Thanks to Lars Berntrop-Bos and the news of Domino 8.5.1 I went to download it from IBM partner site. During the download I remembered that the last time I did a Domino upgrade on Linux, our Sametime stopped working as upgrade overridden / deleted some Sametime files and folders. Hence, for the reasons specified in previous upgrade article, I decided to also download newest Sametime 8.5.

In the past, installing Sametime was almost a piece of cake. You installed Domino server, installed Sametime, did some configuration voodoo and you were done. Now, I am presented with 7 or 8 binaries to download. What on earth is System Console Server? Why do I need separate install for 7 other things that were mostly included in one binary in previous release? Why do I need WebSphere Application Server? And I am not even starting on DB2.

Thankfully, uncle Google led me to this blog, where all possible options are described in detail. Now, apparently, to run all new and shiny features, you need at least two servers. Most likely because mixing Domino and Websphere Application Server is not a good idea if not impossible. If you are willing to sacrifice all new and cool meeting and conferencing features, you can keep your one dedicated server and run Sametime 8.5 Classic.

My real question is, what was IBM thinking? I get that separating each and every major feature of Sametime may mean better performance, but I really cannot see smaller companies (up to 150 employees) sacrificing at least one additional server for the sake of running a simple messaging and meeting application. Specially not those (like the one I work at) that already use other meeting and conferencing software. How can I go to my boss and tell him that we need Sametime for meeting and collaboration, when it takes more resources than existing implementation of competitive software? Also, integrating WAS as a framework? Really?

Phew… now with that off my chest, I am off to prepare a plan of upgrading…

First in line were our internal servers. It took my colleague a significant amount (and by significant, I mean up to 5 times what was our worst case prediction) of time to upgrade.  Upgrade went without a glitch. Problem was, that one server couldn’t start up JVM anymore and both internal servers were now failing to log people in. First was solved by copying JVM from one of our 8.5.1 servers. Second, was a tedious task of finding an option to disable SSO using AD instead of Notes Address Book.

With that sorted and running for several days, it was time to start upgrading remaining servers. One of them runs on 64 bits, btw. Install went fine, quick and did not enable SSO with AD.  Hurrah! Other servers (32-bit ones) were not as kind. All failed to work after starting for the first time. Seemed to be some problem with java controller. Disabled it and ran the server. Failed. I then performed an upgrade again, at which point, install program started bitching as windows service for Domino Server was already of the same version. Ignoring that, I ran the server again. Nope, service shut down with erra again. I then disabled java controller at start up and started the server, only to quit it as soon as it was fully operational. Why? To enable java controller. After performing that task, I started the service, again, and then it finally worked. Yipi!

The only server remaining on 8.0.2 is our Sametime server, which runs on Linux. As far as I know, 8.5.1 is still not out for RHEL.

Are Notes really built for Java? Because at this point it certainly fails to look so.

After contacting IBM support and filling that standard questionnaire, they provided us with a link to knowledge-base article containing a solution.

To summarize an article…

1) If you are running 8.0.2, install fix-pack 1 immediately. This will solve the issue.

2) If you are running inferior versions, you can use SERVER_TIMESYNC_INTERVAL ini file parameter. Values are:

• SERVER_TIMESYNC_INTERVAL = 1 – every 5min (default)
• SERVER_TIMESYNC_INTERVAL = 2 – every 1min
• SERVER_TIMESYNC_INTERVAL = 3 – every 60min
• SERVER_DISABLE_TIMESYNC = 1 – disable polling

Remember to restart the server after applying this setting.

1. You can now create clients. The one we’ve all been waiting for since ND7 came out.
2. Web services created/built on ND8 don’t work on ND7 anymore! So, keep in mind that if you are running web services on ND7, you shouldn’t upgrade your designer to release 8 just yet.
3. You can now use Java libraries when creating web services in Java. You couldn’t in ND7.
4. You can now have port class defined in a script library when creating web services using LotusScript. This was not possible in ND7.
5. You can now return empty array. if you wanted to do this in ND7, you had to create a class, containing an array and then return object of that class.
6. More SOAP error handling elements.

The flight was OK, check-in without issues and registration to the conference was prompt, which scared the hell out of me. You know what they say. If everything goes right, something is bound to go terribly wrong.
Conference registration people were kind enough to give me shoulder bag with loads and loads of commercials, a ticket to Blackberry Bold draw and a conference guide, which was probably the most useful item. If you don’t count the bag that is.
Then, off to the city I was for some gift shopping.

Day 1, Nothing new to start with day

So, keynote address was predictable. IBM owns Microsoft was the golden line. Apparently Notes are mostly stalled at the same level, with organic growth to make our world better.

Next, I went to the lecture about best practices of building decent UI’s. It was the same as last year, and the year before. The only really useful stuff was listener’s input about Layer Tree, which you can use to hide each separate layer and thus ease your UI development. It is located under Design->Layer Tree.

The lecture about new enhancements in Lotus Notes 8 was a great session. It’s main focus was on new functions in @Formula, LotusScript and Java. The most interesting new functions are inter-collection operations from DocumentCollection and ViewEntryCollection classes.

Next was a session on composite applications basics. The examples were based on Lotus Notes 8 mail and contacts template, which owned. There was bunch of undocumented features that can make almost any application look like Notes Mail/Contacts, with several drawbacks. Like the one that you cannot alter design of the database after you have made it look like Mail/Contacts. Well, not without changing the design of Mail/Contacts in the process.

Last session was delivered by Chris Miller about installing Sametime 8. Loads of useful stuff which I will try to cover in my future postings. Well at least basics of it. Btw, if you have ST GW and it doesn’t work, even though you can see it connected to Yahoo and Sametime community, it can be that your port number is false. When you get approved, you need to change to 5060 port instead of 5061 which is set by default. You should get notified about this, but it really depends on who did the actual provisioning.

Day 2, Xpages And Composite applications everywhere

First session of the day was about new Domino Designer 8.5. Focus was on Xpages, which don’t work well with Javascript disabled. Other than that, Agents editor is old style. Still. Probably will be better in 8.5.1, but it is not included in beta yet, so I doubt it will see the light prior 8.5.2. The funny thing is, Script libraries use Eclipse editor and it looked awesome.

Next it was Julian Robichaux explaining how to trap errors. Most of it was focused on his open source database called OpenLog, which is quite nice centralized database for storing error reports.

The birds of a feather session about Mobilizing Lotus applications was decent. If your company is supporting Blackberry or Windows Mobile.

Session about WebServices in Domino 7 was pretty exciting. Got some excellent gotcha’s and definitely some more enthusiasm of using web services in future applications. Bill Buchan was great and really made sure that even some dull facts became interesting.

Last session was basically a beginner’s tutorial on Composite applications. Perhaps I will try to sum it up in one of my next postings, as it really opens lots of application usability options. It was an excellent session and it made me even more sure that Composite applications are a great thing in Notes 8.

Day 3, The conference concludes

First session was delivered by Bill Buchan about Advanced OO programming in LotusScript. It was a great way to renew my knowledge of OO development. There was an example of Singleton pattern, which I will do in the future in this blog as well. Also, there was a note of double dot notation which enables you to call a parent class function from overridden function in your own class.

Second session was about management of ACL. It scared me. Specially, since I can distinctly remember that at a certain bank I was auditing their ACL had several Defaults set to Manager. Well most. Rob Axelrod gave a great lecture about reducing database ACL to acceptable level for all types of databases.

Next was Lance Spellman with creating client plugins for Lotus Notes. The session was more or less just a tutorial to build a window in Lotus Notes client. If you are interested in something more, turn to books on creating Eclipse plug-ins. Anyway, it was an essential demo, that showed, how much do you have to do, to actually create a plugin for Notes. Is it useful? Probably, if you have signing certificate. Otherwise your clients will get that nice do not install plug-in warning.

Last session I skipped, even though it sounded much more interesting. However, I had an air plane to catch. So that was it for me. Goodbye Lotus Developer 2008 and Amsterdam.

We installed our Sametime 8 server on Domino 8.0.0 on Linux platform (our very first Domino Linux install) and I must agree, that it is one of our most stable servers. However, as always, there is a catch. Now, that 8.0.2 is out, we finally decided to upgrade our servers. So we also upgraded our smoothly running Sametime server. Unfortunately, it appears that Domino 8.0.2 (despite using update option) removes certain directories used by Sametime, thus making it non-operational. What I had to do is perform an upgrade of Sametime to 8.0.1, that luckily exists. I expect that if I already had installed Sametime 8.0.1 in the past, I would have to perform a re-install for Sametime.