Smarter Upgrades for the remote user

Posted on February 5, 2009 by qtzar

Smart Upgrade in Lotus Notes/Domino is
a great time saver and when used in conjunction with SuRunAs you can deploy
updates to your users very easily. Just yesterday I deployed the Notes
8.5 client to 16 people in my office without having visit any of the machines
and without having to grant the staff any special install rights, it just
works.

But there is one staff member who permanently
works from a home office in another state, they connect to our network
via our VPN using their home ISP. Technically we could push the Notes 8.5
client to this user but at over 500Mb for the installer files this would
be a lot of traffic to push over our internal network and out our VPN to
the user and I’m sure our network admin would not be very happy if I did
it.

Not wanting to be killed by the network
admin I had to come up with a different solution when it dawned on me that
the SuRunAs package that I created just needed to be run on the users machine.
All SmartUpgrade does is get the package to the machine, stops Lotus Notes,
starts the SuRunAs package which in turn kicks off the embedded installer
package with admin rights and then restarts Lotus Notes afterwards. The
only bit I needed to do was get the package to the users machine and make
it easy for them to start the upgrade.

The solution was simpler then I imagined,
I took the SURunAs package that I had built and put it on a blank USB Thumb
Drive and then created a simple Autorun.inf file that would start the SuRunAs
package. Then I just sent it via the postal service with instruction that
they need to make sure Lotus Notes was not running before putting in the
USB Drive. I did a dry run on a test machine and it worked perfectly. Now
I’m just waiting to hear back from the staff member to see how they got
on.

So if your a Notes Admin who has to
deal with remote users and you want to stay on the good side of your network
admin this might be the simple solution that you need to get everybody
up on Notes 8.5 in your company.

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Why I’d Love To See Full DXL Support in Lotus Notes

Posted on February 4, 2009 by qtzar

At the ‘Ask The Developers’ session at
Lotusphere the first questions was one that the developers were expected
and that was to fix DXL in Lotus Notes. Now Brent
Peters has detailed on his blog
that it is being looked into.

Question: Nathan
Freeman.  We need DXL fidelity.  How many developers do you have
assigned to it and when will we get it?

Response: We are shifting people to DXL now. We have much feedback on this.
Focus has been Designer and xpages.  We will be rolling features out
incrementally rather than a 2 year wait time.

Post Lotusphere 09 answer – This work is currently staffed. Designs being
vetted, would like to push the DETAILS of effort in a DP call. Looking
at what can be done for first incarnation in 8.5.1. One items is to ensure
no crashes.

Well I’m not a design partner so unfortunately
I won’t get to find out about the details of efforts or even give any suggestions
on what I’d like to see in the 8.5.1 incarnation but I can blog about it
here in the hope that somebody who is part of the DP process might spot
it and pass it on to those who need to know…

One of the great things about DXL is
that you could use it to build forms or views in a database on the fly.
Basically most design elements could be created while the application was
still running. In theory you could get some basic info from an end user
and use that information to build customized forms and views etc. This
is extremely powerful when you start thinking in terms of plugins for Lotus
Notes applications. We already have plugins for the Notes client, The sidebar
and even the SameTime client so why not plugins for applications.

Take the BlogSphere blog template for
example, lets say you want to add in a new sideblock. With full DXL support
in Lotus Notes it could be possible that somebody else has already created
the sideblock that you need and published it in a plugins catalog for Blogsphere,
you download a set of DXL documents, import them into your database and
bingo, the blog template now has a new sideblock type. Take this a little
further and one of the DXL items you import into the database could be
a document to say the plugin is installed and then have code in your target
database to allow you to ‘disable’ plugins on the fly also.

Yes, something like this would need
a little bit of background work, some naming scheme would have to be developed
for the target database so plugins don’t overlap but with full DXL support
for EVERY design element available you could develop some serious plugin
support for your applications and this is just one of the reasons I’d love
to see full DXL support in Notes/Domino in the future.

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Caption Competition

Posted on January 31, 2009 by qtzar

This picture is just begging for a caption

Paul M is a devil

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Twitter At Conferences

Posted on January 30, 2009 by qtzar

One of the interesting aspects at Lotusphere
this year was the abundant use of Twitter. If I wanted to see what people
where up to I could just look at my twitter stream and find all sorts of
entries saying what sessions people were at or, at night, what bar or restaurant
they were at and with the @Lotusphere forwarding account I was able to
find others at the conference who where not on my usual list of people
to follow.

A few good examples of twitters usage
at Lotusphere would be the mass twittering of Ed brill winning the blogger
of the year award from PlanetLotus within seconds of it being announced,
Finding out about the ActiveSync support for a future version of Notes
Traveller without being at that particular session and even Turtle’s pleading
over twitter at the Ask the Developers session for all Mac users to hold
up their laptops when he asked his question.

One future direction for twitter usage
at conferences that I can see happening is the creation of a special twitter
account by conference organizers to send out details of changes in the
schedule, repeat session information and even the daily breakfast and lunch
menus. An official account by the conference organizers could put important
information at the fingertips of all the attendees within minutes.

What do you think? Will we see an @LS2010
account at Lotusphere next year? What other conferences have you gone to
that could benefit from official twitter accounts?

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