Month: January 2011

EntwicklerCamp 2011

Lotusphere is just about to start in a few hours and there are only a few days to go to  EntwicklerCamp 2011. The Camp is one of two big conferences in Germany run by dutchman Rudi Knegt and his team.

As always, the lineup of national and intenational speakers is impressive. Maureen Leeland, Ben Langhinrichs, Paul Withers, Detlev Pöttgen, Thomas Bahn to name only a few.

With this camp so close after Lotusphere 2011 you can expect sessions right from the ‘Sphere’.

I will also do a session called “The Lotus Code Cookbook”. The content is not XPages centric because  there are already 8 XPages related sessions on the agenda. So I decided to do a session dealing with “classic” programming techniques.

We will look at some basic settings in the DDE, @formulas, LotusScript, C-API and do RichText manipulation on the CD-record level using LS2CAPI. The content is for beginners to geeks. It took me about 6 months to put the session together. Hope you enjoy it.

If you cannot make it to EntwicklerCamp, chances are that I will give this session at BLUG and / or UKLUG ( if my session proposal gets accepted )

I will also speak at the CGS of Entwicklercamp. “From PLATO to the leading groupware platform” is about the history of Lotus Notes from it’s beginning long before Release 1 to present.

Session slides are prepared and I also have packed a box of giveaways for the attendees. Laptop cases, T-shirts, bools USB-sticks and other stuff.

If you are a company and would like to support me, you are invited to send me some freebies that I can give away at conferences. Any help is much appreciated.


First steps with my brand new iPad

A few days ago, my boss gave me an iPad 16G WiFi for testing in our company environment. I’m working with an iPhone 3GS for almost a year now and I would not like to miss it any longer.

What do we need the iPad in our organization for? Here are a few from our list of requirements

  • Lotus Notes Traveler
  • Connect to our network via VPN and CheckPoint firewall
  • Intranet
  • Connect to SAP via Business Object Explorer app or browser
  • Synchronize documents ( M$-Office, PDF )
  • Edit documents
  • Other aplications via browser
  • Access files on our servers

As we already use Lotus Notes Traveler 8.5.2.1 on iPhone and Nokia devices, I didn’t expect any issues with installation and configuration on the iPad.
The iPad has only WiFi and so I connected to our LNT server internally. The server can be accessed from outside using SSL via a reverse proxy. The connection from the reverse proxy to the internal LNT server uses http only thru the checkpoint firewall.
After downloading the profile and the usuable steps to install it, I was able to sync my mails, calendar and contacts. Next I installed a second profile accessing my server at home ( HTTPS and DSL ). No problem at all at this time.
Later that day I tried to install the access to my company mail accout from outside the network via the reverse proxy. As I said, this works perfectly on the iPhone and Nokia devices, but I am not able to install the profile on the iPad. All I get is an “Error DomainÚErrorDomain Code=0 “Operation could not be completed.” (DAErrorDomain error 0.)” . Thanks to Dennis van Remortel for some tipps on twitter.

There are a few hints on this error and I will sure need to do some more investigation. ( Reverse Proxy logs, Domino server settings etc. ).

Next was to connect the iPad using VPN. This was painless. No app needed. Simply throw in the servername or IP of the corporate firewall, username and password and a shared secret. PN, I am now able to connect to LNT and sync my company mail.

Intranet and other browser based ( XPages- ) applications work perfectly and the size of the display makes it easy to work with them.

We also tried RDP connection to some Windows machines and so we did with SSH to Linux boxes. Teamviewer and VNC work as well.

Now for the documents. I searched the AppStore and found “Documents To Go” which seems to fit perfect for our needs. Pls. forgive me, I’m, a newbee in the Apple world ( except a few free apps on the iPhone ) and perhaps there are better solutions. But I guess that you will write your suggestions in the comments.

At first sight, “Documents To Go” looked like the perfect application. It can open all fiele formats that we use and you are able to modify documents and spreadsheets.

Now for the sync part. “Documents To Go Desktop” lets you sync the content of folders on your computers with the iPad or iPhone. I installed the client on my laptop. After the start it complains that I do not have “Bonjour” installed on my laptop. No surprise is that because I do not have iTunes installed and Bonjour is a part of iTunes. This is the first big minus point for the iPad in the enterprise. We do not allow iTunes on computers in the enterprise.

But this is my private Laptop. so I installed iTunes and started “Documents To Go Desktop” again. I had connected the iPad by USB. To my surprise the device was not detected by “Documents To Go Desktop”.

There is a hint on the screen that sync only works via WiFi but not via USB. This is the next mega-big minus that makes this app absolutely useless for our needs. Not only that you have to connect the iPad via WiFi to the network; you have to connect your local computer to the network via WiFi as well. No problem with a laptop, but try this with a desktop PC …

By the way, the iPad does not load its battery when connected to USB. Tried several ports on the laptop, dockingstation and a desktop PC. Also tried different cables. The pad connects to iTunes in all tests.

Anyone an idea to connect to CIFS shares on Novell Netware using the FileBrowser app? Can connect to Windooze 2003 server and Windooze 7 workstation, but Novell Netware.

So far for my first steps with the iPad. Feel free to comment and give hints and tipps. Much appreciated.


Designer Help: @V2IF Typo or a sack of rice fell over ?

I did some investigation on how often an @function is used in the mail template. It is absolutely useless information, but I wanted to test the usage of  Teamstudio Configurator from Lotus Script.

Here is a snapshot of the resulting view

Reading through the results I stumbled upon the @V2If formula. This formula is used 21 times in the mail85.ntf template.

But why should one use this @V2If in a template that would never be opened on a Notes 2 client. I looked in the Designer Help to find out if there is some difference betweeen the @If and @V2If .

To my surprise I found the following sentence in the help description for @V2If

Note  In applications created with Lotus Notes prior to Release 4, the @If function is automatically renamed to @V2If during the upgrade to Release 4.

If I understand this sentence correct, all @if entries in the code of an application created in Notes 3 are replaced automatically by @V2If when you convert the application from Notes 3 to Notes 4.

IMHO this must be a typo, because this would not make any sense. @IF was introduced in Notes 3. Why should one convert this to the old @V2IF when you are obviously using Notes 4?

Oh listen, a sack of rice fell over in the Yunnan district …


XPages – For … Loop issue

While working on some XPages app dev, I encountered a problem with for … loops in an output script block when the loop is used together with other XPages elements in the block.

There are two ways of filling the content of the script block. The picture below shows both ways and in both cases I get an error message and the code does not compile.

The only way to get rid of the error in the second sample was to replace the “<” with a special character substitution code  &lt; or &#60; .