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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 :-)

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Recently at a customer I had made some changes to a solution. I was running HCL Notes V11 and everything ran fine on my PC.

Soon an office complained about some code had stopped working.

I had upgraded a script library to a newer version of Apache POI for working with Excel files in some agents.
First I thought it was some compiling that hat gone wrong, but it turned out to be the script library had some files missing, soon fixed and all was well.

However what I discovered was I had been running V11 and the customer V10 and the reason for me not getting the errors was that Apache POI version 4.11 is now included in the V11 release.

As you can see here:



Which is super great !

It is because Notes attachment viewers now converts files and show them in the browsers from V11 and on, and Apache POI is used in the process.

So what I would like to know from HCL ... is this a permanent change?
Can we count on this being a part of the Notes client in the future?

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The (LS/Java) API for handling Item values is very rudimentary at best, which for LS  especially painful since it does not have Collections

A more full API is needed (and would be loved).

The NotesItem class should have a API which handles values better.

 Suggestion:

- getValueAt(index)
- getNumberOfValues() (number of values in Item)
- removeValueAt(index) (number of value is decremented by one)
- insertValueAt (index) (number of values is incremented by one)
- replaceValueAt(Index) (same number of values in item)
- sort(Asc/Desc)

Please vote for it. https://domino-ideas.hcltechsw.com/ideas/DDXP-I-570

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Today I had to do some installations of NotesV10 because af Shanghai offiec had gotten new PCs.

1) Notes Installation and an important step

Doing a Notes install is normally a "no brainer" and V10 is too. Install V10 and then FP3.

You start Notes and are then guided through a few forms for name, server name, ID file etc.

After Notes is running you can then shut it down.

To get users setup and configuration from old PC , you copy and replace 3 files in the new data directory: "names.nsf, desktop8.ndk, bookmark.nsf" (and maybe some other files like user.dic..)

This works great in V9, however I have seen this break Notes in V10 and you need to reinstall Notes again (after running NICE).

The trick to make it work it seems is to do a Windows reboot before copying the 3 files, it will then work perfectly.

2) Really strange security issue in V10

Today I saw a really strange security issue in connection with the Notes installations.

After a restart of Notes I had a superuser log in.

After the log in I tried to open a database, acces a server but all the time I would a dialogbox saying wrong password for accessing server etc.

And it could not replicate, same error. Really strange ..in 25 years I have never seen this error .

I logged out and had the superuser check if password was correct, it was not!

Using the correct password everything worked correctly again.

BUT how is it possible log in using a wrong password?? or rather accepting a wrong password and get into the eclipse client ...(but not able to access in databases)

There is a bug somewhere...

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In my other blog entry "Domino Designer (and Sametime) breaks..."

I wrote about the issues many had with Domino Designer V10 breaking down with fonts issues, XPages not working, Sametime looking weird etc.

After working on the issues for months I had finally nailed it down to LibreOffice 6 as being the culprit.

Just by uninstalling LibreOffice the problem went away for many which was great!

However the fix did not work for all .....including some of my installations.

Fortunately some followed my direction and comments about LibreOffice and fonts, and narrowed it further down to just being the font "Noto Sans" doing all the damages

When removed Noto Sans Notes worked correctly after a Windows restart. I removed some other Fonts installed by LibreOffice as well, but I don't think that was needed.

Thanks to Lars Berntrop-Bos, Lukas Malina and others for the great work on following up and commenting to blog entry.

Noto Sans was added in LibreOffice from version 6.0 on and also note that OpenSans is removed in the installation process by LibreOffice 6

See https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Fonts

Now it is up to HCL to dive in and find the real cause and fix the issues for good..

Read More

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