Category: IBM Domino

Publicis Employees to Lotus Notes: Drop Dead

The much-maligned email and calendar software, formerly and more disdainfully known as Lotus Notes, has been cited by a range of departing executives recently as one of the things they disliked most about working for the holding company. It crashes all the time, it’s  not intuitive, and it’s generally “old and clunky,” they say. Don’t even mention the near-useless webmail access. For a holding company that loves to brag about how digital it is, it sure does give employees archaic technology for the most basic of modern communication.

“Emails would take hours, and sometimes days, to be delivered through the Notes servers,” said former Digitas CEO and current Weather CEO David Kenny. “It became common practice to text people to have them watch for and confirm sent emails. The redundancy drove me crazy.”

More >

It’s really easy to fly off the handle on this article, but I think that it served a purpose. What that purpose was, I’m not totally certain, as the whole story isn’t told, leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions. Leave it to the commenters on the article to ask some intelligent questions, which will never be answered. In the past, I have written to the authors of these sorts of articles, asking for more details, only to have those messages go unanswered. Color me surprised.

The other Publicis news. I wonder what messaging system Omnicom runs?

Open Mic Webcast: IBM Notes Domino 9 Social Edition New Features – 3 April 2013

Wow, just a few weeks after the release of Notes/Domino 9. That is progress.

This event will be held Wednesday, 3 April 2013 at 11:00 AM EDT (15:00 UTC, or GMT -4), for 60 minutes. After a presentation, you will have the opportunity to ask questions directly of IBM Developers and Support Engineers. See more details below.  (Note: To view this information online, go to http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27038015

When    Date:  3 April 2013
Time: 11:00 AM EDT (15:00 UTC, or GMT -4), for 60 minutes

Bookmark Webcast Technote
# 7038015    Title: Open Mic Webcast: IBM Notes Domino 9 Social Edition New Features – 3 April 2013
Doc #: 7038015
URL:  http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27038015

Before the call, the technote will include:
An iCal attachment to add this event to your calendar
Details on how to join the call and web conference
The slides that will be presented during the session

A couple of weeks after the call, the technote will be updated to include:
A recording of the session
A written Q&A transcript

To be notified when the Webcast technote is updated, subscribe to IBM My Notifications and select “Webcasts” as a document type of interest.
Web Conference URL    Conference 9526-3802
https://apps.na.collabserv.com/meetings/join?id=9526-3802

We left IBM because there was no webmail

Q: Why did you want to move to cloud-based services for messaging and collaboration?

Fox: Our workforce requires easy access to corporate information, emails, and colleagues to work productively. Our on-premise IBM Lotus Notes email solution did not provide web mail. There was no instant messaging, no presence, and no web conferencing, so it was challenging to communicate and collaborate on the road, at home, or at customer sites. We needed more cost-effective, flexible technologies to help us get away from this whole idea of a workplace being a ‘place.’ Moving to the cloud seemed like a natural evolution.

More >

Way too many snarky comments running through my head, so it’s best if I just let the CIO’s words tell you why the Microsoft cloud is superior to an existing, on-premises solution.

VentureBeat: Once king of enterprise software, Lotus Notes is dragging IBM down

After the Wall Street Journal wrote an article about IBM Notes, it seems that there are some other news organizations have picked up on it and have spinned it into another direction. The “not too favorable” direction. For example, VentureBeat writer Dylan Tweney has another view:

IBM has more modern social-media software, too, but only makes about $55 million per year from that segment of its business. So the challenge for IBM is to continue milking as much revenue as it can from Lotus, while gradually shifting the branding and the revenue to newer, sexier lines of business. One example: Renaming its annual Lotus conference, Lotusphere, as “Connect2013.” Yeah, that’ll help.

We’ll be watching to see if the earnings report sheds any more light on IBM’s efforts to turn Notes around. But as for me, I’m not holding my breath.

More >

 

IBM Notes Mail Rules – Working With Limits

A Help Desk case comes into the queue. A user, when attempting to create a new mail rule, is receiving an error. IBM Notes cannot create a new rule because it exceeds the 32K limit. This user isn’t dumb, he knows that there is no way a simple mail rule will exceed a 32K limit. And he’s right.

What he doesn’t know is that the Mail Rules view, however, can exceed that limit.

Especially if that view has over 100 mail rules. Yes, this particular person had more than 100 rules.

This was an easy fix, one that is told to “Mail Rules Power Users” time and time again – combine your rules. For example, if you have several rules that move mail into a particular folder, combine them into one rule using the “OR” statement. Or the “AND” statement. Like this:

mailrule

Instead of having three separate Rules, I’ve combined three Rules into one. Best of all, I’ve reduced the size of the Mail Rules view accordingly. The unspoken, added benefit is that I can now have more than 100 Rules, as I have Rules that perform several functions at once.

TechNote: Is there a limit to the number of mail rules each user can create?

Salesforce.com: Why Companies are replacing Lotus Notes

One of the beautiful, annoying aspects of the internet is that it never forgets. There are many, many examples of this trueism coming back to bite companies and individuals. So, let’s look at Salesforce.com.

Back in 2009, at Lotusphere, Salesforce was there, in force as I recall, to demonstrate how their offering integrated with LotusLive. Oh, it was a joyful time.

. . . At IBM’s Lotusphere event, salesforce.com will showcase how customers can bring together Salesforce CRM with LotusLive and Lotus Notes, to harness the power and innovation of cloud computing within their enterprises and across their customers.

Salesforce.com has also entered into an agreement with IBM to work together to further enable technology interoperability and joint customer success for businesses that use solutions from both companies.
“The cloud computing model offers customers a low-cost, low-risk way to manage their IT infrastructure,” said Polly Sumner, President, Platform, Alliances and Services, salesforce.com. “Bringing together Salesforce CRM and LotusLive can help customers further leverage cloud computing to streamline their communication and collaboration processes.”

Wow, kittens AND unicorns. It was beautiful.

Here we are, at the end of 2012. How’s that relationship between IBM and Salesforce working out?

Well, the reality is that Notes penetrated companies pretty darn well back in the 90’s (like a Nirvana song permeated the radio waves), and the departmental applications sprouted and filled all the holes that IT often couldn’t get to. Love it or hate it, Notes became a mainstay platform of the enterprise. In a recent survey we did of our Dreamforce 2012 attendees, we found that 73% did indeed still use Lotus Notes. And that 70.3% were considering replacing Lotus Notes, the majority within the year.

No hard numbers, as in “number of respondants,” but that doesn’t really matter. Of Salesforce’s customers at Dreamforce, 73% of their customers use Lotus IBM Notes and Domino. Of those respondants, as I read it, 70.3% of the 73% are looking to replace it.

[Blog intermission] I am rather shocked that there were that many IBM Notes and Domino customers attending. Consider that IBM probably has less than 50% of the total messaging market, and that of that number, 73% were at Dreamforce. I would venture to say that only other place on Earth, where more than 73% of the audience is IBM Notes and Domino customers is at Connect. Or one of the many User Group conferences held around the world.

What the heck happened from 2009 until now that soured the once exceptional relationship between IBM and Salesforce? Remember, it was all kittens, sunshine, and unicorns back in 2009.

If you read the comments to the Salesforce post, and I highly recommend that you do, Ed Brill chimes in. But then, so does Steve Wood, VP of Platform for Salesforce:

Let me start by making a bold statement: we like Lotus Notes! We also have a huge respect for Lotus Notes developers. It has been a transformational platform for many businesses. It illustrated how empowering the business to “do more” with software can result in amazing things. However, it’s old. And I think I could probably get you to agree that IBM has under-invested. It’s client/server (more on xpages later), users find the product to be pretty clunky from a UI perspective, workflow has to be coded, and it doesn’t REALLY have reporting (it has views). It’s just kind of… well… old and tired. All of this stuff means that Lotus Notes users and developers are looking for a new player – we hear that from surveying just those people. They like Lotus and what it does, but they feel trapped in an aging and underinvested platform – that’s where we see our opportunity (and we’re investing heavily).

I wonder if Salesforce will be at Connect?

Link: Salesforce.com Demonstrates Cloud Computing Solutions at IBM Lotusphere 2009

Link: Here’s Why Companies are Replacing Lotus Notes (And You Should Too)

How is winmail.dat my problem?

Misconfigured Outlook clients used to be the bane of my existance. And, occasionally can still be, in 2012. Which is pretty astounding, when you think about it.

The background is pretty simple, really. Outlook clients send e-mail using a Microsoft proprietary format, which certainly isn’t MIME. That is pretty amazing that someone thought that everyone, everywhere, would use Outlook to send mail to other Outlook users.

Try explaining to a customer that those files aren’t a Notes/Domino problem Sure, they understand,  but they want them to go away. So, it becomes my problem.

Thankfully, there are two notes.ini settings that you can apply to your SMTP server. Or server’s. Whatever the case may be.

Open the Domino Administrator. Go to the Servers tab, click on Server Console.

Enter “set config TNEFEnableConversion=1” then click either Send or hit enter.

Enter “set config TNEFKeepAttachments=1” then click either Send or hit enter.

To enable the setting to take effect immediately, enter “tell router update config” then click either Send or hit enter.

There, now someone else’s problem has been resolved on your servers. You’re welcome.

Here is a handy TechNote that explains the cause and resolution in a little more detail.

This behavior is due to messages being sent from Exchange without MIME encoding turned on. Winmail.dat is attached to the message in uuencoded format. Information on how to prevent winmail data being sent to Internet users from MS Exchange is documented and publicly available from the Microsoft Support Web page, in the Microsoft Knowledge Base, article number Q138053

 

Firefox and iNotes

Damn, Firefox causes problems for me and iNotes. You visit a customer to do a simple Domino upgrade and what do you end up spending most of your time resolving? Firefox and iNotes issues.

Now, usually, Firefox doesn’t cause a lot of trouble, especially when you stick with one release and refuse to upgrade. But, of course, there are those among us that cannot abide by being a point release behind. Those are the people that immediately download the latest and greatest. In the case of Firefox, that is a weekly download.

Well, at least it seems like there is a weekly (daily?) update to Firefox.

In this instance, I was able to convince the on-site technical support people to discourage too many people from upgrading to Firefox 15, but for those that did upgrade, they were experiencing some issues:

  • When e-mails came in and there were URLs in the text, they weren’t hotlinks.
  • If they attempted to send mail or calendar invites and there were URLs in them, the message/invites couldn’t be sent.
  • They couldn’t attach files to any mail messages.

Wow, that’s fun.

Thankfully, a well constructed search of the technotes resulted in a solid hit.

iNotes not working as expected with Firefox 15 and later

Added the notes.ini setting to the servers, restarted the HTTP task and all their problems went away. That is, probably until someone upgreades to  Firefox 21, or whatever version is the most current right now.

The lesson is that while it is easy to upgrade your Domino servers, be sure to check the TechNotes/wiki/InfoCenter/forums for issues with Firefox. You can save yourself some time and effort by implementing the requested changes before you restart the servers and tell everyone “I’m done.”