Lotus Notes 8.51 Auto Capitalise start of sentence, fix teh to the, stop double capitals 

I have just spotted this new feature on Lotus Notes 8.51 client:
The options are self explanatory.
They are not selected by default which seems silly. The options can probably be set by a policy.

Go into Preferences->Spell Check  and then select the options under Instant Corrections.


NB You do not need to restart the Notes Client for these settings to work.

Comments (2)
Adam Foster October 26th, 2009 11:29:28

Quickr content on your Blackberry or iPhone 

Here at LAN 2 LAN one of our developers has cracked it with a web based application, that allows you to get at your Quickr Content from your handheld device.

Adam Foster (uber developer!) has created a Domino Application which sits on your Lotus Domino Quickr Server and renders the content down to  your handheld device, which is either a Blackberry or iPhone.

If your handheld operating system supports the attachment, you can download it and view it on your device.

That means right now  

iPhone
iPhone can view PDF, RTF, Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote), and most image attachments. The Word and Excel viewers appears to use the same simplified rendering as Mac OS X's TextEdit program, so not all formatting or embedded graphics may be displayed as they would in Word.

Blackberry Bold
Word, Excel and Powerpoint (2003 format) can all be viewed natively on the device. Image file types are supported as well, ie GIF / JPEG .

Now when I'm out on the road, I can read my Word Documents / Powerpoint Presentations / Excel Spreadsheets all from my bold!

Kudos goes out to Adam for this. Well done Adam!

Now this application is not even a beta, and it is functional rather than pretty .. I've included some obligatory  screen shots from my Blackberry Bold.
As these screen shots have been taken from our production Quickr server, I've had to black out some of the content.

Login Screen



Place Catalog After Login (ooh I'm a Super User :-) ! )



Select the ultrademo place




Select the Library and then click on the Document Link




The Document Properties are displayed. Click on the Attachment Link



And.. hey presto ! a Powerpoint presentation served from Quickr on my Blackberry Bold !




If you would like to know more about this application, please don't hesitate to contact us here at LAN2LAN.

Comments (0)
Andy Dennis October 22nd, 2009 20:48:13

Lotus Domino Quickr allow a subroom to have multiple parents 

We were tweaking a presentation for our Disaster / Incident solution Congrego and the salesman asked me to move 2 of the sub rooms to be under another sub room.
Instead of deleting the sub rooms and recreating them and adding the themes and data, I copied the connection document from the original parent's System/Subrooms view into the new parent Place's System/Subrooms view.
Hey presto suddenly the sub rooms were accessible from two different Lotus Quickr parent places.
When you "Go up" from the sub room it goes back to the original Quickr parent place, but this can be changed by setting the h_AreaParent field in the h_RoomSettings document in the System/Settings view of the sub room.

NB The places were all in the same directory.
Potential future issues, on cascading the membership, but I will keep an eye on this.
This would also work to change the parent of a sub room.
I might make a Lotus Quickr tool to do this from a web page.

Comments (0)
Adam Foster October 22nd, 2009 12:33:24

Lotus Notes 8.51 Designer - Right Click "Open Declaration" functionality 

Lotus Notes 8.51 free designer is more Eclipse like.

It has a right click menu item "Open Declaration".

Left click or focus on a function name, then this nifty right click functionality zooms you to  where the function or constant or subroutine is defined.
Nice.

Would be nicer if you could open it in a new window...
In fact you cannot open a design element in another new window, which is a bit annoying, unless I am missing something...?

Comments (0)
Adam Foster October 19th, 2009 15:56:42

BES and Lotus Domino 8.5.1 (Blackberry Administration) 

Is Lotus Domino 8.5.1 a supported platform for the BES 4.0/4.1/5.0 Server?

Checking our internal support Matrix yields the following results:

4.0 = no
4.1 = no
5.0 = no although it will be in future updates to BES5.0 and 4.1.6 onwards (release dates to be confirmed)

Lotus Domino 8.5.0 base IS supported for BES 5.0.0..

So, you shouldn't upgrade your BES Server to Lotus Domino 8.5.1. yet !!!

Comments (6)
Andy Dennis October 16th, 2009 15:09:46

Windows 7 and Lotus Notes 8.5.1 

After 2 years of Vista, I've taken the plunge and upgraded my trusty Lenovo X61s to Windows 7 Enterprise Edition and I'm pleasantly surprised ! Out of the box, the majority of drivers are supported and so far, all I've installed is the ThinkVantage Power Manager and the Fingerprint Reader drivers.

All of my day-to-day software like office, firefox, google chrome all work without any issue and, its a lot quicker that Vista.

So, it starts up quickly, auto-resumes like my Mac, automatically connects with my AD credentials to our internal Trapeze wireless networks , has fingerprint recognition protection on the laptop on startup and for authenticating to our Active Directory Domain and runs Lotus Notes 8.5.1 without any issue!!

Standard Techie Disclaimer: Lotus Notes 8.5.1 is not officially supported on Windows 7  . Try it at your own peril .. :-)

Comments (2)
Andy Dennis October 15th, 2009 16:01:29

Lotus Notes 8.5.1 and Windows XP Support 

Now that Lotus Notes 8.5.1 had been released, administrators everywhere are looking to upgrade their clients but there appears to be some confusion on which service pack is the minimum requirement for  Windows XP.

The Announcement Letter for Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1 states you need Windows XP Service Pack 3 but this is not strictly true. According to the following technote Windows XP Service Pack 2 is the minimum system requirement ..

Of course LAN 2 LAN always recommend that you have the latest service packs and security fixes on your workstations .. ;-)

Comments (0)
Andy Dennis October 15th, 2009 15:42:41

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

Quickr Domino 8.0.2 FP4 FTW! 

It's worked again, folks!

Go to fix central and download FP4 for Quickr 8.0.2 - contains the fix for our previously reported Quickr / Connections Communities naming issue, and a bunch of other goodies I'm sure.

Comments (0)
Peter Smith October 14th, 2009 15:54:26

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