Month: February 2010

Lotus Traveler calendar invites on iPhone caveat

Just after we had our main Domino servers in the office upgraded to 8.5.1 FP1 I looked into doing to Lotus Traveler configuration updates required to be able to process calendar invites on the iPhone. I did the changes, restarted Lotus Traveler but were unable to see invites on my phone. I messed a little around with it but with no success. Today however I heard other iPhone-enabled colleagues mention that they processed invites on their iPhones. WTF!!

Tonight it hit me why. I have been using the Notices mini-view in my Inbox to show calendar invites for easy processing. Having invites show up in the mini-view apparently blocks the invites from reaching my iPhone because after disabling the use of the mini-view in the mail preferences and sending an invite from my private e-mail/calendar system the invite appeared right away on my iPhone. So there it is – problem solved.

Automatically redirect iPhone users to the mobile UI of Lotus Connections

If you’re running Lotus Connections 2.5 and you installed the mobile interface you really should redirect your mobile users to this interface and not have them remember the URL to the mobile interface. By default users need to specify http://<hostname>/mobile to access the mobile interface (see bleedyellow.com/mobile if you want to see what it looks like) which is not what you want. You want it to happen automatically. To accomplish this simply use mod_rewrite to automatically redirect the user based on the User-Agent of the accessing browser (much like setting the default feature).

To add a mod_rewrite rule to automatically redirect iPhone users add the following to your httpd.conf and restart IHS. Doing the same for Nokia S60 users should be equally easy if you know the User-Agent for those phones.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "^Mozilla/[0-9].[0-9] (iPhone.*"
RewriteRule  ^/?$ /mobile [R,L]

Easy isn’t it?

Remember Lotusphere Comes To You next week in Copenhagen and Århus

If you missed Lotusphere 2010 then do remember that Lotusphere Comes To You next week in Copenhagen and Århus. Among others I’ll be no stage at both events to talk about Lotus Connections and how you may get started easily whether that be with an on-premise solution (Lotus Connections) or a hosted solution (LotusLive Engage/LotusLive Connections). You may sign up for LCTY 2010 here.

I’m a certified Lotus Connections 2.5 Administrator


It’s official – I’m certified! How cool is that?! The certification exam was quite hard and the questions range from Websphere Application Server administration questions to administering the individual features to configuring security to deployment scenarios. There’s a huge deal of things you need to know and the infocenter was my friend throughout preparing for the exam. Don’t bother taking the exam if you haven’t worked with the product for a while and put in the hours preparing.

I must admit that this is my first ever Lotus certification as I’ve never had the need before. While studying for this exam my view on certification has changed a bit. Before taking this exam I heard all the stories about certification and how it was about know exact UI wording etc. This exam was nothing like that. The question was very valid and made you think quite a lot and base your answer in your knowledge of the product. An exam as it should be. Another benefit is that I’ve read about areas of the product I otherwise wouldn’t have and I’ve discovered quite some stuff that I need to implement or configure at customers. All very nice.

Trying a move to the Mac

This week I’ll be trying a move to the Mac as Per Henrik Lausten (@perlausten) was kind enough to lend me his Macbook Pro until Thursday. I’ve had it for a couple of hours now and it’s already becoming easier. One of my pet pives is keyboard navigation which is something I really want and need. I’m a keyboard kind of guy so being able to navigate applications using the keyboard is going to one of the deciding factors. Finding links like this sure makes it easier but the judge is still out.

I’ll post more as I progress through the week.

Managing my calendar workwise and personally – this is how I’m trying to do it

So I have an iPhone and work with calendars on a daily basis so I’m constantly looking for new ways to work with them. For a long time I have been pondering the separation of calendar usage between my work and private life. Ideally they should be separate but viewable together. Up to now I haven’t really found a solution that worked and have been using my Notes calendar for everything using it both from my Notes client and my portable device (aka cellphone). The main problem with that was that there was no easy way to allow my wife, family or others to peek into my calendar on an adhoc basis. I know there’s stuff like Tungle but lets face it – it’s still in beta and it will be some time before it’s Wife certified… 🙂

As of yesterday I think I have the solution though.

Part of Notes 8 is how easy it is to federate calendars into the product calendar by adding either iCal, Google calendars or the like into the calendar using calendar overlays (much has been written about that so Google away if you need more info). I have been perfectly happy with my current setup (using my Notes calendar and Lotus Traveler for everything) up to now but using an iPhone finally pushed me over the edge. The reason? Well there is no way to mark an appointment on the iPhone as private. It does however have the concept of multiple calendars. Whether that’s a shortcoming in the iPhone I’ll leave up to you.

However much I like my colleagues I don’t think they necessarily should have the possibility to see, or be burdened with, what I’m doing on my own time so not being able to mark appointments from the iPhone as private has been an issue for me. When I created appointments on my iPhone (during my weekly calendar sync with my paper-calendar using wife) I had to remember to edit the appointments afterwards in Notes and set the private flag which was cumbersome and a hassle. Plus forgetting it made me ripe for ridicule from my colleagues when they saw what my wife made me agree to!

Yesterday I decided to do something about it and investigated it again. I moved my private calendar to my Google calendar after discussing it on Twitter with members of the community incl. Per Henrik Lausten (who is also my new McDaddy and Mac pusher). Now I’m using CalDAV to federate/sync my Google calendar to my iPhone. My Notes calendar is already there using Lotus Traveler and appointments are easily distinguishable as work appointments are in red and private appointments are in blue. In my Notes calendar I simply use a calendar overlay to display my private calendar alongside my work calendar using the same color scheme. My private calendar is even available offline by checking a box – does it get any sweeter? For me it’s as near to perfect as seems possible now.

I want to thank the community on Twitter for pointing me in the right direction. If you want to see how to configure CalDAV on your iPhone I suggest ‘How to Sync Google Calendar With iPhone Calendar‘ as an easy way to get started. Happy Friday!

Doing Java plugins? Then you need to checkout this OpenNTF.org project

Props goes out to the Java UI Team (Ryan Baxter, Adam Geheb, Stanton Sievers) for publishing the Java UI API Exerciser plugin showing how to use the Java UI API for the Notes client. If you’re doing Java plugins for the Notes client you definitely want to check it out. Installation is also very easy because it’s signed and as such also serves as a showcase on how plugin deployment works when it’s fully transparent.

More info can be found on the catalog entry.

Notes 8 Utility plugins


From time to time I come across some functionality I think should be part of the Notes client but isn’t. If it’s really a big pain point for me and I can implement it myself I do so as a Notes plugin. I’ve implemented a number of such plugins over time but few have ever been published. Since I get requests for similar functionality from time to time I decided to create a page and publish the functionality there as I find the time and dig out the code and polish it of. I envision the list growing over time so do come back! 🙂

If you got suggestions let me know.

Further reading: Notes 8 Utilities