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I recently wrote about how Live Text was very popular at customer, because it would recognize certain text everywhere and provide a related document lookup.

It is very simple and no coding is involved, but you may need to use some Regex to define what text is to be recognized.

Hogne B. Pettersen in the comments asked if I could show how it could be done
So here is a way to get you up and running.

Desktop Policy.
Since you most likely use policies already (you really should!) you will already have one or more Desktop Policies for your users.
The Desktop Policy contains some important information about Widgets.
For a user to be able to create a Live Text Widget you could create a Policy like this.

1) 2 ) Define the catalog server and database. If the Widget database is not created already, create it from the template on the server. It can be any name, but has to match the the name in the Policy
If the policy works for the user a local replica will be created from the server database.
3) You need to enable Live Text and Widget Panel

4) These are very important or you will not get access to create the widgets.
5) You can enable these if you want to distribute the widgets. You most likely do not want to allow by email but by the widget catalog only.

You can do a "Drop All" on the server to push the new policy to all relevant users or do a restart of your Notes client to get the policy changes

You may be able to get the same from some notes.ini settings and avoid the policy, but I can't remember..

The Widget Catalog
The Widget Catalog helps push your widget to your users. You can yourself push a widget to the catalog and define who should receive it (if you have the rights to).
You do not need the catalog to create a local Live Text Widget
It is a very good idea to use the Widget Catalog, but you can also distribute your widget in an email if you want to.

The Live Text example
Lets make a simple example for use of Live Text.

Let the task be to recognize my first name "Jesper" in any text and use it to look up a document with my name in a database containing some names

If you have set up Widgets and Live text correctly you should have these icons in the toolbar
I have created the example database with the names.
It has a sorted view with the names.

and the form


Open the names view in the demo database.

In toolbar click on "Configure a Widget from Current Context" and this will show.
Choose "Open document by key in this view" and click next



Name the Widget and select "Wire as an action"


Go to "Advanced" tab

Enter the name of the field in the example Names database


Click next


1) As you can see I have created a ContentType called "JesperContentType"

2) You can define that when you click "New Recognizer" to define what to recognize in the text



Here you define your Regex definition for your recognized text.
In this example it just finds the text "Jesper" in the content.

In "New Type" I have defined the "JesperContentType" for the example
Click OK and Finish

Using the "Live Text"
If you open any document (like here an email) it will then show Jesper underlined (when in read mode only)


Clicking on the link will open the Jesper document in the test names database

You can assign more than one action to the recognized text, like doing a search, opening another document, etc.
In such a case the different options will show when clicking on the link. You can also define a default action and more.
Since the key is to create the Widget from context, you should try and create widget from your inbox, and see there suddenly more options




The Widget Panel
It is a good idea to keep an eye on the "My Widgets" panel to see what Widgets you have.
From the menu here you have different options. Use "Manage Widgets...." to a list of all the Widgets with Content and Recognizers



Turning of "Live Text"
You maybe do not want the "Live Text" to be "on" all the time.
By going to File\Preferences and by going to "Live Text" you can turn of different Content Type or changes the style of the "Live Text" link



Conclusion
This blog entry is only to get you going and as you can see it is easy to get Live Text up and running.
I do think the "Smart" Live Text Widget stuff can be confusing at best and could have been done much better.

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At a customer the users have a special love for a feature in HCL Notes..and it is not what you think it is :-)

It is actually "Live Text"

They sell containers and a container has number.
Actually is a prefix + serial number + a check digit.
That last digit is used to calculate if the container number is valid


The customer gets a lot emails with container numbers in them.

Many years a go I set up a "Live Text" widget in HCL Notes to recognize container numbers (and variants of it).
The widget finds container numbers every where ... in emails, different kinds of Notes document and it creates links.

Like this:

The links points to one or more Notes databases.





So the user can click on the link and Notes does a lookup in a database having information regarding a containing or a sale of container.

They love it and are completely addicted to it.

"Live Text " is VERY powerful!

It is easy to implement too.

Basically its is: a few clicks to create the Widget .. define the pattern to recognize (regex), make the lookup views in your database, set the widget and your are done.

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I have struggled for hours and hours with HCL Notes on several Macbooks.

It has been from V9 to now V12 .. it would install ...but crash as soon as password was entered.

After long conversations with HCL Support the reason for the crash seem to have been found.

A bug in the Mac version of Notes.... one letter makes Notes crash...ONE letter!.

If you run lots of agents and having used libraries in the client there will be memory leaks.....we all know that.

So the customer uses a policy to set a higher max heap space size in notes.ini.

JavaMaxHeapSize=512MB

And that helps a lot.....however...

there is a bug on the Mac version of Notes:

Setting this parameter crashes Notes immediately after entering a password.

Instead the Mac version needs to have the parameter as:

JavaMaxHeapSize=512M

So many hours wasted ...for just one letter

Hopefully this bug will be fixed i V12.0.1

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I have had users with different (weird) issues since V11 and all that would fix it was a deletion of the cache file Cache.ndk.

Cache.ndk is great for performance and you do want to keep it around, however sometimes you just need to delete it to fix issues and let it rebuild again at a Notes restart

Normally that is not easy for a user to do, since you have to shutdown Notes Client, open Explorer, find it and delete it.

However there is an easier way out... a Notes.ini setting NotesClientDeleteCache=1

Put this in the users notes.ini file (policy) and next time Notes starts it will delete cache.ndk before it starts and
set NotesClientDeleteCache=0 in so it does not delete Cache.ndk again next time Notes is started

So you can have a button for users to click with the simple code of

Dim session As New NotesSession
Call session.SetEnvironmentVar( "NotesClientDeleteCache", "1",True )

There are thousands of forgotten, hidden and undocumented notes.ini settings.

You will have to cross the entire internet to find this one....but it is all worth it :-)

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The Workspace in Notes has always been the center of (Lotus/IBM/HCL) Notes.

Always been the good and the evil.

Many attempts have been tried to fix it, remove it completely or ignore it.

Still ...not much have changed

What is really needed to make the Workspace work is not another cosmetic overhaul, but to fix what is not working.

Much organizations that use Notes have MANY database which quickly makes the Workspace a complete mess.

You can not find database easily

What is needed is the ability to sort by server (server, by categories on DB properties, most used, ...),.. maybe to group databases together within a tab

Really just to be able organize the database in a smart way.

And of course you need to program the Workspace, the Tabs, where databases goes etc.


But in V12 to make things round and different colors does not change anything

Remember the saying ..."If you put lipstick on a pig...it is still a pig" ... ;-)


Some examples of the many Workspace attempts

(The first one I like best)

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Normally my Domino upgrades runs smoothly on Linux (Centos) but the last upgrade to FP1 was strange.

I shutdown the Domino server, did the upgrade and everything seem to go well

However after starting the Domino server again, it would show up as still running version V11.0.1.
The same happened to another Domino on Linux server I upgraded.

I reported the issue to HCL,and got an answer back. Apparently some strings resource files was not updated during the upgrade.

The fix was:
- Shut down Domino
- Uninstall FP1
- Restart OS without Domino service starting after restart
- Do the FP1 upgrade again
- Enable service again and start Domino

This is actually how I have always done it on Windows, but it was not needed on Linux before.

In the future this is how I will do it on all platforms :-)

Read More

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