Domino @ Symetrik Design

A few months ago, we upgraded all of our Brazilian users to Notes 7.0.3. After we did so, the automated messages generated by their help desk ticket system stopped displaying Portuguese accented characters properly.

When accessing the same message through DWA, the message and accented characters showed up correctly.

We generated a PMR with IBM, who told us to right click within the message, and choose Encoding\Other\Unicode (Auto-Detect) which seemed to fix the isssue.

It appears that the message that is generated by the help desk system is received by Domino via SMTP and when the message is delivered the MIME type is unknown. So this fixes the problem one a one by one basis, but how do you fix it so that the default Encoding is Unicode (Auto-Detect) and/or UTF-8? Read the rest of this entry »

I stumbled onto this 5 year old post by Jack Dausman in a series of posts he calls “Secrets of the Administration Guild”

It describes how to create a smart icon in the normal Notes client with code to bring up a Remote Console popup dialogue without having to have the Admin client open or installed.

The code is: @Command([AdminRemoteConsole])

I will have to say that it’s a pretty clever little trick and could be darn useful to give “semi-admins” in regional sites a way to run compact on a server or something.

Like most of you, I glean my information from various sources: Blogs, IBM Notes/Domino FAQ Newsletter, Notes Discussion forums at IBM, IBM technote searches, custom Notes/Domino google searches, Stumbleupon, delicious.com, and various other newsletters such as the searchdomino.techtarget.com or LotusUserGroup, etc.

I just recently signed up for LinkedIn and joined a few Notes/Domino groups. I haven’t done much with it yet, but here’s my public profile http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidkillingsworth.

Today, I received a LinkedIn post with an answer which pointed to Technote 1196837 – Using a Desktop Policy to set notes.ini and Location parameters.

I really wish I had seen this technote a very long time ago.

For a very long time, the “Optional Network Drivers” that Lotus forces you to install has been a very big thorn in my side.

Who uses anything besides TCPIP anymore?

I always disable any non TCPIP ports after install as it complicates Notes configuration for desktop support people, complicates location document creation, and I had one user once who had all the default ports enabled. He also had some network drives permanently mapped. When he was at a site that could not see the network mapped drives, and he would save an attachment, Notes would freeze.

After some study, I realized that Notes was trying to build the list of places to store the attachment for explorer and searching every possible port to map those drives.

I disabled everything except TCPIP for the guy and tried the same process. The guy thought I was Santa Claus and that he’d just received the best Christmas gift ever. The attachment save dialog window instantly opened and presented a local directory.

I’ve tried several ways to get around this on install (and there is no way to disable the ports by policies).
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been investigating why our primary mail routing hub server is taking so long to route messages recently. The behavior started a few days ago (or maybe it’s been going on for a while and we didn’t notice it).

• Messages will queue in the mail.boxes for anywhere from 5 to 15 (maybe longer) minutes.
• They do NOT have the -check in progress- (which sometimes take place when Trend Micro ScanMail or IQSuite, our mail compliancy capturing software, is holding up the router).
• Then suddenly they all route at once.
• Then the process will start over again.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today at the office we had a situation that had never come up before. We recently created a new user, which has the same name as a very old user.

A particularly important group of users regularly send to the old user, using just his common name, example “guru”

Suddenly, these important users started getting the Ambiguous Name Dialog Box which I’m sure that they have never seen before, and I’m sure they hit enter, and the result is that the new user, who is listed first in the ambiguous name dialog box receives the email.

Important users complain, heads roll, management wants the new user’s name changed (even though his name follows our newly implemented naming convention). Read the rest of this entry »

We were getting a few strange sounding reports from a user who was trying to send email to 3 groups.

The first message was:
“A copy of this message was sent to 180 recipient(s), but the Internet format of this message was not sent to the following 34 recipient(s); <address@domain.com>, <address@domain.com> etc.”

The second message was:
“Document has invalid structure: mail.box”

We closed the client, deleted mail.box, opened the client, and let it re-create mail.box and all was fine.

I feel like talking like a cave man because the concept is like starting fire when people start to understand the benefits.

For a long time, I’ve been a pundit of “DON’T USE STATIC IP CONNECTION DOCUMENTS!” Not everyone will listen, maybe because I sound like a radical cavalier consultant admin who knows everything – offering up such new fangled ideas to an organization who does not have a global active directory container or single company-wide DNS suffix.

Here’s why STATIC is so bad: Read the rest of this entry »