Lotus Notes Viewer not working with German client

The embedded Lotus Notes viewer was not working on some customer workstations although all necessary files were correctly installed and the KEYVIEW.INI had the correct Notes program path configured.

After some investigation we found out that a German Notes client installation does have a second KEYVIEW.INI besides the one in the Notes directory. It is stored in ..\NOTES\MUI\DE\ and must also have the correct path of the Notes program directory configured. After we corrected the path name the viewers were ok again.

I was not aware of this speciality of the German client (I suppose the same is true for other languages than English).

Draft Redbook: IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 Deployment Guide

Still a very early draft (planned publish date: 28. September 2007) but it already might be useful for someone, the IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 Deployment Guide:

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Planning the Notes and Domino 8 Deployment
Chapter 3. Deploying Lotus Domino 8 server
Chapter 4. Deploying the Notes 8 Client
Chapter 5. Coexistence: Domino/Domino and Domino/Microsoft Exchange
Chapter 6. Lotus Notes 8 Client Features
Chapter 7. Productivity Tools
Chapter 8. Domino Web Access
Chapter 9. New Administration Features
Chapter 10. New Concepts in Administration: Eclipse, Composite Applications and Provisioning
Chapter 11. IBM WebSphere Portal Integration
Chapter 12. New Application Development Features
Appendix A. Considerations for upgrading from Notes and Domino 6.5.x to 8
Appendix B. Lotus Notes and Domino Client Feature Comparison
Appendix C. Additional material

Lotus Sametime: Error “Cookies not enabled” with Internet Explorer

If you try to access a Lotus Sametime server with Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher you get the error message “Cookies not enabled” although you are sure that cookies ARE enabled for this host.

The reason for that is an underscore (“_”) in the host name of the Sametime server. The problem is already documented some time ago but I was not aware of this and had a hard time to find this out ….

I am quite sure that somewhere you also get a warning when installing/configuring a server with an underscore in the host name but I did ignore it 🙁 So although there seems no obvious problem with such a name you better should take care of it because of unwanted side effects later.

This btw. is no problem of IBM or Microsoft but it is not supported according to RfC 952.

Deploying IBM Lotus Connections: Planning and architecture considerations

Stephen Hardison has just published part 1 of a six-part series about “Deploying IBM Lotus Connections“.

In part 1 he writes about the most common steps to prepare for an IBM Lotus Connections deployment and the architectural concepts of a Lotus Connections installation.

Update: Now also available

Part 2: “Post-installation tuning”
Part 3: “Maintenance”
Part 4: Troubleshooting

Lotus Quickr: “My Places” does not show all places

On a customer installation we did had the problem that the users could not see all of the places they had access to in the “My Places” view.

Some of the places appeared and some others did not. We could not find any things in common for the places which were visible. The only thing we saw was that none of the newly created places were displayed.

[More:]

We then de-registered all places and registered them once again. This made it even worse as none of the places were visible now.

It took us a long time to find out what the reason for that behaviour was.

The customer changed the DNS name of the Quickr server some time after the installation from “SERVERNAME.domain.com” to “servername.domain.com”. The name was changed also in the Domino server document.

But Quickr stores the server name also in the database “PlaceCatalog.nsf” in the root of Domino data (you can see the servers known to Quickr in this database in the view “Place Servers”). In this database the server name was still listed with capital letters. As the place names do have a connection to the server name, Quickr did only found a match for places created as the server name still had capital letters in its name. All newly created places (which got the server name in small letters) were not be recognized as places for this server.

After de-registering and registering all places they were connected to the current server name (in small letters). So none of the places did match with the old server name in capital letters which was still listed in the PlaceCatalog.nsf.

After changing the field in PlacesCatalog.nsf and restarting the HTTP task all places were displayed again with no problem.

Instead of manually changing the server one could also de-register the server and register it again (although you will then get a second entry in the “Place Servers” view).

Lotus Quickr: Problem with customizing themes

If you want to create a customized theme for Lotus Quickr (Services for Domino) you normally start with one of the default themes. I wanted to use the default theme “Quickr (with classic navigation)” and so I activated this theme and afterwards clicked on “Custom Themes” -> “Create Custom Theme”. What I now expected was that if I activate the “Generate” option for all HTML/CSS files I will get the original version of the theme I had activated before (“Quickr (with classic navigation)”).

Unfortunately this seems not to be the case. What I did get was the CSS file of the old Quickplace theme (“Quickplace Classic”) and some HTML files which do not match with any of the standard themes.

So if you want to use a standard theme as starting point for a new theme you should copy the 6 files (StyleSheet.css, Page.htm, Edit.htm, Headlines.htm, ListFolder.htm and SlideShow.htm) from the directory on the server (look here which theme corresponds to which directory). Then you should drag & drop all of the six files to your newly created theme. Then you can start to modify the files as you want.

Lotus Domino: View Rebuild and temporary space

Starting with R5 Lotus Domino is able to rebuild the database views much faster than this was the case with R4.

To be able to use the new rebuild mechanism Domino needs enough disk space in the temp directory.

If there is not enough space you see the following error in the log: “Warning: unable to use optimized view rebuild for Viewname due to insufficient disk space …. Using standard rebuild instead”.

In this case you really should take care of the problem as the standard rebuild takes much more time. We currently measured some hours instead of 30 minutes when rebuilding the views of the Domino Directory or the ADMIN4.NSF after an R7 upgrade.

The amount of disk space needed was almost up to 10 GigaBytes which was not available on the system drive.

You can either delete some files if possible or you can move the directory where the indexer task writes its temporary files to another location by using the NOTES.INI variable “view_rebuild_dir=X:\pathname\”. You have to restart the server after you change this variable.