Preparing A Reasoned Defense... Interested In Your Contributions

Notes Domino is the only email platform we have ever had as a corporation. Therefore, most of the old-timers (read executives and middle managers) are comfortable with it. However, many of the corporate, manufacturing and tech hires in the last few years have come from Exchange shops. A few of them are having hissy-fits about Notes to the point of refusal to cooperate. I see a storm building.

To get ahead of the blow-up, I need to have already prepared a well-reasoned defense, since the final decision makers are old-timers, they need to have a factual basis to make a decision. I welcome your input as I build a defense in these areas and any others you think might be important. Who better to ask than you all who are in the trenches with Domino every day.

I want to be able to present:
Relative strengths/weaknesses of each server platform
Relative Scalability (# of servers per # of users and # of admins per # of users)
Relative strengths/weaknesses of each client
Realistic downtime issues
What ND does that E/O cannot do
What E/O does that ND cannot do
Ability to add customization to the mail experience (we customize the mail template)

I will probably think of some more as I get into it. Suggestions welcome.

One Of Those Weeks

Someone said there would be weeks like this... I'm spending a little thinking time the last few days re-focusing on what I have to offer my user community as a Domino admin. I think I have had more Notes-hatred from various quarters this week than I have heard expressed in quite some time.

A little background:

For better or worse (I'm sure there are others out there who are much more technically skilled than I am, but I am -- with God's help -- adequate) I am the Domino "know-it-all" in the Corporation. If things are going great -- I get silence. If they are going badly -- I get phone calls, IMs, emails or worse, people hovering around me in my cube. Goes with the territory.

We were running our most politically-visible mail server on Win2003R2 w32 with 7.0.2 for a long time with essentially no hiccups other than what the server's 700 users sporadically considered "slowness". Other than that, it was basically rock-solid. It was also doing duty as a target for process-driven SMTP messages (broadcasts of up to 1000 messages at a shot) and functioning as the LDAP server for copiers and such devices and acting as hub for replication and mail sent between our other eleven sites worldwide. It was a busy box.

Given the budgetary opportunity to upgrade, a couple of months ago, we replaced the server with much beefier hardware, Win2003x64, and Domino 8.5 w32 with HF676 applied. In our thinking, we should really have a rock-solid box now! The reality is that we have not really seen any perfomance improvement, but more important than that, we have had chronic server hangs (better said -- client lockouts) where for periods of 10 seconds to a couple of minutes, clients get "server not responding" messages and we get hostile phone calls. We have a PMR open and in looking at the NSD files, console logs and SEMDEBUG files, IBM says it is not a Domino problem. All I know is that, if I watch the server console scroll and I begin to see "WAITING FOR READ LOCK" semaphore debug messages, I am just about to receive connection errors and phone calls. These are problems we didn't have with the old server.

During those times, connection attempts from Domino spoke servers fail also -- because only port 1352 seems to be affected. During these lockouts, remote control sessions, pings, etc. all remain unaffected.

As if it were "icing" for that unpleasant cake, we have for the first time had a server lockup due to "Insufficient memory - server executive pool is full". An known error in 8.5 which we didn't know about until it happened. We did a notes.ini workaround -- "enable_collection_clean_queue=0" -- until we can uninstall HF676 and install FP1 or wait and install 8.5.1 after it is released next week. Bottom line, there are a lot of folks who expected a more robust server and they are seriously underwhelmed -- and these are the folks that are pro-Domino. I have lots of IT folks and users who are not. Whether it is a Domino problem, a server hardware problem or a network problem, it is "perceived" as a Domino problem until I can prove otherwise.

That brings me back to my opening paragraph. I have been spending some time thinking about what I need to provide to my user community:

:: a robust, rock-solid communication platform
:: instruction on how to get the most out of it
:: applications that they can't get with a different platform

This will be what I go after.

SNTT - Fair Use Prompt

** Note to those who viewed this post prior to 9/25/09: I neglected to include the code to execute the "No" choice. It has been added at the bottom.

The corporation I work for is fairly obsessive about its use of corporate policies relating to electronic messaging of all types. As part of it's campaign to advertise its concern about fair use, executive management and legal had us implement a "consent" form for Notes mail. When the user's mail file is opened, they are presented with a comply/exit option.




To do this, I added a bit of code to the Initialize section of the mail template Database Script, as follows:

'Start Template Added Security Prompt Text ------------
Dim allowaccess As String
allowaccess = session.GetEnvironmentString( "$allowaccess", True )
Call session.SetEnvironmentVar( "$allowaccess", "0" )

Dim warningtext As String
Dim answer As Integer
warningtext = |This electronic mail (email) system is the property of *** Corporation and should be used for Company business. Its use is subject to the provisions of Information Systems Policy 08-02-01 Communications - Electronic Messaging, which is available on the Corporate Intranet Website. Email, instant messaging and other electronically communicated messages are not private. Messages can be read by third parties and may remain on backup tapes or other archival media after they are deleted from the sender's and recipient's personal mail boxes.

** NOTE **
The Company reserves the right to actively monitor, log and review all network and Internet activity, including email and instant messages, without notice. Consequently, there can be no expectation of privacy by employees in the use of this system. Use of the Company email system signifies that you understand and consent to these conditions.

Click YES to use the system or click NO to exit the system.|

answer = Messagebox (warningtext, MB_YESNO, "*** Information Systems")
If answer = 6 Then
Call session.SetEnvironmentVar( "$allowaccess", "1" )
End If
'End Template Added Security Prompt Text ------------

To make the prompt function I then added this bit code to PostOpen Section:

@If(@Environment("allowaccess") = "0" ; @Command([ExitNotes]) ; @Return(""))

Nothing earth-shattering here. If you have a need to use this type of prompting, we have used it with Notes 6.x, 7.x and 8.x without any issues.

One Teensy-Weensy Little Server Crashing Thing

Friday morning started well enough. Friday is a short 1/2 day workday for us. As I got settled in, I got an IM from an admin at a site that had moved his Domino installation to new hardware and upgraded to 8.5 last weekend. Everything had been humming all week.

KG's IM said that the server had PANICed and shut down and that in subsequent attempts to start the server it would hang at the copyright notice then error out with a Windows application error.

First, I connected to his server's Lotus drive and looked through the NSD file. It said that nprocmon.exe was the original offender. Funny thing was that after this, no NSD files were created at each startup attempt and each Windows application error referenced nserver.exe as the faulting application.

I remoted to his server desktop and observed the failures for myself. I checked the notes.ini file and decided to comment out all tasks except for the router task to see if it would come up and continue functioning. No joy. I re-installed 8.5 on the very slim chance an executable or dll had gotten hosed. Still no joy. I decided to open and ESR with Lotus, which I did and uploaded the appropriate files with the ESR request.

The first thing Lotus support had me do was to disable the nprocmon.exe task with process_monitor_disabled=1 in the notes.ini file -- that should take care of the original PANIC. I did so, but the server continued to fail on every startup. After several discussions with the Lotus tech punctuated by "on hold" sessions while he discussed with second and third level support, he finally brought my attention to a line in the ini file that, upon investigation, was a referring to a directory link (dirname.dir). I determined that it was obsolete and at the tech's request I renamed it to .OLD and gave the server another launch. Bingo! Back to the Domino I'm used to.

Apparently, this directory link was now a false pointer (no such directory existed on the new server -- in fact, it was no longer needed). That one little unobtrusive 1K file was the showstopper. IBM said they had seen it a few times before and for me, a lesson learned.

The Shoe Goes On The Other Foot: Entourage

I and several others have written recently about uconntam and how she decided to bail on Lotus Notes for her Mac after trying to use it with eProductivity in ways she was used to.

Today I ran across a review from the other side of the coin. Granted, the writer is an Outlook user, but in this situation, he is bailing on Entourage because -- he is unable to get to work in the way he is accustomed to. The grass isn't necessarily greener.

Side note: the author comments about Gmail...

I know users who redirect their Exchange mail to Gmail. In an unregulated business with minimal IT resources, that seems to work.

Seems to acknowledge the fact that it is not really suited for the corporate (i.e. regulated) environment.

Tam Throws In The Towel (at least for now)

I have been one of several people who have tried to come to the rescue of Eric Mack's uconntam -- a new eProductivity user who has been trying to get Notes to perform in the ways she is accustomed to with Entourage and Outlook. Sadly, she is giving up the attempt for now, having reached the point of diminishing return on trying to make the client do what she is used to.

I understand her dilemma and don't blame her for "cashing out". She has given it an honest try and has had enough. I hope that, if nothing else, she will be a poster-child for the need to work on an area of Notes that, perhaps, has escaped our attention -- especially those of us that are geared to corporate single-account email.

Comments/Discussion Points:

1. Since Notes has been "an environment" hosting many applications from the get-go, I understand why it has its existing architecture. Good for many things, bad for someone like Tamara. Can we recognize new realities and adapt?

2. I call to mind Microsoft's internet "wake up call" back in the nineties. They had to go through a major re-orientation in their engineering and marketing so that "where the market was heading" (the internet) didn't pass them by. They pulled out the stops when it was apparent that their current concept of the world didn't fit reality any more.

3. Otherwise, do we just say "we don't do it that way here" and let that part of the market walk away?

4. None of this is to, in any way, diss the great gains that have been made in the UI starting in 8.0 -- Mary Beth and the team have done great work and involved many people in the decisions. It only shows that there is more work to be done. I have every hope that NotesDomino advocates inside IBM and out will work together to make that happen.

Tools Used Properly vs. Tools Used Poorly

Pardon the perhaps rambling nature of this post. I am aware that a lot of people are Twitter users. I have never seen the value in it, but I decided last week to give it a try and see what I think. My initial thinking going in was "what's the value of telling people what I'm doing right now, especially if they are not following me?"

I have used it for just shy of a week and began by doing the sporadic what-i'm-doing tweets. Then I decided to try the "following" thing and began following Ed Brill and Eric Mack. Following them led me to others I wanted to try following. It also gave opportunity to attempt, along with others, to help Tam, one of Eric Mack's clients try to get Notes working as a POP client. As it turned out in that case, the TwitterVerse rose to the occasion when a cry for help was sounded. Good value for Twitter shown in that situation.

Today, I ran across an article that plays very strongly into the "value added" test for Twitter -- and for Notes -- and for any platform. Notable quotes:

I recognize that it's becoming fashionable among many to bash Twitter, but for those who have learned how to use Twitter well (as opposed to many who use it poorly), the value of it is quite impressive.

...Mark Cuban actually has made the strongest point, noting that in many ways, Twitter is becoming more useful than Google. This isn't to say that Twitter is "killing" Google (x killing y stories are lame), but that many people are finding information via Twitter now, where they used to find it via Google.

Social media has been a place, for some, where one could say all sorts of vile things about people, products, policies that don't suit them. Others use the tools to promote productive, value-added discussions. The recent discussions about Lotus marketing have generally fallen in the latter category. Several weeks ago, there was a discussion at an off-site blog that was highlighted in the YellowVerse for it's insane Notes-bashing. This falls in the first category. They are, to me, like the back-window stickers I see on trucks that have someone pee-ing on a nameplate of a different brand of vehicle. Juvenile... that's my opinion.

The quotes above are valuable to me in that they communicate:

:: Tools which are good in themselves can be used poorly with poor results
:: There is no need to have a "destroy all competitors" mentality in marketing an excellent product

Additionally, in the case of Eric Mack's uconntam, we have a lot to do to help people see how to use Notes effectively, that will make the difference at the end-user level to make Notes a value-added proposition that would have to be -- to use a tired expression -- "pried out of their cold, dead fingers."