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

Hi everyone!

First and foremost: welcome to the new decade and Happy New Year! I wish you for 2010 the following: increased server uptime, less helpdesk calls, no b-tree corruptions issues and no raid controller failures!

Secondly, this is a short post to announce the start of a new series of future blog posts. As we all know, most of us have a tradition of coming up with “resolutions” for each new year that comes along. And as traditions goes, most of us manage to find new and creative ways each year to avoid doing whatever needs to be done to keep up with those resolutions.

So, instead of trying to set myself up for failure by setting resolutions that I will unmistakably avoid adhering to (like loosing weight for example … something which I will need to do anyway), I have decided to setup resolutions for myself in the Lotus Domino arena and share them with you.

This month, I will begin a series of blog posts about things that a new Lotus Domino System Administrator should do in his (or her) environment and I will, when possible provide detailed instructions or code (when I can) to speed up the whole process. So far, I have an idea for each month and here is the tentative list of “resolutions”.

• Cleanup your File -> Db -> Open dialog box.
• How to Review and Standardize your Server Docs (hopefully in a few easy steps).
• How to Review and Standardize your Server Configuration Docs (hopefully again in a few easy steps).
• Cleanup your Monitoring Database.
• Setup Mail Statistics.
• Setup Server Statistics.
• Cleanup your Policies.
• Cleanup Person documents.
• Cleanup Groups documents (this one I am not sure how I’ll go about it).
• Review your Program documents.
• Run the Domino Configuration Tuner.
• How to Automate the gathering of information after a server crashes (I’m not sure about this one too).

If you have any ideas for “resolutions”, go ahead and share them in the comments and I might take you up and do a post on your idea.

Happy New Year once again!

Marc