Quickr 8.2 Supported on 8.5.1 

IBM aren't hanging around in getting 8.5.1 into the marketplace. They have already announced that Quickr 8.2 is now supported on 8.5.1.

Whew! Seeing as I was going to do a sample upgrade anyway at least I can rest assured it is supported. Saying that, can't find (yet) documentation about using 8.5.1 SPNEGO with Quickr - an item high on my to do list.

In the Domino Admin guide it talks about using Internet Sites for handling users who cannot participate in Windows Integrated Sign-On, which is a bit tricky considering the lack of support for Internet Sites in Sametime and Quickr.

Rest assured brave readers (or at least brave web crawlers), when I crack it I will post the info here.

Comments (1)
Peter Smith October 15th, 2009 13:40:15

Integrating Connections With Quickr 

One of the new features in Connections 2.5 is the ability to link Communities with Quickr places, so that a community can be provisioned with a collaborative document sharing environment.

We're trying to get this working on a customer deployment and have come across a classic problem.

The API creates folders for the quickr such as.. Lotusquick\Teamspace_20for_CommunityName. The problem is that Quickr does not allow capital letters in folder names, and through the native create place methods will alter capitals to lowercase for you. See technote 1402477 - this technote strangely is not showing up on the web, but is in the .nsf version.

UPDATE: My good friend Stuart has found the technote, not through Google but by searching ibm.com! Technote.
You can rest assured that a PMR is hot on it's way to IBM - maybe blogging will have the same result as the AD / DA problem last month!

In the meanwhile you merely need to manually change the folder names to lowercase in Quickr and it will work. Not a great solution but if you have  a number of active Communities you could get them working while we wait for a fix.

Comments (0)
Peter Smith October 7th, 2009 12:42:54

Cloud Life 

This week saw the launch of the latest cloud offering from IBM -  LotusLive iNotes - a hosted resilient mail solution to compete against Google and Microsoft.

This kicked off the ongoing debate (internally) about the general move, or perceived move, to cloud based services. The lure of dispensing with complex in-house server environments and all the associated costs of maintaining them, in favour of consolidated, centralised managed services is tempting many organisations.

Of course the devil is in the detail and the vision of "The Cloud" for customers tends to have a thousand shades of gray. Wikipedia defines cloud computing as -

"an example of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them."

On this basis, enterprises that already have a data centre or hub site that has links allowing users to connect from the Internet are already providing a form of (Private) cloud services. Moving further into the cloud is really a discussion on improving resilience, scalability and a support model for those services. This could entail moving to hosted environments with managed servers through to outsourcing complete solutions such as email to a provider such as IBM.

Many enterprises still consider the Public Cloud as currently a no-go area. Reasons include data security  and SLA concerns, data compliance/governance regulations and the complexity of migrating legacy applications. This is where Private Clouds step-in by providing cloud benefits whilst retaining the data within the enterprise perimeter for compliance. For many this will provide a stepping stone to cloud services as issues around adopting Public Clouds are resolved.

The reality is that most organisations will end up with a Hybrid Cloud (think IBM coined that one) with a mixture of ring-fenced (bespoke or sensitive) services in a Private Cloud, and other standard offerings (email, productivity suites etc) supplied by Public Cloud vendors.

Gartner predicts that IT organisations will spend more on Private Clouds than Public Clouds through 2012, with the bulk of Public Cloud usage devoted to "very large data queries, short-term massively parallel workloads, or IT use by start-ups with little to no IT infrastructure".

Relating all this to the day job we are beginning to see companies adopting cloud strategies, with the objective of delivering services in a cloud model. To help them achieve this we are working on several infrastructure consolidation and virtualization projects, to reduce the footprint of services and prepare them for life beyond the LAN.

Comments (0)
Peter Smith October 6th, 2009 11:30:28

Is this a blog or a wishing well? 

No sooner did I decide (After much frustration) to blog about Active Directory and Directory Assistance not working, than I receive the following email..

 
Hi Peter,

You will be pleased to know that the following Quickr Defect (SPR) has now been resolved in Quickr Hotfix build 8.2.0.4-004a:

Lotus Quickr SPR #DAMC7TWHQT                                            
Brief Description:   Quickr 8.2 - Cannot add Active Directory groups to Quickr using Directory Assistance                                        
APAR ID: LO42468

I have tested the fix and can confirm that you can now add groups from the Active Directory LDAP. I was then able to log into the place as a member of a group and there did not appear to be any issues.

Please note, this build is likely to be this month's FixPack (8.2.0.4) which will be released on Fix Central in the next few days.


So, there we have it. Coincidence or the blog acting as a wishing well? Perhaps another test to prove it one way or the other... hmm let's see - admin client for Mac or the ability to map to Quickr folders?

Choices choices.

Comments (0)
Peter Smith October 1st, 2009 20:46:22

Quickr 8.2 + Directory Assistance + Active Directory = Fail! 

Those who run Quickr against multiple LDAP sources by using Directory Assistance take note.

There is a regression error in the underlying 8.5 Domino server which cause LDAP lookups for AD groups to fail, regardless of how you set the filters.

This has been reproduced by IBM and is in triage with Development, so check with support before you upgrade to see if it has been fixed.

Why would you want to use DA for LDAP you ask? Well, Quickr natively can only support one LDAP source and if you want to give access to users from multiple directories the way to do it (apart from federating LDAP servers), is to give Domino control of the directory and then use DA to set up multiple links to LDAP servers. A great work-around, until now of course.

Watch out for my article on restricting access for LDAP users to Quickr through filters, coming soon!

Comments (0)
Peter Smith September 30th, 2009 16:29:41

Enabling DAOS in Quickr 

One of the great features of Quickr 8.2 for Domino (of which there are many), is that it can take advantage of the functionality in the underlying Domino 8.5 server, specifically DAOS.

The Domino Attachment Object Store reduces disk storage and I/O by writing attachments directly to a file system and single instancing them. While the benefit of this on mail servers is self evident, IBM studies have shown that on Quickr systems you can still achieve a 10% disk storage saving - users seem to want to store documents multiple times, but that's another rant.

The real benefit of DAOS in Quickr is that it extends the scalability of the system as attachments no longer reside in databases, removing the performance impact of the server having to open and maintain huge NSF files. Out of the box DAOS is not enabled as part of a Quickr install, and even after configuring the underlying Domino server each Quickr NSF must be enabled through the Administration client.

This can be a real challenge in expanding Quickr environments, especially where users self provision places, and cause an ongoing Admin overhead. There is, of course, a simple solution. DAOS is enabled through an advanced database property on the NSF. To automatically enable DAOS for new Quickrs set the property in the templates that create the main.nsf and rooms for Quickrs.

Main.nsf inherits from h1_meetingroom and rooms from h1_pagelibrary which are templates located in Data\LotusQuickr\AreaTypes. Set the database property "Use Domino Attachment and Object Store" and all new places and rooms will automatically inherit the setting. You will need to do this for each placetype on the server that you think will benefit from DAOS.

Why they don't spell out this stuff on the Infocenter is beyond me.

Existing places will need to be changed - for this I like to keep a developer handy, or you can just "mass select and click" to set the property. Remember to run "compact -c daos", preferably via a program document out of hours, to move existing attachments out into the DAOS store.

Comments (0)
Peter Smith September 29th, 2009 15:03:35