Paul and Bill have officially launched the ILUG 2007 site, so start making your plans now. Me and Rob will be revisiting our error trapping session at the event, and we're just a small part of a tremendous cast of speakers.

I'll probably be buying plane tickets this week. My wife and I are both heading out there for a little vacation on top of the conference. I think the way our schedule will end up is:

• Fly out on Saturday the 19th or Sunday the 20th (it's an overnight flight whenever we do it)
• Do touristy things early in the week
• Do the conference on Thursday and Friday
• Attend the big geek dinner on Friday night
• Recover from said dinner on Saturday
• Fly back on Sunday the 27th
• Have all day on Monday (Memorial Day) to un-jetlag ourselves

That seems like the best way to schedule it, if we can. Flight prices are a tiny bit cheaper flying back on Monday instead of Sunday, but not cheaper enough to make a big difference.

Anyway, it's going to be a great show and Paul and friends are putting a huge amount of effort into it, so try to make it if you can. If nothing else, it's a great excuse for a vacation.

Oh, and I hear that a couple of sponsor spots are still available if you're interested...

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Bruce had an LS:DO problem recently and talked about potentially moving the code to LEI/LCLSX to see if that helped. Even though this isn't Thursday, I'll go ahead and post this as a Show 'n Tell Thursday tip for you.

Here's some code that shows you how to make an ODBC call using the LEI LCLSX classes in LotusScript:

Making calls to an ODBC DSN using LEI (also in prettified HTML format)

First of all, some terminology:

• LS:DO is the "old" way to connect to ODBC databases in LotusScript, using ODBCConnection, ODBCResultSet, etc. It's still a part of the LotusScript language, and it still works.
• LEI is the Lotus Enterprise Integrator, that provides ways to access external data (usually relational databases) either with ODBC or by using one of the native "connectors" that are available for systems like Oracle and SAP. The nice thing about the LEI connectors is that you don't have to have any DSNs defined on the local workstation for them to work.
• LC LSX is the LotusScript library that allows you to programatically access databases using LEI, much like you would using LS:DO.

So... why use LEI and LCLSX instead of LS:DO? Well, to be honest I still go back and forth between the two. I've heard that LEI gives better performance when you use the native connectors, and if you add DECS to the mix you can do a lot of server-side configuration to simplify things. However, I've always found LS:DO a little easier to use, so I still fall back on that quite a bit.

In the example above, then, why would you want to use LEI to make ODBC calls, instead of LS:DO?

Not too long ago, good buddy Bruce was also having a problem accessing a WVARCHAR field using an ODBC driver and LS:DO. If he used the driver and a DSN to access the data with something like Microsoft Excel, everything came over just fine. But if he used the same driver and the same DSN with LS:DO, it didn't work. The WVARCHAR data was blank. Nothing there.

The "W" in WVARCHAR stands for "wide", which is another way of saying "Unicode" (not strictly, but pretty much). LS:DO was choking on the Unicode data, even though the ODBC driver could clearly access it. I did a little guessing, and I guessed that the problem was that LS:DO only supports ODBC 2.0 while Unicode calls in ODBC weren't available until ODBC 3.5.

We tried using LEI/LCLSX code -- same Notes client, same ODBC driver, same DSN -- and we got the data. So there you go. Good reason to use LEI, at least sometimes.

technorati tag: Show-n-tell thursday, SnTT

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Hey everyone. ? I just wanted to let you know that I'll be away next week. ? Keep your RSS readers ready, I've got a ton of tips queued up for when I get back.

There's an interesting discussion brewing in the comments of my last blog entry. We started off with the problem that the Notes URL:

notes://servername/databaseReplicaID?OpenDatabase

will actually check the Domain Catalog first, before it checks the server that is explicitly named in the URL (this is not considered a bug -- Notes is functioning as designed). Michael Urspringer confirmed this behavior, as well as the fact that changing the Notes URL to:

notes://servername/databaseFileName.nsf?OpenDatabase

will work "as expected" and check the server that you specify.

Oh, and SPR EAVM4THH42 indicates that doclinks work the same way (they always look at the Catalog before the server hint), because they too use database replica IDs.

So the discussion that's brewing is that Nathan Freeman asked why you would ever use a replica ID in a Notes URL anyway? Andy Broyles mentioned that it's handy in the case of mail file relocation, and I can buy that one. But in most cases I'm thinking that the file name is the way to go. Replica IDs are too smart for their own good. They try to second-guess you by saying "I know you said that this is the server you wanted, but I think this other one is better because it comes [alphabetically] first in the Catalog."

Personally, I don't normally like software to do too much thinking for me. When I say that I want to go to this server, I want to go to this server.

Where I get a little wishy-washy is in the case of doclinks. I can kinda see how the Catalog idea could work better with a doclink in a large international organization as long as each geographic region has its own Catalog (which I don't even know is possible -- I'm not an Admin). That way if someone in Australia sends a doclink to someone in Canada, if there's a local Canadian server that can serve up the document (and the Catalog is configured properly) then that's what is used.

However, this whole alphabetical lookup of a server in the Catalog is still a little unusual. I guess when you're naming your servers, you're always going to have to make sure to name the one with the best connectivity "Aardvark" or "AAAAcme" or something, to make sure it floats to the top of the list.

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The Feb 2007 edition of IBM Forward View contains a video, "Is Second Life The New Business Center", which provides a simple and quick overview of some of the things IBM is doing in Second Life. ? ?It's only a minute and a half long, I suggest you take a look.

A friend of mine is having a problem where he has a Notes URL like this:

notes://servername/databaseReplicaID?OpenDatabase

He has no icons for this database on his workspace, and yet when he clicks the link it opens a replica of the database on some other server -- not the one specified in the link.

So I did some searching and found this technote that indicates that calling @Command([FileOpenDBRepID]) to open a database uses the following logic:

1. Look for an icon of the database on the workspace, and use that if it's available (if there are multiple icons, use the one at the top of the stack)
2. Look for the database using the Catalog/Domain search, and use that if it's available
3. Look for the database using the server specified in the server hint, and use that if it's available
4. Look for the database on the user's Home Server, and use that if it's available
5. Look for the database on the user's local machine, and use that if it's available
6. Give the user the "Choose Servers to Search" dialog (listing the servers in your Home Server's Notes Network, and highlighting all servers for which you already have an icon on your workspace)

Okay, that seems reasonable... all except that second and third part. Those look reversed. According to the technote, even if you specify a server hint, the client will always check the Catalog first. And the Catalog is (of course) in alphabetical order, so if you happen to have a server in Anguilla then that one will have preference over a server that may be much closer to you.

Taking this a step further, this LDD post indicates that this is the same logic used when you open a database using a notes:// URL. So even though my friend was clicking this:

notes://servername/databaseReplicaID?OpenDatabase

he was getting the database on "anotherserver" instead of "servername", because "anotherserver" came first in the catalog.

At least, that seems like what was going on. Here are my questions, if anyone can help:

• Can someone in a larger enterprise environment confirm/deny this for me? (ANSWER: yes, that's exactly what's going on)
• Does it help to have the database name instead of the replica ID? (ANSWER: yes, using the database name will fix it)
• Does the same thing happen with doclinks and database links? (ANSWER: yes, the SPR says that doclinks have the same problem)

If the client always checks the Catalog first anyway, then the server hint doesn't do a whole heck of a lot of good, does it?

UPDATE: oh, and I realize that if the server name that is specified in the link is not available via DNS, then the server hint doesn't work. In case you were thinking that was the problem.

SOLUTION: Michael Urspringer did some testing and confirmed that (A) the Catalog server was indeed the problem in this case, and (B) using the database filename instead of the replica ID will fix the problem. Kurt Higley also said that the filename versus replica ID has always worked for him, so a big thanks to Michael and Kurt for coming back with the answer so quickly!

Thanks also to the anonymous commenter who said that SPR EAVM4THH42 indicates that doclinks work the same way (always look at the Catalog server before the server hint).

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No, this is not a post about the new term for replication in Notes/Domino 8! ? This is about my excitement over The Police 30th anniversary reunion tour.

I've been a big Police fan ?since I was little, but was too young to attend the Police Picnics when they were originally touring. ? I have dozens of live Police concerts, and I've seen Sting many times, but I am very psyched to try and see this new tour. ? Of course, getting tickets is not going to be easy, nor cheap! ? The unfortunate part is, the day they are playing Fenway Park in Boston, I will be in Toronto for a wedding! ? ?However, the scheduling gods are not entirely against me. ? The are playing in Toronto at the Air Canada Center the weekend before. ?So if I can get tickets there, I'll just go a week early and see them in Toronto.

Boston would be much better though! ? Fenway Park. ?Outdoors. ?Huge crowd. ? Ah, so sad... but I'll take what I can get, if anything at all.

Unfortunately, there are always people that find ways to ruins things. ?Spam. Spim. Spit. Phising. ?Visuses. ?Trojan Horses. Hoaxes. ?What a waste of time, money, bandwidth, and good Karma these thing are!

The other day I was helping a user with a hoax email from Paypal, and I pointed out a Notes feature that I thought would make a good tip for today.

When you hover (don't click!) your cursor over a URL in Notes, you will see the actual destination of the click appear in the status bar at the bottom of the Notes screen.

For example, while this URL appears to go to www.paypal.com, notice at the bottom of the screen it shows that it is really going to www.scannerstalk.com. ?So in this case, I would not trust the link.



I hope this helps you fight the bad guys.

Earlier this week developerWorks Lotus published an article by Julie Kadashevich about The new IBM Lotus Notes 8 Out of Office functionality. ? Ed Brill blogged about it, and in the comments to his post, a few questions came up about the current functionality. ? One of the things I noticed is that some readers did not know you can set exceptions which tell the OOO Agent when NOT to send an email.

Since the article shows the new look of Notes 8, I thought I'd show you how to set exceptions in your current version of Lotus Notes.

When you enable OOO (Tools - Out of Office)


you are presented with the dialog box below. ? Click on the 4th tab, label Exceptions, and you will see several options.


The first is "Do not automatically reply to mail from internet addresses". ? This is a great option if you simply want to turn off all external notifications telling people that you are away. ? Don't worry, the people in your company will still be notified.

The second choice is "Do not automatically reply to mail from these people or groups". ? ?This provides a great way to eliminate sending responses to any of the mailing lists you belong to, or any other type of email that does not accept replies. ? For example, if you subscribe to daily newsletters, you don't want to be sending responses to these.

The third option, "Do not automatically reply to mail which is addressed to these groups", is similar to the option above. ? This is very useful if you belong to something like Yahoo or Google groups, or any type of listserv mailing list. ? ?Enter the name of the group email, and OOO will not send notifications.

The final option "Do not automatically reply if the subject contains these phrases" allows you to define at a very granular level which emails to not respond to.

When you are done, click Enable.

I hope this helps you get a little more out of the Out of Office Agent. ? Please make sure to read the developerWorks article about the new Notes 8 features, as OOO has been greatly enhanced. ? ?My two favourite changes are that OOO now can run automatically instead of on a schedule, and the notification emails now tell you the subject line of the original email sent.

If you are looking to find out details about an email message, such as the servers it was routed through and when, first open the message and choose View - Show - Page Source from the Notes menus.



This will open a new window with detailed information about the MIME/HTML contents of the message. ? This is very useful when trying to track down mail routing issues, or figuring out if something is SPAM, etc.

Since many of you work for small and medium sized companies, I wanted to point out a resource designed specifically with you in mind. ? The new Lotus Software for Small & Medium Business web site provides information about Lotus products, demos, customer case studies, and more. ? If you are a SMB (typically less than 1000 people), and you are looking for information about Lotus (maybe to show the boss!), make sure to bookmark this site today.

Over the years we've all heard the "gentle conversations" about the Notes User Interface (UI). ? Long time readers may remember my blog post about how Notes has had tabs for years, and now so many programs (web browsers, chat clients, etc) are copying that. ? Well today I was watching this funny Windows Vista vs. Apple OS X video, and they were showing how Vista is copying OS X in using little triangles to open and close file lists.


Hello? ?Does this look familiar! ? Notes views have had Twisties for a decade!

I hope you can point this out to your users that complain about Notes! ? ?Long live Notes!!!

I want to thank everyone that attended my Lotusphere sessions, which were essentially live versions of this blog. ? I got some great feedback, and several follow up questions that I intend on answering over the new few weeks.

One of the suggestions revolved around making "the essential content" from this site more easily available, especially for a new reader, or someone new to blogs in general (and don't know about archives). ?So, I I've added a "Must Reads" section to the left side navigator. ?There is still an "Important Resources" section a bit further down, so I will try to balance what I put in each. ? I think "Must Reads" will be more for the casual reader, and it will include introductory Notes information, as well as maybe 3-5 top tips, while "Important Resources" will be for the more advanced.



Thoughts?

Sorry for the lack of postings this week, but I've been in major catch up mode after Lotusphere! ? So much has already been written on various other blogs about the week, that I've decided not put you through reading the same old things here on my blog. ? Instead, I want to write about something most people don't even think about. ?I'd like to take this opportunity to recognize the MONUMENTAL contributions that occur behind the scenes to provide you all the great coverage you get of the week.

In many ways, the Lotus Public Relations (PR) and Analyst Relations (AR) teams are the unsung heroes of Lotusphere. ?They spend months before the event planning all the details necessary to make sure the industry covers all the news of the week. ?Trust me, you have no idea how hard they work. ?These teams are responsible for pre-briefing the industry before Lotusphere even begins, organizing and running the main press conference that takes place minutes after the opening general session ends, arranging interviews for hundreds of reporters and analysts during the week, making sure the product press releases are published for both Lotus' own announcements, as well as dozens of our Business Partners, recording podcasts and webcasts, meeting and organizing dozens of the Lotus bloggers, and a million other things that I can't begin to remember.

These teams don't get to be on stage and hear the applause, but trust me, you owe them a HUGE thanks for all the work they put in making Lotusphere successful, before, during, and after the event.

This year reporters came from all over the world (Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom , and the United States) and have already authored over 150 articles. ? Additionally several stories were run on major television stations this year. ?Can you imagine trying to organize all of that?

While the week is a ton of work, thankfully there is always room to squeeze in some fun. ?Taking a break from the madness, Mark (who is from China but now living in NY working for the Software Division PR team) celebrated his birthday. ? Happy Birthday Mark, I like the Mickey ears!


Based on my own interactions during Lotusphere, I'd like to thank Elena Fernandez, Erica Topolski, Jennifer Clemente, James Sciales, Mark Guan, and Janine Robinson from IBM, as well as Melissa, Zoey, and Maureen from Text100 for all the work they put in, and for all the help they provided me during the week. ?I am sure I am missing several people from their respective teams, so please, pass my thanks on to all of them as well.

Here we go: yet another Lotusphere 2007 wrapup. My takeaways from the week were:

This is not Ray Ozzie's Lotus Notes
I can't take credit for making that little saying up, but after seeing everything at Lotusphere I think it's right on. Hannover/Notes 8 is not that weird, clunky Notes client that everyone is used to seeing. It's a total overhaul, with interface design at the front and center. You will be proud to show this new client to your boss. And all of us Notes developers need to start learning how to design better UI's now, because our old single outline 3-pane displays are going to look even worse in about 6 months. Nathan Freeman and Chris Blatnick gave some great starting points in their session -- keep checking their blogs for downloads and tips if you didn't make it to the show.

Social Software is the new Knowledge Management
I know, I said this already, but you'll be saying it soon too. There's a new KM in town, and it uses tags, aggregators, and wikis. Plenty of people are saying "it will never work in business", but I think you're going to be surprised. With anyone under 30, that's how they're managing their personal information already so it's a natural fit. "Older" workers may need to be convinced with some business justifications, but that won't be much of a stretch. It may just be a matter of semantics in the end -- call an aggregator a "news feed" and a tag a "bookmark" and there you go.

Giving Quickr away for free is a great move
I have no numbers to back this up, but I firmly believe that when Lotus offered the Sametime entitlement in 2004 (where Lotus 6.5 clients got a Sametime server and basic Sametime functionality for free) it was a huge move towards getting Sametime accepted and deployed throughout large enterprises. All of a sudden, you no longer had a decision to make about running Instant Messaging in the office. No budget concerns, no competitive analysis. It was free and it was already on the client, so why not use it?

Now that Lotus is doing the same thing with Quickr Personal Edition, they're setting the stage for the same thing to happen. What is Quickr, you ask? It's a lot of things, but most of all it's this: Quickr is a document management system. That's the killer piece of the product. You start using it (for free), and you tell two friends and they tell two friends, and the next thing you know your company is using a document management system. It even has integration points with WebSphere and SharePoint.

Notes 8 is the ONE AND ONLY strategic e-mail platform for Lotus
No more confusion over Workplace versus WebSphere versus Notes/Domino. Notes e-mail is it. You will NOT be forced to migrate off of the Notes/Domino platform at any time in the forseeable future (contrary to closed-door statements from other vendors over the past 3 years).

The Lotus team is trying very hard to make the new products "developer friendly"
Time will tell how developer friendly the tools end up being, of course, but that is definitely a solid and conscious focus in the new product line. I attended a session on how you can use Component Designer to create composite pages, with wiring, using only drag and drop. I was told how you'll be able to call external web services natively from LotusScript in only a few lines of code. I saw how there are "Web 2.0-ish" widgets available for use directly from the Designer clients. As much as I love writing code, I love having it written for me even more.

Unified Communications may actually gain traction
This one is going to be interesting to watch: a new push for unified communications in the enterprise. The concept has been around for years -- combining e-mail, voice mail, and phone service -- but IBM is making a big new push with Sametime 7.5 and some of the addon technologies. Sametime Rendezvous (yet another great tool to come out of the IBM Research Labs) is especially cool, because it manages all of your Sametime-based teleconferences for you, and instead of having to figure out which 800 number to call for each conference, it assigns you a unique telephone number that you dial in to from anywhere, and that number connects you directly to the correct conference call.

One of the analysts at the Unified Communication keynote mentioned that decisions on IM, phone systems, and e-mail are all becoming convergent. Again, it'll be interesting to see if/how that plays out.

Finally, extended coffee breaks!
Okay, this is a non-technical point, but I've complained about the short coffee breaks so much in the past that I need to step up and acknowledge that the problem seemed to have been addressed this year. In years past, I've literally had coffee carts rolled away from me by Disneybots, before the coffee breaks were over and while I was about to grab myself a cup. Lots of other people have reported this too. This year though, there were at least two times that I was able to get water/coffee at least 10 minutes after the break was supposed to be over, with no rushing or evil Disneybot stares at all.

I don't know if that's something that was truly fixed or I was just lucky, but it was a great improvement.

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That's all for now. There's a lot more commentary on the other blogs and news channels, to cover all the things I missed. All in all, it was a great show, and it will be a a very interesting year to come.

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Technorati Tags: Lotusphere2007

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I know David, I was a Lotusphere blogging slacker after about day one (minor amounts of live blogging aside). There was just too damn much going on, and I had sessions on Wednesday and Thursday to stress over, okay!?! I'm still beat, but at least I didn't catch the annual Lotusphlu that a few others went home with.
;-)

I'll try to post a somewhat substantial Lotusphere wrapup tomorrow.

In the meantime, Ed was good enough to post the slides for our "Selling Notes" session today, so you can peek at those while you're waiting for either our podcast rendition or the DVD video (that you still have time to order).

I've also got a ton of requests for the OpenLog beta that me and Rob showed everyone in our error trapping session. I promise, it works and I'll give it to you soon. I need to do a little more cleanup before I release it into the wild. Everyone wants that JavaScript logging...

Technorati Tags: Lotusphere2007

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Here is my Lotus Notes Hints and Tips presentation from Lotusphere 2007. ?ID109.pdf


Thank you so much to everyone that attended, and especially those that filled out positive evaluations! ;-)

I am planning on doing 3 posts this week to summarize my impressions of Lotusphere 2007. ? The first will be an account of my personal experiences from the week, the second will be a business/announcements overview, and the third (as requested) will be my take on "what the new and improved Lotus means to end users".

For now, I've added some photos for you, including shots of our closing speaker, the incredibly charasmatic Astrophysicist Dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson. ? Enjoy.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/alanlepo/sets/72157594494787529/

This is pretty cool. ?IBM.com is running a headline banner for a podcast from Lotusphere that I did last week! ?The support IBM is putting behind Lotus these days is incredible. ?You can also listen to the other two podcasts I did last week,, one with Chris Miller , and one with LotusUserGroup.org.

I had the pleasure of being interviewed today by Jess Stratton of LotusUserGroup.Org...
"Alan has a very long job title, such that I needed to read it off his card. In the short version, he's a "Lotus evangelist". Find out what Lotus Connections and Second Life have in common, and what Alan's role is in the process. Alan also tells us about his first Lotusphere, in which he actually wasn't supposed to be there. Sneaky Alan!"

2 Minutes With... Lotus

also try and listed to 2 Minutes With... The Gurus ?and ?2 Minutes With...Our Members