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Update: added How Do I Temporarily Get The Applications View Out Of The Way section (March 6, 2010)

The release of Notes 8.5.1 brought with it a significant change to the Domino Designer client. For those admins out there (or anyone else, really) who do not have the benefit of an in-house development team to bounce questions off of, you may find yourself lost or at least somewhat confused the first time you open Designer 8.5.1. If you are totally unfamiliar with the Designer 8.5.1 client, you may want to start with the Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5 Deployment Guide’s App Dev UI section for a quick overview of the layout.

Because I am writing this with Domino administrators in mind, I am going to bypass all of the new features and instead focus on how to get you up and running by tackling the most common problems I have seen admins overcome with this new Designer client. (more…)

There are two camps of Mac users: those that think you don’t have to defrag a Mac and those that know better. I am now firmly in the “those that know better” camp.

I do not go easy on my Mac. I download, install, and subsequently delete a lot of data. I also use Parallels and create snapshots which tends to also eat up disk space. I run several versions of Notes and Domino servers via Parallels. My Mac usually runs for at least 12 hours per day if not more. Many times it will run all night running test scripts. I may not be the test case for the average user, but I can certainly be the average test case for almost any IT professional. (more…)

“IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1, The Upgrader’s Guide” is the latest Domino related title to come out of Packt Publishing. The book promises to be your guide enabling you to quickly upgrade your existing Domino infrastructure and to assist you in leveraging the newest features of Notes and Domino 8.5.1. For the most part this promise is kept, but there are caveats.

The book begins with an overview of features in the Notes client. Though the title would lead you to believe that the book focuses on version 8.5.1, in fact the book is riddled with references to 8.0 and 8.5. I assume it was the authors intent to help the reader mentally segregate the features into a timeline of their inclusion into the product, however a simple table in an appendix would have conveyed this information just as well while providing the dual purpose of serving as a quick lookup reference. Given that the title of the book is specific to the 8.5.1 release it would have been a smoother read if all features were discussed in aggregate. (more…)

Conxsys is proud to sponsor the milestone 100th episode of the Taking Notes podcast! In this episode, Bruce and Julian interview Matt White, Declan Lynch, and Peter Presnell. They discuss everything XPages from how to get started to debugging (or lack thereof). Go listen to this podcast right now and help us to continue to support wonderful podcasts like Taking Notes by downloading the free nsfRewind Server Document Edition and purchasing a support agreement for it, or by purchasing the nsfRewind Enterprise Edition today!

By rather popular demand I have re-done the Lotus Notes wallpaper from yesterday and made it fit several screen resolutions (800 x 600, 1024 x 768, 1280 x 800, 1280 x 960, 1400 x 1050, 1440 x 900, 1600 x 1200, 1680 x 1050, 1920 x 1200, and of course 320 x 480 for the iPhone). I have also included similar wallpapers for Quickr and Symphony. All three are available in color and grayscale versions. I had to make the logo’s a bit smaller for the Quickr and Symphony versions because they just looked better that way. I’m calling this the Lotus Eclipse Collection. Get it?

In order to get the iPhone versions on to your phone, surf to this site in Safari on your iPhone and click the link for the wallpaper that you want. Once it is displayed, tap and hold the image until the menu displays. Choose Save Image. The image is now available in your Photos and can be added as wallpaper just like any other image.

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For some reason today I was in a bit of a creative mood and decided to create a few Notes, Conxsys, and nsfRewind wallpapers. I hope you enjoy! If you have any other high-quality PNG Lotus product logos and would like similar wallpapers created just let me know.

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The Domino 8.5.1 Field Translation pack is now available for nsfRewind Server Document Edition and nsfRewind Enterprise Edition customers. This translation pack includes user-friendly field names for server documents, configuration documents, program documents, connection documents, group documents, and person documents for Domino versions 8.0.2 and below, 8.5, and 8.5.1.

Field translations are used to translate confusing field names into more user-friendly and easy to understand names. For example, if nsfRewind were to alert you that EDFileNames in the server document had been modified, would you know if this was something important enough to drop everything to take action or if it could wait until later? With nsfRewind Field Translations you would, instead, be notified that the field “Directory Cataloger:  Directory catalog filenames” had been changed. With over 650 fields in the server document alone field translations can make using nsfRewind just that much easier. Almost better than that is that they are provided free of charge, even for users of the free nsfRewind Server Document Edition!

Currently field translations are only available in English, but anybody can create their own translation packs whether that would be into another language or for a different application. If you do create your own translation pack for another language or another application, you can contribute them back to the nsfRewind user community by sending them to us.

nsfRewind v1.0.2 is now available to all nsfRewind customers. This version, along with the field translations for Domino Directory 8.5.1, makes it fully compatible with the recently released Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1 software. Upgrading current installations of nsfRewind to v1.0.2 is recommended for all customers whether they are running Domino 8.5.1 or not because it includes bug fixes and enhancements to logging.

nsfRewind v1.0.2 is a no-charge upgrade to existing nsfRewind Enterprise Edition customers. Enterprise customers can login to the support center to download their copy today.

nsfRewind Server Document Edition continues to be a freely available download.

Yesterday’s IBM press release announcing the pending shipment of Notes & Domino 8.5.1 contained quotes from Bruce Elgort, David Leedy, and myself. I’m pretty sure that this is the first time that IBM has quoted me in a press release before. But, cool as that may be, my real excitement over this press release was the surprise announcement that the Domino Designer client will now be given away free of charge. I, for one, say that it is about time. Not only does this harken back to days gone by, but what better way to see an influx of Notes-based applications than to give the Designer away for free? Now the countdown to 8.5.1 begins……

Flow v1.0 Beta 5 has been released on OpenNTF.org. This version includes a small enhancement called Property Caching.

The Flow Engine’s new Property Caching feature allows developers to set the following properties prior to the Flow document object’s instantiation when using the Flow Engine:

• LogMailRecipients
• LogMailSubject
• LogFileName
• ViewIcon
• ContinueText

Previously, code had to be written in a specific order. For example, when logging to an e-mail the engine.LogEventsToMail property had to be enabled prior to setting the mail recipients with engine.LogMailRecipients. Now, when using the Flow Engine class, these properties can be set in any order.

To find out more about Flow please see this previous post. To get your copy of Flow head on over to the Flow project page on OpenNTF.org.