DominoKeys.com

I’ve been quiet on my blog lately. Trust me, its not for a lack of having things I want to talk about. I’ll start up again soon. In the mean time, I thought I’d post a quick one about what I’ve been up to.

First, DirecTV did it to me again. They pushed down an update without telling me first (or after). The update has one really nice feature that I miss from my TiVo: backing up ~5 seconds when you are fast-fowarding and then hit “play.” That was probably the biggest thing to adjust to when I made the switch to my TiVo. Its nice to have that feature again. — Yet, it caused all sorts of shows to stop recording for no reason. After working with a “qualified” tech for over an hour, I realized it would take less time to just re-add them to the list. Now that I’ve done that, things are working well again.

Next, I finally had it with my personal site’s ISP. I’ve blogged about this before because they have great deals but horrible customer service. They approached me about a domain name that was about to expire (one I WANTED to let expire) and that started a downward spiral. The end of the story is that I couldn’t stand dealing with them, never got explanations for odd problems and outages and finally decided to move on. I am in the process of moving that site to ICDSoft.com, which is where this domain is hosted. I think that’s a good decision.

And last, my side-project is taking off like I never expected. The community involved in it keeps growing and its been fun to see the site grow from a simply family web page to one of the fastest growing Disney-fan site community on the internet right now. Even Google’s news.google.com polls us for news stories now! I just can’t seem to get used to searching for Disney news on news.google.com and seeing my own site appear in the results. How cool!

Enough of an update for now.

I noticed on Ed Brill’s blog today that a new executive overview piece is available on Notes 8 and guess what … its good! Its real good!

Its a quick rundown of the big pieces of Notes 8 including some nice appealing screen shots and a very good, brief write up of the value without getting too technical. I like it! If I were a CEO and knew nothing about Notes, I would be interested to stop down to an IT area and ask some follow-up questions … which is exactly the point.

You can see it for yourself here.

My new MacBookPro finally arrived this week. I ordered it very shortly after the updated models were announced to take advantage of the new memory capacity, faster firewire port and larger hard drive (which was the biggest issue I wanted to fix).

Its been an insanely busy week at work and a busy week at home as well. So my new computer sat off in the corner, quietly and in its complete packaging. I didn’t even have time to break the seal and take a look.

Last night I FINALLY had some time to open up the box and start up Apple’s migration assistant. It was at that moment that I realized I should have done this on the first day the computer arrived.

See, despite the fact that this is my 6th Mac (7th if you count the Apple IIc I had a long time ago), I still think of some things in “Windows” terms. In Windows, moving to a new computer means you reinstall software on the new computer (for about 2 days – ’cause inevitably you forget SOMETHING on your list), you move files to a USB drive and then onto the computer, and you spend the next several months realizing stuff you missed (favorites, settings, etc.). Add to that the need to suddenly remember every password from every website you’ve ever been to.

On a Mac, none of that happens. You turn on the new Mac and walk through the Migration Assistant. You grab a firewire cord and hook your new and old Mac together. You turn on the old computer and hold town the “T” key. The Mac assistant then asks 4 questions about which accounts you want to pull over and how much “stuff” in each account you want to keep.

A few hours (and no user intervention) later, its done. Every last file, program, setting, cookie, window attribute, etc. is ALL on your new computer. You simply log into your account and EVERYTHING is where it was and behaves exactly the same.

Now I know what you’re thinking: too good to be true. You’re right, I did have to set the following things manually:

• My screen saver

That took all of 20 seconds.

I’m now blogging on the new computer and I can already tell that the screen is much brighter (LED screen), its quieter (especially the fans and hard drive) and the surface of the touchpad area seems to be improved a bit. There’s also no longer a spot for the iSight “you’re on camera” light, which is odd to me. I’m sure I’ll have more to report in the next week. For now, I’m ready to get stuff done!

I decided this week that I was going to RSVP for a MNNotes411 event in October where Ed Brill will be speaking. Don’t worry Ed, I won’t heckle you … too much. When I RSVP’d I also got an email saying they’ve added me to their link page (which was nice of them) and have already received a few emails about the help center product. Looks like I went to offering it for free too soon!

The Lotus Notes/Domino community is a great group of people and I’m excited to continue being a part of it through another link like this. (And feel like I’m contributing SOMETHING by offering at least one Notes database for free.)

Two of my favorite things have joined forces! I’ve been a big fan of Postini after seeing it being used by my father-in-law’s home email account. I was impressed at how powerful it was and how easy to use it was … two things that don’t always go together in the I.T. world. After seeing him use it, I marched straight back into the office and signed our company up with Postini and have been happy ever since.

The power of Postini goes beyond their spam/virus detection tools. The true power is in how they have configured the administration. IT Admins can sign into an account and control global settings on the filter (such as sensitivity, junk mail behavior, etc.) and then upload a list of users (or connect to their LDAP) to give end-users as much control as IT thinks they can handle over their accounts.

Bottom line for IT Managers: your team sets it up once and sets the baseline level of detection and then you pass on the rest of the management to each user. They can control their own white/black lists, sensitivity settings, etc. but can only do so within the confines of how you’ve set up the “global” settings. That means your team won’t have to manage adding individual email accounts to white/black lists all day long!

I’m anxious to see what this acquisition means but since I’m a fan of both I have to believe it’ll be positive.

I have now accomplished 2 of the 3 things I need in order to feel good about this purchase (since it was a work-related purchase after all). Here’s a recap:

(Please keep in mind that all of these steps are for Lotus Notes on the Mac.)
1. Lotus Notes Contacts on the iPhone

• File\Export…
• Give it a name and select the file type of “vCard 3.0″
• Decide if you want “All docs” or just the ones you selected and hit OK
• Open Apple’s Address Book
• Select File\Import\vCards…
• Find and select the file(s) you exported
• If a duplicate exists, you will be prompted with options to resolve it. Since that’s the case, you could export the entire contacts list from Lotus Notes once a week (or whatever) and deal with duplicates. This is handy for me, since I am more likely to update contact information in Lotus Notes than I am the Mac Address Book.

I know what you’re thinking … “I could set up an Automator activity for that.” You could, if Notes had Automator activities (or if you know a way around that … and if so, please share!)

2. Lotus Notes E-mail on the iPhone

This one is theoretically easier, yet took me a long time. You’ll see why in a moment…

• Enable IMAP on the Domino server that has your mail file. To do this, open your domain’s Address Book. Click on Configuration\Servers\All Server Documents. Edit the one for the server your mail file is on. Go to the tab Ports…\Internet Ports…\Mail and enable the IMAP (143) port. It would be a good idea to enable the name & password authentication as well.
• On the iPhone, set up a new mail account. Enter the name (DNS name on the internet — your Domino server needs to be exposed to the internet with an external IP, or NAT’d or something) of the IMAP server in the “incoming mail server” area (and add your Notes username and password).
• In the “outgoing” area, you need to enter the name of an SMTP server. This might be the same server or it might be a hub mail server. In my case, it was neither. We route mail through a spam filtering service and tell the ISP to pass all SMTP traffic to their servers, instead of us. Once I remembered that (and remembered the name of that server) I was able to get past this point.

Its also interesting to note that you can tell the iPhone to check for mail every X-minutes. If you connect your iPhone to WiFi hotspots that you frequent, it’ll help speed your email connectivity as well. Also, you may want to do a quick search in the Notes help files for “IMAP” for a quick understanding of how it works, especially if you’re more familiar with POP3 accounts.

… and the one I haven’t yet figured out:

3. Lotus Notes Calendar on the iPhone

Oddly enough, this is the one that I wanted to tackle first! You can export your calendar entries to .ICS files and import them into iCal, but that’s kinda a pain. I’m working on modifying my mail file to display an .ICS calendar feed that iCal can subscribe to (so that it is then passed on to my phone). I’m still working on formatting the file correctly (for iCal to read it properly) but I’m not done yet.

Other Resources:

It appears that there is already a product that would help me out tremendously. The name of the product is KissWorks which is in a transition to Seth Ober, who apparently originally worked on the product. You can purchase the product or benefit from lots of time I spent searching to find the trial link here. One important note: it doesn’t work. — I’ve tried it on a few installs with no success. I’ve tried to contact all of the email addresses listed on the various sites but haven’t heard back from anyone.

I have to admit … when I finally got up the courage to stick a paper clip into the SIM drawer release on my iPhone I wondered what else was in that thing. Thankfully, I don’t have to waste $600 to find out, someone else did that for me.