Month: November 2006

Re: Still a Domino Developer

There’s quite a heated discussion going on at the moment at edbrill.com and at codestore.net. I’m a bit late to chime in but here’s my 5 cents…

I enjoy working in Notes/Domino and overall I think that the platform really kicks a…! Does the product have its shortcomings? Sure – but that is true for most Swiss-army knife products. Could things be done better? Sure – but so it’s true for many other applications and environments. Do I always agree with the decisions of Lotus? Nope – but I hardly ever agree with anybody… 🙂

Being serious for a moment… My number one grievance with Lotus is not about feature XYZ but rather that that the bug/feature submission process for many IBM products, incl. Lotus Notes, is opaque. Once the bug/feature request is submitted it is very difficult to get the *real* status on the issue unless you know someone on the inside.

Would it be possible to make bug/feature request submission more transparent? What if the bug/feature request database was available on the web for all to peruse? Bug tracking systems like Atlassian JIRA and Bugzilla have functionality for voting on bugs. In this way all customers and business partners could see what’s going on and what’s actively being developed. It could also help Lotus to gauge what’s really important to developers and what’s not.

While I know that a process is probably not always possible I think it would go a long way to give developers an outlet for issues and ideas. It could be that I as an user wouldn’t be allowed to create issues in the database myself but it would give me a chance to keep track of my issues.

Just a thought…

Sametime 7.5 client language when doing plugin development


If you are doing any Sametime 7.5 plugin development you might have noticed that the client always starts up in your local language – Danish in my case. If your native language isn’t English and you’re developing international plugins you might want to run the Sametime client in English instead which you can do by adding a command line parameter in your launch configuration.

To do this open your launch configuration, go to the Arguments-tab and add “-nl <locale>” (without the quotes) in the “Program arguments” field. The specified locale can be any valid Java Locale such as US, DK or DE.

What to do when POP3 is not allowed in Microsoft Outlook?

I’m helping a customer migrate e-mails from a Notes mail databases to Microsoft Outlook MSG-file format today. For this process we needed to extract all the e-mails using Outlook POP3 access to Domino. Nice and easy. Unfortunately the installed Outlook client didn’t allow us to configure a POP3 account in Outlook. What to do? Look to Google to provide the answer.

Re:Removing the slash screen from Sametime 7.5

As mentioned in my SnTT post on 5 October 2006 (post) you can remove the splash screen from Sametime 7.5 by hacking the config.ini file in the configuration-directory. A by far easier way is simply to add -noSplash as a command line argument to sametime.exe in your Windows shortcut or to the sametime executable on Linux.

A little easier… 😉

Central repository of known locations for Sametime 7.5

If you have Sametime 7.5 installed and use the location awareness you’ll have a file called locprofile-config.xml holding the locations you have configured so far (mine is in C:Documents and Settingslekkim.HQApplication DataSametime.metadata.pluginscom.ibm.collaboration.realtime.location).

The locations are identified by the network you are connected to and is identified by the current IP-subnet and the MAC address of the default gateway.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<locprofconfig>
   <locprofiles>
      <locprofile profilename="192.168.1.0 00:09:7C:2B:74:88       ">
         <locations>
            <locip>192.168.1.0</locip>
            <macaddr>00:09:7C:2B:74:88</macaddr>
         </locations>
         <personalloc>it-inspiration hq</personalloc>
         <city>københavn k</city>
         <country>DK</country>
         <postalcode>1058</postalcode>
         <primphone>70223141</primphone>
         <shareloc>true</shareloc>
         <timezone>Central European Time (GMT +1)</timezone>
      </locprofile>
      <locprofile>
         ...
      </locprofile>
      <locprofile>
         ...
      </locprofile>
   </locprofiles>
</locprofconfig>

At present the file is person dependent but since it is part of a plugin but I think it would be really cool if parts of the file could be populated from a central repository via an extension point. This way the Sametime Connect client would automatically display the correct location of the user throughout the company without each user having to update the file themselves. It would also mean that the information could be entered and displayed in a consistent manner.

Of cause the user would still have to specify the location details for custom locations such as hotels, home work stations etc. but I think it would make life easier for the majority of users.

Just an idea…

Gems from the 7.0.2 release notes

  • Mail file
    • Allow user to expand public groups to remove certain addresses
      The functionality is created using a special $-field called $ExpandGroups which you might want to use in your own applications:

      FIELD $ExpandGroups := @DeleteField;
@SetField("$ExpandGroups"; "3");
@Command([ViewRefreshFields])
    • Calendar documents which are marked ‘Private’ now get populated in the busytime.nsf without calendar details, but still visible if a delegate can access the mailfile.
  • Domino Designer
    • Support for additional DXL design elements
      New elements for Shared Columns, Shared File Resources, and Shared Stylesheet Resources have been added.
    • User-defined HTML tag attributes
      User-defined attributes can now be added to the tag generated by the web engine. When the field $$HTMLTagAttributes is present on a form, its contents are placed in the attribute list of the tag. For more information, see “Additional HTML-related field attributes” in these release notes
    • Custom declaration
      Users can now specify a custom declaration on a per form basis. When the field $$HTMLFrontMatter is present on a form, its contents will be placed in the generated HTML, ahead of the tag, and the web server will not generate anything there automatically. For more information, see “Additional HTML-related field attributes” in these release notes.
  • Domino Server
    • Allow for basic authentication of some URLs
      Domino 7.0.2 allows certain URLs, for example those that generate RSS feeds, to use Basic Authentication, even if Domino Session Authentication is in effect.

Apart from the changes listed above a bunch of notes.ini variables has been made obsolete so I recommend you go through the list yourself. There are a number of iNotes variables in there (iNotes_WA_*).

7.0.2 also adds iCal support but as a developer you might want to know that the iCal import is limited to 500 documents per file. The following is from the release notes: “Users can import iCalendar files with a maximum of 500 documents; use multiple imports for more than 500 documents.” This could be a problem if you are going to import large calendars. Unfortunately there isn’t a programmatic way of importing the iCal file so you have to go through the File menu.

As always you want to pay special attention to chapter 3: Known limitations, problems, and workarounds.

Direct link to the PDF version of the Notes/Domino 7.0.2 release notes.

Finding Installshield Tuner on Passport – impossible?

Now I have spent the better part of the morning trying to locate InstallShield Tuner for Notes on the Passport site without any luck. The part number for Notes 7 listed in technote 1226984 (p/n: C47CQNA) doesn’t help either since they appear to be for Microsoft Outlook for Domino… 🙁

I’m quite sure it used to be there…

Update: Apparently the key is to search for p/n CR31VNA on Passport. Why I simply cannot search for the p/n of the actual install (C84T5NA) still doesn’t make any sense to me. Via notes.net…

Sametime 7.5 business voes – why doesn’t the picture update?

At the office we are using the business card feature of Sametime 7.5 and up to now it has been working fine since we got past our initial problems with the UserInfoServlet (which made me reverse engineer it). A problem is now appearing though. The problem is that once users update their business card picture in the Domino Directory (we simply populated the field with a “standard” image to begin with) the picture doesn’t update in the Sametime Connect clients. Right-clicking the user in Sametime Connect and selected “Refresh Person Info” doesn’t help either.

Poking around the Sametime folders I found where the cache is kept (“C:Documents and Settingslekkim.HQApplication DataSametime.metadata.pluginscom.ibm.collaboration.realtime.peoplePersonCache” on my computer). In this directory there is a folder per community you have configured in your client. In the folder for our internal community there is a XML-file and an image file per user – the XML file holds the information fetched from the UserInfoServlet-servlet and the image is the business card image.

I thought it was so simple that I could simply modify that last updated timestamp in the XML-file, delete the image file or delete both the XML-file and image file to make Sametime refresh the information. Not so however… 🙁 Exiting the client, manually updating the image and/or modifying the XML-file makes the new information appear when starting the client again.

Looks like the client is caching the information which is all well and good but shouldn’t it update at some point?

I guess that the caching/refreshing is governed by some other setting – maybe in the buddylist. Unfortunately I can’t find any information about this subject. All information is related to initially configuring the stuff.