Category: IBM Notes

Open Mic Webcast: External elements that can negatively impact your IBM Domino server

A new Open Mic Webcast on 23 October at 11AM EST.

Join IBM’s Monica Senior, along with several other members of the IBM Domino team as they discuss External elements that can negatively impact your IBM Domino server

During this webcast, we will cover five external elements that can cause your IBM Domino server to crash, prevent the server from starting, and/or affect the server’s performance. These external elements include but are not limited to operating system configurations and applications that are seemingly harmless, but we will cover how their settings negatively impacted IBM Domino servers.

After a presentation attendees will be given an opportunity to ask questions. Throughout the event, attendees will also be encouraged to comment or ask questions through our SmartCloud meeting web chat. Join us for this interactive, educational, lively session.

Follow highlights from these Open Mics live on Twitter using #ICSOpenMic or following us on Twitter @IBM_ICSsupport.

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Let’s see if we can guess the “five external elements.” I’ll start:

  1. DNS
  2. Network
  3. Users
  4. Halon
  5. Alcohol (as consumed by either/both the Administrator or the Developer).,

Whirlpool Corporation: Goodbye IBM Notes

Google Apps scored some enterprise street cred on Monday by announcing a huge customer: Whirlpool.

Whirlpool has 68,000 employees and 66 facilities around the world who will standardize on Apps, Google’s cloud email and office productivity suite. Whirlpool did not ditch Microsoft Exchange or Office for Google. It was using IBM’s Lotus Notes, its CIO Michael Heim told the Wall Street Journal.


This news item is very short on details, unless you are interested in the Google versus Microsoft battle. In fact, all of the articles that I could find on this topic only talk about Google and Microsoft. It makes you wonder if IBM even has some sort of cloud service. If it does (and it really does have a cloud service – why don’t you Google it?), it is never mentioned in these types of articles.


Sixty-eight thousand employees is rather significant, meanwhile in Armonk, NY, IBM says that IBM Lotus/Domino is a growing product. It’s really hard to define “growing” as the contribution of IBM Lotus/Domino is rolled into several other products in their portfolio. I’m sure IBM has lined up a company to take Whirlpool’s place, and then some, in order to continue the growth in IBM Lotus/Domino.


As an aside, there once was a great company in North Canton, Ohio, by the name of Hoover. I’m sure you have heard it. Hoover was sold to Whirlpool. But before that, I was fortunate to assist them with a cc:Mail to Notes migration. Along with the migration, I made some friends at Hoover. One of which has become a very good friend. For that, I am extremely grateful to Hoover (and, I suppose, IBM/Lotus).

Using the Database Maintenance Tool (DBMT) and Compact Replication in Domino 9

Well, this is a bit late, however the TechNote will be updated in “a couple of weeks” so at least you will have have the opportunity to review the slides and the Q&A.
You are invited to join an Open Mic Webcast on the topic “Using the Database Maintenance Tool (DBMT) and Compact Replication in Domino 9”.  This event will be held Wednesday, 11 September 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 here).

When     Date:  11 September 2013
Time: 11:00 AM EDT (15:00 UTC, or GMT -4), for 60 minutes
Title: Open Mic Webcast: Using the Database Maintenance Tool (DBMT) and Compact Replication in Domino 9 – 11 September 2013
Doc #: 7039379
URL: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27039379

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.

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.”

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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.

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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.

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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?