Author: lekkim

Positive, competent, out-spoken, frank and customer focused architect and developer with a strong foundation in web, cloud and product development. I'm a strong advocate for API first and cloud based solutions and development. I have a knack for being able to communicate and present technically complicated matters in conference, customer and training settings. I've previously acted as team member and leader in a product organisation.

Show ‘n Tell Thursday: Maximizing tabs in DDE (20 October 2011)


It has been a looooooooooooooooong time since I did a SnTT but I found it fitting for this week. The tip is short and very straight forward but will make it easier and more productive for you to work in Domino Designer on Eclipse (DDE).

If you are like me like the navigator in DDE is on the left, and the outline/controls/data views are on the right. You realize that you do not have much space left for code in the center editor. Bummer! 🙁 To help remedy that you may either minimize or close the views on the right but that really isn’t ideal as it takes time and some times you need the views e.g. for XPages work. As an alternative you could figure out which views you use for what tasks and create custom perspectives in DDE for those tasks which isn’t for the Eclipse-superuser. You could also choose the easy solution – simply maximize the editor.

Maximizing the editor is easy. You simply double-click the tab or press Ctrl-M to make the editor go fullscreen. When done you simply double-click the tab again or press Ctrl-M to return it to being “in the middle”. Easy and quick.

Hope it works as nicely for you as it does for me.

New IBM Connections Kick-Start offering

IntraVision is happy to offer a fixed price IBM Connections Kick-Start offering to get you started with IBM Connections per the entitlement offered by IBM as part of the Notes 8.5.3 maintenance release. At our Social Business event on Thursday 27 October (there’s still time to register) we will be happy to discuss this offering as well as our new OnTime for IBM Connections product with you. More information about event may be found as part of our online newsletter (linked below).

IBM Connections Kick-Start and Social Business event with Stuart J. McRae (in Danish).

IBM Connections Extension license

(Of course) Stuart beat me to the punch but I wanted to blog it anyway.

Today IBM officially announced the IBM Connections Extensions Authorized User license as an easy (and inexpensive) way to buy the rest of the IBM Connections suite of features if a customer is making use of the entitlement for Connections Files and Connections Profiles granted as part of Lotus Notes 8.5.3. I too think this is a great move by IBM but asks the question how I’m going to control what parts of Connections users use if running in a mixed environment where some users are using Connections as entitled through Notes and some use it by virtue of their full license. In Sametime we have policy controls to help us but we do not have that in Connections nor have I heard any mention of it. I guess we will have to see how to approach this and whether it becomes an issue at customer sites.

Anyways still a very nice and clever move by IBM.

Deploying XTAF dictionaries to Notes clients via a Widget Catalog

So Vladislav Tatarincev just blogger this as well but I wanted to highlight it as it pertains to plugins and widget deployment which is so dear to my heart. IBM has written up a very nice technote on how to deploy extra dictionaries for use with Sametime and Notes 8 and it’s really worth a read. Especially if you write emails and chats in some languages other than English. And yes there are some of us who do… 🙂

Now if just there was an easy ways to switch between the dictionaries at runtime and by easy I mean something that does not require the use of the preferences dialog. It really has to be easy as most – if not everyone – installing extra dictionaries write in multiple languages say Danish and English, German and English etc.

Deploying XTAF dictionaries to Notes clients via a Widget Catalog

IBM Connections wsadmin cheat sheet

Starting with IBM Connections 3 the Websphere wsadmin command is even more important as the only way to deploy Connections is using Websphere Application Server Network Deployment or ND for short. The wsadmin command is used to check out the Connections configuration files and check them back in after modification. Because some commands require different configuration services to be loaded I have started compiling a cheat-sheet of some of the commands one use all the time. I have created a page for them. Expect the list to grow over time.

Of course the Info centers and wikis also list the commands.

Solved my custom TAI issue with WAS 7

I’ve previously blogged about the goodness of Trust Association Interceptors in Websphere Application Server (WAS) and how I’ve used it to turn the login procedure for IBM Connections on its head. We recently started upgrading the customer I originally developed this for to IBM Connections 3.0.1 hence they needed an upgrade to WAS 7. After upgrading the WAS servers the custom TAI didn’t work anymore. The TAI loaded just fine but it didn’t generate the needed LtpaToken2 for the visiting user. I cried out for help in the Connections forum. I got a few pointers but none of them helped me.

Fortunately I figured it out tonight.

The issue was that my custom TAI created subjects (a subject is the entity that holds the identity of the authenticated user in WAS) in a custom realm that wasn’t trusted by WAS. The only trusted realm was the one that WAS created for me when I configured Federated Repositories. The solution was to add the custom realm as trusted under Federated Repositories, configure <my realm> and then go to “Trusted authentication realms – inbound”. The entry is at the bottom under “Related Items”. Here I simply added my realm as Trusted, restarted WAS and I was golden!! Again this wasn’t necessary in WAS 6 and actually the option isn’t there at all in ISC.

Now I’m back to thinking that WAS and TAI’s are the best thing since sliced bread! 🙂

Tip of the day – my Copy Link Location plugin

There are some questions I get asked a lot by customers, colleagues and people I meet at conferences. One of them is why there isn’t an easy way to copy links detected in Notes documents using LiveText to the clipboard. And I must admit that it is odd. To remedy I’ve actually developed a plugin that installs into Notes 8 to add an action item to links in Notes documents. After installing the plugin an action to the Copy Link Location to the clipboard is added to all links in the Notes client.

The plugin really highlights the power of Notes, LiveText and the plugin architecture in Notes. As you will probably recall – plugins are fun!!!

Besides that a right-click context menu is also added when right-clicking Notes documents to copy the Notes link (notes://) to the clipboard. It’s all part of the same package.

To see how to install etc. head over to my Notes 8 Utils page.