03/14/2008
02/20/2008
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Everything seems to be getting on the eclipse bandwagon, Lotus Notes, Domino Designer and now even the moon.
I've taken a load of pictures and had them uploaded to flickr automatically thanks to my Eye-Fi card but if you really want to find out what happened tonight head on over to Terri's blog for the full writeup.
02/11/2008
Tags : ForumFriday
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First off a big thank you to those who participated in the first Forum Friday. It was a slow start but it looks like the name 'Forum Friday' has stuck in the same way that 'Domino' was just a code name for the HTML task in the Notes server.
In addition to the name and tag 'ForumFriday' I was also thinking that an image might be nice so you can visually associate a blog posting with Forum Friday.
Martin Vereecken over at BusyBee's BizzyThoughts has come up with a few designs and is currently running a poll to see what people prefer.
Maybe by next Friday a few more people will take part. It's a great way to expand blog readership while being helpful in the notes.net forums all at the same time.
02/08/2008
Tags : ForumFriday
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Janbarnes Taylor asks :I have received an email that the attachments are showing as pictures in the text bar, in outlook these pictures could be saved in their original format , eg bmp or jpeg, can this be done in Lotus Notes?
If your Lotus Domino server has been setup to preserve the MIME in an incoming email and you receive and email with embedded images then you will see the images when you open the email in your client as opposed to seeing icons for attachments. This is particularly useful when reading HTML emails.
If you need to get at the images and save them then you can turn on a special preference. Go to your user preferences in your Notes Client and in the 'Additional Options' box scroll down the list till you see the 'Show Inline MIME Images As Attachments' and enable the option. You may need to restart your Lotus Notes client for the setting to take effect.
Now when you open your email you will see the attachments icons listed at the bottom of the email.
I hope this helps and don't forget there are loads more Lotus Notes/Domino related blogs out there. Check out Planet Lotus for more links to Lotus related blogs.
02/06/2008
Perfect Season
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So what happens to all the Super Bowl hats and t-shirts that were printed with the Patriots as the winning team? Well they all arrived at a warehouse just outside Pittsburgh on Tuesday and soon they will be shipped off to third-world countries as clothes for needy kids.
Nice to see that they aren't just trashed and actually put to some good use.
Source : WTAE Pittsburgh
01/31/2008
Tags : Lotusphere2008
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Here is something I have not seen mentioned on any blogs yet that I noticed while reading through the Lotusphere PDF's.
In the Lotus Notes 8.5 client there will be support for iCal Subscriptions and Federation. While it is only mentioned on a single page in the PDF (INV106) the screenshot looks quite interesting. It looks like you can turn on and off calendars just like in Apple OS X's iCal application. The different calendars can be assigned different colors and I believe that you can 'subscribe' to an iCal file on the web and receive updates from it.
This is an interesting feature that I'll be keeping as eye out for more details on.
01/29/2008
Forum Friday : Vista File Access Rights
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Note : This is a sample post to show how this idea might work. It is a real answer to a real question on notes.net ( and yes, I know it's not Friday )
Brent Quick asks :My Vista user has another problem, we cannot refresh the design of his databases from R7 to R8. We get the following error:
Design Refresh Failed, Cannot write or create file (file or disk is read only).
The error message suggests that the user does not have the correct access to write to their notes data directory. Under normal circumstances a user would not have this access unless they are the administrator on the computer however it is easy to grant the correct rights to all users.
First open up your windows Explorer and goto the Program Files directory. Then right click on the folder for Lotus Notes and select the security menu option.
In the dialog box that pops up make sure you are on the security tab and then select 'Users' and grant them 'Full Control'. This will set the folder so the user has the correct access and it should be inherited by all the files and folder under that but to make 100% sure click on the 'Advanced' button.
Make sure that 'users' still says 'Full Control' and then tick the 'Apply To All Child Objects' box and click OK. This will make sure all the files and folders have the exact same rights. Once it's finished processing you can click on OK to dismiss the original dialog box.
Under XP this is normally all you would need to do however as you mentioned Vista I just want to remind you that one of the requirements of the Lotus Notes client on Vista is that 'User Access protection' is disabled so you will want to verify that settings also.
01/29/2008
An Idea For The Lotus Blogging Community
Tags : ForumFriday
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During the Bloggers BOF at Lotusphere there was a discussion on how some people were worried that the topic that they were posting might be considered to be aimed at beginners and would not be of interest to others in the Lotus Blogging Community.
My personal opinion is that there are always new people who are starting out as Notes/Domino administrators or developers and that these topics are of utmost importance to them. While they will eventually need to know about classes or the speed issues incurred by using variants, what they need right now is the answer to their current challenge.
It is on this note that I would like to propose a new idea for the Lotus Blogging Community along the same lines of 'Show And Tell Thursday' and it's an idea that everybody can participate in no matter what area or level of expertise you work in.
The idea is called 'Forum Friday' and it is very easy to take part. All you need to do is go to the DeveloperWorks ( notes.net ) website and pick one of the many forums that are available, Have a look through some of the questions and pick one to answer. Write up your answer on you own blog and then reply in the forum with a link to your blog entry.
The beauty of this is twofold, not only do the 'beginners' get their question answered but they will also get exposed to the blogging community ( you would be amazed at the number of people who work in the industry and don't read the blogs ). You get increased readership, people will get informative answers and the entire Lotus community will benefit through the shared knowledge.
I would love to hear everybody thoughts on this idea.
01/22/2008
Tags : Lotusphere2008
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Rocky Oliver presenting. I only have 34 minutes of battery left so lets see how much I can get written before losing power...
Going to cover what's new in Notes 8.0 formulas, look at some new and exciting lotuscript stuff and generally help make people aware of new ways to do things.
Why use formulas? formulas are always faster. They are highly optimized and closer to the core API while lotusscript and java are higher lanaguage levels and need translation down to the api.
@SORT will sort things. It didn't appear till Notes 6. There are a number of keywords like [accentsensitive] or [decending] and you can string them together [opt1]:[opt2] etc etc.
You can use [CustomSort] you write a formula that comes back as tru or false. It uses a quicksort method and compares values and runs the formula against them. If it's true then the values are switched and if false they are not switched. It runs until everything comes back false.
So to sort by size use the following code. The $A and $B represent the values to be compared.
@sort(list;[CustomSort;@length($A)>@length($B));
The custom sort formula can be as complicated as you want. As long as it returns True or False. Just don't make it more complicated as you need and remember that $A and $B are the values to compare.
@Transform is a powerful formula.
Think of it as an @ForAll. It works against a list and executes a formula against each value in the list and replaces the result of the formula into that list members position. This example will take a list of names and if any value for X is a lowercase g then it will make it an Uppercase G.
@transform(Some_List; "X";@if(@lowercase(@left(X;1))="g";@Uppercase(X);x)))
The first X in quotes is the variable and that is only used in the transform formula.
Another new formula @Nothing. Saves you having to trim empty strings. Use it where you'd normally use ""
@abstractSimple : creates a short abstract of a text or richtext field.
@GetViewInfo : returns 1 if the view is filtered using @SetViewInfo
@IsusingJavaElement : will return 1 is the view is a new Java based view.
@passwordQuality : New examples in the help doc
@URLQueryString : Now allows dynamic DB2 query views
@Version : Added new version numbers
6 minutes of battery left.....
01/22/2008
Tags : Lotusphere2008
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Bob Balaban and Philippe Riand are presenting some of the new features coming in Domino 8.5 for web application development.
Why Change. Well things have not changed much since 1996 using the built in domino functions. It basically sucks compared to some web sites todat and the goal is to make domino web apps Kick-Ass again and make it easy for developers to acheive a better UI for their apps.
All done by enhancements to the domino web engine and exposing the features in the new designer client and the addition of xPages. Nothing will be taken out. There will be a switch for 'Old Style rendering' for those apps you don't want to update.
gZip compression for web traffic is coming...
Plan to fix all the 'Pain Points' in current web development. Things like the closed HTML generation, More XML/JSON access for ajax, better DXL. By fix they mean fix, not just cover it over with a new ui.
Closed HTML generation will be fixed by generating semantically tagged html that is ajax and css friendly and well formed XML. pass-thru html will not go away but should not be needed as much.
As of last week DOJO has been checked directly into the Domino 8.5 server build so it is there by default. They are planning to replace the Java applets with DoJo equivs. IBM legal made this difficult but it is now done.
Add a REST like API so you can get and post data with a url command.
DXLis not 100% reliable, make sure that anything that can be exported to DXl cn be reimported with 100% confidence.
Quick demo of using the new rendering model to show how to link a css file to a domino rendered html page. Looks good so far. the Dojo replacements of teh applets look nice. A bit of competition with EXT.ND here. More demo's of ths in the labs if you want to go.
xPages ( just a code name right now so may change ) is a new feature in Domino 8.5. It leverages JSF based java runtime from Lotus Components. xPages are builtin design elements for creating modern web apps with builtin Ajax features.
Demo time...
xPages is built ontop of JSF. there is no need for JSP or Java. Allows use of scripting languages like JavaScript XPath etc. Built in XML support and most importantly all done in the Domino environment. No need to deployment to a JAR like on WebSphere Portal.
xPages can be looked at as a pure XML file and every property is computable. There is a palette of prebuilt controls and you can add your own custom controls. The custom controls are like subforms on steroids or you can support Java controls.
Loads of AJAX support to make page refreshes lighter, Ajax typeahead can be added to any control and implemented via a formula on the page design No need to write your own AJAX service.
The look and feel is driven by CSS. This can help enforce a look and feel acrosss all your apps.This also allows you to skin your apps, there is a default style used for controls but they can be overridden in the CSS skin.
Skins can also detect the browser so you can have different skins for different browser types ( IE, Firefox, Windows Mobile, iPhone etc ). They are also looking making the rendering engine detect browsers so it can generate the right code for the browser.
Actions can be handled on both the client and server side code. For server handlers there is no need to write WQS/WQO Agents. They run within the xPages with full access to the age content. Simple actions can be created or they have extended Javascript to support @functions. ( Nice !! )
xPages are fully localizable, An automated string extraction utility will generate resource bundles and you can then make translated resource bundles to be supplied to the browser. There is no runtime penalty for this.
xPages looks good. I can't wait to personally try them out.
Dec's Dom Blog
