Month: June 2010

Traveler unlimited

With iOS4, Apple allows more than one Echange account on the iPhone. Therefore you can now have more than one IBM Lotus Notes Traveler account on your device.

Mikkel Heisterberg already wrote about this yesterday.  I configured my iPhone 3GS after apgrading to iOS4 to sync mails from the Domino server in my company and from my server at home.

It works like a treat, although the power consumption increased. You can view mails, calendar and contacts from both accounts mixed together in one view or you can switch between the accounts to show only mails from one account at a time. Same for the calendar.

You also have access to addressbooks on both servers.

But you will only be able to read encrypted mails in one of your accounts, because Traveler Companion only supports one configuration.

Maybe IBM will enhance this in the future when multiple IBM Lotus Traveler accounts are used by more and more customers and will become a supported configuration .


BLUG meeting and a DAOS problem

Yesterday another meeting of the Belgium BELUX Lotus User Group (BLUG) took place in the IBM Forum in Brussels. It wasn’t a full day event, but I decided to drive the 220 km to the meeting.

There were two one hour sessions on the agenda. Joel Demay presented the new features that are coming with Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.2 and Roland Driesen talked about document management.

Again, the meeting was well organized with welcome coffee and a free bar. Theo had about 70 registrations. I’m not sure if all of them attended. But it is very impressive to see that so many people are interested in getting together for such a short meeting.

I was introduced to one customer as “the DAOS specialist”, which I’m not … He told me about an issue he had when activating DAOS on Domino for AIX.

When you enable DAOS by typing load convert -c -daos on mail\db.nsf for the very first time, no subdirectories are created in the DAOS repository and as a result, no files are transported to the repository. You have to manually create a subdir in the DAOS repository ( 0001 ) first.

After this, DAOS works as expected and new subdirs are created automatically.


OpenNTF : Domino Team MailBox

After a period of silence, a new version of the Domino TeamMailBox has been released a few days ago on OpenNTF . Ben Rose (jaffacake.net) is the new project chef. He enhanced the “old” template with some new options.

Future plans are to create a template for Notes 8.x.

I have translated the V7 template into German. Other languages are still missing  for the V7 release.

So download the original template, open it in designer, translate all the strings to your language and send the results to Ben. Any help in translating, finding and fixing bugs and adding new features and options is much appreciated.


Configure Teamstudio Undo to maintain *.nsf files

By default Teamstudio Undo only monitors changes in template files (*.ntf). If you open an application (*.nsf) with Undo, you see the following on your display

To maintain Notes application in the same way like templates, open the teamstudio.ini file in your notes data directory, locate the IncludeFiles= entry in the [Undo] section and append  *.nsf separeted by a comma to the existing entry. ( IncludeFiles=*.ntf,*.nsf )

You need to restart the client for the changes to take effect.


Teamstudio and Ytria together in perfect harmony

I am using the tools from Ytria for a couple of years now and they helped me to solve issues with document data, agents, bulk update of view properties and so on.

Today I received the license keys for the Teamstudio tools. I have Lotus Notes 8.5.2 CD5 BETA installed and despite a installer warning that the installed Notes version is not (yet) supported, the tools installed without any issue and now live in perfect harmony with Ytria‘s EZ-Suite.

I am not yet familiar with all the features of the tools but have some time over the weekend to learn how to use and get the most out of them.

I also talked to a Teamstudio sales representative and they offered me a referral contract. No problem with that, but I do not want to earn zillions of Euros talking and writing about the tools.

I would like to give something back to our wonderful community instead:

If you place an order for any of the Teamstudio tools and refer to “eknori” or “Ulrich Krause” you will get a 10% discount.

This offer is valid until the end of july.


Domino Mobile Admin ( for Blackberry )

Found an email today in my inbox from a Notes fellow from Turkey, Ferhat Bulut:

I am working for a commercial application which will run on Blackberry and will be integrated with Lotus Domino. You can easily manage some operations on your –company’s- domino servers from your blackberry device wherever you are. …

If you are looking for such an application, you will find more information on this website.


[Guest Blog] Why is IBM doing such an easy job for Microsoft?

Here is another guest blog entry from Matthias:

Problems with Sametime embedded clients and their compatibility against each other running a sametime 8.5 Server.

  1. IBM did a great marketing job to get existing notes 6 or notes 7 customers to Notes 8.5 (new features like DAOS, id vault and so on)
  2. Lotus Notes  8.5 comes with the  8.0.1 Sametime client embedded. Everything works just fine. Doesn’t matter if you have ST751 or ST801 client. You can video call or just call, chat etc.
  3. Now you upgrade your sametime infrastructur from ST751 or St80x to ST85 and you want to use the new meeting rooms and the new audio and video codecs.

Everything great so far.

Now the first big issue where it seems that domino development does not collaborate with sametime development:

It is not possible to upgrade the embedded ST801 clients to ST85 cos some guys decided to switch the eclipse framework between Notes 8.5 and Notes 8.5.1

Assume you have around 2500 clients running Notes 8.5.0 FP1 with embedded ST801 and you have a new Sametime 8.5 Server.

Second big issue.

  • How can you achieve that the 2500 clients can use the new functionality of meeting rooms and codecs when you cannot upgrade from embedded ST801 to ST85??
  • Well, 8.5.0 Client is not that old that I want to migrate now every machine again to 8.5.1 just to use the embedded ST85 client and can have the meeting rooms and the other functionality.

Fortunately we are migrating at the end of the year to Windows 7. We decided to use  Lotus Notes 8.5.1 clients and upgrade the embedded ST802 to St85.
And exactly here starts the next problem:

  • A Notes 851 client with embedded ST85 cannot video or audio call a Notes 850 client with embedded ST801. The funny thing is that there comes the error message that the other user has no audio or video tools. If the ST801 clients starts the call then the error comes up that the ST85 user declined the call.

So there is not compatibility between those clients for video and audio call and no clear error messages why it does not work.

Now IBM please tell the customers

  1. Why the development teams do not talk to each other and are doing such annoying stuff
  2. How to avoid different versions between a Windows7 or Lotus Notes 851 rollout between the users and that the functionality of a ST85 can be used.

Now I have the choice between not using the functionality and leave all 851 clients on ST802 with win7 and start a second rollout after the big win7 rollout or tell the users that sometimes it will not work cos someone is running ST801 and the other one is running already ST85.
Do you think that the users will accept this or even understand this???

As a customer, I have to say that this is very, very annoying and it makes it very easy to switch to Microsoft. If it is better there doesn’t play a big role in that case, it is just a political decission that it might be better there.

Your turn IBM Wink