Urs-o-Log

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.

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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).

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.

Currently the Lotus Quickr documentation is only available online.

To read the documentation offline you have two possibilities:

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Print the online documentation either to a printer or to a PDF file.

You can do this by clicking on the small arrow which appears when you move the mouse pointer over a topic:

Then you select “Print this topic” or “Print this topic and subtopics”:

A disadvantage is that you only can print 100 topics at one time. So you have to print the whole documentation in smaller pieces.

The other possibility to read the documentation offline is to install the “IBM User Interface Help System built on Eclipse”.

This is the same help system used online but runs on your local PC. You can download the help system here.

After you installed the help system (you will need to have Java installed also) you need to install the Quickr documentation plugins. As far as I know there is currently no official download site available. So in the meantime you can download them from my private FTP server (unfortunately not very fast). I will update the link as soons as it is officially available.

When trying to install the Lotus Quickr Offline components you might get the following error message:

Unable to download file German.dat. The German language resources are not supported by the server.

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Solution:

Quickr uses the DOLS (Domino Offline Services) components for offline usage. The server tries to display DOLS specific messages in the language which is defined in the default locale for Windows.

So if the defaut locale in Windows is set to “German” the server tries to display the messages in the German language.

To avoid this message you either have to switch your locale to English (which normally is not desired…) or you can enforce the server to display all DOLS related messages in English by adding the following key to the Windows registry:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Lotus\DOLS]
“LanguagePreset”=”English”

If you want to display the messages in the default language of the locale (e.g. in German) you should be able to do this by installing the multi-language pack on your Domino server. (I did not verify this by myself!)

Update:

I just tested it with the German language pack for Domino installed and it works without the need to use the registry key mentioned above (and in this case the german DOLS software will be downloaded).

Within Quickr you can create templates (called “place types”) which you can use to create new places with the same configuration. Below there is a summary of how you create new place types:

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1. Create a place based on an existing place type which meets your requirements (e.g. Standard place for teams)
2. Give this place a name so that you can recognize the place as the master of your new place type (e.g. start the name with “MASTER “. This is important as you will need this master place in case you want to change your place type later.
3. Customize the structure (e.g. add/delete/rename folders, add rooms etc.) and the look and feel (e.g. themes etc.) of your place
4. Customize members (e.g. add a super user group to the “SuperUsers”, delete all other members from, add standard members/groups to the place (e.g. a group for all users of a company departement etc.)
5. If your master place if configured correctly you can configure the place type options (“Customize -> PlaceType Options”)
6. Set “Allow PlaceTypes to be created from this place?” to “Yes” and enter a description for this kind of place which will be displayed later in the place type selection list.
7. You can also upload an icon (GIF/JPEG) with a size of max. 100x80px and a link to a web page where you can find more information about this place type (e.g. how to use it etc.)
8. If you want to have the current members along with their rights copied to any new place you create from this place type set “Include the current members of this place in places created from the PlaceType?” to “Yes”, otherwise to “No”. This is useful to have already a administration group added to the “SuperUsers” in every new team place.
9. You can disallow place managers the right to change member information and access rights within the place by setting “Show the Members page? “to “No”.
10. You can disallow place managers the right to change the table of content of the place (e.g. adding new folders etc.). For this you have to set “Allow managers to make changes to the table of contents?” to “No”.
11. You also can configure what menu items will be displayed in the “Customize” menu. Attention: It seems that this setting cannot be changed in already created places even if you change this in the template later.
12. If you have configured all place type options you are ready to copy your master place into a template.
13. As an administrator choose “Work with templates” on the Quickr homepage.
14. Click “Create PlaceType” and give the place type a descriptive name. You also have to choose from what master team place the place type should be inherited from.
15. You then can reorder the place types (e.g. move all you customized place type to the beginning of the liste) and also hide place types which should not be displayed in the list of place types.
16. You are now read to create new places based on your newly created place type.

Some other things to consider:

• You can change the configuration of a template later by changing the master template of this place type first. Then you have to edit the place type and choose “Yes” for the option “Update this PlaceType with the latest changes from…”. All changes in the master place will be automatically written to the place type and will be visible for any newly created place.
• You can update already existing places with the new template information by using the QPTOOL command on the Domino console. See here for the possible options
• You cannot create a place type from a place where the expanded memebership was activated
• The size of a place must be less than 1 GB to be used as a place type
• The place which you are using as the source for a place type should NOT be deleted later. Otherwise you will no longer be able to change the design of your place type!!
• You should have a picture for you place type handy (format: GIF / JPEG; size max. 100×80 px)

To display non-English characters correctly you must set up the server to generate output using UTF-8 encoding. See the Installation section of the infocenter for more information. I would recommend to do this always even if you are using an English server.

To enable people who use double-byte character set (DBCS) languages, such as Japanese or Chinese, to use My Places, you must enable single sign-on authentication on the server. In addition, you have to add the NOTES.INI variable “Country_Language=xx[-xx]” to configure the DBCS language to use. You have to re-index all views in the place catalog afterwards. See the Configuring section of the infocenter for more information.

Please be aware that you have to use an external directory to support DBCS languages within user names This is not supported with the Quickr internal directory.

To change the sort order of the directory search results within Quickr to the look-and-feel used in germany (“Lastname, Firstname” instead of “Firstname, Lastname”) you have to add the following lines to XPCONFIG.XML:

This will display “Lastname, Firstname” in the first column and “(e-mail-address)” in the second column.

Beware of the fact that this only works for LDAP directories. I am not aware of any possibility to change the sort order for the Domino directory.