How I saved eight minutes today by doing nothing

April 29, 2013 By Leave a Comment

This is a short example of something that landed in my inbox today which, I confess, I was so impressed with I just had to share it.  In the nearly twenty years I have been working with Notes I have become accustomed to receiving emails with DocLinks, and more recently URLs to databases or other applications which a user wants me to interact with.

A DocLink, for the uninitiated, is basically like a URL but specifically for a Notes document in a database somewhere.  This predates URLs by about 10 years, at least in the form that we know them.  Traditionally a user would send me a doclink to a document in a Notes database they wanted me to act on.  More sophisticated apps used emails with Doclinks to run a workflow of some kind.

This model carried over into the internet world and any messaging system these days can easily send you an email with a URL to a web page which might contain actions for you to perform.

Notes, however, with version 9 is different.  Using Embedded Experiences Notes can do the work of getting that web page or application the original email and presents the action you have to perform in the context of the message.

Notes working with a Connections embedded experience

One of the reasons this is good is because I don’t need to go clicking on a link to find out what the message is about.  It’s presented, with the fidelity of the original application, right there in the email.  The buttons work, I can perform all the same actions as the original application has, but I am doing it inside an email.

This is a big productivity gain as I don’t need to move from one application to another, I don’t need to log in each time to another system simply to see what a link contains and I can deal with the action straight away.

In this one example above I saved about five seconds.  That might not sound much but today I got about 100 of these emails, so I saved 500 seconds, a little over 8 minutes.  Let’s say half of the employees in IBM (200,000) saved (conservatively) 5 minutes a day using this.  That’s 16,700 hours PER DAY we’ve saved.  Multiply that by your day rate and you’re clearly more productive by being SOCIAL BUSINESS.

Filed Under: IBM Connections, IBM Lotus Notes Tagged With: , , , ,

Color-coding diary appointments is not just for Outlook any more

February 6, 2013 By Leave a Comment

In a recent migration from Exchange to Domino one of our customers complained that they thought Outlook was a much better tool because – and this was apparently the only reason – they could color-code diary appointments depending on the category they chose for the appointment.

Well, the good news is that IBM Notes Social Edition does that too!, behold:

IBM Notes 9 Social Edition - color-coded calendar entriesYou can set up the colors for the categories in a new tab in the Preferences, right next to the color-coding of emails you’ve been able to do:

Preferences

You can also vary the colors of standard, uncategorized diary entries now too.

When you are creating an appointment, you merely choose the category for the entry and the calendar does the rest:

IBM Notes

Download the public beta of IBM Notes for yourself and take a look for yourself!

Filed Under: How To..., IBM Lotus Notes Tagged With: , , , ,

Fixing IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.3 on OS X Mountain Lion

July 20, 2012 By 5 Comments

UPDATE: IBM has posted instructions and a tweak for your Lotus Notes client on OS X 10.8.  I recommend following the instructions posted by IBM, rather than my tip below.

This tip comes courtesy of an excellent suggestion by @stuartmcintyre…

After installing the OS X Mountain Lion GM seed, Lotus Notes gets moved into a Lotus Notes folder.  On my machine, double-clicking on Notes.app within the folder causes Notes to start but when I double-click on an email or calendar appointment, Notes would crash.

A solution is to move the Apple Notes.app file into a folder and move Lotus Notes back to being the Notes.app application (into the same location as it was before the upgrade to Mountain Lion).

Finder won’t allow you to move or rename Apple’s Notes.app so terminal is needed:

Open Terminal in Mac OS X then type the following commands:

sudo mkdir /Applications/Apple
sudo mv /Applications/Notes.app /Applications/Apple/Notes.app
sudo mv /Applications/Lotus Notes/Notes.app /Application/Notes.app

This has worked well for me, but as always, make sure your backups are up to date before doing this!

Thanks Stuart!

 

Filed Under: IBM Lotus Notes, Mac OS X, Technical Stuff Tagged With: ,

List of useful social-related add-ons for Lotus Notes, Sametime & others

May 31, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Something I wish IBM would include in the base install of Lotus Notes is all the excellent plugins for the sidebar that extends the functionality of Notes to work with Connections and Quickr.  For those that don’t know, they are all available free of charge from the Catalog on Lotus Greenhouse.  However, to save you some time, I have listed and linked below the ones I have found most useful.

For Mozilla Firefox there’s the very handy Connections toolbar add-on:

If you have an iOS device (Apple iPad/iPod Touch/iPhone), IBM has you covered:

And on Android, you’ve got some options too:

You need a free Lotus Greenhouse ID to download these.

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Filed Under: IBM Connections, IBM Lotus Notes, Technical Stuff Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Looks like there’s a problem with Lotus Notes and OS X Mountain Lion…

March 6, 2012 By 2 Comments
(Puma concolor) aka: Mountain Lion, Puma

Image via Wikipedia

I kept wondering where the Apple Notes application had vanished when playing with the Developer Preview version of Apple Mac OS X Mountain Lion.

I realised it wasn’t there because I had Lotus Notes installed. Both have an application icon with the name “Notes”.

If Notes is installed and you upgrade, you lose the Apple Notes application. If you install Lotus Notes after Mountain Lion, the install fails.

I am sure someone in IBM knows this….but just in case!

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Filed Under: IBM Lotus Notes Tagged With: ,

Enabling application installation in Lotus Notes

January 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This is something I constantly have to search for when I am installing a Lotus Notes client and want to install something like the IBM Connections Status Updates sidebar plugin.

To be able to install new features into Eclipse (Lotus Notes client) it is necessary to edit the plugin_customization.ini file which is buried in the installation folder of Lotus Notes.

Full details of this procedure can be found here, but for my own benefit if nothing else, here is a shortened version of the instructions to get me to where I need to go.

On the Mac

  1. Shut down Lotus Notes
  2. Right click on the Lotus Notes icon in the Applications folder and select Show Package Contents
  3. Drill down to the /Contents/MacOS/rcp folder
  4. Open plugin_customization.ini in TextEdit, or similar.
  5. Add the following line of code to the end of the file: com.ibm.notes.branding/enable.update.ui=true
  6. Save and close the file
  7. Start Notes
  8. The Install menu item appears under File, Application

On Windows

  1. Shut down Lotus Notes
  2. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to \notes install dir\framework\rcp ,e.g c:\program files\ibm\lotus\notes\framework\rcp
  3. Open plugin_customization.ini in Notepad, or similar.
  4. Add the following line of code to the end of the file: com.ibm.notes.branding/enable.update.ui=true
  5. Save and close the file
  6. Start Notes
  7. The Install menu item appears under File, Application
Filed Under: IBM Lotus Notes, Technical Stuff Tagged With:

Enabling application installation in Lotus Notes

January 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This is something I constantly have to search for when I am installing a Lotus Notes client and want to install something like the IBM Connections Status Updates sidebar plugin.

To be able to install new features into Eclipse (Lotus Notes client) it is necessary to edit the plugin_customization.ini file which is buried in the installation folder of Lotus Notes.

Full details of this procedure can be found here, but for my own benefit if nothing else, here is a shortened version of the instructions to get me to where I need to go.

On the Mac

  1. Shut down Lotus Notes
  2. Right click on the Lotus Notes icon in the Applications folder and select Show Package Contents
  3. Drill down to the /Contents/MacOS/rcp folder
  4. Open plugin_customization.ini in TextEdit, or similar.
  5. Add the following line of code to the end of the file: com.ibm.notes.branding/enable.update.ui=true
  6. Save and close the file
  7. Start Notes
  8. The Install menu item appears under File, Application

On Windows

  1. Shut down Lotus Notes
  2. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to notes install dirframeworkrcp ,e.g c:program filesibmlotusnotesframeworkrcp
  3. Open plugin_customization.ini in Notepad, or similar.
  4. Add the following line of code to the end of the file: com.ibm.notes.branding/enable.update.ui=true
  5. Save and close the file
  6. Start Notes
  7. The Install menu item appears under File, Application
Filed Under: IBM Lotus Notes, Technical Stuff Tagged With:

Lotus Notes gets social

January 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

One of the main announcements at Lotusphere 2012 was the name of the forthcoming next version of the Lotus Notes client – Lotus Notes Social Edition.

It represents a re-focusing of the Client towards Social Business and encourages the use of many of the technologies in IBM Connections for a more productive work environment. From Ed Brill’s Flickr feed, you can see a screenshot of what it will likely look like:

6713811587 fcf213ced1 z

Why is this important for social business, however? And would it encourage a current non-Lotus Notes organisation to switch?

Why is it important for social business?

Many of us work in organisations which have some form of electronic workflow going on. Whether its automated notifications from a server because it’s low on disk space, or whether it’s a request for a vacation or to approve a purchase order, a lot of what lands in our inbox these days is not necessarily written by one of our colleagues, but instead is an automatic notification about something.

We’ve all experienced the sinking feeling when we’ve been away from our email for a couple of days and return to hundreds of unread messages. We have to pick through these for the information that is truly useful; for the messages which convey something we need to action or something we need to know. The rest of it normally goes in the trash.

By automating many of these workflows into Activities in IBM Connections these notifications become a “river of news” which, although important, is separated from actual communication by the Lotus Notes Social Edition client.

For a social business, you can interact with the activity stream in the same way as you would read a twitter feed. You can filter this according to a variety of criteria and essentially “tune out” to what you consider to be noise.

The important thing here, though, is that the activity stream is an important part of your information dashboard. The screenshot above shows the Stream, the Inbox and the Calendar – these are the basic things you need to have access to in order to participate in the social business.

This is something which will be unique to Lotus Notes Social Edition.

By using the social business tools within Connections, such as Wikis, Activities and Blogs, the activity stream can give you the updates and notifications you need, but separate from actual communications via email.

Would it encourage switchers?

The Lotus Notes Social Edition is the first truly social email system built for business. It combines email, calendaring and the activity streams in a way which the modern workplace will warm to. Because Notes is now going to separate email from workflow and status updates, the end user will have greater clarity of what’s going on.

Would it encourage people to abandon their “legacy” email clients in favour of a Social system? I believe so because:

    1. The complexity of the user interface has been greatly reduced. Compare the screenshot above with your average Microsoft Outlook 2010 screenshot and you’ll see what I mean.
    2. Email is still an important part of business communication but overload of information is something we all recognise.
    3. It brings the advantages of social collaboration into the centre of the daily work environment, rather than it being an afterthought or something which users need to go somewhere else to see.
    4. A social business is one which is more engaged with its work and will therefore be more productive.

These plus I am sure many other reasons will encourage businesses to look at IBM’s fresh approach to business productivity and help them evolve into social businesses to stay ahead of their competition.

Not bad for a 22-year-old product!

Filed Under: IBM Lotus Notes, Social Business Tagged With: , ,

Making the most of Lotus Notes Managed Replicas

January 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

One of the best features to be added to Notes 8.5.2 client was the ability to have a managed replica of your mail.  Put simply, a Managed Replica is a local copy of your mail which you use as your primary copy of your mail but which is automatically synchronized and updated wherever you are and whenever you send or receive mail.

Obviously to die-hard Notes-folks a local replica of your mail is hardly anything new, in fact is some institutions its the default practice.  What’s new about this, though, is the fact that the Notes client doesn’t forget to switch around mail replicas when you are on and off the server.  You are permanently working on the local replica, but you don’t notice any lag like you would when you were using scheduled replication to synchronize your mail.

The upshot is a win-win situation for the user.  You get all the speed improvements of a local replica, plus all the immediacy of the server.  Your Domino Administrator will thank you too – as you’re connected to the server for a fraction of the time you would be normally.

Now that long anticipated server upgrade might just get postponed because, with everyone using managed replicas suddenly the server is a good deal faster.

If you are using Notes 8.5.2 client you could consider adding the following lines to your NOTES.INI file (and restarting Notes) to get managed replicas going:

CacheMail=3
OutgoingMailSendThreshold=1
ReplicateOnNewMail=1
CacheDBInitialFullDoc=30
DocAutoRetrieve=2
FailoverSilent=1
($PrefRepIDDefFullText)=1

Alternatively ask your Domino Administrator to set up a policy to enable this.

Full details of all these settings plus much more on how managed replicas work can be found here.

Filed Under: IBM Lotus Notes, Technical Stuff Tagged With:

Outlook to Notes Migration – Week One

November 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Week one of an Exchange to Domino migration is hopefully the toughest. The best laid plans get put into action, the understandings formed of the customer’s environment are challenged and the architecture you’ve built is tested to the extreme. This particular customer is going from a mixture of Exchange 2000 and 2003 to Domino 8.5.2 in a clustered (two site) infrastructure. What have we learned so far?

Domino Clustering is Great
Domino clustering really is a fantastic feature of the product. Resilience built in to the product, multi-site disaster recovery across operating systems (if you need it) and a client solution which comes out of the box aware of the cluster topology. It’s also surprisingly easy to set up. Like Lotus Traveler, “it just works”. It’s another part of the system which you would think had been designed by Apple because of its simplicity yet power.

Notes Client Windows Login Integration is a Black Art
The customer is keen to minimise the differences for users between their previous environment and their new one. Thus, eliminating the need to login to Lotus Notes is a good thing to do. We opted to enable the “shared login” feature of the 8.5.2 client on the principle that it would do just that. We’ve had our problems as it seems to misbehave when we have rolled out user profiles with the ID Vault.

User Feedback has been Good
We anticipated resistance to the deployment of Notes and hence went to some lengths to emulate the behaviour of Outlook as far as possible. This excellent developerWorks article has proved to be very useful. Some settings, however, need to be set manually on the workstations and although we anticipated this, we’d like it to be much more automatic for the next 400 users. We thought people would be deeply entrenched in the ways of Outlook, but the feedback so far as been that Notes is reasonably intuitive and it has some appealing features over Outlook.

Co-Existence Tools Work Well
In the good-old-bad-old-days the MSExchange-Lotus Notes connector was the workhorse that kept the two systems talking during the migration. We’ve opted for SMTP mail routing and remote LDAP lookups between the servers to achieve the same, or at least, similar results. There are some limitations, of course, such as the fact that Outlook users can’t look up Notes user’s calendars and can’t share resources but most people seem content to accept that this is a transient issue. Using Directory Assistance in Domino, Notes users can get the email addresses of the Outlook users simply by typing in part of a name and pressing F9. Domino does the hard work of looking up Active Directory and returning the email address.

Web Mail vs Notes Client
We’ve also learned that for a green-field site, the benefits of Notes client vs web mail are wafer-thin. The quality of the iNotes implementation is such that it is quite acceptable for all day use and not a temporary-use after thought. We’ve found people more IT-savvy than we expected because they inevitably have their own Gmail, Hotmail or Whatevermail account and are used to sending and receiving mail through a browser. On the other hand the extra benefits of Notes for laptop and power users as well as the sidebar plugins with Sametime and Connections still make the Notes client a compelling choice.

Good Value
The deployment of Notes and Domino represents great value for the customer. They get (albeit limited use) access to Instant Messaging (Sametime), Personal File Sharing (Quickr), Social Files and Profiles (Connections) as well as all the stuff that comes with Notes. They’re happy (so far!) and so are we!

Flies in the Ointment
So is it all good news? No, of course not, but the issues have not been significant. We’re wrestling with migrating lots of PST files in to Notes archives and occasionally getting the feared Red Box of Death (we have to use Notes 7 client to use the CMT migration tool) but have tracked this down to corrupt data in Outlook. Weird things happen from time to time and occasionally the Windows/Notes shared login steadfastly refuses to play ball, but in general, its going fine.

Filed Under: IBM Lotus Notes, Technical Stuff Tagged With: , , , ,
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