sure, there’s LEI, there’s DECs and various vendors which all had data-pumping solutions we could build on … but there is nothing like Alloy out there for Oracle. However, things might change in the near future and time will tell if the vendor we spoke to will get his dev team to provide a similar solution … time will tell indeed.
  
Walking the Mile …
  

This being my 6th Lotusphere, I decided once and for all to figure out just how much walking around I did. And as I’ve seen on planetlotus.org, I wasn’t the only one wondering the same because another blogger also posted something about it (I will need to find his blog post and link to him). As you all know, a GPS doesn’t work indoors, so I enlisted the help of my old, but trustworthy, Polar RS200 Running Watch that comes with a foot pod to measure the distance I’ve walked/run. Over the years, I used this watch while running in several 5k, 10k, half marathons and in one full-blown marathon so you can say that we go back a long way. And, in case you wonder if that gizmo is precise, I calibrated it a while ago and it became really precise after that. In fact, during each of the aforementioned races, it was spot on during the 5k and 10k races and within a few dozen feet on the 21k and 42k races.
     
So, how many miles did I walk? Here it is:
  

• 1.818 mile on Sunday (2.920 kilometers)
• 2.789 miles on Monday (4.490 kilometers)
• 3.168 miles on Tuesday (5.100 kilometers)
• 6.766 miles on Wednesday (10.980 kilometers)
• 1.416 mile on Thursday (2.280 kilometers)
• Total: 15.957 miles (25.77 kilometers)
     

Please note that due to some precision loss when rounding up after converting the kilometers to miles, if you do the math, you’ll notice a small difference but it’s nothing to write home about.
  

So, basically, I walked a bit more than half-marathon during Lotusphere this year. Please note that I turned on my foot pod only when I was walking to/from sessions, to/from lunch, in the product showcase and at MGM. Otherwise, I turned it off.
  

The Polar RS200SD Running watch

 How Far Is It?
   

Just for your information, you need to know that from the far end of the dinning hall to the fountain in the rotunda of the Dolphin, it’s 300 meters (984.25 feet).
   
And from the fountain in the rotunda of the Dolphin to the complete end of the Sawn conference rooms, it’s another 500 meters (1640.42 feet).
  

Basically, if you’ve just finished a session near the end of the hall in the Swan and want to go to lunch, it’s half a mile to walk. And then, as luck usually has it, if your next session is back at the complete end of the Swan … you’ve got to walk another half mile back.
  

Parting Thoughts about Lotusphere 2010
  

Ok, a few final words about my thoughts on Lotusphere 2010:
  

• The sessions were just as good as the previous years. As usual, there are too many interesting sessions to see and not enough time. As an admin, I’m really wondering if I should deploy Sametime 8.5 … I’ll have to think about it. As a part-time application developer, it’s clear to me that ”the writing is on the wall” and that Lotus has placed their chips on XPages and Web Services.
• The food was good, just as usual.
• The vendors had some nice swag this year … or maybe it’s just me who didn’t notice it the previous years. Or maybe I just really wanted to win a big tv once in my life …
• Also, maybe it’s me again, but I feel that they weren’t as generous as the previous years with the coffee, water bottles and soft drinks. But each year, I get a bit more addicted to coffee and sugar so that explains it.
• Someone, somewhere, probably-high-up-in-the-food-chain-of-Lotus, chopped the budget of the Certification team: the Certification Lab didn’t have any CertFX or SelfTestSoftware to help us study. Also, maybe they indulged us a bit too much in the past because I would really have needed a chair massage in the Certification Lounge (my back was killing me at one point) but they didn’t have that this year.
• I don’t like the “map(s)” for the session schedule instead of the good ol’ booklet for the schedule. I am really not a fan of that. It’s probably cheaper to print the “maps” rather than to print a booklet but the booklet was so much better in my opinion.
• Conclusion: for me, it was a pretty “bland” Lotusphere 2010. There was no real earth shattering announcements (except for the presence of William Shattner) that affected me in my daily life but it was a nice Lotusphere (maybe Project Vulcan will hit me later … but I’ll wait and see). Oh also, the fact that attendance was lower this year, it was nice to be able to walk around without bumping into a gazillion people.
      

Thanks for reading!
  

PS: Now that I’m back from Lotusphere, I really need kick-off my new year resolutions series and I also need to post something on how to Smart Upgrade to Lotus Notes R8.5.1 Fix Pack (I just created the package today).

Summary
 

Last year, on November 19th 2009 to be more precise, I posted an entry on my blog with a nice 160 page presentation on how to deploy Lotus Notes R8.5.1 using a combination of SmartUpgrade, the Install Shield Tuner, SURunAsWizard and Policies.  The post was quite popular and I thank every one of you who visited my blog and/or who commented.
 

However, one of the problems with the last presentation was that, if you followed the steps religiously, the Lotus Notes R8.5.1 client would not login the employee into Sametime on the 1st startup. In fact, to get it to work automatically, you had to open the sidebar and click on the Login button at least once. Fortunately for me, last month, Tony Trout of Lotus Support sent me 1 more line that should have added into the plugin_customization.ini file to get the notes client.
 

And what line needs to be added? Simply this one: 

com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.login/autologin=true

So, after updating the file, recreating the package and testing it, I can safely say that this line works. So, what did I do next? Well, I updated the presentation for your enjoyment. You will find the download link after the “Thank You’s”.
 

Once again … a few “Thank You”!
 

Just like on my lst blog post, before you get to the download part, I would like to say Thank You (again) to a few people who have made this presentation possible …
 

• Andy Donaldson and his blog posts here and here on how to use the Install Shield Tuner. His blog posts helped me a lot!
   
• Michael Willard, Andrew Lapidas and Andy Liew of Lotus Support for working with me and discovering the bug in the SURunAsWizard.
   
• Jean-Paul Mehanna of Lotus support for his help in figuring out how to setup the Sametime Community in the plugin_customization file.
   
• And most importantly #1, John St. Germain of Lotus Support, for all his help and discovering that using “-d” in the SURunAsWizard caused most of the issues I was running into (it’s an undocumented gotcha).
   
• And most importantly #2, Tony Trout of Lotus Support, for not giving up on me and my questions in regards to the Sametime Community config in the plugin_customization file and keeping me constantly updated on his research.
     

As you can see, it was a team effort … so I have good reasons to say “Thank You” to all these folks … but that’s the power of the Notes community … lots of people all working together and sharing information.
 

So … What does the Presentation cover again?
 

Basically, this 161 page presentation still covers the following (only 3 pages were updated):
 

• Part 1 – Creating the Smart Upgrade Kits and Smart Upgrade Tracking database.
   
• Part 2 – Setting up your computer to create and tune the kit.
   
• Part 3 – Creating the “Kit” and Tuning it with the Install Shield Tuner.
   
• Part 4 – Using SURunAsWizard to create a single-file executable.
   
• Part 5 – Uploading the package and updating the policies.
   
• Part 6 – A deployment example.
   

And Now … The Updated Presentation …
 

Well, simply click on the file below to download it to your computer … and enjoy. Hopefully it will help you and your company deploy Lotus Notes R8.5.1 more quickly and more efficiently.
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
Click on the icon above to download the presentation
 

I hope you enjoy it.
 

Addendum
 

On November 17th 2009, Mr. Ed Brill posted on his blog a post with links to 2 new wikis that had just been published which contains similar information. I felt kinda ackward because I had been working on this presentation for a while now (John St. Germain can attest to it since I had sent him draft copies of the presentation). However, since I had spent so much time on it, I didn’t want to let it all go to waste and I decided to finish it and post it. Maybe it will help someone out there …?
 

PS: I’m leaving for Lotusphere on Saturday so I might not be able to respond to comments for the next week.

Summary

Well, this is going to be a quick blog post … nothing fancy and maybe lots of people out there already know this. Anyhow, long story short, Patrick just noticed that there was no option to archive documents from the “Chat History” view in his Lotus Notes R8.5.1 mail file.
    

I thought that was weird so I investigated and I saw the same thing. I was worried that I was dealing with a mail85.ntf that was missing design elements so I opened a support call with IBM out of sheer unadulterated paranoia (note: in my opinion, being slightly paranoid should be job requirement for every admin job … and as long as the admin doesn’t start to wear a tin foil hat to the office then everything is fine if you ask me).
  

The answer from Lotus: “That’s normal … you can only archive from [very] specific views and the Chat History view isn’t one of those. You can find them in the All Documents view and archive from there…”.
   

But There’s Hope …
 

After a short discussion with the Lotus Support rep in regards to this, I asked her to create an SPR for this and she was kind enough to create one. The number for the SPR is #AKNX7Z7U4J.
 

Enjoy!
 

Marc
 

PS: On the topic of “Tin Foil Hats”, some folks at MIT did some research (click here to view the website or here for the Wikepedia article) and determined that “a tin foil hat could either amplify or attenuate incoming radiation depending on frequency; the effect was observed to be roughly independent of the relative placement of the wearer and radiation source.“

Hi everyone,

Last Saturday, Patrick had to fly back home to his family for personal reasons. I tried to call him on that day but I got transferred to voicemail almost right away. So, I was a little surprised when he emailed me at around 3:30 pm and his email was simply 1 line: ”I’m on a plane!”. Since it wasn’t written “Sent by from BlackBerry” at the bottom, I figured he was joking and using his Notes client … so I logged into Sametime.

After a small chat via Sametime he told me that he was on a flight above Nevada and was using “GoGo Wireless Internet” on the plane to get into Notes and Sametime. He said he was flying at 485 mph at 38 000 feet. How did he know? Simple: he had his automotive GPS along for the ride and he sent me this screenshot while he was over Wyoming:

So, because we were both bored (him from sitting in a plane and me from studying for my re-certifications exams all afternoon) we decided to test out a few things to see if GoGo Wireless Internet was blocking any kind of traffic.

The first thing we tried was fiddling with a Sametime Online Meeting. It didn’t work the first time: partly because I got out of the meeting room when I discovered that my Logitech QuickCam 9000 was broken. On the second try, I plugged back into my computer my old QuickCam Live for Notebook and that worked!

The only bad thing was the he didn’t have a headset that had a microphone (only headphones) with him on the plane so his laptop microphone was picking up the engine noise and I couldn’t hear him. However, if I talked, he could hear me and reply back via the group chat feature in the meeting room. The video was a bit sluggish: Patrick said there was a 15 second delay in his video but hey, it worked!

Utter nerdgasm. Or boredom. Or a mix of both?

Anyhow, after we had our fun with the Sametime Meeting room we tried a Skype Video Call and it also worked! The same “engine noise” problem drowned out Patrick’s voice but he could hear me. The video was a bit quicker in Skype … but then again the lag in the video while we were in the Sametime 7.5 meeting room might have to do with how Sametime 7.5 encodes video. Maybe we’ll get to re-try if I ever get the courage to upgrade our Sametime server to 8.5? Time will tell.

I hope you enjoyed this post …

Marc