 Anthony Holmes | Anthony Holmes 6 February 2010 05:49:20 PMAs somebody who works for IBM, I've almost entirely stopped using MS Office. However I've been flipping between Symphony 1.x, OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice for a while, and not entirely settled on any of them. Company loyalty to IBM meant that I'd often use Symphony, especially when working on presentations and documents that I was going to share with other IBMers. But for some work an most personal use I've generally used Open Office 3. After a couple of days using IBM Lotus Symphony 3 (Beta 2), I'm developing confidence that this is likely to become my preferred Office product. Here's why: My key feature: Text documents can now be displayed with two (or more) pages shown side by side:  This feature has existed for some time in OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice, so Symphony isn't doing anything new here. But I've got a large, wide, high resolution screen. Being able to see the flow of my documents is important to me. Until Symphony obtained this feature I was always likely to be unhappy using it as a word processor. This was the first thing I looked at when I installed Symphony 3, and I was very happy to see that it is now available.
Sidebar In addition, there's something in Symphony that I think make it even better than OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice. Specifically, I'm thinking about the Sidebar controls. These provide a unified interface for functions that are done with three different interfaces in Open Office. (Toolbars, dialogs and a funny non-standard pane.) The Sidebars follow the convention used in the Lotus Notes 8.x interface of placing some items in a peripheral vision location. Things that you will need occasionally sit off to the edge. I believe that this has been developed as a result of usability testing. Changing Text properties is handled two different ways in Open Office: - Toolbar icons (which are squashed into a narrow line, instead of being laid out in the more usable format used by Symphony's Text Properties control) or
- With a Modal Text Properties Dialog (where you need to select your Text/Paragraph etc., bring up the Modal Dialog, and then make your changes before pressing OK. A tedious and distracting approach.)
For those who like Toolbars and Modal Text Dialogs, these still exist in Symphony. But with the wide screens that are becoming the norm these days, the Symphony Sidebar approach works well. There is a nicely laid out set of controls on the right hand side (that can be opened or compressed). It has layout space that make it simpler to find things (like the Modal Text Properties Dialog), but unlike the Text Properties Dialog, you're not forced to press OK in order to go back to editing your document: you can switch quickly between editing your text and changing properties. (**See the bottom for why I don't like modal dialogs).  In Open Office, Clip Art becomes visible when you select Tools; Gallery. This then opens a window stuck between your toolbars and your document that doesn't look like anything else you see in the interface. (This is the "funny non-standard pane" I mentioned above.) It's a bit obscure to know where to turn it on (it's not in the Edit, Format or Insert menus), and when it is turned on it's inconsistently placed. By contrast it's easy to see where to turn on the Symphony Clip Art, and when it is enabled it appears in the same place as the other Sidebar controls:  The other two default Sidebar controls are Styles and Navigator. In Open Office these open as (thankfully non-modal) floating windows. If that's what you prefer, you can also drag them away from the Sidebar in Symphony and they turn into floating windows. But the down side of floating windows is that they are quite likely to obscure the text you are trying to edit. That is counter productive. In Open Office they can't be docked. I prefer the Symphony approach of having a consistent place on the edge for them to sit that doesn't obscure text.
**Why I don't like Modal Dialog Boxes As Wikipedia describes it, "Non-modal or Modeless dialog boxes are used when the requested information is not essential to continue, and so the window can be left open while work continues elsewhere". Formatting text is a classic case where non-modal dialogs simply make sense.  For those who haven't seen it, this is the non-modal Text Properties in Lotus Notes: it lets you easily assign text properties without having to switch modes (and press OK) all the time. Tabbed Windows and Tags (originally called Categories in Notes) were features that Notes pioneered that eventually stormed the rest of the PC interface world. Non-modal dialogs already exist in some software, but I hope that they will become more popular. Anthony Holmes 21 January 2010 05:20:06 PMHere is some information about the cluster.ncf file that is created for any server or client that makes a connection to a cluster. Whenever a server that is a member of a cluster is accessed, Notes records information about all the servers in the cluster, so that it can try to fail over to other cluster members in the future if the original server is ever unavailable. Domino servers do the same thing when they contact other servers in clusters. The information about all the servers in the cluster is (I believe) kept in RAM, but it also gets written to a file called cluster.ncf. It's documented that this is actually written to cluster.ncf when the Notes client is shut down. The fact that the file contains a ". ncf" extension might lead you to suspect that is is a form of Notes database (like ".nsf", ".ntf", ".ndk"...). But if you try to open it in Notes, you can't. That's because cluster.ncf is a simple text file. You can open it in Notepad or any other text editor. Here's a sample cluster.ncf file, showing information about a single cluster of servers: Time=11/10/2007 03:15:21 PM (CA257371:001760C4) HomeCluster CN=Server1A/O=Org CN=Server1B/O=Org In this case the first line give information about the time the cluster information was picked up by the Notes client. On the left hand side it's in simple text: "Time=11/10/2007 03:15:21 PM". The text value is imprecise and ambiguous: is it 10th November or 11th October? Would things break if someone switched their Regional Settings from US to almost anywhere else in the world? What time zone was in use when this time was recorded? The information in brackets gives more precise information: (CA257371:001760C4) This hex information isn't a DocumentID, replica ID or UNID. Instead it is time and date information. Translated it says "Time Zone: 10 Hours East of Greenwich, with DST, Year: 2007, Month: October, Day: 11th; Time Hour: 15 (with DST)/Time Hour: 14 (without DST), Minute: 15, Second: 21, Ticks (sixtieths) of a second: 00 Information about how to decode these numbers can be found here: How to Interpret the Hexadecimal values in a Time/Date value http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg27003019 The second line of the cluster.ncf gives the name of the cluster: HomeCluster The third and fourth lines give the names of all the cluster members in the cluster, whether or not the user has yet had the need to connect to them. If there were four servers in the cluster, then all four servers would be listed here. In this case the user has definitely connected to Server1A. They may or may not have ever connected to Server1B, but if Server1A is ever unavailable, the Notes client will know where to go. If this person connected to other clusters, the cluster.ncf file would contain additional Time; Cluster Name; Cluster Member Name(s) appended to the file. As always, many thanks to the customer who asked me about clustering and cluster.ncf. It gave me a good reason to have a look at the nuts and bolts of how this works. Anthony Holmes 18 January 2010 11:16:16 PMTime zones mean that the Lotusphere Opening General Session starts at midnight Australian Eastern Daylight Saving time. So I'm sitting here waiting to either turn into a pumpkin; or to follow what happens. Here's how my 30 inch screen is laid out to watch the six people live blogging at http://www.lotuspherelive.com  I'm waiting for lots of interesting infobloggers!! (Actually, I'm not sure: perhaps only one of these six live blog sessions is going to be active... but I've opened them all just in case.) Over on my Mac I've also got the Lotusphere CoverIt Live blog: http://live.lotusphereblog.com/ To while away the time until the witching hour, I'm filling in the time by running up a set VMs to run Sametime 8.5 on the Mac and a PC. All in all I've got 30", 27", 17" monitors running and a laptop screen surrounding me in a semi-circle. I guest this must be a techie's idea of heaven? UPDATE: I refreshed my browser, and got the lotuspherelive blog in a nicer format: (I think Sametime Links must have loaded.)  UPDATE 2: One of the themes in the Opening General Session is "Collaboration Agenda"... hemmm... that sounds a bit like "Working Collaboration". :-) Anthony Holmes 5 January 2010 01:08:00 PMHere's a problem two of my customers have seen: A single person is getting all email except message sent to them by people on one other server. Those emails vanish. They don't appear in any mail.boxes and they aren't returned to the senders. In both cases I was impressed that my customers managed to track down that much information about the problem. It's potentially very elusive. Imagine what happens when the (non)recipient phones up the Help Desk: "I'm not getting some of my emails." "Yes, most of them arrive." "Fred told me he sent an email, but I can't see it." "No, Fred didn't get a non-delivery report." "Yes, I got the test email you just sent me" (from the Help Desk). "Mary has also just told me that she sent me an email that I didn't get." You'd be tempted to decide that the problem was caused by people covering their backsides and pretending to have sent emails, or getting forgetful, or messages going to someone else with a similar name. It would take you a while to discover that the messages had a) truly been sent b) completely vanished and c) bear only one common factor: the senders are all on a single mail server, and their server is not the destination server. (And, by they way, anybody on the Senders' server can successfully send to other people on the Recipient's mail server. So it's not a server to server routing problem.) If I've seen this problem twice, there must be many others out there with the same problem. Here's the solution: Imagine this environment: People are sending emails to Fred Flintstone from SendingServer1. Fred's Person document shows that his mail file is on Receiving Server1. The mail routing between SendingServer1 and ReceivingServer1 is working correctly for other messages. The problem is recipient specific. Mail sent from anywhere in the world (except SendingServer1) is routed by a lookup of where Fred's Mail File is in his person document. But SendingServer1 notices (and uses) a hidden field in Fred's Person document with this value: NewMailServer: SendingServer1 There is also a value in the person document for NewMailFile. These values are (properly) added to person documents as part of a user move initiated by Adminp. They are needed to ensure that mail isn't lost in the middle of a mail move. The values are normally automatically cleaned up at the end of a move. In these cases the following happened: - The Administrators didn't think that Fred's mail file was in the middle of a user move when they encountered this problem. But there may have been a move in the past.
- In both customers' case, there was likely to be some strangeness around a user move for Fred Flintstone.
In one case a person was moved to another server and then back to the original server, but Adminp was prevented from deleting the mail file on the temporary server.
In the other case, the customer simply fixed the problem and didn't track down the root cause, but it was likely to be similar.
- No matter what happened to confuse the Adminp move, the critical point was to discover that there was an additional mail file for Fred Flintstone sitting on SendingServer1.
When SendingServer1 saw that the NewMailServer value was SendingServer1, and when it also discovered that it had the mail file named in NewMailFile, it used those values in preference to Fred's "proper" mail server and mail file values. Removing the NewMailServer and NewMailFile values and deleting the rogue mail file on SendingServer1 fixes the problem. (Before you delete the mail file, make sure the 'missing' messages are copied/replicated to Fred's proper mail file. For background information on the two fields, see this document: AdminP Move MailFile Request Adds Two New Fields to Person Document (NewMailFile and NewMailServer) http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21087214 Anthony Holmes 3 January 2010 06:44:41 PMI have discovered a neat Open Office.org extension that combines the benefits of PDFs (near universal readability) with the benefits of Open Document Format (a clean, standards based document format, not subject to a monopoly provider's control). When I send documents to my customers, I will have authored them in Open Document Format using either Lotus Symphony or OpenOffice.org. Rather than convert the document to MS Office format, I will likely convert it to PDF format for sending. I can feel confident that anybody will be able to read that format. If I think that the customer may want to edit or re-use the document, I might send them a second copy: in Open Document Format... because most (but not all) of the people I deal with will have access to Symphony via Notes 8, Open Office or one of more than twenty programs that support the format. But it always looks awkward to send them two attachments for the same document. The Sun PDF Import Extension is a plug-in for Open Office 3 that has some neat features. The feature that I like is the ability to create Hybrid PDF documents when you export a document as a PDF from Open Office. The PDF you create looks like a standard PDF (and displays like one in Acrobat). But it also contains the entire Open Document formatting. This means you can open it an edit it in Open Office just like any other document. As its title suggests, the Extension was initially aimed at letting you import a PDF into Open Office. If you import an ordinary PDF there are limits. Principally, each line of a document's text appears as a separate text block. If you imported a 'run of the mill' PDF, you could make changes to it, but it's not like opening a Word Processing/Spreadsheet/Presentation document. It's fiddly. And that's all because of the complexity of the standard PDF format: it's not designed to be an "Office" editing format. But Hybrid PDF documents give you a very neat way of getting the best of both worlds: a universal display format (PDF) and a fully flexible editing format (ODF). There's one (hopefully temporary) limitation: Because the extension is based around Open Office 3, hybrid PDFs don't appear to be editable by the current version of Symphony. I'll be very interested to see whether Symphony can open Hybrid PDFs when it is updated later this year.
Examples Here are some sample documents. They are all a simple one page document that I wrote describing Hybrid PDFs, saved in four different file formats. I've included some simple graphics, styles, a table, some bullet points and a hyperlink in the document so that you can compare how this document looks in different formats. (They were all created on a Macintosh.) Hybrid PDF Format (115k) Standard PDF Format (70k) MS Office 95/2000 Format (53k) Open Document Format (45k) Anthony Holmes 2 December 2009 10:19:25 PMWith Notes 8+ the rendering of MIME/HTML emails has been greatly improved. Notes no longer uses its old proprietary web rendering engine (the very old Notes browser/Perweb.nsf). My understanding had been that this was done by calling the native browser for each OS to do things like rendering MIME/HTML emails. This turns out to be slightly wrong. I had somehow (wrongly) formed the theory that the rendering was done as follows: Notes client with Windows: Internet Explorer Notes client with Linux: Firefox Notes client with Mac: Safari However, the technote below reveals that this isn't true for the Mac and Linux.... and I'm guessing not Windows either. It seems that something called the XULRunner is used: a runtime environment that gives web browsing capabilities that can be embedded into other applications. It's based on Mozilla/Firefox: and hence the rendering looks good. Anybody coding MIME/HTML is likely to do it in a Firefox friendly way. So that's much better than relying on the Notes browser for rendering: the Notes browser was very good at mangling layout. I imagine that the benefit of using XULRunner over the "Native browser for each OS" scheme that I had imagined Notes 8+ was using would be that I assume that XULRunner is fairly consistent between each OS. (Although I imagine there might still be a few font differences.) If an email renders one way with Notes on Windows, it'll presumably be as close to identical for Notes under Linux and Macintosh as it's possible to get. Lotus Software Knowledge Base Document Title: Platform differences for Mac and Windows on Lotus Notes 8.5 Doc #: 1330933 URL: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg21330933 PS: The old Notes browser hasn't been entirely dumped. There are a couple of very limited scenarios where it might be used in Notes 8/8.5. But for any normal usage it has been eliminated. Anthony Holmes 30 November 2009 09:25:22 PMAfter experimenting for a while with DVD boot versions of Ubuntu, I decided to install the 'mainstream' IBM Linux client on my work laptop. The IBM Open Linux Client is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2. It comes pre-configured with essentially everything I need to do my job. Which is great. (This is my second 'new' OS this year. Early this year I got a Macintosh for my personal use.) There was one odd thing that I noticed. Although I had selected Melbourne, Australia as my time zone, and despite looking around for a place to set date format (and failing to find one), I found that Notes was displaying dates in US format: MM/DD/YYY, rather than the format used in my country and a large proportion of the rest of the world: DD/MM/YYYY. On the IBM Linux forum, the suggestion was that I add the following to my Notes.ini. Which I did. And the dates now appear as I want them. # Use 'D', 'M' and 'Y' to set your preferred date order DateOrder=DMY # Use of '/', '-' or ':' are preferred DateSeparator=/ # Use of '/', '-' or ':' are preferred TimeSeparator=: # Allowed values are '12_HOUR' and '24_HOUR' ClockType=12_HOUR These settings may be useful to those outside the US who decide to run Notes under Linux. However, my question is this: The IBM Lotus Knowledgebase essentially says these settings are superseded. But these technotes are all referring to Domino, not Notes. So is it appropriate to use these settings? Are the technotes forgetting that this is the only way to do it for Notes under Linux? Or should I be digging into Linux and changing a setting there? (And if that's what I need to do, where and how should I be configuring it?) Lotus Software Knowledge Base Document Title: NOTES.INI settings relevant to Dateformat and Timeformat on the Domino server Doc #: 1097363 URL: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg21097363 Lotus Software Knowledge Base Document Title: DateOrder and DateSeparator notes.ini parameters do not work as expected in Notes/Domino 6 Doc #: 1195319 URL: http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg21195319 Anthony Holmes 21 November 2009 06:06:25 PMThis is my story about being nudged to do what I always intended to do, but hadn't quite done completely. A chain of emails floated around IBM recently. At the highest level of IBM's Software Group, the question was being asked: how completely have we moved towards the goal of replacing MS Office with Symphony? New laptops no longer come with MS Office, but those of us with older laptops would have had Office originally... and we might still use it. Anyway, the discussion jumped the oceans and landed in Australia, where my boss's boss's boss sent a message down to my boss's boss, who then sent one to my boss, with each boss in the chain adding their own layer of encouragement/direction. (And B^3's message had a layer of technical credibility/leadership, since he could cite the fact that he's been successfully running with Linux for three years now.) By the time that the message got down to me, I nodded sagely as I read the email, thinking "Yes, of course I've moved off Office for all my work documents, so there's nothing for me to do". But my conscience spoke up. For personal reasons I have been using a particular spreadsheet for the last couple of years. I have diabetes, and I use a rather nice spreadsheet to capture blood glucose/insulin results. And because it is tracking what I do from day to day, it sits open for most of the time. In Microsoft Excel. Why do I use it in Excel? Well, if you look at the first image below, you'll see a chart with three colours behind it. These show low, normal and high blood glucose ranges, and these can be adjusted as you change your treatment goals. It's achieved by combining two chart types together. None of the Open Document Format spreadsheet programs display it in the same way. It's not an essential feature, but I used it as an excuse to not shift across. But given the encouragement by B, B^2 and B^3 (along with Top B1 and Top B2 in the US), I decided it was time to get of my backside and move. I could have tweaked the Excel spreadsheet and very quickly re-saved it as an ODS spreadsheet with 98% of the functionality of the original. A few minutes more and I could have tweaked the "low, medium, high" parts of the graph to display in a way that worked better cosmetically in the Open Document Format programs. Instead, I took the initiative to create an entirely new diabetes management spreadsheet. This gave me the chance to rebuild some of its features so that they work the way I want them to. It was also a good way to get me really familiar with the way the program worked. It took me less time than I expected to build a 'useful' spreadsheet. (Bear in mind that it has thousands of cells across ten sheets.) After I've refined it a bit more, I might make it available to people with diabetes more generally. It's probably worthwhile to have a diabetes monitoring spreadsheet available that doesn't require people to pay a tax to a software company before they can use it. Original MS Excel Spreadsheet:  My new Open Document Format Spreadsheet in IBM Lotus Symphony:  I can now honestly say that I'm MS Office free. Historical Footnote Back around the turn of the millennium, Sametime was in common use by the technical staff at Lotus in Australia, but some people (largely sales people) were slower to take it up. One day the General Manager of Lotus Australia sent out an email to all staff stating that if people were at work and at their computers, he expected them to be logged into Sametime. Suddenly it became worthwhile looking at Sametime's presence list to see if a salesperson was available (and anybody else too). A critical mass of usage was achieved. Amusingly, the sales team soon became the biggest fans of Sametime. They just needed a nudge. Here's my assessment: With certain categories of software and products, there's an exponential value curve: they're useful with a small user population, but the value jumps when you reach a critical mass of users: Networks, Email, Instant Messaging... and I think the same curve also applies to IBM Lotus Connections. Anthony Holmes 16 November 2009 09:44:04 PMThe December 2009 APC (Australian Personal Computer) Magazine has a brief Head2Head article comparing Google Premier Apps with Lotus Live iNotes. (It's in the physical magazine. I can't find it on the web site.) It provides a very concise point for point comparison: - What is it?
- Cost
- Main Selling Point
- Cons
- Summary
The comparison seems fair. - "iNotes comes with industrial-grade security."
- "Google Premier Apps is fundamentally a consumer service which occasionally suffers from major outages. On the other hand, IBM say there will be no outages with iNotes."
- "iNotes is quite bare, and each user gets only 1GB of personal storage."
... The gist of the comparison is that Google Apps seems to be aimed at enthusiasts or businesses looking to get off Exchange, whilst Lotus Live iNotes "is designed to give businesses a rock-solid web-based option." I guess if you want to read it all, you'll have to buy the magazine. ("Fair dealing" and all that. I can't quote the entire article.) Anthony Holmes 13 November 2009 03:12:28 PMAs far as I ever thought about it, I had long since stopped using Internet Explorer 6. My usual work computer (when I'm at my home office) is a Mac Pro (not a Macbook). On the road I use a Thinkpad T60p running either Windows or Linux.... as time goes on, I'm spending more time in Linux. When running the Thinkpad with Windows XP, my default browser is Firefox, although I also use Safari when I'm pining to have a Macbook, and I've got Opera and Chrome when I'm feeling like a change. So I've really stopped thinking about Internet Explorer. However, today I got an email with a survey from IBM's internal TAP (Technology Adoption Program). Sidenote: The TAP is a truly excellent program that I believe most companies - not just IT companies - ought to think about. It provides a structured environment for new technologies to be tried out. It has programs for bleeding edge stuff, alpha version, through piloting and eventually pretty mature broad scale deployment. It's a very good way of ensuring that new software is tried out by more than the developers or IT group, and lets me, at a distant location, try out new stuff. Anyhow, I clicked on their link within Notes, filled out the survey, and got taken to the TAP home page which reminded me that my installation of Windows XP is still running IE6:  Now this should have been bleeding obvious to me. I knew that Notes 8 uses the "default Operating System browser" for a number of purposes: when you click on URLs and when you read emails with MIME/HTML content. Which means: Windows: Internet Explorer Macintosh: Safari Linux: Firefox But because I never use IE anywhere else, I had forgotten that there was probably a benefit to upgrading from IE 6. Web Developers will probably thank me when I upgrade. And possibly my MIME messages/links clicked from Notes will look better too. By the way: it could be argued that I ought to be able to choose a browser, and select Firefox as my Notes browser and never call upon IE from within Notes. But I see the logic of tying Notes to a single browser for each OS: for example it ensures that MIME emails get rendered (mostly) consistently on all PCs using the same OS. And I guess it ensures IBM's developers get a predictable set of browser capabilities to tie into each OS's version of Notes. |
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