Prevent, identify, and fix the most common performance problems in Domino applications! This updated and fast-moving session covers over 50 Notes and Web performance tips including formulas, LotusScript, agents, views, forms, images, DB properties, security, CSS, JavaScript, GZip, caching, and server settings every developer should know. Learn how to trace slow performance in existing applications, including an open source tool to reveal what Notes is waiting for when you see the yellow lightning symbol. Emphasis is placed on balancing performance, maintainability and functionality.
iPhone/Gmail users have been dealing with the annoying "on behalf of" indicator on all sent messages for a long time now. Gmail allows you to send and receive email via multiple email accounts but messages sent from the iPhone almost always contain a heading like this: From [other email address] "on behalf of" [gmail address].
GMail recently "fixed" this problem by allowing you to choose a different outgoing SMTP server on your Gmail account. We were thrilled with this new development and rushed to Gmail to try it out. After entering our martinscott.com smtp server settings, Gmail came back with an error "Remote Server does not support TLS code(500)." Turns out, Gmail wanted our Domino server to support TLS/SSL authentication for SMTP. This was a big letdown, since many Lotus Domino environments are not set up this way. So we continued to look for a solution.
We then learned that Windows Live Hotmail added POP3 and SMTP support for its free user base (previously, it was only available to paid Windows Live Hotmail Plus subscribers). With this new information, we went about creating a Hotmail account, and linking an iPhone to it. After running through the setup (details below), we sent an email from the iPhone (using our Lotus Notes email address) to another email address. We opened the email with much trepidation and were almost giddy when there was no sign of "on behalf of" or Hotmail or any indication that it came from anywhere but our Lotus Notes email address. We have since tested sending emails to many different email accounts and the result has been the same for all. Goodbye "On Behalf Of"! We won't miss you.
Wondering how to get your Lotus Notes email to Hotmail (or anywhere else for that matter)? MartinScott's WirelessMail forwards copies of your important email to ANY email-addressable wireless device, including iPhone, BlackBerry, Droid, Palm/Treo, PocketPC, Symbian, cell phones and pagers. You can even use it to forward Notes mail to another email account.
To link Hotmail to your iPhone Create or update your existing Hotmail account
You will have to add your Lotus Notes email address as an authorized reply-to address in your Hotmail account. Go to Hotmail.com, log into your account.
In the top right corner, select to Options / More Options
Under 'Manage your account', click 'Send and receive mail from other e-mail accounts'.
At the bottom of the screen, click 'Add another account to send mail from'.
Enter your Lotus Notes email address as a reply-to address and click 'Send verification e-mail'.
Hotmail is going to want to confirm that your Notes email address is legitimate, and will send you an email verification link. Once you have verified your Lotus Notes email address, it will be added under your Hotmail address. Click on 'Use as default' to make this your default 'reply-to' address.
With the Hotmail settings complete, now it's time to update your iPhone.
On the iPhone, Tap Settings > Mail > Add Account > Other Fill in the fields using the information below: Name: First Last Address: your Lotus Notes email address Password: your Hotmail password Description: (optional) Tap Save
Choose POP (not IMAP)
Under Incoming Mail Server, type the following: Host Name: pop3.live.com User Name: your Hotmail address Password: your Hotmail password
Under Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP), type the following: Host Name: smtp.live.com User Name: your Hotmail address Password: your Hotmail password
Tap Save.
You can now receive mail from Hotmail and send mail (through Hotmail) but have emails look as if they came from your Lotus Notes address.
Unified Messaging solutions for Lotus Domino are getting more and more popular, but there's not much public information comparing them. And many manufacturers of such solutions take different approaches to their architecture, resulting in varying degrees of functionality, performance, and reliability. A partial list of contenders include: Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Nortel, iLink, is-coord, Siemens, Pentos, PhoneSoft, and VoiceRite.
What solution have you tried, and what do you think? Did you see any UM demos at Lotusphere?
... when even days later your feet feel like you ran a marathon. ... when you reach for your badge holder in the morning so they will let you into breakfast. ... when you are so inspired to upgrade, enhance or otherwise change your environment, you put in change control request for things you haven't even planned out yet. ... when you've spoken to dozens of people for hours a day but still ran out of time to talk to everyone you wanted to. ... when you live in 80 degree temperatures but still bring a jacket to your home office, in case the air conditioning is "like at Lotusphere" and set to "stupid cold". ... when you think back on the major business and personal relationships in your life and realize that you met most of them at previous Lotusphere®'s.
Got any others?
Thank you all for coming to see us at our sessions, our booth and everywhere in between. Both Jamie and my session slides will be posted tomorrow!
Many types of issues can prevent proper functionality of system databases such as admin4.nsf and names.nsf. This free utility will perform a health check on any database, looking for consistency between copies across servers, including: replication, administration, design, data, and security properties. This can save you hours of time trying to figure out why your AdminP requests aren't processing across servers, or why your Directory isn't behaving. This is only a 1.00 version, so comments and suggestions are welcome!
For those joining the mass-geek-migration to Orlando in January to attend Lotusphere 2010, MartinScott is thrilled to present you with five opportunities to meet/see/chat with us!
1. First up is Franziska Tanner as she presents a JumpStart session in the brand new Admin Boot Camp Track with Marie Scott and Gabriella Davis where they present:
BOOT103: Running with Scissors: Sharpen Your Skills for a Pain-free IBM Lotus Domino 8.5 Upgrade Client and server upgrades to Lotus Domino 8.5 don't have to sting! Join us as we share our cutting-edge techniques for a successful upgrade - beginning to end. In this session, we'll snip through proven methods for your client upgrade with the pros and cons of basic or standard clients; building smarter SmartUpgrade kits; and managing strategically implemented policies. But our shears won’t stop there as we cut thru the most efficient steps for upgrading your servers and your Lotus Domino Directory; leveraging your servers to take advantage of Lotus Domino 8.5 performance improvements; and time and space savings via DAOS and ID Vault! You’ll walk away with your own ever-sharp skill set for your most comprehensive, and pain-free upgrade yet.
3. If you work with developers or are just looking to improve your release management skills, come watch Jamie Magee as he presents with Eileen Fitzgerald:
BP111: Heel! Sit! Code! Obedience/Compliance Training for Your Developers Does your Lotus Domino environment feel like an untamed area with “packs” of developers running around unchecked? Admins, get control of your "dog eat dog" environment using ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) Release Management processes. ITIL Release Management ensures that you deliver applications into production that meet business requirements in a timely and efficient manner. It may also reduce friction between your admins and developers, and reduce the body count when developers want to introduce something into production.
4. For admins who inherited their server environment or are trying to make sure everything stays functional, join Franziska Tanner as she again presents with Marie Scott and Gabriella Davis:
BP103: "Top Chefs" Share Recipes for Avoiding Everyday Server Disasters Do you have the right recipe for securing and performance tuning your servers? Are you dealing with mail fidelity issues, routing or replication bottlenecks? And if you're got all that right, how about ACL's, ECL's, policies and client management? Come watch three seasoned chefs resolve real-world scenarios that could otherwise spell disaster if allowed to flare-up in your domain. Demystify transaction logging and get great tips on managing ids, preventative server maintenance, essential Notes.ini settings and must-have monitoring tools. Whether you're a "Top Chef" or a "Swedish Chef", you won't want to miss this smorgasbord of a session, full of solutions you can take home and use.
5. Last but not least, MartinScott will once again be represented on the Showcase Floor, this time at pedestal 327 (see location below). We'll be showing our newly updated NoteMan Toolbar, WirelessMail, Panagenda MarvelClient, Panagenda greenLight, and our yearly giveaway! And drop by early to get your limited edition C.U.L.T. (Certified Unofficial Lotusphere T-shirt) shirt! We'll also again be offering "15 minutes with our Experts" for you to discuss your business problems, get a second opinion, or just do a sanity check in the areas of application development, client management, upgrades to 8.5, server architecture, education and anything in between.
Keep your eyes on the schedule site and of course this blog for exact times, once the schedule gets published. Hope to see you at Lotusphere 2010!
A couple of days ago I posted the "making of..." video from what has turned out to be the most exciting marketing idea (in my humble opinion) I've ever seen. Presenting the Dominopoint Day 2009, "Lotus Knows....." Social Stripe!
What really struck me about this, even while making it, is how well the above expresses the sentiment of each of our User Group events, such as ILUG, UKLUG, IAMLUG. Not taking away from how well Dominopoint Day was organized and not minimizing how much everyone learned or the business that took place that day. But when you reduce it down to what is at the core, the real star of these privately organized events made of blood, sweat and tears are PASSION, KNOW-HOW and COMMUNITY!
Those three things hold great significance not just to me as a person, but to who I work with and what kinds of things I get involved with. It's why we leave our families to travel to foreign places. Why people like Tiago and Daniele take the time to translate slides and introductions from English to Italian the night before the big event.
It's why Giuseppe Grasso, Claudio Meregalli and Daniele Grillo and their extended team put hours and hours of their own time into user group events.
And, it's why both Mary Beth Raven and I got up on stage in front of a few hundred native Italians and at least "tried" to introduce ourselves in Italian :)
Sidenote: I probably got way more excited about this than I should have, but check out our very own translators that sat up in the control room and talked along our presentations! If you wanna know what the attendees heard, watch this video, taken during Mary Beth's session.
Ciao lettori gentili! We're back from Italy, where Franziska Tanner was invited to present at DominoPoint Day 2009, held at the IBM Forum in Milano. Over 570 people attended what is the largest free Lotus/Domino user group event in the World (that we know of) that was held on November 13th, 2009.
DominoPoint Day not only had the best coffee EVER, it also had the best, or rather most effective and innovative marketing initiative EVER. The final result of this effort is being posted by the fine folks at DominoPoint soon but until then, check out this neat "making of...." video.
And in case you're interested in Franziska's "Come farsi licenziare Facilmente" presentation slides, here's the Italian version she used. We'll post the English version in our second blog post about this great event.
Lastly, for a play by play of the actual day, go to this DominoPoint Blog post, written by one of the organizers. Hope you speak Italian though :)
From UKLUG 2009. Full slides available for download.
Prevent, identify, and fix the most common performance problems in Domino applications! This updated and fast-moving session covers over 50 Notes and Web performance tips including formulas, LotusScript, agents, views, forms, images, DB properties, security, CSS, JavaScript, GZip, caching, and server settings every developer should know. Learn how to trace slow performance in existing applications, including an open source tool to reveal what Notes is waiting for when you see the yellow lightning symbol. Emphasis is placed on balancing performance, maintainability and functionality.
Sparked by a challenging Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) and Domino move and upgrade over the weekend, here some migration tips that might save you a headache or two in the future:
- This one is the most obvious of the obvious tips, but get a full backup of the server you're upgrading or moving off of. Not only that, make sure there is actual, restorable data there as I cannot tell you how many times I ask for something to be restored only to be met with "well, uh, turns out that backup hadn't been tested in a while, so there is no actual data"
- Check all your third party apps for compatibility, including browsers. BES 5.0 for example isn't certified (and won't work) with IE8 and these are the sort of surprises you don't need DURING an upgrade. Also, before you upgrade anything, have all your software ready, even for things you already might have installed. Also make sure to search for patches, hotfixes and any other SPR's, such as this one here, that you might need.
- Speaking of third party apps, they're likely going to need to be re-installed after a hardware move, AFTER Domino is back up, so make sure your project plan accounts for that. Sometimes the team that deals with Domino isn't the same team dealing with AV, so plan ahead and make sure you've got the appropriate people on call.
- Whenever you are upgrading or moving a BES, have your SPR identifier, SPR authentication key and CAL handy as you'll need it during the install.
- If you're moving hardware, make sure you stop and DISABLE all services on the old box in case anyone ever feels the need to re-start it again, for re-purposing of the old box, for example. On that note, we're big fans of recycling or re-purposing of old hardware, IF it makes sense. Perhaps you can use your old box as an archive server?
- Another obvious tip that is obviously not so obvious since I am writing about it.... , also have your IBM support information and those of third party apps, like BES handy in case you need it. IF something unexpected should happen, you're not going to want to waste more time looking for that stuff.
- You know how you get rid of a TON of junk whenever you move to a new place? A server move is an excellent opportunity to go through your server with a fine tooth comb as well. Are all those databases really used and need to move? Are all those ports and tasks in the notes.ini really used? Small word of caution here, while minor changes to the server are ok to perform as part of a migration, don't make fundamental changes at the same time, as it could make troubleshooting more difficult in case something goes wrong. Instead, make a plan (it's called change control, guys) and implement your clean up actions in stages, AFTER your server has been moved or upgraded and proven itself in the "wild".
- For BES 5.x, the admin interface has changed some. Here an awesome tutorial link I send to my clients, that's really more of a "how to" for anything you could possibly want to do on the new BES 5.x admin console.
- If you're moving hardware, carefully consider if you REALLY have to change your server IP or host name information as your Notes clients are most likely tied to one or the other or both. There's nothing like getting a nasty surprise on Monday morning when half of your users can't connect to the server anymore. Unfortunately, as a server admin you're blind as to what information your clients are using and only third party apps can help you "audit" Notes clients and take preventative measures for things like connection docs pointing to an IP address, BEFORE an upgrade.
Those are the things that came to mind, this list certainly isn't conclusive. What other server upgrade or hardware move tips do you use?
