SnTT - Outbound e-mail address formatting

Alan Lepofsky shared a tip recently that shows how users can control their own outbound e-mail address formatting. This works well if you work from a local mail replica, but if you're a typical office worker who accesses his mail directly from the server, you're sorta* out of luck. Notes 6 shipped with a feature called Dynamic Client Configuration that updates your Location document with information from the server and one of the fields that gets overwritten is the Internet Address. So if you apply Alan's tip and you regularly connect to a Domino server, your changes will be overwritten.

I'm a dual propeller beanie wielding developer and admin so I get the lovely joy of figuring out how to use layers and researching how to configure a mail server so it shows users' full names as well as e-mail addresses. Lucky for you I'm the generous sort who doesn't mind sharing. :-)

Before we dive into the technical bits it helps to understand the big picture of how this fits together. The Notes client can send e-mail through a Domino server or directly to the Internet. This is controlled via the Location document that is selected in Notes.

If you send mail directly to the Internet, the e-mail address on the Location document is used. In this case using Alan's tip makes sense, since there is nothing else that is going to take care of adding extra bits to your outbound e-mail address. If you send through a Domino server the server's configuration is used, so it's best let the server to do the conversion.

Configuring how the Domino server formats outbound e-mail addresses is done in a Global Domain document.


If you don't already have a Global Domain document create one by clicking the Add Domain button. If you have multiple Global Domain documents, one needs to be designated as the default.


The important part here is the Conversion tab. Note the last field, which specifies the Address format. I had to set this to Name and Address even though the section above it very specifically states it is not used in R5 or higher.


It's as simple as that. Now all outbound e-mail that goes through the server will include the sender's name. Remember, if you're working from a local replica and sending mail directly to the Internet you will have to use Alan's tip to include your name with your address.

There is also a section on the default Configuration document that deals with some server level configuration of mail addressing. I honestly had no idea this existed until Thomas Adrian mentioned it as a response to Alan's blog post. According to a later response, this doesn't work reliably. I've been using a Global Domain document for years and never had any issues. Hopefully a better admin than I am can explain when the Configuration document is needed and when a Global Domain document is needed.

* I said sorta because there is a way to disable Dynamic Client Configuration (the feature that lets the the server update your Location document), but it's not one I show end users since it hobbles administrative abilities and I need all the help I can get. See the responses on Alan's blog if you're interested in how DCC can be turned off.

Dining With Friends

For the past 8 years my partner, Myron, and I have participated in a fund raiser for Low Country AIDS Services (LAS) called Dining With Friends. The idea is a group of people get together, have dinner, and bring donations for LAS. Pretty much anything goes for the dinner portion. Some people do a potluck, some do a progressive dinner, some rent venues and hire bands. We just have it at our house and we cook all the food ourselves, with the help of some extremely patient and hardworking friends. Our party begins at 6:00 PM and at 9:00 PM there is a reception at the Charleston Maritime Center with champagne fountains, more desserts than you can count, and a live band.

I relocated from Atlanta to Charleston in 1997 and we decided to throw a Dining With Friends party in 1998 so I could meet more of Myron's friends. The first year we had about 15 people show up. We prepared a bunch of random appetizers, drank too much wine, and it was a lot of fun. I don't think we even made it to the dessert reception. :-p By the third or fourth year our party had grown to about 40 people. The people we knew were inviting people they knew and it became a wonderful evening of camaraderie, food and people wanting to help a very worthy organization.

It just so happened that Dining With Friends fell on May 5th about the time our party was having exponential growth. To make it easier on ourselves we decided to do a Cinco de Mayo themed party. That was the first year we did a theme and we have kept it up ever since. So far we have prepared Mexican, Mediterranean, Moroccan, Spanish and Portuguese tapas, French bistro, and Caribbean cuisines. (The idea of Asian food keeps coming up, but it needs to be served fresh and hot, which is hard to do in this kind of setting. Not to mention the amount of work involved.)

We take a hands on approach to our party because we both get tremendous joy from cooking and sharing it with our friends... and their friends... and their friends... The goal, though, is to help LAS, which gets about 10% of its operating budget from Dining With Friends. Our first party raised a little over $200 in donations; at our most recent we collected $3700. We didn't think to keep track, but the best we can figure we have raised about $12,000 for LAS over the last 8 years. The money is only used for local programs and we feel good about giving back to the community.

If you're in Charleston on Saturday, May 5th give us a shout. We'll be having a party and everyone is invited. We'll provide the beer, wine, food and probably some kind of calamitous drama. :-)

MADtv - iRack

SnTT - Layers for Dummies

When I saw the work Nathan was doing with layers last year (the graphics have been removed, but trust me when I say it was really really cool) I was excited and I rushed off to start using them... but I quickly got stuck. I didn't have a real business need at the time, so the work I was doing was purely proof of concept. It was cool, but I didn't have any reason to do it so I gave up and moved on.

Then along came Lotusphere and Nathan and Chris' now famous BP101 - Interface Matters presentation, and I was once again dazzled by what could be achieved with layers. Also at Lotusphere, Ben Langhinrichs discussed using layers in his portion of Speedgeeking. That was so overwhleming (both Ben's content and the session) that I didn't have time to process it. And finally, Ben published another article about using layers that had some truly amazing effects. So I knew layers were nifty, I just had to find a place to use them in the course of my work.

In a recent application users are entering customer information for a special order. In the following section only two fields are required and I'm using a field hint to indicate that. I started out with a fairly standard layout that you see all the time:


And of course users would end up filling it out like this:


I talked to the users about this and they said the fields were running together visually. Okay, using OS style fields and laying it out better would help, but mixing formats on the same form would be messy and I didn't want to convert everything to OS style right now. Also, users didn't really understand that they didn't have to fill out the address fields. As they tabbed through the form their cursor would land in those fields so they completed them. I could have altered the tab order, but the rest of the form has over 60 fields (not all visible at the same time so calm down, Nathan). And besides, now I finally had a reason to figure out layers. :)

Here's what I came up with. Now if the user needs to fill in the address, they click the Address hyperlink

... fill in the information ...

... and click Close to see the information displayed on the main form. I decided not to use labels since it's obviously an address.


I know I need to do some more work to make this more appealing, but still this is a step forward. I have seen lots of demos of layers, but I haven't seen a step by step walkthrough of how to implement one from start to finish. Maybe that's because I'm more dense than most and everyone else has figured it out already, but in the off chance there are any other slow people out here I thought I would share a detailed tutorial.

Before I get into how this was built, there are some mechanics you need to know.

1. You hide a layer by applying a hide/when formula to its anchor. If you just hide everything on the layer you can't click anything underneath the layer, but you won't have any visual indicator of why. Conversely, hiding the anchor hides everything on the layer, so you don't have to put hide/whens on every element that is on the layer.
   
   
2. Positioning a layer is more art than science. Designer adds some padding to things that can throw the position of the final display off a little, so expect to do some tweaking. I have had to close out of Designer and Notes and clear my Notes cache to get some odd display issues to clear up.
   
   
3. You can show or hide a layer in Designer by right-clicking the layer or its anchor and using the context menu. Once you get a layer positioned exactly where you want the last thing you want to do is drag it out of the way.
   

Those are the most important things to know before you get started, so let's dive into how I did it. I started off by reusing the original layout,which consists of a lot of nested tables.

What you see here is an outer 1 x 2 table with the yellow header. The second row of this table has a 2 x 1 table. The inner left column has a 2 x 3 table with the always visible fields, and the inner right column has a 2 x 1 table. The most important part is this inner right column. This contains the hyperlink to open the layer, the layer anchor, and the field that will hold the final results of the user's action.

I didn't have to use a table for the Address hyperlink and the layer anchor. At first I just had everything aligned vertically, but when the layer becomes visible, the anchor also becomes visible and you can see the screen jump. By putting the anchor beside the Address link, which is already visible, there is no jump. There are probably other ways around that issue, this is just how I chose to handle it. I'm also very picky about stuff like that.

Showing and hiding the layer is the most complicated part of this operation, but basically all you're doing is setting a flag that is used in a hide/when formula. Highlight the Address text and create an Action hotspot as follows:

You'll notice I'm using the notes.ini to store the address layer's state. I'm doing this so I don't have to clutter the form with fields. Also, I can use this same variable for multiple applications if I start using an Address layer popup frequently. You could use a field on the form to store this if you choose. Let's set the hide/when on the anchor to make use of the environment variable:


... and move on to positioning and sizing the layer.

You can put fields directly on the layer, but you'll notice the formatting options for a layer are pretty limited. I chose to leave mine blank and use a table as my main container instead. I set it up with a border and a drop shadow, since it is displayed as a popup


Now we can put the fields on the layer, and I used another table for the layout

All the fields are set to OS style and I played around with the widths until I got them to line up nicely when they were displayed for the user. The final step is to code the Close link, which updates the Shipping field on the document and hides the layer


I'm using a field for the shipping information because I later use this information in a form letter. Rather than having to deal with all the discrete fields I aggregate them once to make it easier on myself later. Since I need to show it anyway, it's a win/win.

The final step is to make sure the layer is hidden if the user closes the form without clicking the Close button on the layer. I do this by setting the environment variable in the QueryClose event


And here's the final database: LayerDemo.nsf The UI is a little funky, it's got some concepts I'm playing around with. I figured while I was playing around with layers I might as well get a little crazy with some other ideas. :-)

[Many thanks to Nathan for pointing me in the direction of using the notes.ini variable. I also want to thank Nathan for making me aware of @Command([RefreshHideFormulas]). I hadn't come across that in 7 years of doing Notes development, but it sure would have made lots of things much easier if I had known about it sooner.]

taken out of context

It started innocently enough. The Notes 8 Beta was released to the public. Immediately people were up in arms and posting dozens of entries to the beta forum with the same topics. John Head took it upon himself to create some rules of engagement. That's when it got a little ugly.

Apparently Volker Weber was offended by John's self-empowered actions and launched a crusade against him. As is common, the statements Volker quoted were taken out of context and were not credited or referenced, making it somewhat difficult to determine who he was talking about. Today I was dragged into the tempest in a teacup when the same was done with some comments I made on Ed Brill's blog. Taken out of context and with no further discussion they seem to say one thing, when in reality the common interpretation is not the correct one.

I have already clarified my intent on both Ed and Nathan's blogs, but I'll repeat it here. First, the context. The conversation on Ed's blog was about things that hold up deployment of new software versions:

[Ed Brill] Raises an interesting question, Pete -- does the traditional software superstition that prevents organizations from deploying a "dot zero" release still apply? My impression is that a .0 could be dead solid perfect, but some companies by policy will still wait for a .0.1.

[Me] It's more testing and training that affect our rollout schedule than any perceived quality issue with .0 releases. As Dave said, by the time we have done our testing and gotten our training materials together the .01 release it out already.

I will say that my testing of Notes 8 beta has gone very, very badly and that experience will greatly affect our adoption of Notes 8, regardless of the point release. I read John Head's rules and am taking them to heart, hence the silence regarding my issues. :)

My take on John's rules is that they were basically asking everyone to do what they could to actually help the testing efforts. Complaining about things you couldn't change wouldn't help. In this case I'm having a problem getting the Notes 8 Basic or Standard clients to run. I don't have the time to do troubleshooting and crash analysis, so I opted not to report my problems. I have nothing substantive to report, therefore there is no reason for me to make a report. I could whine and wail in the beta forum but without any documentation it's rather pointless. John's rules of engagement influenced me, but I think in a positive way.

This is relevant to the discussion with Ed because the problems I have had with the beta will mean I will be doing more extensive and longer-term testing of Notes 8 than I have any previous version. That will significantly delay my Notes 8 deployment.

© 2007 Charles Robinson. All rights reserved.

SnTT - Resetting the Prohibit Design Refresh flag on folders in mail databases

Okay, that last SNTT thing was a little weak so I decided to pull the trigger on one I've had saved for a while. :-)

This is a follow-up to a question someone asked during GURUpalooza at Lotusphere 2007. The scenario described is that after upgrading to a new version of Domino and applying a new mail database template, some users lost folders. This isn't an uncommon problem, and I posted a snippet of code in response to a similar question on the developerWorks Lotus forum. Gregg Eldred picked that up and blogged about it, but it is still coming up so I thought I would do a more formal write up, and clean up the code.

The reason the above happens is simple: if there is no template specified for the database and users create folders, the Prohibit design refresh from replacing or modifying option is not set. If there is a template defined, it is. What's odd is that when you create a mail database for someone the standard process sets the template name. Sometimes this gets wiped out, and I honestly don't understand why. I just know that in my own environment, with extremely technophobic users, it has happened a number of times.

What this means is that when the database is updated from its template, any folders a user created while the template was blank will be deleted. The documents are left in the database, though, and will show up in All Documents. You just have no way of knowing what folder they should be in and it's a royal mess.

Below is a snippet of code that will take care of this for you. Here's a brief rundown of what it is doing:

• Open the Domino Directory
• Loop through all the Person documents to get the mail files
  
• Compare all the folders in each person's mail database with the template you specify
• If the folder exists in the template, it clears the Prohibit design refresh flag. This allows a design refresh to update anything that is in the template. If the folder is not in the template but it is in the user's mail file, set the Prohibit design refresh flag, which will prevent the design refresh from deleting the user's folders.

In the thread on Gregg's blog someone suggested pointing this at any database that allows users to create folders. That's not a bad idea, but you would have to have some known list of folders that are not user-created. Or there might be a flag on a folder that tells you who created it, and you could compare it to the database signer. That's something I haven't even researched, so I don't know what is possible. Anyway, here is the code I use. Just drop in your server name and template and away you go.

Sub Initialize
  '*** January 21, 2005 - Charles Robinson
  '*** Set the Prohibit Design Refresh flag on all non-template views and folders
  '*** to prevent a design refresh from overwriting user-created folders
  '***
  On Error Goto ErrTrap
  Dim nLog As NotesLog
  Set nLog = New NotesLog("Set Prohibit Design Refresh for Mail")
  Call nLog.OpenAgentLog

  Dim nSession As NotesSession
  Dim nDBNAB As NotesDatabase
  Dim nDBMail As NotesDatabase
  Dim nDBNTF As NotesDatabase
  Dim nVW As NotesView
  Dim nDoc As NotesDocument
  Dim nDCPeople As NotesDocumentCollection

  Set nSession = New NotesSession
  Set nDBNTF = nSession.GetDatabase("server/org", "template.ntf", False)
  Set nDBNAB = nSession.GetDatabase("server/org", "names.nsf", False)

  Set nDCPeople = nDBNAB.Search({Form = "Person"}, Nothing, 0)
  Set nDoc = nDCPeople.GetFirstDocument
  Do Until nDoc Is Nothing
     Set nDBMail = nSession.GetDatabase("server/org", nDoc.MailFile(0), False)
     If Not nDBMail Is Nothing Then
     Forall vw In nDBMail.Views
     'See if the view in the mail file exists in the template
        Set nVW = nDBNTF.GetView(vw.Name)
        'If not set the prohibitdesignrefresh flag
        vw.IsProhibitDesignRefresh = (nVW Is Nothing)
     End Forall
     End If

GetNextDoc:
     Set nDoc = nDCPeople.GetNextDocument(nDoc)
  Loop

  Set nVW = Nothing
  Set nDBNAB = Nothing
  Set nDBNTF = Nothing
  Set nDBMail = Nothing
  Set nDCPeople = Nothing
  Set nSession = Nothing

  Exit Sub

ErrTrap:
  Call nLog.LogError(Err, "Unable to modify database " & nDoc.MailFile(0))
  'This is necessary to prevent logging an error for every folder and overflowing the agent log
  Resume GetNextDoc
End Sub

This LotusScript was converted to HTML using the ls2html routine,
provided by Julian Robichaux at nsftools.com.

SNTT - Donate your unused CPU cycles

User	Daily Average	2/28/2007	3/14/2007
Lotus.Geek	716	969,750	979,780
smitty1024	793	712,747	723,848
AndyBroyles	1,050	640,985	655,688
cerobinson	4,468	253,802	316,350
gjwolfswinkel	904	201,324	213,979

What's that, you ask? Why it's an analysis of the World Community Grid points contributed by the top 5 members of the Lotus Domino Bloggers group from February 28th through today. What could that possibly have to do with SNTT? Nothing, really. It's just a really cool way to donate unused CPU cycles to a good cause. What's your excuse?

cool is king

In a recent article on Computerworld, Mike Elgan discusses the decline and fall of the Palm empire. One snippet stood out in my mind:

HP fails in the smart-phone market in part because of an institutionalized delusion, common at most big and old Silicon Valley companies, that enterprises buy smart phones based on security, back-end infrastructure support and integration with enterprise systems in general.

Yes, those things are important. But in the smart-phone market, cool is king, even at the biggest companies. RIM does a great job supporting business goals. But RIM is No. 1 because people "love" their BlackBerries. Palm is No. 2 (but dropping fast) because people "love" (or used to love) their Treos.

I think this is succinctly describes what has happened with Lotus in the last decade or so. Lotus was acquired by IBM, who has made a business out of huge incomprehensible systems, so they applied their bloat theory to Notes. While they were working on robust backends Microsoft, Google, Zimbra and a whole host of other vendors have been killing Lotus where it matters most: mindshare.

I don't want to turn this into another Lotus marketing sucks meme, because this isn't about marketing. It's about doing something cool that inspires people. Love it or hate it, you can't deny that Microsoft has poured a lot of innovation into the user experience in Outlook. Finally Lotus caught the clue bus. They devoted a ton of resources to making Notes 8 actually look good and not be such an odd duck.

I sat in Andre Guirard and Marc Jourdain's presentation at Lotusphere where they highlighted what was new in Domino Designer. I was amazed at some of the new functionality, but the features they demonstrated were taken out of context to highlight individual changes and improvements. This was really cool, but it was only part of the story.

Later in the week I attended Mary Beth Raven's presentation on designing the user interface. That's when I got the rest of the story. Everything Andre showed was directly linked to the work Mary Beth's team had done. I asked Mary Beth how much latitude they had when doing their designs, and was surprised when she said they were pretty much given carte blanche to do what was necessary, and development had the herculean task of making it happen.

Until I saw Andre's presentation describing the enhancements to the development environment I was going on the premise that you'd have to use Java to get the functionality of the new mail template. Seeing it all put together in Mary Beth's presentation really drove home the scope of the work involved. Not only did they redesign the Notes user experience, development had to create the tools to build it.

The amount of work put forth by Andre Guirard and his team is staggering and as a result Notes 8 looks abso-freaking-lutely fantastic! There's still a lot of work to be done, a lot of warts that need to be polished, but I'm thrilled to be working with Notes right now. That's a far cry from where I was a few months ago.

P.S. If this sounds too fanboy for some, don't despair. I've got some branding irons in the fire. Be afraid, Ed. Be very afraid. ;-)

just when you thought DST was done

Microsoft published a report that some Windows 2000, XP and 2003 computers are not properly using updated timezone information even if all patches and Registry hacks were properly applied. From the article:

You may see systems that have successfully applied the Windows DST2007 hotfix 931836 but are still operating on old DST rules after March 11. Opening the Time/Date control panel applet and changing the time zone to a new time zone; hitting apply, and changing it back to the original time zone will often correct this problem.

Another variation of this problem has been observed on Windows 2000. In that scenario after applying the DST hotfix or using TZEdit and then changing the time zone (manually or with the script above), the time zone still does not update. For that situation we’ve found that making the registry updates described in 914387 followed by running the script above will reliably cause the system to follow the new DST2007 rules. A symptom you may observe is that if you set the clock to the correct time, it will revert back to the incorrect time within one hour.

Creating Composite Applications tutorial

I stumbled across this in the Notes 8 Beta forum: Building Composite Applications for IBM Notes 8. It looks promising.

Notes 8 beta 2 system requirements comparison

	Notes 7	Notes 8 beta 2 - Classic	Notes 8 beta 2 - Standard
RAM	128MB minimum 512MB recommended	128MB minimum 512MB recommended	512MB minimum 1GB recommended
CPU	Intel Pentium	Intel Pentium	Intel Pentium
Hard disk	512MB recommended	512MB recommended	900MB recommended

Classic is the C++ client. Standard is the Expeditor (Eclipse RCP derived) version.

blog move going slower than anticipated

Life has been happening and I haven't managed to get my blog moved over to the Blogsphere template. I'm still planning to do that, though. I struggled with the IBM Blog Template for about three days before downloading Blogsphere, and I much prefer the latter. It has a setup wizard to create the base configuration, it has multiple easily selectable themes built in, and *gasp* there's even help!

DST - don't forget about your Enterprise Integration components!

Today was my turn to venture into the DST rabbit hole. One thing NOT included in IBM's deployment guide: Enterprise Integration components. Absolutely, positively no mention anywhere of that. A friend on IRC stumbled across this fix for Notes 7, but it says nothing about Notes 6 or 6.5 clients.

I called Lotus support and was told the EI queue is callback only, and they only repond to critical calls on weekends. DST updates are not considered critical (yet?). It's also a little strange that numerous other hotfixes are posted with the technotes, but for the EI components you have to call support and ask for them if you're using Domino versions prior to 6.5.5 or 7.0.1.

**UPDATE**

I posed the question about EI updates for Notes 6/6.5 on the developerWorks Lotus forum, and Jean-Yves Riverin responded with the following collection of documents:

DST 2007 fix for Lotus Enterprise Integrator 6.x
Contains instructions for obtaining a fix to address Daylight Saving Time 2007 changes in Lotus Enterprise Integrator (LEI) 6.x.

DST 2007 fix for Lotus Enterprise Integrator 7.x
Contains instructions for obtaining a fix to address Daylight Saving Time 2007 changes in Lotus Enterprise Integrator (LEI) 7.x.

DST 2007 fix for Domino Enterprise Connection Services 6.x
Contains instructions for obtaining a fix to address Daylight Saving Time 2007 changes in DECS 6.x.

DST 2007 fix for Domino Enterprise Connection Services 7.x
Contains instructions for obtaining a fix to address Daylight Saving Time 2007 changes in DECS 7.x.

Notes 6.x client DST 2007 fix for LSX for Lotus Connectors (LSXLC)
Contains instructions for obtaining a fix to address Daylight Saving Time 2007 changes in the Notes 6.x client for LSX for Lotus Connectors (LSXLC).

Notes 7.x client DST 2007 fix for LSX for Lotus Connectors (LSXLC)
Contains instructions for obtaining a fix to address Daylight Saving Time 2007 changes in the Notes 7.x client for LSX for Lotus Connectors (LSXLC).

Now to figure out how to differentiate between R6 and R7 clients in a logon script.... I'll post that when I figure it out.