Kids Say the Darnest Things …
 

And End Users Ask the Darnest Questions … point in case: an employee calls me up and asks the following simple question:
 

“Hi Marc, I want to add an arrow into my email. In Microsoft Word, I click on Insert → Symbol and then I get to pick the arrow from the Wingding font selection and insert it right into my Word document… it’s soooo easy … I need to know where’s that option in Lotus Notes R8.5.1 because I can’t find it!”.
 

The answer is: *nowhere*. Seriously it ain’t there. Don’t bother looking.
 

A PMR a Day Keeps The Doctor Away?
 

Since I couldn’t find the option myself, I did what I usually do: I opened a PMR (I swear, I’ve opened almost 1 PMR day over the course of our 8.5.1 rollout for various questions, bugs and issues that I couldn’t figure out myself).
 

And the answer I got from Lotus Support was a bit surprising. Here’s a copy-paste of what the Support Rep wrote me:
 

I did discover that there was an SPR enhancement request submitted for this and the SPR# is MCHZ6DUMHZ. The SPR was closed with “No plans to fix in the 8.0 code stream”
 

I just wanted to let you know that I created an Notes client 8.5 code stream document for this issue. This will increase the”weight” of the issue. If weight increases sufficiently, it may be re-raised for triage for an upcoming maintenance or feature release.
 

So, there you have it … it won’t be added to the R8.x codestream. Tough luck heh?
 

But It’s In Outlook! [Cried the End User Weilding A Torch and a Pitch Fork in front of My Cube]
 

Yes, I cannot deny that this feature is in Outlook (and MS Word). In fact, here’s a screenshot of the Outlook 2010 client (I think) with the button that shows up in the right hand corner when a user clicks on the “Insert” tab of the [evil] “Ribbon interface” at the top …
 

So, there you have it folks … the option is right there in Outlook. Even better: they can insert mathematical Equations that are transformed into embedded images once the email is sent (it’s kinda neat, I have to admit) … but it won’t be in Lotus Notes R8.x …
 

Dear Lotus … Help us Help You …
 

Before I end this blog post, I must utter the following prayer …
 

Oh Lords of Thy Yellowverse
Please Add Unto Lotus Notes
The Ability to Insert Symbols
And Maybe Even Equations
So That My End Users Will Be Satisfied
And  Love Thy Email Client Even More
 

Ok, seriously Lotus … please add this “feature” into the next client … and my users will love their client even more!
 

One Last Thing …
 

Just in case someone smarter than me reads this blog post … is there anyone out there who would happen to know the code that I could put into one of the Toolbar icons to do this? This is just out of curiosity … maybe someone … somewhere has already done this(?) …
 

Conclusion …
 

Well, there isn’t much to say really … with the R8.5.1 client, Lotus has improved the email side of things by leaps and bounds to a point where my end users are amazed when I show them some of the new features (messsage recall anyone?) .. but there still is a bit of space left for improvement …
 

Anyhow … thanks for reading!
 

Marc

Dear Lotus,
 

I need you to help us help you! More specifically, I need you to make sure that SPR JSTN84CSC7 is given enough priority so that the SURunAsWizard is “fixed/updated” for Lotus Notes R8.5.2.
 

Let’s face it: we all got the memo that said “deploy Notes 8.5 to as many machines as possible” and we’re all working really hard toward rolling it out. But you have to help us at some point. You really do.
 

Seriously, “why” is the SURunAsWizard utility still not working on Windows Vista machines? And why isn’t it working on Windows 7 machines either? I can understand that you haven’t gotten around to fixing it on Windows 7 … after all, that OS is new on the block. But for Windows Vista? It’s been out for 3 years already (4 if you count the RTM release) so one of your genius coders that’s chained to his (or her) desk somewhere deep in the bowels of your HQ should have had the time to update the SURunAsWizard utility for that OS by now … Right?
 

In all seriousness, I can understand why you haven’t fixed it for Windows Vista’s machines! After all, none of the soul crushing enterprises out there would dare to punish their employees by forcing Windows Vista on them (or would they?). But as buggy/weird/stange/messed-up Windows Vista was (especially with the evil User Access Control feature)… the new kid on the block, i.e. Windows 7, appears promising and some organizations are moving away from XP to Windows 7.
 

Which company is moving toward Windows 7? Well, the one that I work for is going that way.
 

Yes, we started handing out laptops with Windows 7. The local LAN Admins have installed the good ol’ Lotus Notes 7 client on them (to be able to quickly move the user from their old clunky machine to their new one) and when I try to Smart Upgrade those employees on their shiny new laptops to Lotus Notes R8.5.1 FP1 (later to FP3 or FP4) it doesn’t work because of Windows 7.
 

I’ve been a good little admin: I tried some things, I did some Google searches, checked the forums and finally, I opened a PMR.
 

Sadly, I was told right away “sorry, we can’t help you, that’s a known bug and there’s an SPR for that.”. I was surprised … shocked actually.
 

I was told that this is documented in Technote #1381191 (click here to view it).
 

That Technote even has the exact error that I see when I look at the LotusInstall.log file of my Windows 7 users:
 

Failed to launch process as specified user: 5
 

So, please Lotus, if you want to give me an early Christmas present, please please please increase the priority of SPR JSTN84CSC7 so that it gets fixed in Lotus Notes R8.5.2 … THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!
 

Dear Members of the Yellowverse Community,
 

If you are bored to death and are looking for a good excuse to open a PMR today (or tomorrow, or whenever you have the time), would you mind opening a PMR with Lotus Support and ask them to add your name to the SPR JSTN84CSC7 so that it gets a higher priority?
 

The more people who add their name to the list of customers who needs this, the faster it will be fixed.
 

Thanks for reading!
 

Marc
 

PS: This is not a “rant”, this is a request for help …

Ever Get a Recurring Nightmare?
 

I don’t. Which, I hope, makes me a normal person (as normal as Canadian can be anyway).  However, I do have a recurring error that creeps up in about 5 to 10% of the upgrades that we’ve done so far [shameless plug time: yes, I'm using the instructions from my own blog post here to upgrade the employees using Smart Upgrade].
 

That error that comes up from time-to-time, like a recurring nightmare, is as follows: ”The file is damaged, obsolete or intended for a different version of Lotus Notes“. This error shows up on the 1st time that the employee starts his shiny new Lotus Notes R8.5.1 FP1 client.
 

Here’s a screen shot of the error (not that it really matters … but I’m a visual learner).
 

I *really really really* wish Lotus would change that error message to say WHICH file is damaged. But that might be too much to ask? Is it?
 

So, in the meantime … here’s something that fixed the problem when it showed up …
 

The Solution
 

Truth be told, this isn’t a “pretty solution”. It’s a bit long and it could probably be shortened up” but I decided to “play safe” by running a bunch of commands on local to be 99.9% sure that the files on the local are clean for the next start up. So … ready? Here we go …
 

01. [Click] on Start → Program Files → Accessories → Command Prompt
02. [Type] C: and press <Enter> on the keyboard.
03. [Type] CD\Notes\Data and [Press] <ENTER> on the keyboard.
04. [Type] ..\nfixup.exe -F
05. [Type] the Lotus Notes password when prompted and [Press] <Enter> on the keyboard.
06. Wait for the fixup task to finish.
07. [Type] ..\nupdall.exe -R
08. [Type] the Lotus Notes password when prompted and [Press] <Enter> on the keyboard.
09. Wait for the updall task to finish.
10. [Type] ..\ncompact.exe -c -i
11. [Type] the Lotus Notes password when prompted and [Press] <Enter> on the keyboard.
12. Wait for the compaction to finish.
13. [Type] DEL CACHE.NDK and [Press] <Enter> on the keyboard.
14. [Type] DEL LOG.NSF and [Press] <Enter> on the keyboard.
15. [Type] DEL PERWEB.NSF and [Press] <Enter> on the keyboard.
16. [Type] DEL DESKTOP8.NDK and [Press] <Enter> on the keyboard.
17. [Type] EXIT and [Press] <Enter> on the keyboard to close the Command Prompt window.
18. Start Lotus Notes R8.5.1 and verify if the error is still there. Continue to the next possible solution if the error reappears.
19. Once Lotus Notes is started, go to the Workspace.
20. [Right Click] on the Workspace and in the menu that appears [Click] on Properties.
21. [Click] on the 2nd tab of the In the small Info box that appears.
22. [Click] on the Compact button of the 2nd tab of the small Info Box.
23. Wait for the compaction to finish.
24. [Open] the Personal Address Book of the employee.
25. Close and Re-Open Lotus Notes R8.5.1 and verify if the error is still there. Continue to the next steps if the error reappears.
26. Verify that the Personal Address Book of the employee has the version 8 look & feel.
27. IF it does not have the version 8 look & feel, close the Personal Address Book then continue with these steps.
28. Open the Workspace.
29. [Click] once on the icon for the employee’s Personal Address Book.
30. [Click] on File → Application → Replace Design.
31. In the screen that appears, verify that the title of the box that appear says “Replace Application Design of names.nsf” or “Replace Application Design of contacts.nsf. If not verify your selection in step 29.
32. If you have the right database selected, [Scroll Down] the list of templates and [Click] on “Personal Address book”.
33. [Click] on “Replace”.
34. [Click] on “Yes” when warned about the “design changes”.
35. Monitor the progress in the status bar.
36. When the Replace Design is completed, [Open] the Personal Address Book of the employee.
37. Once again, verify that the Personal Address Book of the employee has the version 8 look & feel (it should be fine now).
38. Close Lotus Notes and Re-Open it to see if the error should be gone.
 

In the end, if you’ve done all this and the error is still there … you might need to backup and rename the DESKTOP6.NDK to see if that’s the culprit. I had to do that only once and it resolved the error. It created another one however: I had to rebuild the workspace of that particular employee.
 

Conclusion
 

Well, like I wrote, I wish Lotus would change that error message to say which file is damaged … so I might SPR it for a future release.
 

Also, if someone else had documented this somewhere else … sorry, I didn’t do a tourough Google search before writing this post.
 

As usual, thanks for reading!
 

Marc

I’m Serious: Seamless Mail Upgrade Needs a Progress Bar …
  

Lesson Learned: I just did an upgrade from Release R7 to R8.5.1 of a “remote site”, i.e. a location that goes across the WAN to get to their Notes server … and Seamless Mail Upgrade gave me some trouble when it comes to the “folder upgrade” part.
 

Basically speaking, if you use the “Seamless Mail Upgrade” to upgrade those user’s mail files via policy, they will get prompted to upgrade their folders after they open their mail file for the 1st time. 
 

But the problem is as follows: if you have a user with a ton of folders … it will take forever to upgrade their folders across the WAN (I’ve seen it take 3 hours on 1 particular machine) … and there is NO PROGRESS BAR. Here’s an example of what their screen looks like … interesting isn’t it? Apart from the usual “lightning bolt” in the lower left part of the screen, there is nothing that tells the user what’s going on.
     

What do most users think? They Think It FROZE!
 

Like I said, these were users going across the WAN and their “Seamless Mail folder” upgrade took a while (hours for some). Some of those employees thought that their Lotus Notes client had frozen and rebooted their machine … with the effect that they got re-prompted to upgrade their folders again (because the notes.ini variable “MailUpgradeFolder” is set to the same value as the “Setup” variable in the notes.ini once the Mail Folder upgrade is completed … and since they stopped it, it isn’t set).
  

And What’s The Solution? Communication … and an SPR
 

If you really want to use the Seamless Mail Upgrade, then the only thing you can do for now is to tell your employees that are in remote sites that the Seamless Mail Upgrade might take a while … a long while in fact.
  

If you want to turn it off, you can. But then you will have to do the mail template upgrades yourself at night (or during the day) and I’m pretty sure that you have better things to do than upgrade mail templates at night.
 

And last but not least: the SPR! Shortly after running into this, I opened a ticket with Lotus Support to request an SPR to add a progress bar to the Seamless Mail Template upgrade. The SPR number is RSSA87HKV7 and feel free to open a ticket with Lotus Support to add your name to the list of customers who need the same thing … the more people ask, the more chances of this making it to the next release.
  

Addendum…

It’s been an amazingly busy 2 months for me and I haven’t had the time to blog a lot. I hope that things will quiet down a bit in August so that I can put the finishing touches of the 4th version of the Smart Upgrade guide (I need to add a section about the Widget catalog and the Update Site).
 

Thanks for reading!
 

Marc

There are Some Rules in the Universe that you Cannot Break…
    

Like the speed of light for example (for now anyway) and the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow (see here).
  

For entirely different reasons however, the creators of the Yellowverse have imposed upon us, the little creatures inhabiting this world, different kinds of limits. Like, for example, the 32k limit on text field.
   

Sometimes, creative developers have found work around or coded around that issue … but there are other times where it just plain hurts and you can’t do nothin’ about it.
   

Point in Case: Hitting The Limit Of 32k When Adding Mail Rules To A Server Configuration Document
   

When adding 1 new mail rule to your server configuration document, you get this nasty error (click on the image below to see a bigger version):
 
   

 
So, what can you do when this happens? Not much really. You can try a few things however to make some room:
   

• Review all the mail rules in your server configuration document. Remove all those that aren’t needed anymore.
• Review and check if you could combine some rules together.
• Review and check if can make any rules “smaller”, for example if you had a rule that said “journal when sender is jsmith@whatever.com” you can change it to just “journal when sender is jsmith”.
• If you can, journal everything that is sent and received on your server (it might make the size of your mail journal file increase incredibly fast however).
     

But There Might Be a Glimmer of Hope
  

I opened a ticket with Lotus Support and the support rep created SPR #KGEW84SR3T to add “when Sender or Any Recipient Contains” as an option when creating mail rules.
   

So, if you are like me and you’ve hit the limit, I recommend that you also open a PMR with Lotus Support to ask them to change the way Mail Rules are saved along with Server Configuration Documents.
  

Thanks for reading!
   

Marc

Another Day, Another PMR and Another SPR …
  

This is going to be a quick post. Nothing fancy but it might help someone out there. To begin with, let’s assume that you have used my two previous presentations here and here to get Smart Upgrade up and running in your own environment. Now let’s also assume that you have a mixture of R7.0.1, R7.0.1 CCH2, R7.0.2, R7.0.3 and even a few R7.0.4 clients out in your environment.
   

Everything is working fine to Smart Upgrade all the clients *except* the R7.0.1 CCH2 clients … why is that?  Even if they click on File -> Tools -> Notes Smart Upgrade, they get the dreaded “No Matching Kits” message box.
   

First and Foremost, what’s the CCH2?
   

Simply put, it’s the Client Cumulative Hot Fix Pack 2 for Lotus Notes R7.0.1. “Back In The Days”, we had to deploy that CCH2 to some machines who used a particular database because it contained a fix for a weird DBLookup issue. We had no choice back then …
   

So, What’s The Work Around?
   

The Work Around is quite simple: edit your Desktop Policy Settings document to remove the mention of the FP1 in the “Deploy Version” field. In effect, the “Deploy Version” field will need to only contain “Release R8.5.1″ and your R7.0.1 CCH2 clients will get prompted to upgrade.
   

But This Creates Another Problem … and Here Comes Another Work Around!
       

Now that you have removed the mention of the “FP1″ from the “Deploy Version” field … guess what? Nobody gets prompted to upgrade to Fix Pack 1 (or Fix Pack2 if you have already packaged it … the steps are exactly the same as the one I wrote about before). So, every couple days, you need to re-edit your Desktop Policy to put back the “Deploy Version” to “Release 8.5.1 FP1″ so that people who got upgraded to R8.5.1 also get prompted to install the Fix Pack 1. And you have to “flip-flop” back and forth until all your CCH2 clients are upgraded. Not. My. Idea. Of. Fun.
   

What’s for Desert? An SPR of Course!
  

None of my posts would be complete without the mention of an SPR … it’s almost an habit nowadays (a bad one if I may add that). But anyhow, I have opened a PMR about this with Lotus Support and this turns out to be a known bug with the CCH2 and has been documented in SPR #BJGY83KQGR. The Lotus Support Rep that I worked with provided me was extremely good but he was very careful not to mention if this would be addressed and/or if it will ever be fixed at all (probably not since it applies to an “old” version).
   

Parting Words…
  

For me, in my company, I’m going to be “flip flopping” the policy back and forth a few times … because I have about 400 R7.0.1 CCH2 clients. Hopefully, I’m one of the few companies “out-there” who’ve had to install this and who’s facing this now. But if that’s your case … I feel your pain.
  

Thank for reading!
  

Marc

The Devil IS In The Details …
  

A VIP in my company was recently upgraded to Lotus Notes R8.5.1 FP1 and had to print a list of the contacts from the address book of a roaming user (the address book is on the server) in a list format. As you probably know, it’s a very simple thing to do: open the address book of the roaming user (the VIP has access to that address book), click on File -> Print, make sure that “Print Selected View” is selected and then click on “Print”. Then, casually walk to printer, grab the stack and run with it to the person who requested it. It’s easy and it makes everybody happy to know that the list of contacts is safe and sound on sheets on paper in a file somewhere in somebody’s desk drawer.
   

But if you are using Lotus Notes R8.5.1 (with or without the FP1), there is a bug with the “Print Selected View” in the Contacts (names.nsf) database based on the R8.5.1 design.
 

The bug might be easy to miss but it’s there: the “Print Selected View” only prints 1 line per contact. You might say “That’s not a big deal” IF you only have 1 phone number per contact BUT if you have contacts with multiple phone numbers … only the 1st number will appear on the printout.
   

I’m not kidding. The VIP wasn’t impressed either.
  

And that VIP has the hear of other VIPs in my company and that makes Lotus Notes look bad (yes, a simple thing like that … but hey, the devil IS in the details).
  

So the CIO called up Patrick and Patrick then called me up and said “find a workaround” … and since nobody reports to me, I can’t delegate this request … dang … oh well … I told myself, “it’s probably something stupid … this should be easy” and after 13+ years of working with this product you’d think I’d remember never to say that … but no. I was wrong …
  

Before the Workarounds … the PMR (and the SPR)!
 

After testing a few things, I decided to open a PMR with Lotus Support. And I consider myself super lucky because John St-Germain was assigned the PMR. John St-Germain was instrumental on the gazillion of Smart Upgrade related PMRs that I had opened last year, all of which,  allowed me to create the two presentations here and here. And, once again, I received an excellent level of customer service from John St-Germain on this PMR!
  

Anyhow, after a bit of catching up on the latest news with John and giving him a bit more info about the issue, he went back to his test environment (or evil genius lair somewhere in a volcano on a deserted island as I like to think about it … hey – it makes life less boring to think of it that way) and reproduced it super easily.
  

Because he was able to reproduce it so easily, he did a bit of digging around and when he called me back he explained that “Yes”, this is a bug in R8.5.1 Standard (but not in 8.5.1 Basic) and that the issue had already been reported and SPR’ed.
  

The SPR # is CAML7YUTUW and John said that it’s being investigated to be fixed in 8.5.2.
   

So after I realized that that 8.5.2 won’t be around until a couple more months, we discussed a few options. So here’s a few workarounds.
  

Workaround #1 - Basic Mode
  

Simply put: close your Lotus Notes R8.5.1 Standard and launch it back in “Basic” mode. There should be an icon for that either on your desktop or in Start -> Program Files -> Lotus Applications. If not, just create a shortcut to nlnotes.exe and that will launch it in “basic” mode.
  

The bug does not occur in “Basic” mode because the Contacts database dosen’t load as a Composite Application …
   

Workaround #2 – Copy Selected As Table
  

Select the Contacts you want to print, then click on on the menu Edit -> Copy As -> Table. Then start your favorite Word Processor (either Microsoft Word or Symphony Documents). Once you are in the word processing application click on “Edit -> Paste”.
  

Once the pasted contacts appear, tweak the table, remove the borders, change the fonts, etc, etc … basically spend some time to format the table so that it looks nice when printed … not fun to do.
   

Workaround #3 – Open Contacts in Basic Mode (Thanks to Craig Wiseman for this one)
   

I had forgotten about this but Craig Wisemen posted a comment to simply hold down CTRL+SHIFT+ALT and then click the contacts icon (assuming you are clicking on the icon in the bookmark bar). As he wrote in his comment, this will open the Contacts database “Basic” mode (i.e. without the Composite Application settings) and you’ll be able to print the selected view.
   

Workaround #4 – Add a Form Specifically for Printing the List
   

If you go back to your R8.5.1 Standard client and then open your contacts, if you click on File -> Print, you’ll notice a drop down list for “Print Styles”. In that drop-down list, there’s a bunch of options to print your contact lists on labels and in various other exotic formats (the phone directory is kinda cool in a old school way). See below for a screenshot of the drop-down list.
  

  
    
   
   
Since all the options displayed there are actually forms that are stored in the local Contacts database (or local Address Book if you prefer), what’s stopping you from coding your own form to print a list of all (or selected) contacts that would display properly? Answer: nothing… except maybe time.
  

So you’ll be happy to know that I spent the time to create the said form and that it works OK for our VIP. I couldn’t figure out an easy way to get the column headers to appear on each page but the VIP didn’t care about that.
 

The form is stored in the attached zip file below as a DXL file: simply click on it to download the zip file to your hard drive. Once you extract the contents of the zip file, you’ll also see an LSS file and that contains the code for the agent that you’ll need to create to import the DXL file.
   

So, to import the DXL, start by opening your local names.nsf in Designer (or the one of one of your roaming user who needs this) and then click on Create -> Agent. Give the agent a decent name like “Import Form” and then click OK.  Set the agent to be in LotusScript and then import the LSS file for the agent (it’s in the zip file that that you unzipped). Once the code is imported, save the agent and run it.
  

Once you run the agent, you will be prompted to select the DXL file. And once you select it, it will create the new design element.
  

At this point, you’re almost done but to wrap things up, you’ll need to open the address book in designer and open the form “Print Selected Contacts – Portrait Format”. Once the form is opened, ask for the form properties and enable the option “Include in Print Menu” and save the form. You can close Designer at this point.
  

Once you’ve done those steps, you can go back to your list of Contacts, select a few from the list (or all of them), click on File -> Print, select “Print Selected Contacts – Portrait Format” and then click on “Preview” to see what will get printed or print “OK” if you feel lucky …
  

Conclusion …
  

Well, there isn’t much to say except to repeat “The Devil IS in the details”. Seriously, their computer(s) can crash once per week … people almost expect it when they use Microsoft Windows nowadays,  and they won’t make a big deal out of it. But when something that worked forever (probably since the R1 days!) suddently stops working for no particular reason … some people find this extremely annoying and complain … and sometimes they have other VIPs within earshot … more specifically those that are making the big decisions that can help or hinder the future of a particular groupware solution in a company …
  

Thanks for reading!
 

Marc

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.“

Summary

In the past couple weeks after your server upgrades, you’ve managed to get a few people upgraded to Lotus Notes R8.5 Fix Pack 1 manually (mostly the “top-brass” to speed up adoption of Lotus Notes R8.5 FP1 in the company). Word is spreading around about the awesomeness of Lotus Notes R8.5 and people want to have it installed without waiting for the training sessions to be ready. So, what do you do (especially when you can’t say “no” because it’s the VP of HR asking to be upgraded)?

Do you go desk-by-desk and upgrade employees manually? Or do you finally decide to sit down and make SmartUpgrade work in your company?

If you are like me, you decided to sit down and (at least try to) make SmartUpgrade work.

However, chances are that your company is like the one that I work for and has many “remote” employees who don’t have access to a file server AND who also happen to be configured as “Users” or “Power Users” on their desktop/laptops. Because of that, you can’t tell them to simply access a network drive and double-click on the setup.exe of the R8.5 install package. And even if they could: they wouldn’t be able to upgrade because of their limited rights. So, what do you do in this case?

Well, you use SURunAsWizard.exe to create a self-contained executable that logs into the machine with a user id that has Administrator rights to the machine and does the upgrade for you. Sounds cool isn’t it? Too bad it’s broken in R8.5 Fix Pack 1.

The Problem with SURunAsWizard.exe in R8.5 Fix Pack 1

Ahhhh SURunAsWizard.exe … one of the much touted “features” in R7.0.2 and up (if I remember correctly but I can’t remember what I did last week so don’t quote me on this ok?). Oh what a joy it promises to be. The “end-all/solve all” solution: with a few clicks you can package the install files in a (quite large) executable file so that they run under an administrator account, attach it to your SmartUpgrade “kit” document and, via policies and/or groups, let SmartUpgrade run magically to upgrade your users.

Unfortunately for me, I had a really tough time (a root canal procedure would have been easier … I think) to get SURunAsWizard.exe to work right. In fact, it’s only after opening a PMR with Lotus Support and diligently working with 2 support reps that we discovered that there is a bug with the SURunAsWizard tool in R8.5 Fix Pack 1 when you try to package all the files in 1 single (and large) executable. SURunAsWizard.exe works perfectly fine in R8.5 FP1 IF you tell it to “Store a Reference to a file on a network share” … but not with the “Store files into the SURunAs executable, creating a self-contained package” option.

What is the exact problem? Well, if you put that large executable that SURunAsWizard created on one of your coworkers computer with limited rights and double-click on it … you’ll get a nice messagebox that says “Failed to launch process as specified user” on the 1st line and “Error 123: The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect” on the 2nd line.

SURunAsWizard in R8.5 ... The Error when you use a single exe package

If you’re curious like me, you’ll do a Google search on the error and you’ll end up with technote #1247849. That technote mentions that error (scroll to the bottom) but it only says “This is not a Lotus Notes error, but an error from the Wizard indicating that either there is a problem with the local user account on the OS, or the user information was entered incorrectly in the wizard.” … and it also says “In Windows XP, you can verify the user information entered in the wizard by pathing out to the MSI location, right-click on the MSI, choose RunAs. If there is no problem with the user account and if the user information was entered in the wizard correctly, there will be no error. Creating a new user account on the OS should resolve this error.”. In this case, it’s a lie: the problem is with the SURunAsWizard tool.

But anyway,  for the fun of it, you re-create the package just in case you made a typo in the user name and password … several times. You even try different switches to pass to the setup.exe when you are creating the package. Alas, nothing works. You then follow what the technote says and re-create another account on the OS (and your package again so that it uses the new user id and password) just to see if it helps but it dosen’t resolve it.

Now, if you look on the hard drive, in my particular case at the root of the C: drive, you’ll find the log file that the SURunAsWizard generates when it tries to run.

The Log File created by the package of the SURunAsWizard

When you open that log file, you’ll see a nice error that says that it can’t detach files to a strange path … notice how it tries to re-create a “C:\Temp” folder structure? That’s really odd.

Starting SURunAs logging
Created temporary subdirectory: C:\DOCUME~1\mchampoux\LOCALS~1\Temp\SURunas1392\C:\Temp\85Final
***> Failed to detach resource file to C:\DOCUME~1\mchampoux\LOCALS~1\Temp\SURunas1392\C:\Temp\85Final\instmsia.exe
Created temporary subdirectory: C:\DOCUME~1\mchampoux\LOCALS~1\Temp\SURunas1392\C:\Temp\85Final
***> Failed to detach resource file to C:\DOCUME~1\mchampoux\LOCALS~1\Temp\SURunas1392\C:\Temp\85Final\instmsiw.exe
Created temporary subdirectory: C:\DOCUME~1\mchampoux\LOCALS~1\Temp\SURunas1392\C:\Temp\85Final
***> Failed to detach resource file to C:\DOCUME~1\mchampoux\LOCALS~1\Temp\SURunas1392\C:\Temp\85Final\setup.exe
[... there's a ton more entries ...]
Setting current directory to C:\DOCUME~1\mchampoux\LOCALS~1\Temp\SURunas1392\
COMMAND: C:\DOCUME~1\mchampoux\LOCALS~1\Temp\SURunas1392\C:\Temp\85Final\setup.exe setup -d -a /s /w /v”ALLUSERS=1 /qb+”
USERNAME: adminid
DOMAIN: HP6120
***> Failed to launch process as specified user.
Error 123: The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.
Stopping SURunAs logging

So … logically speaking, it’s normal that it fails miserably … that’s not a valid path in Windows because it’s illegal to create a folder with a “:” in it.

Ok, this was a long post … so get on with it: what’s the solution???

The Solution

Simple: if you absolutely must create a self-contained package for your R8.5 deployment, simply use the SURunAsWizard from your R7.0.2 (or higher) installation. I’m serious.

This problem was SPRed by Lotus Support as SPR #ALAS7WES7X.

Enjoy!

Summary

Another late night programming session … your vision is getting blurry and you ran out of Red Bull a few hours before that. Somewhere in your LotusScript code, there’s 1 line with a call to the “EndSection()” method of the NotesRichTextItem class … but for one reason or another you didn’t call the “BeginSection()” beforehand (you thought you did but it’s late) … it dosen’t matter right?

So you test your agent on the server and it Panics and Faults right away! The code dosen’t even go into your ErrorHandler routine (you have one right?) … sooooo what gives?

Steps to Reproduce the Error

If you want to reproduce the error, simply create a new scheduled agent in a database on one of your Lotus Domino R8.5 Fix Pack 1 test servers (or on a production server if you enjoy the occasional lynch mob running after you around the office with torches and pitchforks – hey they say running is good for you) and paste this code into the Initialize section of the agent:

On Error Goto ErrorHandler
 
 Dim Session As New NotesSession
 Dim NewEmail As NotesDocument
 Dim NewBody As NotesRichTextItem
 
 Set NewEmail = Session.CurrentDatabase.CreateDocument
 Set NewBody = New NotesRichTextItem ( NewEmail , “Body” )
 
 Call NewBody.EndSection()
 
 Exit Sub
 
ErrorHandler:
 
 Print “An error occured in the agent MCXTestAgent”
 Exit Sub

Notice that there isn’t any call to the “BeginSection” method? Now, either let the agent run on it’s schedule and watch the server Fault OR issue a TELL AMGR RUN “YourDatabaseName.nsf” ‘YourAgentName’ command … and watch it Fault.

The Solution

While this is technically a problem with LotusScript and it should have gone into the ErrorHandler routine … it’s also, technically speaking, a problem with your code … i.e. you should have have called a “BeginSection” a couple of lines above somewhere in there. So just add the “BeginSection” call where it needs to be and enjoy.

To be safe, I opened a ticket with Lotus Support to report this “behavior”. The support rep who called me back said he was able to reproduce the error quite easily and that he opened SPR #JSHN7WBRPM in regards to this issue.