The Domino Chick
Daylight Savings: What you need to know
Friday, February 2nd, 2007
As many people are now becoming aware, the Daylight Savings Time changes coming up next month are going to affect pretty much every piece of software in your organization, including Notes/Domino. Within IBM Lotus, there is a development, test, and documentation team that's been hard at work creating and revising corrective agents and documenting what needs to be done to address the changes in your environment. Susan Bulloch has been working on the DST documentation and helping to educate customers and IBMers about what needs to be done about the changes, and has written a number of blog posts on the subject; the latest one has direct links to the DST agents, instructions, and communications guides to help you test, deploy, and communicate what's going on to your users. Go check 'em out!Permanent Link | Comments: Read (0)
Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 03:29:51 PM
Location: New York, NY
Live from the Irish User Group event
Friday, June 16th, 2006
I'm at the Irish Lotus User Group event in Dublin, sitting at the HADSL booth doing a little blogging after Ed's keynote and before my session. The keynote was great - lots of good information, and the message was very clear: Hannover is Notes!I'm speaking on Domino Domain Monitoring in a little while and then sitting in on some of the other sessions this afternoon. If all goes well and time allows, there may be a small surprise or two during the closing session and prize draw, but don't hold me to it. There will definitely be some fun to be had afterwards at the geekdinner, though! Photos will be posted shortly - keep an eye on the photoblog at the right as I'm sure the blogmonkey will make an appearance.
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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 10:57:19 AM
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Live from DNUG
Tuesday, May 16th, 2006
So, I didn't make it to the Ask the Experts session on Thursday night. Late on Wednesday, I got a call from the airline, telling me that my direct flight from Los Angeles to Boston was cancelled, and that I would have to be rebooked on a connecting flight through Chicago. There were delays in Chicago, so I didn't end up getting to the hotel until about 11 PM Thursday night. I stayed up for a couple of extra hours to work on the VMWare images for my presentations the next day, and then presented two sessions on Friday. I also attended a couple of Susan's sessions, where she demonstrated the new "Notes on a stick" feature, and took my ND7 Administration Update test, which I passed. (Chris sure did make that test difficult, though!)After that eventful (but short) trip to Boston for the View's Admin2006, I am now in Germany for DNUG. I just finished my second session of the conference on Domino Domain Monitoring. Yesterday, I did a jumpstart session on Domino Administration. Both sessions went quite well, and the audiences seemed to enjoy them. Domino Domain Monitoring is one of my favorite new 7 features, so I really enjoy talking about it and showing everyone how it works. There's a lot of information, but I somehow managed to fit it all in within a one-hour session!
In Karlsruhe, I've been spending far too much time with Paul and Bill, plotting the chaos that will occur at the Irish Notes User Group in June. In a little while, I'll be heading down to their session on worst practices, which is always informative and great fun. Tomorrow, I plan to catch Ed's session in the afternoon, and the rest of the time I'll be in the Meet the Lotus Software Experts lab on the main floor. If you're here at DNUG, stop by and say hello!
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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 01:14:01 PM
Location: Karlsruhe, Germany
Policies Modification
Thursday, March 23rd, 2006
For my very first Show 'n' Tell Thursday post, I am going to show you how to modify a user's location document, preferences, or client-side notes.ini variable with customized settings documents. Back in October of 2004, Ed mentioned that you could modify the ini with customized policies, and there is a technote documenting this "undocumented" feature. In this post, I will walk you through the customization and show you how you can use it to populate a field in a location document that is not included in the out-of-the-box settings document.First, I will need to modify a subform in the Domino Directory called $ClientPreferenceSubform. This subform contains fields that affect both the Desktop and Setup settings documents, so keep that in mind when modifying it. Of course, you don't have to put anything in the fields that you create in this subform, so it won't affect any users who have a Setup or Desktop settings document applied to them in a policy unless you do populate the field on the settings document.
The next step is to find out the name of the field I want to modify in the location document. For this example, I am going to change the field that indicates when my Notes client will log on to Sametime. The field name is "SametimeLogonWhen". Next, I will create a field on the Client Preferences subform that corresponds to this field. Since the location document field is a dialog list, I will also create this field as a dialog list and paste in the choices from the field on the location document.
Note that the field name is prepended with LocAll. This is how you indicate that the field to be pushed down to the client is a location document field. Once I have saved this subform, I just need to go into the Desktop settings document, choose an option, and apply the settings and policies as I normally would. Any user who is affected by a policy containing this modified settings document will now have the new value pushed to their location document.
If you want to push down a notes.ini variable (or a user preference, since all user preferences correspond to a notes.ini variable), do the same thing, but prepend the field with $Pref instead of LocAll.
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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 03:39:46 PM
Location: New York. NY
AdminP FAQ
Thursday, September 1st, 2005
I just wanted to point this out in case you missed it. My colleague Susan Bulloch has put together two new documents in the Lotus Knowledge Base on AdminP. If you were at Lotusphere, you may have seen the session she and I presented on it - it's apparently quite a popular subject and a pain point for a lot of customers. In fact, one of the most popular engagements I do is an AdminP health check. So, if you've ever wondered about what makes AdminP tick, check out AdminP - Frequently Asked Questions, and for more in-depth, continually updated information, bookmark the Knowledge Collection for AdminP in 6.0x and 6.5x. And thank Susan profusely for putting those documents together - they will undoubtedly be a big help for a lot of people.Permanent Link | Comments: Read (0)
Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 08:46:11 AM
Location: Minneapolis, MN
ND7 Released!
Wednesday, August 31st, 2005
Lotus Notes and Domino 7 has been released! Read about it here and then go download it from either Passport Advantage or PartnerWorld.Permanent Link | Comments: Read (0)
Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 07:21:42 AM
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Move from Notes seminar - what happened?
Tuesday, February 1st, 2005
Today I was supposed to go to a seminar sponsored by Microsoft and delivered by Guidance, a MS business partner, entitled "Moving from Lotus Notes/Domino and Microsoft - Integrate, Extend or Migrate Lotus Notes/Domino to Microsoft Products". I was, of course, mostly interested in what they had to say about integration and coexistence, because in the real world, people rarely run a shop that's using 100% of any one company's technologies. It's much more likely to see a huge mix of different operating systems, applications, legacy systems, etc., and I like to learn new ways of addressing these issues.Imagine my surprise when I went to the partner's website and saw the seminar missing from their front page. I double-checked my e-mail - I'd received a confirmation notice when I registered but no cancellation notice, so to be sure I went to the registration site and entered in the seminar's event ID. The registration website told me that no such event ID existed. I then called the business partner's office but was unable to confirm with a live person whether the seminar was still going to occur. As I don't really like going to Dodger Stadium (the location of the seminar) when it's not baseball season, I'm not going to risk it -but what if other attendees don't check the website and go to Dodger Stadium only to find no seminar going on?
What happened?
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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 12:35:43 PM
Location: Los Angeles, CA
All done!
Thursday, January 27th, 2005
Susan and I just wrapped up our last presentation and finished up our staffing duties at the Meet the Developers lab. We're not technically done - we need to be at the Ask the Developers panel after lunch - but we're done with our official duties. All of our sessions went well. Our first Jumpstart had some technical difficulties because one of our servers kept giving us the blue screen of death (thanks XP!) We finally resolved it but didn't really need to since we ended up just using the two other servers instead. It did let us insert a little impromptu joke, though - my test servers are in the Sandwich domain, and the servers we used were Bacon, Vegemite (a nod to our friends from down under) and Grilled Cheese. Grilled Cheese was the one that was b0rked, so we told everyone that Grilled Cheese was... wait for it... toast.The second jumpstart on Sunday went much more smoothly. Monday - Wednesday we had varying lab staff duties and managed to squeeze in some sessions that colleagues needed us to attend. Ed's "Boss Loves Microsoft" session was great as always, as was Wes Morgan's session on networking for collaboration. Our last session to present was this morning and was on AdminP. We got to announce that the 21-day name change reversion problem that so plagued many customers now requires administrator approval in 6.5.4 and later. We knew it was fixed in 7, which was in our presentation already, but we got confirmation from the developers that it's also fixed in 6.5.4. Most of the session attendees seemed very happy with the content of the session. And I put my blog URL in the resources slide, so for those of you that attended or are coming here from other Lotusphere speakers or attendees' blogs, hello!
Speaking of blogs, a lot of interesting points were brought up in the Lotus Blogging Community Birds of a Feather session on Wednesday, and I've got a blog post brewing in my head about it. I also had to promise all the other bloggers there that I'd blog more often. And I will.
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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 12:20:11 PM
Location: Orlando, FL
Lotusphere preparation
Saturday, January 15th, 2005
Right. Time to make this an active blog again. Sorry 'bout that.I'll be delivering a couple of sessions at Lotusphere '05 with my esteemed colleague Susan Bulloch. We're doing a Jumpstart on Domino Administration (technically two sessions, since we're doing a repeat of the Jumpstart right after the first one), and a session in the infrastructure track entitled "Leveraging AdminP in Domino 6.x". I don't know how many people have registered for the Jumpstarts, but I do know that the AdminP session is in the biggest room at the conference, so make sure you show up and fill up those seats!
I'll also be participating in the Lotus blogging community BOF and working with Susan for her BOF on Deploying Notes and Domino 6.5. I'm going to squeeze in Ed's "The Boss Loves Microsoft - Where Does That Leave Lotus?" session (always a good one) and the history of Notes panel, and most other times I'll be in the Meet the Developers Lab. So, if you want to say hi, ask a question, or bring me some snacks, stop by!
The whole schedule can be viewed here and full Lotusphere information is here.
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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 03:42:23 PM
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Domino on Linux
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2004
During the View's Admin 2004 conference, I gave a talk on running Domino on Linux. It was a lot of material to cover. The session was geared towards Domino administrators who are used to working with Windows operating systems on their Domino servers. I covered a lot of similarities and differences between Windows and Linux, went over some basic terminology, then walked everyone through an install of Linux- what to expect, what operating system settings to choose to make it optimal for Domino, etc. Then I talked about doing the Domino install, ran through some configuration settings, and discussed some performance and troubleshooting tips. It wasn't an in-depth performance session - it was a session geared to get Domino administrators comfortable with Linux. I wanted to walk them through terminology, installation, and configuration, and get them familiar with where to look when things go wrong, so they wouldn't be so intimidated by the Linux platform.There seemed to be a lot of interest in it, though - it was the first session of the day, at 8:30 a.m., and there were at least 50-60 people in attendance. In addition, a number of people stopped me in the hallways or around the conference to ask me questions about it. I know I'm really interested in Linux as a platform for Domino. I've been working with Domino on Linux since the mid-R5 codestream, around fall of 2000. It worked well then, but it works phenomenally well now. IBM/Lotus have really put a lot of effort into making the code available and stable for the Linux platform. They have put their money where their mouth is and demonstrated a commitment to developing enterprise-level products that work well with open-source operating systems. And this is where my question comes in.
What do you think of Linux as a platform for Domino? Have you tested it? Is your organization looking to alternatives to Windows as a server platform? I really want to know what's going on in real IT shops, with real administrators facing the challenges of running a Domino environment on a daily basis. What are your thoughts? Do you think Linux has a real shot as a platform for Domino in the enterprise?
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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 10:34:07 PM
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Books
Thursday, April 8th, 2004
I've been looking at my library of Domino and other technical books lately. Some of them are books that I've found extremely valuable - they're dog-eared and their accompanying CD-ROMs are looking a little battered. I have others that I've purchased, thinking I'll use them extensively, and ended up giving them a cursory once-over and relegating them to the bottom bookshelf. I've been looking at them because I'm trying to determine what makes a particular book fall into the first category.I've been thinking about this because I'm considering writing a couple of books on Domino and related technologies. I've co-authored two IBM Redbooks - one on Domino Clustering and one on QuickPlace administration and deployment. The clustering redbook hasn't been updated since 2000, so I thought there might be some interest in an updated version that details the changes between the 5.x and 6.x codestreams. I'm also considering a book on troubleshooting, but maybe I could turn that into a series of articles instead. I mean, everyone wants to read a whole chapter on parsing NSD call-stacks, right?
Another area that I'd really like to write about (and you'll most likely see me write about here) is running Domino on Linux. There has been a lot of discussion in Linux-related publications lately (see Ed's recent posts here and here), and I think a lot of organizations are considering moving to Linux as a platform for Domino. I think Linux is a fantastic platform for Domino and I'm very excited about the prospect of running a designer client on Linux - even if I have to do it under WINE - because I'd love to have all of my home machines running Linux exclusively. I know there are a couple of Redbooks out there about running Domino on Linux, but I wonder if there would be interest in additional books on the subject.
Of course, none of this will get started for a couple of months, due to the aforementioned season of conferences. I barely have time to blog, as evidenced by my dearth of posts this week. However, I'd like to know if there's any interest in books or articles on the subjects I mentioned. Just don't be surprised if I use your comments to convince an editor or two. :-)
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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 08:37:49 AM
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Seasons
Monday, April 5th, 2004
Baseball season starts today! I know our friends outside the U.S. (and many here in the States) couldn't care less, but I'm very excited. I live less than a mile from Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, and this year I think I'm going to take advantage of a coworker's season tickets and go catch a few games in the good seats.Another season that's starting up (for me, at least) is conference season. I'm speaking at the View's Admin2004 conference in May, which I just realized is less than 6 weeks away! Then there's the Lotus Advisor Live conference in June, which I'll be attending, but not as a speaker. I'm also attending two conferences in July that aren't Domino-related - a comic book convention and a Star Trek convention - but those are almost too geeky to mention.
I mention these for two reasons - shameless self-promotion and to ask for feedback. I'm finishing up the final versions of my slide sets for my talks at the View conference. In the past, I've heard various feedback from attendees about whether they like to see live demos in the session. I'm doing four sessions this time around - Domino Clustering, Mail Monitoring, Running Domino on Linux, and Transitioning Your Skills to WebSphere. Last year, I did two clustering sessions and one mail monitoring session, but I didn't include demos for a couple of reasons. The clustering sessions would have been difficult because I couldn't guarantee a working secure internet connection back to my office, and I didn't want to bring two servers with me (unlike my friend Rob, who brought two (or was it three?) servers along with him for his QuickPlace sessions). Instead of demos, I included lots of screenshots and additonal notes in the slides.
This year, I'm planning to definitely do demos for the Running Domino on Linux session - I've got my laptop dual-booting Windoze and RedHat Linux, and switching back and forth from the laptop with the slides to the laptop running the Domino server will be simple enough. I'm again presented with a challenge for the clustering and WebSphere sessions, though, so I'm thinking that I may just include screenshots for those sessions and only do demos for the aforementioned Linux session and maybe the mail monitoring session, because I can run a Domino server locally on my laptop and I won't have to worry about any potential connectivity issues.
My question, then, is this: do you prefer sessions with live demos to ones without? If there aren't demos, are you satisfied if the session content and additional materials provided give you lots of screenshots and clear information, with tips you can apply immediately to your servers? And thirdly, if I get a lot of feedback requesting live demos, will you all talk Rob into shipping me some servers? ;-)
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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 08:18:21 AM
Location: Los Angeles, CA
To Archive, or Not to Archive
Friday, April 2nd, 2004
... that is the question.I've been having an interesting debate with some colleagues over reducing disk space consumption. Of course, our biggest disk space consumers are mail databases. The use of the single-copy template has certainly helped, but we always get into circular arguments about other ways to force users to reduce the sizes of their mail files.
We can force users to archive using policies, but where do we place the archives? If we put them on the user's workstation, then they aren't being backed up. If we archive them to another server, then we are merely moving our disk space consumption problem to another location.
Enforcing quotas also presents an interesting set of problems. We can annoy users by reminding them that they are over quota and can't save any sent mail each time they send something, but savvy users can work around this by cc:ing themselves when they send a message. We can start holding mail for users that are over quota, but then we run the risk of having hundreds of messages sitting on the server, waiting for users to reduce the size of their databases before they can be delivered. What if 500 users are over quota at the same time? What if one of those messages is to a salesperson on the last day of the month, telling him they just need one last piece of information by 3:00 p.m. so that they can sign the contract? What if he doesn't reduce his mail database size until 3:15? We can also start rejecting inbound mail for users over quota, but I don't even want to get into the nightmare that would be for customer-facing users.
So, we've settled the debate (sort of) by deciding that forcing user behavior is not the answer - user education is the key to reducing mail database sizes. As we roll out Notes 6.5.1 to our user base, we are conducting training classes to introduce them to the new features. We've incorporated instructions on how to archive, how to delete large messages and/or remove the attachments, and emphasis on one of our favorite space-saving client features - reply without attachment. We've already noticed a shift in end user behavior and a slight reduction in mail database sizes for the people who have gone through training.
How do you manage your users' mail database sizes?
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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 10:52:45 AM
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag
Thursday, April 1st, 2004
I've been playing around with the NSD tool a lot lately - I was familiar with analyzing .rip files in R5, and I wanted to include some NSD-related content for my e-Pro webcast on Domino Server Troubleshooting last week. Now, some people may not find analyzing .rip files or NSD output very interesting, but that's the sort of supergeeky thing I like - poking around in call-stacks, trying to find the .dll or process that's hosing a server.Now I'm troubleshooting a server crash from earlier this week, and due to log analysis and confirmation from the NSD output, I traced the problem to a third-party product that I have installed on my server. I opened a ticket with the company that makes the product, just to let them know that they've got a potential issue with their product running on 6.5 servers. They haven't certified it for 6.5.1 yet, and I want to upgrade, but I want to make sure they've got the issue fixed before I do, because I can't have random server crashes happening all the time. I suppose I can just disable the product's add-in tasks temporarily until they certify it for 6.5.1, because it's not a mission-critical app (and really, my boxen at my home office are just used for testing and my own personal fiddling, so it's not affecting a production environment). We'll see.
In the meantime, I'm going to keep analyzing those NSD logs until I am seeing call-stacks and process trees in my dreams. :)
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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 11:45:00 AM
Location: Los Angeles, CA
