I had the podcast with Alan Lepofsky at Lotusphere2007 on his new role as evangelist for Lotus Connections as a starting point to this whole Lotus Connections thing.  Well today there was an IBM/business partner tech call for the product which I made sure I was available for.  We are getting interest in hosting this product for customers already and I wanted to see architecture and anything else I could grab.

The blog technology is based on open source for this, using the Roller technology.  This is an easy way to get users started but also the floodgates on information.  One of the speakers even stated this was not a highlight of what Connections has to offer.

Currently only ITDS and Active Directory 2003 are supported.  They are 'actively" looking at properly utilizing the Domino directory for the LDAP services.  This is something that was addressed during Q&A at the end.  Domino support is crucial to many enterprises that have based and aggregated themselves around a Domino directory choice.

There will be a pilot and production install options.  The pilot builds the required tables on DB2 for you and the WAS part is a very basic install with security needs.  Much like the Sametime Gateway base install.  All the services are installed for testing ability in the pilot mode.  Production will offer standalone or clustered services with the ability to include or not include parts of Lotus Connections.  Data preservation should be preserved if you move from pilot to production.  This is a great way for customers to get their feet wet

A slide was pushed on ITDI (IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator) abilities to allow enhanced profile support across data sources.  ITDI will be offered as a bundled part of Connections.  A good move on the part of IBM to allow a greater building of profiles from numerous data sources.  Such as a Domino directory for usernames with HR info on profiles.  Using some data mapping in XML you could build a nice table and hierarchy for profiles, including skillsets.

If you read my LUG Sys Admin newsletter I had some initial candid talk about Lotus Connections inside.  I would suggest popping over there for some beginning thoughts.

I said I would type this up so I went one better and recorded a mini podcast from the St Louis User Group meeting today where we talked about the DST changes we did at Connectria. I will compile that tonight and get that published.

But as a quick note, look for another new agent (4.0.2.7) to come out and fix some of the looping script errors we received on numerous servers while running the server based agent against the mailfiles.  We saw this on more than a few customers across versions of templates as well as Domino versions.  It drove us nuts, and wasted a lot of time to have to go into the text files and remove the offending user mailfile to get the agent to run on.  Until it encountered another one and looped again.  Now some ran without incident.  Others stopped more than 20 times on larger sites.

I also talk about the order we did things and across the product lines.

Well at least an old news story that hit YouTube thinks so...

5:00am - Quick team meeting in my office to go over everything we need to get done.  Blackberry pushes and Sametime are first up on the list.

5:30am - So first up for me was the Sametime servers.  Others were prepping the DWA, calendar and RnR stuff.  I have some of those to do in a bit, but I started with our internal servers first.  Running the JTZU patch took far too long to search the Sametime systems.  You really cannot run this tool in interactive mode since then you need to specify what gets updated and you have no clue.  It even prompts you that letting it search could take hours.  It really only took a few minutes when all was said and done to find what needed updating.  It did take a while to run however.

6:16am - This was incredibly frustrating when the IBM support site was up and down all morning also.  Yes we have knowledgebase locally, but it is faster to web grab some of the files.  Also, it also would be nice not to get just random error messages on documents not existing when you know they do.

7:00am - First batch of RnR changes completed and one test mailfile set done.  One weird error on one customer and the rest went smooth so far.

8:00am - Script errors when the calendar agent runs on a bad mailfile in the text list.  We find endless script loops running.  Removing the last mailfile attempted (and all previous completed ones) from the text list and restarting the agent fixes it.  Some clients have no issues at all, others have a handful that cause grief.  It has you going back to each server and making sure it it not looping.

8:30am - The path for managed and hosted server is an issue, so we created numerous agents with different drive letters that we can fire off.  Now AS/400 and some random servers ever have different data paths from the norm.  Standardization I say, standardization.

8:50am - Encounter first Domino Directory in foreign language.  Script in agents only works on English views.  It says it can't find the Server\Mail Users view.  Which is there, however it is Servidor\Usuarios do Correio. First glance doesn't show where the agent grabs that view name to change it.

So I will give another (after much sleep) overview tomorrow on steps, commands and other things we figured out and streamlined as we went along to make your life easier.

We are finishing the final prep for the big change this weekend and I came across a small section of the technote that stood out as a time saver as no one will be on the servers during the time we are patching.

1. To run as multiple instances (i.e., four instances), copy/paste the agent multiple times in the same database, and change the name to "AdminAgent1", "AdminAgent2" etc.
2. Ensure you have the server setup to run the desired number of concurrent agents in the Server document in the Domino Directory. The "Max concurrent agents" setting is found on the Server Tasks -> Agent Manager tab. Note: There are separate settings for "Daytime Parameters" and "Nighttime Parameters," make sure that you set each as desired.
3. Repeat steps 1-5 from the section above on configuring the agent to run in the background:
- in step 1, ensure that multiple TXT files are used to evenly divide the list of files to process
- in step 2 ensure the individual agents are edited to point to the individual TXT files
- in step 6, simply issue "Tell AMGR Run" for each of the individual copies of the agent:
i.e. for 4 agents it would be the following
Tell AMGR Run "mail\AgentDb.nsf" 'AdminAgent1'
Tell AMGR Run "mail\AgentDb.nsf" 'AdminAgent2'
Tell AMGR Run "mail\AgentDb.nsf" 'AdminAgent3'
Tell AMGR Run "mail\AgentDb.nsf" 'AdminAgent4'

So notice the key area about having enough Amgr threads defined to run all the instances you wish.

So reading the technotes we have some gaps in what will transpire and in what order at most customer sites.  A lot of this relies on the ability, or timing, of getting the desktop operating system patched.  If you follow the simple step plan in technote #1254624 you will see that (1) the server OS gets patched, (2) then the Domino version (if possible), (3) the JTZU for Sametime servers or other Java dependent apps and then it gets fuzzy.

(4) is in relation to putting the OS patch on the clients.  For one thing, Lotus suggests that the Notes client is closed when the patch is applied.  How many of your users leave the client open all night long?

The computer should be restarted after the patch is applied and before restarting Notes.  If the computer is not restarted after installing the patch, Notes will return the old time zone information for time zones other than the current time zone.

A lot is riding on this client restart or even patching.  I am also not sure how you are forcing your users with machines at home or laptops to do it.  If you start scheduling meetings across the clients that do and do not have the OS patch, then you will get variances in what they see and how correct they are.

Now to toss in some confusion, (5) should be done as soon as possible in relation to the OS updates.  This is finely designed and choreographed dance folks.  The amount of errors that DWA users will get relies heavily on this.  See technote #1241063 for the alternative issues.  From simple error pop-ups to meetings getting scheduled in Greenwich Mean Time, I think we have a problem here.  There is no way to get all those DWA user machines.

(6) moves on to the RnR database and the users mailfiles.  Now, if the users have local replicas also, they should be grabbing the change agent through replication before you run it on the server too.  See technote #1254639.  The RnR Manager must be shut down when the agent runs, and you even get a prompt while running this from the database Action menu.  Note, you will be signing these agents with some id file that needs at least editor access to the RnR database.

I will have more info for you to follow this one as we finalize and formulate the plan to update servers globally, hopefully it helps.

So today I went all day trying to use Sametime Mobile for my normal day to day activities while on the road.  This just didn't cut it for a power user that is used to manipulating around the client.  This would have been one of those areas that should have been in beta for some testing.  I don't know if it was, some let me say that also, it might have been.

1) I had a chat, invited another per the menu item but it opened another chat window instead.  Ok, I might have did it wrong, but the way it shows the screens does not make it clear how to select multiple people at once or to add someone correctly to an existing one.

2)  Now, the new chat window only had one menu item in it for some reason., the word Close.  I took that to be close that chat.  No, it closed Sametime Mobile entirely!!  I then had to log in again to go the #3

2) Finally figured out how to do group chat.  Once the 3rd person joined it threw an error  Cannot chat with cn=xxxx/O=Connectria.  Error code = -2147475456.  Now after clicking the OK button, it took me into the group chat.  I think this is a bad closing of the single chat moving it to group mode.  The icon changed to a group symbol with my name instead of the normal of whom I was chatting with as an individual.

Of course, I still do not like the blue and black where everyone in the group is blue.  Can we get different colors for each person?  Now that would be a huge benefit too

A couple quick surprises.  One, most everyone in the room did not run Lotus Domino on Windows.  Instead it was iSeries, Linux and even some Solaris.  Interesting twist.  The second part is they really got the infrastructure session and asked some great follow-up questions about scaling a Sametime architecture for each of their needs.

Now the Sametime Mobile client has something missing I had not noted before.  The Blackberry Enterprise Messenger service, that hooks into Sametime works quite well and is being enhanced even more.  The one thing it does do that the Sametime Mobile developers looked over is that if I am not in the actual chat, and lets say the device is in my holster.  The Welcome Screen has no indicator at the top that there is a pending chat.  Yes you would get the vibration, and if it was the last thing received it would go right into that chat.  But, if you get email behind a chat, for example, and let the Blackberry sit, there is no visual indicator a chat came in unless you check yourself.  Theirs, of course, shows that indicator.  Just one of those things that users demand.

You can jump over to it right here.  It will be interesting to watch how many go up since you are allowed to upload your own plug-ins and even report copyright issues.  How many of you have plug-ins that you can share already?  This is not a marketplace site at all it seems, but a freeware type area where people can pop up quick code they have created.

The IBM sample ones are already there and ready for download it seems.

During the day, which had decent turnout even right behind Lotusphere, a question arose revolving around trusting the IP address of the Sametime Gateway in the Sametime server.  The person stated that they had placed the following:

VPS_Trusted_IPS=1

in the sametime.ini thereby allowing all IP addresses to be trusted.  So in turn, did they still need to go into stconfig.nsf and list the IP address of the Sametime Gateway.  Some research says this is not the setting they are using and that if they are using the one I think:

VPS_Bypass_Trusted_IPS=1

instead, then they are allowing any server to connect to their Sametime server.  The first ini variable should have been a list of IP addresses and not a 1 (one).  This setting should only be utilized during debugging connectivity issues and then should revert back to the trusted list.  If they are running this in production, we will cover it tomorrow in how to clean it up.

Otherwise it was good to see everyone in the room was running Sametime, outside of 1 person, already.  A few had test installs of 7.5.1 running but no one had gotten near the Sametime Gateway.  The user ranges were from under 50 to over 10k.  Which gives a nice slice of environment sizes to cover examples with.  It seems there are still not enough Sametime marketing campaigns for some reason to reach everyone.  While they have it in place, so much of the capabilities and architecture were still unknown to them.  Wait till Day 2.

If you follow my blog comments you will notice that Scott Vrusho stated that an updated agent has been posted once again for DST changes.  Results from a few people are coming back with a few issues to confirm but I will let you know how all our testing goes this week.  Read Scott's comments and announcement with link to the new agent in this posting.

Due to the number of issues and mishaps with patching operating systems, Domino servers, Blackberry servers and devices and other random calendaring questions, I have decided to first issue a new DST standard and then tell you about the new Lotus feature.

1 - Central Standard Time (CST) and any other area that has to embark on all these changes will now commence using IST (IBM Standard Time) which requires Microsoft to tell you what time your calendar appointments and all other information will take place.  No matter what time the view might happen to show in your calendar view, when you open the entry it will be an hour in some random direction.  If you so happen to then synchronize these entries with a Blackberry, you will be so far off in arrival you are destined to pay fees for missing appointments at your doctor and dentist office.  IST will require you to run countless patches and scripts on your servers and some Java device that makes you drink more coffee since even if you upgrade you servers to the recent version and then run the JTZU, it will still show files not properly updated.  Furthermore, IST is only observed on every 2rd Sunday of the 4th month of the 3rd quarter on oddly dated even years.  IST will require a 487 MB download for the Passport Advantage or Partnerworld site which will be down for IST patching until Apr 1 2007.

2 - Lotus now announces a new part of the Lotus Domino product line (Andy P had a huge hand in this), the Approximate Freetime lookup.  Instead of knowing exactly when a room, co-worker or Sametime on-line meeting will be available, you receive a range of time depending on if they updated their local PC at home, their Blackberry device or have switched to marking stripes on the wall with kindergarten sidewalk chalk.  You are now welcome to casually stroll into meeting rooms at any given time and claim ownership of the room for that time.  The person with the fastest pocket calendar shall win and the other group will get the room approximately when you are done.  In case of a draw, there shall be 3 rounds of rock-paper-scissors with the winner taking control of the room.  This new product will be available for download with the new Lotus software project named "Almost, Close, Estimate"

I mentioned we found the issue with the DST patch issued by RIM that caused Sametime Mobile on the Blackberry to stop working.  Well removing the entire Sametime Mobile program and downloading it again fixed the issue.  Sametime Mobile works once again.  This was posted as a comment to my blog posting and also we had confirmed it earlier in the morning today on our own Blackberrys.

We went ahead and moved on with more internal testing with all the DST patches before our big outage.  This test was to push the Blackberry DST patch to the handhelds and have them restart.  Patch went on great.  However, after the patch was loaded, Sametime Mobile client for Blackberry will not start.  As soon as the client code begins it crashes.  No log in screen, nothing.  Blackberry without the DST patch loads the Sametime Mobile just fine still.  Yes we did this on more than one BB device of different versions too.  Sucks to be them (for some reason my DST patch didn't download).

Update: After this point I got one IM saying they had the same issue and now an email with the same result. Blackberry Enterprise Messenger will still work however.

A short YouTube video to show how to get screen captures just right

When I read the release about Five Across I had to laugh some because it sounded about 70% like Lotus Connections written for Linux, FreeBSD or MacOS X.  Data can even be stored independently so you can move around between operation systems.  It had blogs, profiles, RSS syndication, podcasting, quoting and file uploading.  But then it fell a little flat with the 5-star rating of people instead of pages they link or Dogear.  Cisco is claiming it is not entering the space to compete with the public providers, but to have an enterprise solution that can bridge companies and customers.

So here is where I am headed. I wrote a small piece for my monthly newsletter that I am thinking about breaking into daily parts and talking about Lotus Connections in general.  I am disappointed that Lotus took it down so soon after Lotusphere, one can make many assumptions why.  It would have been nice to play with the technology some more.  Also, I talked about BloggingConnections.com while at Lotusphere.  I have still not gotten any word from the right people at Lotus to start that up but stay tuned.

Part 2: As the Lotus community, we needed some straight information from Lotus without having to wade through tons of pages.  Scott Vrusho, Manager for Notes/Domino Maintenance Releases and Serviceability in Human Interaction & Collaboration at Lotus, steps up to the plate to answer these questions.

A special note: Scott contacted me this morning with 2 important updates.  One, the Domino 7 agent for the RNR services was taken offline on Friday after we talked and it is being replaced today.  If you downloaded the version 4 agent Thursday night or Fri morning last week, get the new one downloaded.  The second was an answer on how the Sametime server will handle invited meetings.  I cover that in the podcast.

A customized Blogger search ability

Thanks to everyone so far wanting to add sites to the list that gets searched.  I have gotten all requests in there and we are almost at 100 Lotus/IBM blogs listed.  I have an OPML list ot add shortly that will toss many more in there.  

However, I know there is plenty more, so you can either volunteer to add sites with Google Marker or send me an email or response comment.  THis is turning out to be a huge timesaver for a few of us that use it frequently to get a feel for what bloggers are posting and weeding out all the other noise on the net.

I found this one quite interesting when you jump into Yahoo Messenger 8.1 and when adding a new contact the drop down shows Sametime.  Of course this means the contact you add must have the Sametime Gateway running conected to their Sametime server.  Another reason to purchase my book right ?  hahaha.



On another note, KoolIM came out with a web embedded IM client like Meebo, but it has Sametime in the list.  Predefined with the Dallas public Sametime server.  I found that interesting (as shown in screenshot).

So we already host a company that provides video email capabilities to broadband providers.  This relies on the fact that you will receive them in email however.  I am not sure I want all of our end users receiving large video files in their email, it defeats the purpose of quotas.  It also goes overboard in unified messaging expectations for most companies and enterprises.

Along comes EyeJot offering a web based solution.  You can subscribe via RSS and even get your video mail in iTunes.  Interesting concept.  Even a recorded greeting video.  I created an EyeJot page on my blog real quick to see how it functions.

I bring this up since Sametime will soon be offering point-to-point video.  While there is no storage at this time for offline or emailed video, I can see this type of plug-in being developed under development as we speak.  The ability to leave an offline video/voice message that gets stored on a central server and removed when grabbed or listened to would be highly productive.  Yes, some call this email, but it takes it a step further having virtual visits from your friends.  Expression are carried over, tense and tone are carried, much unlike email and IM.  Heck, your face becomes the virtual emoticon  

Start expecting tons of postings for me for a while as our massive DST change takes place.  This posting today from a fellow co-worker (Ron Heller at Washington University for proper credit) had me in shock for one of our customers that has a heavy date/time application:

Has anyone noticed that the "patched" systems also incorrectly "fix" the past?

At least on a Windows system (Notes 6.x client). If your client and server have been patched, try creating (or updating) a Calendar entry for, say, November 1, 2006.  You'll notice the time is incorrectly set to Daylight Saving time, which was not the case in 2006.

I don't know if this is a bug with Microsoft's patch, or IBM's implementation in Notes/Domino, but this can create havoc on applications with historical data.

Once again, this is a local Microsoft issue since it can only read one time zone at a time, not Lotus Notes.  But be warned...

While there is a glaring line that states that the number of seats accounted for just applications in Notes/Domino are not being counted in here, it is interesting they way they break the sizing down for who has Domino and who has Exchange. Looking at their statements and figures, Domino leads in larger enterprises and the two go head to head in swapping customers in migrations.

Take a read of the article here:

The survey's release comes amid the shipment of Microsoft's Exchange 2007 late last year and IBM's annual Lotusphere conference, which was held last week and focused on Notes/Domino 8, slated to ship mid-year, and new social networking collaboration tools.

The report Gartner put out costs a lovely $995 to read some collection of data I never understand where they actually derive it from.  But if you have a log in, it is over here.

Part 1: A live podcast at Lotusphere2007 with Andy and Rob of Technotics discussing all things Daylight Savings Time (DST) in Lotus Domino.  While we joke around (as always), we drive right to the heart of why this is an issue you should be preparing for.

I have a part 2 coming that is a direct interview with Lotus discussing more on the DST and Domino issues we will face.

So enjoy the ambiance of having it sound like you are sitting right there with us at Lotusphere2007.  This podcast runs 22:28 minutes for a file size of 16.1 MB


Lotus provided numerous technical links in email.  I suggest you get to reading if you have not:

Daylight Saving Time select sites & technotes

Title: Daylight Saving Time Alert

Title: Lotus software: Daylight Saving Time (DST) changes for 2007 will affect Lotus software products

Title: Effects of 2007 Daylight Saving Time (DST) changes on Lotus Notes Calendaring and Scheduling functionality and Resource Reservation functionality

Title: Daylight Saving Time (DST) 2007 information for Lotus Notes and Domino

Title: Daylight Saving Time (DST) 2007 information for Domino Web Access

Title: Daylight Saving Time (DST) 2007 information for Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook (DAMO)

Title: Executive Summary and End User Guide: Daylight Saving Time (DST) 2007
Content: Information to help IT System Administrators and Help Desk personnel communicate the changes for DST within your organization.

Title: Deployment Guide: Daylight Saving Time (DST) 2007
Content: Step by step instructions to implement the changes needed to prepare your Lotus Notes and Domino systems for the DST 2007 changes, along with FAQ

Title: Agents for updating Calendaring and Scheduling entries and Resource Reservation entries for Daylight Savings Time (DST) 2007
Content: The released agents, instructions for applying the agents and a detailed description of how the agents work.

Rob Axelrod talks about his thoughts in the Notes and Domino forum

Blackberry talks about DST patches

As many of you know I am a music fiend and always looking at new ways to hear/listen/filter.  I have the local collection (way to big to hear it all) and also the Yahoo streaming with a custom channel.  Well I came across a site today that I found quite cool and a neat way to navigate moods/tempo/etc.

It was called Musicovery and I happened to stumble across it.  You can select year ranges/tempo/mood/genre and all of that in a sliding connected image that let's you choose paths.  There is like 18 genre's and then sub moods then a sliding bar for year coverage.

A customized Blogger search ability

I find it hard to see all the blogger sites at one time looking for content when we all do not tag the same way.  So I have 83 sites already listed (from my own links) and will take more and even volunteers for the Custom Search Engine on Google.  Alan L started one quite a few months ago but I think this has broader appeal.  Since we all do not use Technorati the same way, but wish to see who said what on a topic, this will search only the blog sites and not hear the noise from everywhere else

You can find the 4 videos right here.  But here is one of them..

While troubleshooting an issue of client lag for a customer, we discovered that the user was accessing their 2GB mailfile.  No problem so far.  However, during the day as they deleted certain messages, the system would take up to 7 minutes before timing out.  This would come and go.

After talking to the tech team handling this user, we discovered that all work was being done in the All Documents view of the mailfile, all the time.  So the index would build, they would work fine and then when they read, replied and then deleted mail from within the message (while saving the sent one of course), it would then start this long wait process.  Well using the Domino Administrator we saw that the All Documents view index was 40MB or so.  So each time the user made a bunch of changes, they would force the view update and then download the entire index as shown in the client_console running. Now even with a dedicated T1 this should take 4 mins or so.  Imagine fighting with the other staff for this same bandwidth and you have the failure.

So convincing a user that the inbox and folders is the proper place to work is the next step.  Oh yes, all mail is in the inbox and no folders