Lotus Nut

I first posted this to my Blogspot blog. The most recent update is for a specific DWA 7 error - and I'm planning on adding some stuff from DWA 8. This post generally ranks high on my search engine hits, so I like to keep it updated from time to time. Hopefully it's helping people get these issues resolved. If you know of a resolution that's not listed, please let me know! This first entry is one that happens pretty frequently. An alternate title could be "iNotes Warning" from previous versions. This document contains two sections. One is a general information section and the other is a section on steps to correct the error(hopefully). Please see the bottom for a change log.

General Information:

The full error message is:
"Microsoft Internet Explorer Domino Web Access Warning. Sorry, we were unable to process your request at this time. If you are unable to continue working in your mail file, please dismiss this warning and then select View, Refresh from your browser's menu."

In Domino Web Access (DWA) 7.0 and higher, there is a new error message that reads "The installation of Domino Web Access 7 Control has been blocked or declined by the user. Do you want to use this on subsequent Domino Web Access pages?" A specific correction for this can be to ensure that the user has at least Power-User authority. Another possible correction is to simply add the DWA server to Internet Explorer's Trusted sites zone.

IBM has two technotes regarding this:

Prompt: 'Installation of Domino Web Access 7 Control has been blocked by the user. Do you want to use Subsequent Domino Web Access Pages?'. This alludes to the DWA7w.cab file being moved or corrupted on the DWA server or even that the default HTML directory has been changed from domino\html. I have notified them that in my experience, this may come up when the DWA server isn't in the trusted sites zone for IE.

Can the Domino Web Access ActiveX Upload Control (iNotes Class) be manually placed on a workstation? While not directly related to the error message, this contains a table of the behaviour of DWA with and without the ActiveX control installed.

Corrective Actions:

Recently, the top two on the following list have been what we have seen to cause more issues. If the computers are external (employees' home PC), then I would definitely bank on them having spyware.

- Disable Pop-Up blocker
- Clean up spyware (use application such as Spybot and/or AdAware)
- Add DWA server to Internet Explorer's Trusted Sites zone (this may be a good idea for any other intranet servers or via an Active Directory policy)
- Clear out Java Cache by running C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_0X\bin\javacpl.exe
---Click “Delete Files” then click “OK”.
---*if there are different versions, do this for each version or uninstall older versions and leave only the newest copy.
- Clear out Windows temp folders.
--- C:\Temp--- C:\Documents and Settings\USER PROFILE\Local Settings\Temp
--- C:\Documents and Settings\USER PROFILE\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
--- C:\Winnt\Temp
--- *Clear out the Temp/Temp. Internet Files for each user listed in the Documents and Settings folder.
- Reset IE to default settings.
--- Right Click on the Internet Explorer icon on the desktop or go to Control Panel and open Internet Options.
--- Click on the Programs Tab. Then click the Reset Web Settings button. Uncheck
“Also reset my home page” then click “OK”.
- Tools > Internet Options > Advanced > Disable "Use HTTP 1.1" (you may need to enable it because sometimes IE just doesn't like the setting. I have actually seen it start working by enabling this option.)
- Tools > Internet Options > Advanced > Disable "Do not save encrypted pages to disk"
- Download the MSXML 4.0 SP2. This link will get you to the download. I selected the msxml.msi.
- Clear Browser Cache
- Delete iNotes or Domino Web Access class file
- If one is currently installed, upgrade to the latest Sun JVM
- Windows Update (also verify that a recent Windows Update has not broken this!)
- Load Convert, Fixup, Updall, and Compact against the mailfile
- Reboot
- Defrag
- Run a tool such as Symantec/Norton WinDoctor

Change Log:
08/14/2006: Added information regarding Java Cache, Temp Folders, and Resetting IE defaults.
04/14/2006: Added information regarding technotes 1228480 and 1161877.
Added comment to Windows Update line to state that a recent update may be causing the problem. I have personally seen this in 2004 and the link in the text above is from April 2006.

In response to: What is your typical database maintenance routine?

Regarding Compact, I had an entry I posted a while back related to fragmentation and compacting. In that, I actually recommended using something like a load compact -c +10. We all know that fragmentation causes very poor performance. However, defragging causes the databases to be even more fragmented because every new write will likely be to a non-contiguous block on the drive. I've been pondering this a lot more lately and thinking that allowing the 10% white space (like you mentioned) is actually a good idea. Something could even be accomplished by some code to add data to a database and then delete it so that there's white space. Then defragmenting that database (using something like defraggler, you can choose to just defrag a single file at a time) will yield a contiguous space that will not become fragmented very quickly. This, coupled with archiving, I believe can be a pretty good boost in i/o performance. I'm cross-posting this comment at my blog too for further thoughts...

Yeah, David beat me to it! I think there were a lot of concerns with previous versions related to DB integrity. So we still see a good many customers still running fixups fairly regularly (more than once per week). I don't guess this would hurt, but it would definitely cause a good bit of overhead for something that's pretty unnecessary.

I would like to inform you of a new blogger - Chad Scott. From his introductory post:


Chad also has a post related to some Issues in Notes and Domino 8.0.1 and how IBM is handling them.

Welcome Chad!

Or "Here are some new features provided by Lotus Connections 2.0"... I think it's pretty awesome that there are 173 blogs hosted here - though most of you need to post a little more frequently!! But for those of you who stay on top of blogging, Connections 2.0 has a lot of nice updates to the Blogs service. The lists below are not exhaustive, but represent many of the new features.

Blogs Home - this feature has been significantly enhanced with extra views and a cleaner presentation of the data.

• Defaults to the most recent entries, but you can sort with various criteria - title, recommendations, comments, visits.
• Display summary (just title) or detail (first ~250 characters of body).
• On the left, you can also browse to All Blogs and My Recommendations.
• Blog Subscriptions - hover over these to either subscribe to Entries or Comments in your browser or by adding them to a Community.
• On the right are links to Featured Blog Entries, Most Recommended, Most Commented, and Most Visited.

Blog Authoring

• If you are a member of a multi-authored blog, you may choose which blog to post to more easily.
• Going into html editing mode, you may embed content from online services, such as YouTube.
• Preview the post before publishing it.
• Embedding images is now much simpler with a "wizard" instead of just entering a URL (to your own upload directory, usually). This will allow you upload directly from your computer, recent photos, or a URL. You may also choose the layout and size of the image and make the settings default. To me, this is very reminiscent of the Blogger upload functionality.

Commenting

• Comments are now in ascending order (like all good blogs should be)! This was one of the biggest complaints from the community and one of the first "issues" we noticed when setting up the site back in December.
• Much-improved comment previewing system. This was also a big complaint because you would have to go "back" in the browser in order to modify what you were previewing. Now, it is all inline.
• Have you ever wanted to cross-post a comment to your own blog? This is now possible using the "Add this comment to my own blog" option!

Etc...

• At the bottom of each blog post is a "Notify Others" option which allows you to select other registered BleedYellow users to send a link to the post you're currently viewing.
• Also at the bottom of each post is a "Flag as inappropriate"
• PlanetLotus "support". There were some formatting issues that prevented direct Connections 1.0.2 feeds from being used at PlanetLotus (you could use FeedBurner, though, which is probably a better idea - allowing you to track subscribers). This has been corrected with Connections 2.0. For the feed you submit to PlanetLotus, you need to use the following format: http://www.bleedyellow.com/blogs/roller-ui/rendering/feed/lotusnut/entries/rss (the default link is "/atom" at the end - Yancy Lent has found that /rss will work with the PlanetLotus feed system!! Thanks Yancy!
  

Funny story - after compiling this list I decided to see if there is a similar list in the InfoCenter, and there is. I believe I actually caught everything except for the AutoSave feature (which I have set for 3 minutes).

After much lab testing, we felt that it was a good time to upgrade BleedYellow to Connections 2.0. As you may have noticed, the site is now Blue. This is the default style for Connections. We are currently in the process of painting it yellow again so that you can see the transformation.

Most of my past week was devoted to testing this upgrade in the lab. After working with IBM and some YellowBleeders, we found that all components (except the forum) were fully operational. But we all know that sometimes success in the lab does not translate into pruduction success. We have seen a few things go wrong with this upgrade. We have encountered an issue with the new Homepage and will be adding that feature shortly. Unfortunately, we have also run into an error with Communities after the upgrade. We're hard at work with IBM to get that resolved. The other known issue is an error message after sending colleague invitations. The invitations do go through and the recipient can accept them, but there is an error when you send it. Feel free to use this feature and disregard the error. We will get that sorted out as well.

So, have fun with the updates to the various features. More on those later...

During the evening of Saturday, August 9, 2008 we will have some scheduled downtime for maintenance of all BleedYellow services.

 

Also, Sametime shouldn't be down for very long.

 

Thank you for your patience...

 

Cross-posted at BleedYellow Site Feedback

Someone sent me an email earlier today with an interesting question. Consider that you want to rollout Lotus Notes 8 Standard but only use the Basic configuration (let's consider that the computers only have 512MB RAM, but a memory upgrade will be deployed later). When doing this with Notes as the default mail application, the Standard configuration will be launched. How can you change this?

1. Open the registry editor.
2. Navigate to hkey_local_machine > software > clients > mail > lotus notes > protocols > mailto > shell > open > command
3. The (Default) value is C:\Program Files\IBM\Lotus\Notes\notes.exe -defini %1
4. Right-click (Default) and choose "Modify"
5. Change the value to C:\Program Files\IBM\Lotus\Notes\notes.exe -sa -defini %1
6. Open Internet Explorer and go to Tools > Internet Options > Programs
7. Change the mail application to Outlook Express and click Apply
   
8. Change the mail application back to Lotus Notes and click OK
9. Click a mailto: link on a webpage and this will launch the Basic Configuration of Lotus Notes!

Note: I should have looked at the devWorks posting that the person sent me along with the email because the solution was (partly) posted there as a response. Over there the solution does not detail what you change the registry value to - just that you change it.

Also, as another addendum to the solution posted at devWorks, this will work with IE and Firefox (I presume it will also work with Opera or whatever else you may use...)

First of all, this is not quite as easy as it should be. For one, you can't force an initial one-way push from iPhone to Google. It's either merging both or overwriting the iPhone's contacts with those from your Google account (the contacts are actually stored in GMail). Make sure you read all of the steps below before just going through them... Also note that these instructions are for Windows, although this should work in much the same manner for Mac. I originally had been synchronizing with MS Outlook, but on my new laptop Outlook was never loaded. So I decided that I would make all of this work with Google now that it's available.

In my case, I had a lot of good contact information on my iPhone that I did not want to lose. But after the initial merge there were a lot of duplicated email addresses. So I proceeded with the cleanup and came up with a nice little procedure below. Also, take note of step 17 - ongoing contact modifications are only one-way (for now) from Google to iPhone. Hopefully this will change with newer versions of iTunes.

1. Get iTunes 7.7 (for Windows)
2. I'm 99.9% certain you don't have to have iPhone 2.0 software to do this since it was available from Mac iTunes for a little while, so this should work with any iPhone.
3. Dock your iPhone and switch to the Info tab for the device and select "Google Contacts" for the contacts sync.
4. Put in your GMail account username and password.
5. Accept the license agreement and this should kick off the initial sync.
6. Choose to merge the contacts.
7. Open GMail in your browser and switch to the "Older Version" at the top right. In the newer/default version, none of the contacts from my iPhone were visible (even though the number of contacts reflected it). In the older version they are all visible - make sure they are all here!!
8. Export your contacts to GMail CSV.
9. Save a copy of that CSV as a backup.
10. Modify the CSV to have the contacts you want. If you're like me, there are probably a good many one-off contacts that you don't want synched to the iPhone. I deleted the vast majority of these. The deletion of the "extra" contacts can also be performed from GMail prior to step 8.
11. Switch back to GMail (should still be in "older version" and DELETE ALL of the contacts! You heard me right...
12. Sync your iPhone again and you'll be prompted to confirm the deletion of all contacts. Confirm this.
13. Switch back to GMail and Import the CSV that you saved in Step 10.
14. Verify that all of the contacts look OK.
15. Switch back to the "Newer Version".
16. I noticed that many of my Contacts were all listed under "Suggested Contacts". You will want to select them all and choose "Move to My Contacts".
17. Sync your iPhone again and all of the contacts will be pushed to the device.
17. Please note that if you modify a contact on the iPhone that it does NOT (yet) push that change up to GMail. You'll have to modify the GMail contact and this will send the changes to the iPhone at the next sync.

The other week I was made aware of something I did not know was possible. It turns out that the reason I never knew it was possible was that it is new with Domino 8. I found this out after attempting the trick on a Domino 7.0.3 server...

With previous releases of Domino, if you wanted to remove a line from the notes.ini, you had to manually edit the file. But now, with Domino 8, you can type set config Notes_ini_Setting= and this will remove the line completely. In previously releases, the line would still exist but it would just have a null value. Below is a screen capture of me doing this.



You can see that I show config to verify the entry exists. Then I set it to = null. Then I show config again and get "Invalid value for command option" (which means the entry does not exist. Finally, I set it back to its original value and show config again to validate that it exists.

Note: If you really want to make sure the entry is gone (and doesn't re-appear or stay enforced), be sure to look through your configuration documents and also remove the entry from the notes.ini section.

Not to be confused with the iPhone 3G (the newly-released hardware that I hope to acquire sometime), the iPhone 2.0 software is now available. I actually loaded mine yesterday after reading of the availability at iPhone Central. Although the 1st Generation iPhones can run this same 2.0 software, there are some extra features that the iPhone 3G will have due to the hardware upgrade. Obviously, it will take advantage of the 3G data networks and it has built-in GPS.

My upgrade to iPhone 2.0 went fairly smoothly. After loading it, I immediately went to the AppStore to get some applications. I was surprised at how many useful, free apps there are! Lifehacker has a list of some of these.

Some of the ones I have loaded are:

• Remote - remotely control your iTunes library over wi-fi. This will be even better if they allow streaming from iTunes through the iPhone! I have noticed some quirks with this when the display shuts off (volume control stops working, play/pause is confused, basically it just stops working!), but closing to the home screen and opening the app brings back the functionality.
• Facebook - works fairly well. I actually really like Facebook's iPhone web app. It actually has more functionality in general. However, the Facebook app allows you to upload photos as well as use Facebook chat
  
• Twitterific - I am not giving up on this yet. I have been using the Hahlo Twitter web app for a while and really dig it, but I will keep trying to use Twitterific.
  
• AOL Radio - Lots of streaming radio stations with options to look for local stations. Works well
• eBay - I like this app a lot so far.
• Bank of America - I am not a customer, but kudos to you for doing this. I have considered switching to BoA because of this. My bank tells me to just use Safari because all of the functionality works. Ok...thanks
• Contacts - So this is pre-loaded with the software. You no longer have to go to the Phone application just to see the contacts!
• WeatherBug - I think I will dig this one. I have been using Weather Underground's excellent web app (http://i.wund.com) for a while. I don't like the radar feature with WeatherBug

So there you go. Enjoy the software upgrade if you are not going to be going to the 3G anytime soon. You can also hold the "home" button and press the top button to take a screenshot!

Oh yeah, since this is a Lotus blog, here is iNotes:



I also have to mention that I find it funny that when adding a mail server that Microsoft Exchange is listed before Apple's mobileme product as an available mail server!! They must have really got in good with Apple!

Over the past couple of weeks, I have had some people email/tweet me about connectivity to im.bleedyellow.com. In these cases, port 1533 was being blocked either at a client location or a public place (even in a hospital!). So the first thing I always mention is to try port 80 and voilà we're in business!

So while we are all thinking about it - change those connections on your laptops!

 Ed Brill points out that Sprint announces Mobile Email Work; access Lotus Domino or Exchange. This is really great news!I'm really glad to see that Sprint is going to have mobile mail available for Domino with around a dozen devices (including the ubiquitous RAZR). I will be interested to see how this actually works, technically. Sprint touts that this will be a "push" mail solution (See Nathan's post on push mail) and that software updates on the device will be forthcoming.

After going to the press release that Ed linked to, I clicked through a couple of pages and found that Sprint does have some more information about this at their website. Thankfully the press release (the item that will have the most hits!) mentions Lotus Domino because Sprint doesn't have a word about it at their mobile email site (at least not yet).  But I did see this at their site - specific mentioning of Exchange:



Sprint worked with Seven Networks to do this. Seven Networks has some info at their website that there is an Enterprise version available to work with Lotus Domino. I'm presuming that this is how Sprint will be licensing this. I know they've been around for a while, but I've never been familiar with their offerings. Perhaps others have some experience.

By the way, in the US, Seven Networks works with Alltel, AT&T, and Sprint. So the big news on Ed's blog is that Sprint actually mentioned Domino. There's nothing really specific that it appears Sprint is doing in this regard other than licensing and marketing their mobile email product running Seven Networks' software.

And while I'm sure the Instinct is a great device, I'm wondering if Apple already has that market cornered with the iPhone - especially whenever it is available on multiple networks. But time will only tell on that.

I just read this over at Kevin Hansen's blog:

This month, an Exchange server will go live in our organization. It will be connected to Domino to allow us to deliver iPhone services to our corporate users. We have a number of iPhones requested from our user community and more are sure to come.

Somehow, I don't believe this is they type of response to John Head's "Call to Action" that was anticipated. Kevin also states that this will be opening the door for more use of Exchange in his company and some likely migrations from Notes mail for certain groups.

It was asked at Ed Brill's blog if companies would seriously choose to move to Exchange just to support the iPhone - apparently the answer is yes. As I'm writing this, there are 367 signatures at the iPetition. This represents mobile users in the tens of thousands. Let us hope that more of these companies do not see more pressure to deliver push mail to iPhones.

I do believe that IBM is trying to get this all sorted with Apple - and much of it is out of IBM's hands. I have tested and provided some feedback on Lotus iNotes Ultralite. I think it is a good interim solution for those who need access to Domino mail from an iPhone. But, I think we all agree that it does not provide the desired long-term solution we all want for push mail and pim sync.

Further, to reiterate what Ed said, none of us really know how the Exchange services are going to work on the iPhone. There has been past debate about whether Exchange Server with Windows Mobile devices actually provides "push" mail. So will the iPhone implementation of this be more of a constant pull than a push? (Not that end-users actually care - they just want instant access to mail...)

I do not want to keep this debate going, but with the knowledge now that there are companies considering Exchange implementations to do this, we should keep this in mind.

If you do, then please go sign this petition: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/iPhoneAndLotus/

And even if you're reading this blog and you're not a Lotus Notes user or even an iPhone user, sign it anyway!!!

Turns out there are many things going on with me this week....

Yesterday I traded my much-loved 2001 Pontiac Grand Prix GTP for a 2006 Toyota Corolla. (gonna miss the 280 lb-ft of torque...but not the 18MPG on Premium fuel)

Here's the dealer photo. My brother has one in red, so now we'll be sporting the Gamecock colors!



Today marks my 1 year anniversary with Lotus 911. This is a superb place to be and I'm enjoying all of the challenges. I think the final line in Scott's introductory email of me to the team here from last year describes this past year well: "If you prick him, he might just bleed yellow too."

This weekend we're planning on going up to SC to visit with family. We're looking forward to two big things on this trip. We'll get to see my wife's mom for the first time since she started chemo last month. She's had some ups and downs with it, but has been doing well lately! Also, my nephew turns 2 tomorrow and will be having his birthday party on Saturday!

OK, back to work...