Manipulating images resources directly in IBM Lotus Notes and Domino

See my suggestion for two new Lotus Notes formula language functions for programmatically manipulating images in Notes Client and Web browser environments, and please visit IdeaJam to place your vote on my idea.

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New formula language functions: @SetImageResource and @GetImageResource

A squeaky wheel runs amok in ultra-hot hot weather (all about Lotus Notes 9.0)

Thanks to the great meeting place that PLANET LOTUS has now become, I came across the following post by Glenn Irvine: What I’d Love to See in Notes 9.0 (go take a look at it)

Let it be clear from the outset I have nothing whatsoever against the feature changes that Glenn is requesting. It’s just that when he talked about “Notes 9.0” I expected it it the be about, well, Notes 9 as a whole – but it only happened to be about several usability shortcomings in the mail application in Notes.

So I made the following comment (maybe because it’s around 10 AM and already warming up. The Bureau of Meteorology predicts a real scorcher here in Victoria today. They reckon it will reach 44 degrees Celsius or more, which would make it the hottest February day on record down here, and very ominous for bushfires. (UPDATE: see what actually happened here.)

We had a couple of similarly hot days near the end of January. People, animals and plants are under considerable weather stress in our corner of the continent. The last rain of any significance was in December last. The weather was quite cool then, but it has warmed up with a vengeance recently.

A day or two ago, ex-Collingwood footballer Peter Daicos, when putting out his wheelie bin in North Balwyn (just a few kilometres away in the heart of suburban Melbourne) was bitten on the toe by a venomous red-bellied black snake. (Talking about snake, scientists have found in Colombia a fossil 13-metre giant snake, as long as a school bus, which used to devour giant turtles and primitive crocodiles. Scary.)

Another sign of the unusually warm stretch we’ve had here in south-eastern Australia is the fact that many of the less hardy deciduous trees have been dropping their leaves, months before the stat of our southern autumn.

Maybe this has put me a bit on edge, but I just commented on Glenn’s story as follows. Let me know if you agree, or otherwise:

- - - - - - - - - - - - -
What disturbs me a bit about the content (but sometimes only the title) of posts like this is that all too often they’re restricted to talking about desired enhancements in apps bundled up with Notes. Often the comments are restricted to Notes Mail (as in your case above, Glenn) — or to iNotes or Sametime or one of the other IBM apps.

Understandably, IBM people (like our famous and most gentlemanly leader Ed Brill) often talk about specific enhancements in their own apps. Hey, I worked for IBM for a long time, and know that it’s hard enough to keep up with what IBM is announcing much less what happens outside IBM.

Many of the vast community of IBM business partners and independent ISVs, not to mention all those thousands of Notes customers big and small alike who roll their own apps (and some of whom have a vast inventory of such apps), do like what they see being added to or fixed in in Notes Mail.

But in many cases they also want major new generic enhancements in Notes. A perfect example of this would be the grouse new Xpages capability that’s just been released in Notes 8.5 for us all to savor.

Notes remains a fantastic application platform [for certain classes of apps] as we all know. While there have been many outstanding mainly server-related enhancements in the past few years (major compression improvements, DAOS, etc) it’s not quite as common for a startling application-building enhancement like Xpages to appear.

So what would I myself talk about when I say I’d like to see something new in Notes 9 or Notes 10?

How about a few REALLY big hitters, for generic app design and development? For one, the ability to design an application once and have it behave exactly the same in the Notes client and a web browser? (Not asking for much, am I?)

IBM in an earlier release used to make available what I’ll term “some trusty old Lotus Notes applications” which you’ll find listed here on my website: http://asiapac.com.au/Links/NotesDomino.htm#TRUSTY_OLD_LOTUS_NOTES_APPLICATIONS

They’re quite old and rusty pre-Domino apps (so are not web enabled), but my point here is that one thing they did at that point in time was to let people see that Notes is note just about mail (as important as mail still is), but that Notes is really very good for building a vast range of other application types.

The old hands at Notes (customers and others) were very worried that IBM had lost its way in the early part of this decade, but needn’t worry now since it’s apparent that IBM is solidly behind Lotus Software including Notes.

A recent extremely promising move from IBM is the decision to get behind OpenNTF.org and help push out the message that Notes is a great application platform, and that there are lots of free apps available from OpenNTF (and from a range other sources too, for that matter)

In summary, what I would have called this post is “What I’d Love to See in Notes 9.0 Mail” because there are LOTS of other bigger things I’d like to see in Notes 9 (and 10 and 11 and ad infinitum) as a whole!
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Technorati Tags: Lotus Notes 8,Notes Mail,Application Platform,IBM Lotus Notes and Domino

Messing around with OpenNTF.Org’s sign on and download process (updated)

Don’t get me wrong, I reckon that OpenNTF.org is an absolutely fantastic boon to the Lotus Notes/Domino community. There are lots of excellent tools, frameworks, utilities and applications available for download at the best possible price [free, as in beer].

But right now I cannot download anything. Frustration… It accepted my long-time password without complaint, but still shows my status as “not logged in” and prevents me from downloading anything.

So I request a new password, which it tells me will arrive shortly, but I have to wait maybe fifteen minutes for it (didn’t take an exact measurement of the elapsed time). Having to wait so long was another frustration, such things should happen within seconds, a minute or two at the very outside.

I signed in using the new password, but it still showed me as being “not logged in” (highlighted in yellow in Figure 1) so I couldn’t download anything. Therefore I repeat the sign-on process a number of times more, sometimes deliberately entering the wrong password and having it knocked back. … Swearwords flowed liberally!

After a few more minutes of puzzlement and messing around, I decide to try the same with Firefox browser, and everything worked fine this time. Then tried to work out what configuration setting (or cookie or whatever) was causing my IE-based Avant Browser session to spit the dummy and prevent downloading [even while accepting the new password].

I decided to give up on that quest and, not liking the cryptic new password, wanted to reset it to its old easily-remembered value.

I hoped to find a conventional “Manage your profile” or “Reset Password” function just underneath the “Register” and “Forgot Password” links in the right-hand column (where the green highlighted area is in Figure 1) but it wasn’t there.

Maybe I was just just having a bad morning or am going blind, but having signed in (under Avant Browser) couldn’t see a “reset password” facility anywhere, so it appears that I’m stuck with the cryptic password.

[UPDATE STARTS HERE] But then I look at the Firefox window again and, as shown in Figure 2, see that indeed there is an “Update Profile” option (thought there would be all along, actually).

Now I’m an old-timer in the IT industry – still think that punched cards and print-outs are the most reliable form of input/output devices devised so far!  One of the reasons I have misgivings about new fads like AJAX and cloud computing is that they’re so reliant on HTML and browsers in all their variations, and problems like I experienced this morning with cookies (or whatever it was) are really awful to experience and nightmarish for the web application designer/developer to handle elegantly.

I write regular articles for iTWire which uses Joomla and so I have to use a browser-based editor which I find quite awkward to use. And the built-in browser-based editor for Blogger.com that I originally used for writing posts in this very blog was also quite clumsy and restrictive. even compared with the nice Writely editor they acquired for  Google Docs (which they should adapt for use in Blogger.com, I’d recommend). But now I use Microsoft’s excellent free Windows Live Writer and find it far, far nicer to use for blog content management. It’s a cinch to create everything offline in a familiar GUI (very similar to using Microsoft Word, or Expression Web / FrontPage) and when you’ve finished composing your article you just click on the Publish button and everything (text, images, more) is updated on you blog with no hassles whatsoever. It’s a very nice piece of work, congrats Microsoft.

Browsers do some things nicely, but I find them not at all good – sometimes quite horrible -- for really serious transactional activities of various types. Conceived as a means of displaying web contents, they are now being force-fitted into all sorts of environments where they perform less than ideally.

Footnote:
I find the OpenNTF site (kindly hosted by Prominic) to be a little on the slow side. My impression is that the average response time is around ten seconds or so, just on the borderline of acceptability. It would be nice if it were snappier (and a better advertisement for Prominic’s Lotus Domino hosting offering -- hint, hint).

Technorati Tags: OpenNTF.Org,Password management,IBM Lotus Notes and Domino,Freeware

UPDATE #2:
I implied above that I might possibly be going blind. Being a thorough type, I did further research on the causes of blindness, and just by chance came across the following little gem concerning a form of blindness (in dating)…

UPDATE #3:
Strangely enough, next day the sign on problems that I had experienced under Avant Browser (a front end to IE) went away. I have no idea why.

Version 1.01 of Presenter for IBM Lotus Notes released (04 November 2008) – Eat your own dog food!

 

I don’t give many presentations these days, but expect to do so tomorrow afternoon at the Melbourne (Australia) Lotus User Group meeting.

So I took out my unique little “Presenter for Lotus Notes” application and brushed up a few cobwebs on it. No new functionality, mainly some color changes to alternate view rows and little things like that.

Its now ready for download at either http://asiapac.com.au/NotesPresenter_Download.htm or http://notestracker.com/NotesPresenter_Download.htm. Naturally, it’s still completely free.

But you are probably asking: “What on earth is Presenter for Notes?”

Well, the story behind Presenter goes like this…

I once did industrial chemistry and high school chemistry/mathematics teaching, then spent a long time at IBM (from 1970 to the mid-1990s, now retired), and find myself as a consultant still in IT 39 years after starting at IBM. My fortieth year in IT begins next January, is that good or bad I keep asking myself.

During all that time, I’ve seen a vast number of lessons, lectures, business presentations and the like. In the early days, they were done on blackboards and paper. Later overhead projectors were in vogue, with their transparent plastic “foils.” These foils, in any quantity, weighed a ton and weren’t much fun to prepare, distribute and lug around (as I can attest from giving lots of IBM presentations across Australia, and Asia while supporting the IBM System/38 and AS/400 and other systems).

Then in the 1980s and 1990s, along came Lotus Freelance and Microsoft PowerPoint and suchlike. A better thing? On the whole, probably so.

But overdone to the n^th degree. Now we have PowerPoint presentations in plague proportions! See here or here (especially look at the articles about “Unplug that projector” and “Drag and drop” and “warts” and “disaster”).

When I was to give a presentation several years ago, I asked myself if there was a different and/or better way.

Being active in the Lotus Notes community, I decided that “If you promote and sell it, you should use it!.” So I developed a “presenter” platform to be used in the Lotus Notes Client environment itself.

The rationale for having a tool like Notes Presenter is briefly outlined in an earlier blog post of mine, see Notes Presenter -- Let's eat our own dog food with more details on the download page given above. There’s a user guide built in to the database, in the “Help Using This Database” document.

You can use Presenter not just for preparing and giving presentations via a Lotus Notes Client, but also for packaging and delivering virtually any Notes applications (databases) together with any sort of related supporting files: executables, documents, data files (even other Notes databases, including design templates), and much more.

You could, as just one example, hold different versions/releases of a Notes application suite – or a presentation, or anything else -- either inside [separate documents held in] a single Presenter database or in multiple Presenter databases each one dedicated to s single version/release.

In fact, whatever can be attached to a Notes rich text field can be delivered via a Presenter database as one tidy self-contained package.

With the various Presenter views (such as the view by Category/Concept shown just above), and via full-text search, you can quickly and easily locate a particular slide or group of slides related to a given topic.

For example, in the question time at the end of a pitch,  somebody asks you about a particular term you used that’s buried deep within one of many slides. Use a full-text search to rapidly locate that slide instead of fumbling around (as I’ve seen happen a number of times) and perhaps not even be able to find that slide again.

There’s a lot more I could say, but let me just say that if you’re a Lotus Notes Client user you should “eat your own dog food” and avoid using PowerPoint wherever possible. Download Presenter for Lotus Notes and go try it out!

SDMS version 4.4.01 released (28 October 2008)

Version 4.4.01 of SDMS, the Simple Document Management System for IBM Lotus Notes and DOmino, was released today with NotesTrackerB built in, Tuesday 28 October 2008 -- and of course it’s free, as ever.

When v4.4.00 was released, I inadvertently reset its default access level so that it was no longer Manager. This meant that, as delivered, you could not do things such as changing the database’s title, unless you knew that you could bypass this problem by making a local copy and select not to copy the access control list.

In version 4.4.01 the default for the ACL has been reset to Manager.

This should make it easier for you again to start off using SDMS “out of the box” (without suffering the abovementioned access level problem).

TechWords Interactive IBM Lotus Notes Crossword

Hey now, here's something crafted especially for Lotus Notes enthusiasts and just posted to my iTWire blog section, A Meaningful Look

It's the third in my new series of interactive technology crosswords for iTWire, and you'll find it at the following link:

TechWords Interactive IBM Lotus Notes Crossword

I really hope that you Lotus followers all like it -- or at least appreciate it -- and if you do please help me by "Digging" it on the above iTWire page.

I'm looking forward to coming back to the theme of IBM and Lotus Software in a while, after creating some puzzlers for other technologies.

I'm aiming to create a new technology crossword (or searchword) puzzle every week or two, but they take quite some fiddling to prepare and upload to iTWire. And keep in mind that's not even making allowance for the creative juices that have to flow in order to devise the clues and answers for each theme. Over the last few weeks I've developed a healthy respect for crossword puzzle authors!

Top 8 Reasons to Love IBM Lotus Notes 8 - Webcast

Ed Brill, Business Unit Executive of IBM Lotus Notes/Domino sales, worldwide, extols the the next major feature release of Lotus Notes, due to be released any time now.

Understand how these collaborative advances, are helping users work the way they want, for the better. (You can download the presentation slides as a PDF document for later review.)

As earlier pointed out, we have tested our premier product NotesTracker against this year's two public betas of Notes 8, and it passed with flying colors. Not a single change to the NotesTracker code or design was required; that's upwards compatibility for you!

An error was encountered while opening a window!

I've written previously about pathetically inane error messages that lurk in dark corners of otherwise good software, waiting to spring out at you when you least desire them.

Today's beauty is one that lives in the current latest release 7.0.2 of the IBM Lotus Notes client (imminently to be replaced by the brand new Notes 8 client based on the IBM Expeditor/Eclipse architecture).





This is all that you're told. No more, no less!

So, there was an error, was there? And one that was encountered while opening a window, was it? What a masterpiece of exposition! What design committee thought up that one?

If you get yourself into this predicament, you'll find that this artfully vague message will be regurgitated every time that you try to relaunch the Notes Client following the crashed session.

As it turns out, the solution is quite simple: open the Task Manager and cancel the ntaskldr.exe Notes task.

Would it not be easy to modify this error message to suggest such a remedy? No, no, of course not: let's leave it there to bamboozle even more users!

MESSAGE FOR ALL SOFTWARE DESIGNERS & DEVELOPERS:
Why not eliminate the stupidities in your old code, and not just plow ahead creating new code?

UPDATE:
There's more info about this situation in IBM support Technote 1224056 which states this "was addressed in Notes/Domino 6.5.6. It is reported as no longer occurring in the Notes/Domino 7 and 8 releases." ... I'm not too sure about that! Time will tell, eh?

Steps for installing multiple Lotus Notes Client releases on a single system

(Last updated 08 April, 2008)

PREAMBLE:
So, you're perhaps a developer or a tester or administrator, and are wondering how you go about installing more than one Lotus Notes Client release on your computer.

In October last year (2006) I briefly discussed some tips for installing multiple Notes client releases on a single system with some links to other peoples' posts on this topic.

There was also a related post about the possibility of using Junction Points or SoftGrid for Installing multiple Lotus Notes releases on a single system? but, in retrospect, I don't think that this is a useful path to follow. Indeed, it could be an extremely difficult and messy way to go about installing multiple Notes/Domino releases!

The most "generic" solution is to run multiple virtual machines on the one system, each VM having a different Notes/Domino release. This is, of course, nearest to running them on separate systems, but it doesn't work too well if your system lacks processing power, especially RAM. It's the cleanest solution, in the sense that each Notes/Domino release has its own separate Windows registry to play with (no chance of OLE/ActiveX conflicts).

Since mid-2003 I've been using two different notebook PCs as my main development platforms, but they were not expandable enough in terms of processor power, RAM and hard disk to cope with what I was trying to throw at them. For example, they both happened to be limited to 1GB of RAM. By limiting the separate VMs to no more than about 128 Mb of RAM each, and with the aid of some external USB-attached hard disks, I was able to run three or four virtual machines per notebook. However the performance was a little on the sluggish side, okay for testing purposes but certainly not for continued use.

With the above in mind, over the Christmas/New Year break I've taken delivery of a brand spanking new desktop system: an AMD Athlon X Dual Core 5200+ processor, with 4 GB of RAM and around 1 TB of mirrored hard disk. I pressured hardware specialist Gordon Newell (friend and fellow ex-IBMer) of Chalcot Micro Systems (here in Melbourne, Australia) to build me an ultra-fast yet ultra-quiet desktop machine (it's turned out to be quieter than my latest notebook PC, so I can enjoy listening to quiet music without annoying fan and disk drive noise). Altogether, it should keep me happy for a couple of months, before I notice that it's not fast enough! I'll certainly be running several virtual machines, but it's a pity that the 32-bit Windows XP version cannot make full use of the 4GB of RAM for applications, reporting only about 3.GB as being available. (I would have used the 64-bit version to overcome this issue, however lack of sufficient drivers prevented me from doing so. And this is not to mention the sad and sorry story about having to purchase 64-bit versions of all my applications, but don't get me started on that!)


THE STEP-BY-STEP PROCEDURE:
Here now is a more explicit description than last time about installing multiple releases of Notes/Domino on a single system. Note that this enables you to run each release, but not necessarily concurrently. This is adequate for my purposes but might not be for yours, in which case either follow the VM path or see if Bill Buchan's tips work for you (these are referenced in my earlier post).

The scenario is that I install everything on the Windows G: drive -- which for historical notebook-PC-related reasons happens to be a logical rather than physical drive, though this does not in any way affect the outcome. Change the drive letters to suit your own situation (and, of course, they don't all have to be installed on the same drive).

I'm assuming here that, for development and support purposes, your intent is to install not the simple Notes Client but rather the Domino Designer/Administrator product.

The releases should be installed in the following sequence, meaning that when you're finished the Windows registry should have that latest Notes/Domino settings in effect (in this example, Notes 7.0.2):

1. Notes plus Domino R4.6.4 were both installed into the G:\Notes4 folder (it could have been separate folders, but this works for me, and anyhow I hope that there aren't any of my customers still using R4.6.4).
2. Notes R5.0.11 was installed into the G:\Notes5 folder, and Domino R5.0.11 was installed into the G:\Domino5 folder.
3. Notes R6.5.5 was installed into the G:\Notes6 folder, and Domino R6.5.5 was installed into the G:\Domino6 folder.
4. Notes R7.0.2 was installed into the G:\Notes7 folder, and Domino R7.0.2 was installed into the G:\Domino7 folder.

(Stating the obvious, when you're doing this for yourself you would use your own directory names.)

The release installations go on pretty much uneventfully until you get to the final stage, installing R7 after you have installed R6. The first consideration arises because IBM enhanced R6 to support roaming Notes Client users, see IBM Technote 1106932: Is a Multi-user Installation of Notes/Domino 6.x Needed in Order for Users to Roam?

As a consequence of having taken the multi-user path in an earlier installation, you may need to use the registry tweak described in IBM Technote 1176213: Error: 'You are attempting to upgrade a multi-user installation' when upgrading to a single-user install -- and might find helpful information in Technote 1113003: Unable to upgrade Single-user install to a 6.x Multi-user install plus Technote 1114371: Where is the option for a Multi-user Install of the Notes Client? and perhaps also Technote 1219467: Users are prompted to complete the Client Setup Wizard after upgrading a Notes multi-user installation to 7.0

In my case, I wanted to install Domino Designer/Administrator R7 into the Notes7 folder, but instead was presented with the following installer panel (click on any of the following the images to see an enlargement):



The problem here is that you don't want to install R7 into your R6 folders, but the installer has the Change... buttons grayed out so you are stymied by being prevented from selecting different folders for R7. So what do you do next?

Well, my workaround was to cancel the above R7 installation, start the Windows registry editor (regedit.exe) and locate the hive key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Lotus\Notes whereupon I could see entries for R5 and R6 (but not for R4, which is possibly why you can get away with putting both R4 Domino and R4 Designer into the same folder). I renamed them by adding the string _OLD to their names, like this:


Then, I renamed the Notes6 folder to Notes6_OLD.

Having done that, I relaunched the R7 Domino Designer/Administrator installer and this time was allowed to select the desired new R7 target folders, thus:


When the R7 install was complete, I refreshed the registry editor window and got:


The final step is to rename the R5 and R6 hive key entries back to their proper values (by removing the string _OLD from their names), thus:

And of course, I renamed the Notes6_OLD folder back to Notes6.

After that, all four Notes/Domino releases more or less operated normally.

I run one server and one designer client at a time, and they don't necessarily have to be at the same release level. For example, I might leave the Domino 7.0.2 server running continuously and launch the various Notes Client releases one at a time to perform function compatibility tests.

It's likely that certain Windows registry-based functions such as OLE will only work for the last-installed version, but you can't have everything! (If this is an issue for you, then try the Virtual Machine approach, where you have the older releases each running in its own VM with its own dedicated Windows registry settings.)
--------------------------------------
UPDATE - 05 May 2007:
I just came across IBM Technote 1233184 (modified 2007-01-02) which more or less confirms that my suggested procedure works. The body of this Technote is as follows:

Coexistence of Notes 6.x and 7.x on a single workstation

Problem
IBM Lotus recommends that you do not install more than one version of Notes on the same computer. Notes is not designed to function in this manner. Rather than install, for instance, Notes 6.x and Notes 5.x on the same machine, upgrade your Notes 5.x client to Notes 6.x. If you install both versions on the same machine, be aware that this installation could have adverse effects on the operation of the version of the client (or server) that was originally installed. For example, OLE/COM settings will point to the Notes 7.x directory, default email client settings, etc.

Solution
With that understanding, follow the steps below to install Notes 7.x on a machine that also has 6.x installed:Note: You must have local administrator privileges to complete this procedure. These instructions apply to single user installs only: they do not apply to multi-user client installs.

Shut down the Notes client and all Notes-related tools, utilities and add-ins running on your computer.

Rename the Notes 6.x directory. Notes 6.x is typically installed to \Program Files\Lotus\Notes on Windows. For example, you could rename the directory "Notes6."

Rename the entire Notes registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Lotus\Notes. For
example, you can rename it HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Lotus\Notes6

Rename the entire Installer registry key KEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Lotus\Notes\Installer.
For example, you can rename it
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Lotus\Notes\Installer6

Run the Notes 7.x install program (SETUP.EXE). Select new locations for the program and data
directories. For example, you can select \Program Files\Lotus\Notes7 and \Program Files\Lotus\Notes7\Data

During the install you may see an error message
"Error 1905.Module c:\program files\lotus\notes\nelsons.Dall failed to unregister. RESULT". Click OK and installation will proceed.

When the install program has finished, rename the 6.x directory back to the original directory name, for example, \Program Files\Lotus\Notes)Note: The information provided above is taken from the Notes 7.0 Release Notes.

Related information
Caveats that occur when more than one version of Notes is installed on the same computer

UPDATE - 30 July 2007:
Das Notes Forum has another perspective on this, by Jens b. Augustin:
Parallelinstallation Von Clients, merer Detentions

Here's a translation from German to English (performed by Google Translate):
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fatnotes.de%2Findex.php?topic=15318.0&langpair=de%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8


UPDATE - 22 January 2008:
My website and blog tracking services show that Notes/Domino developers all around the world are very interested in this topic, so here's another promising tip.

I've recently come across another product that appears to have the potential for supporting multiple Lotus Notes Client releases -- or for that matter most other Windows software -- concurrently and robustly. It's called Altiris Software Virtualization Solution (SVS), now a Symantec product. There's a full-fledged professional commercial version and a free personal version (the same as the regular commercial product except for the server-side components for centralized management).The personal version should be good enough for the solo Notes/Domino developer. You can read about SVS at http://www.altiris.com/Products/SoftwareVirtualizationSolution.aspxWhen I get enough time I will read the rather hefty documentation and give SVS a try, then report the results in this blog.

UPDATE - 12 March 2008:
Over at his BizzyBee's Thoughts blog, Martin Vereecken has an article Notes 8 and Notes 7 coexistence that gives another take on the Windows registry settings that I discussed earlier on in this post.

But the most precise recipe so far is this one by Thomas Bahn: Installing and running Notes R5, 6, 7 and 8 concurrently ... Nice work, Thomas!