Domino @ Symetrik Design

A few weeks ago, I posted about the fact that I had been laid off.

I live in Hong Kong and Domino/Lotus jobs don’t seem to be prevalent here at the moment.

In the meantime, I’ve taken time to “re-charge” my batteries and spend time with family and catch up on some todos around the house that had been procrastinated on for some time.

Now that I’ve got some time to focus, I have decided to learn PHP. I have thought about it for a very long time, but have never made the time to do it.

I figure that I’m excellent with server and infrastructure management and the tools to manage the infrastructure, excellent with Domino management and support, but lacking in any programming areas.

I do tend to do freelance work on the side, away from the corporate environment that are usually LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) type projects. This entails usually setting up a Drupal site, or similar open source PHP web application and hacking the CSS and theme to get it looking right.

I am familiar with working “around” PHP, but not a master at writing or even editing it.

I’ve starting looking into the online resources that are available and it looks like there are some really good free resources, both tutorials and video tutorials.

I’m just wondering if there is anyone out there that can give any good starting advice for someone that is more of an all around IT management person and is used to mostly keeping servers, up, configured, and running that does not really have any programming concepts experience.

Also, I’ve started looking at the Zend Framework for PHP. I’m wondering if that really is a standard for developing PHP applications.

One thing I’m wondering is why you would not use the Zend Framework? It seems like a no brainer to use it especially if you were developing something from scratch.

You may have known about this for some time, but i’ve just discovered the PocketMac for Blackberry software that is available from RIM.

I was helping a friend backup/synch his contacts on his Blackberry Pearl yesterday and we were just about to purchase and download the Missing Synch, but a Google search yielded the PocketMac for Blackberry software, and the update, which are both available here.

It works very well, and the default configuration is to synch your contacts with the Mac OS X address book, you calendar entries and tasks with your iCal calendar.

It was simple to configure (actually I didn’t have to change anything), simple to use, and FREE.

kudos to RIM for this. I might actually consider buying a personal Blackberry now versus a iPhone or other smartphone.

I’ve been in the market for a smartphone, but many of them (non iPhone or Blackberry) don’t easily synch with the Mac’s. This makes the choice for a Blackberry much easier for me.

I’m wondering how I missed the release of this though?

I knew it was inevitable, but I’ve been laid off on grounds of “cost cutting - due to economic crisis.”

As a result, I won’t be continuing my “Migrating to Exchange - One Domino Admin’s tell all journey” series.

I hope it was informative to those out there that haven’t had the chance to work with Exchange, but have heard all the hype over the past few years.

Here is my summary:

• Microsoft is not the best solution, but it does integrate well with it’s other products (desktop, email, document management, proxy servers, firewalls, security). You can have an end-to-end solution. There are obviously downsides to putting all of your eggs in one basket, but it has to be said.
• Microsoft Sales team promises alot that they can’t deliver.
• If you use Microsoft Engineering team to implement what the Microsoft Sales team has sold you, you will get proof positive on the previous point. Even the Engineering team will admit that they’ve oversold you.
• If you are going to migrate to Microsoft, get a 3rd party independent consulting company to implement it for you or at least help with managing the project.
• When migrating to Microsoft, keep an eye on the cost of additional hardware, the cost of SQL server licenses, and the cost of bandwidth upgrades which will be inevitable and make sure and factor in those extra costs. You won’t have a server for server comparison between your existing products and Microsoft. You may be able to use virtual machines for some of your systems, but some of the systems require physical hardware and/or cannot exist on the same box as other servers.
• Single Copy Storage that Microsoft has touted for Exchange is a myth (for lack of a better word) and Microsoft Engineering is actually recommending against factoring it in as a disk saving attribute when doing capacity planning. Single Copy Storage is only valid across each Exchange Store (database) on an Exchange server, and typically, you will have several Exchange Stores on each server - so the benefit is minimal.
• Only a certain number of mailboxes can exist on an exchange server and those mailboxes must be split amongst different Exchange Stores (databases). There is recommended limit to how many stores you put on each Exchange server. It’s actually quite a bit more complicated than the Domino database model and Domino’s DAOS (which is server wide).
• I can’t stress enough how much more bandwidth you will need compared to a Domino infrastructure.
• There were many things that I felt Microsoft did much better than Domino, such as the Calendaring and Scheduling, but I won’t get into that here.

…..and yes, I am interested in contract work, please contact me at the link on the navigation menu (upper right).

This was originally drafted on March 31st, 2009 and I’m just now getting to publishing it.

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I sat in on an Office Communications Server 2007 design discussion and here are a few points that we covered that I felt noteworthy.

The client must have Microsoft Office Communicator installed. I guess this must be different from Microsoft MSN client and Microsoft Windows Live client.

As part of the unified communications concept, you have “One number” which means that a user can be contacted on different devices/numbers at the one number. Sort of like smart routing.

3rd party Internet awareness with AOL/Yahoo must be subscribed to a service from Microsoft

Exchange 2007 server Unified Messaging role - can route phone calls, read your email to you over the phone, read your voicemail to you over the phone, etc. I believe alot of PBX and other hardware dependencies must be in place for this to be a reality.

OCS 2007 archiving role…can act as instant messaging journaling. Archiving can be journaled by Symantec Enterprise Vault. The benefit of this is that e-discovery for legal can take place in one technology for a particular query instead of having to use Facetime archiving search tool for e-discovery of IM history.

I first Drafted this on March 18th, 2009 after a meeting with Microsoft Design Engineers and I’m just getting to publishing it. Only a few factoid type bits of information is included and the final number of servers that we’ll need to implement compared with the existing number of Domino servers.

I apologize in advance for the vagueness.

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If you have 2003 outlook clients, you must have public folders server to provide free/busy time services to outlook 2003 clients.

Outlook 2007 can connect directly to mailbox servers over MAPI

However, all other types of connections or clients, need to connect through the Client Access Server (CAS) server which routes us through to the Mailbox server for every transaction.

Every messages must go through a hub transport server, even if two mailboxes are on the same mailbox server.
This is generally to achieve journaling better.

Before Domino servers 38 including 3 BES servers (15 sites) after Exchange user servers 105 (14 sites)

There are alot of resources on the Internet to find this stuff, but I wanted to add some of my favorites here that I find useful. There are so many Blackberry tricks, tips, and shortcuts that is hard to know all of them.

Here are some of my favorites: The most favorite being the ability to use the “K” key to lock the keyboard instantly.

• To capitalize a letter, hold it down.
• To insert a period when typing text, press the Space key twice. The letter following the period will be capitalized automatically.
• Press the Space Key to insert the @ and PERIOD characters in an address field.
• To turn on NUM lock, press shift + Alt
• To turn off NUM lock, press Alt.
• Press ALT+RIGHT SHIFT to turn on CAP-lock mode. Press SHIFT again to turn it off.
  When typing text, press and hold a letter while rolling the trackball to scroll through the accents, symbols, or marks associated with that character. When the desired characters appears, release the letter key.

INBOX NAVIGATION (Some of these work in tasks, memos, and appointments also)

Sorting: Use Esc to return to full listing with any of the following:

• ALT-i: show only incoming mail
• ALT-o: show only outgoing mail
• ALT-p: show phone log
• ALT-s: show SMS messages
• ALT-v: show Voicemail messages

Navigating:

• t: go to top of message list
• b: go to bottom of message list
• backspace: close message list and return to home screen
• spacebar: page down
• cap + spacebar: page up

Turn off Dial from Home Screen to use the Home Screen short cuts below.
Phone > Options > General Options > (set) Dial from Home Screen = NO

Home Screen Shotcuts

• M Messages
• P Phone
• A Address Book
• L Calendar
• F Profile
• T Tasks
• D Memo Pad
• T Tasks
• V Saved Messages
• U Calculator
• R Alarm
• O Options
• K Lock
• B Browser
• C Compose Message
• S Search

Today, I was testing the “Force user to change Internet Password on next login:” option on the last tab of the person document.

I wanted to set an HTTP password for several users that will only be POP3 clients, and set the “Force user to change Internet Password on next login:.” I wanted to do this so that we could have remote admins at that site change the user’s password through the web interface and then setup the Outlook client to connect to Domino via POP3 - all without giving the remote non-Domino admin access to our directory. They are in Brazil, we are in Hong Kong and there are 300 users, so it’s a logistical issue. It’s a long story why outlook and why POP3….don’t ask.

I set a password of 87654321 on one account, forced replication to the remote server, used IE to login, which presented me with a change password dialog. I changed the password to 12345678, and it let me on in to the mailbox.

I then noticed that I could login with both the old and new password. ????
I ran “tell adminp process all” on each server involved and replicated both admin4.nsf and names.nsf, and then repeated the process of both tell adminp and manual replication to make sure that adminp had finished all it needed to finish for the password change process to complete.

Still, I could login with both passwords = me confused.

I searched the Notes 6/7 discussion forum and then found a couple of documents in the administrator help which explain that this is a caching issue. By default the old password is cached for 48 hours to alleviate any confusion between HTTP access on multiple servers, and adminp and/or replication delays.

Look at the administrator documents titled for the full explanation:
HTTP_PWD_Change_Cache_Hours
Caching Internet password changes for SSO

Yesterday, I posted a quite stern email and the follow up email from an obviously frustrated and upset user.

Today, I have another one that made me chuckle a little bit. This one is a bit more lighthearted.

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Case ID: HD00000000XXXXXX
Requester: XXXXXX, (Office)
Summary: My Lotus Note is approaching max memory.

Description: Hi Sir/Madam,

My Lotus Note is approaching max memory.

Would you please release more memory for me Or should I achieve something?

Only increminating personal information has been changed. The capitals and all have been left the same.

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TO..: “IT DEPARTMENT - XXXMYCOMPANYXXXX”
FROM: XXXXXXX
DATE: 30-MAR-2009 09:11
MSG.: 1042041

I HAVE FINALLY MANAGED TO CHANGE MY PASSWORD AFTER MANY ATTEMPTS

THANKYOU

RGDS/XXX
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I CANNOT USE LOTUS / OUTLOOK BECAUSE MY PASSWORD NEEDS CHANGING.

WHEN I TRY TO CHANGE MY PASSWORD IT SAYS I CANNOT CHANGE MY PASSWORD.

THAT IS R I D I C U L O U S

XXXXXXXXXXX
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I received this in a Microsoft (not business partner) email invitation to a Microsoft IT Professional Seminar Series

On the agenda was - “Windows Server® 2008 R2 (Codename ‘Windows Server 7′)”