Roaming and ID Vault problems

I have been working on a project for the last 5 months to upgrade users to Notes 8.5.2 FP2 from v7.  In addition to this, we are moving people to the ID Vault and applying a Roaming policy.

Since I have been here we have noticed that the design of the solution is not fit for purpose for this company, but was fit for purpose for the "other" joint head office.  The solution was tested, but not tested enough and the scenarios of the varied working practices were not fully understood.

RSS to XML and FTP Update

Wow!  I actually did some coding in Lotusscript yesterday.  It was actually a pleasure, but not something I would like to do on a daily basis going forward.  It is always nice to dust off some old skills and prove that you can still achieve something worth while and in a timely manner.

Here is the new website.  PMBlogs

My tasks was to simulate Planet Lotus.  As far as I know, there is not a "Planet Project Management" and I would like to collect all of my PM blogs into a single webpage, updated hourly to see the latest blog entries.  I know I can use Google Reader, but there is something useful about having all of the blogs in a single list on a single page.

Prince2 eLearning

Seeing as I have been a Senior Developer / Team Leader / Project Manager for the last 5-6 years, I thought I would try to get a qualification.

In June 2011, I decided that I would set myself a four week target to get my Prince2 Foundation exam completed and then set a deadline of just three weeks after my summer holiday for the Practitioner exam.

I decided that I would study Monday through Thursday evenings for 1-2 hours per night, once I was home from work.  This worked well, as I could happily sit in the garden and enjoy the evening summer sun and read the Prince2 manual.

I found the reading fairly easy going, most of which was common sense with a few keywords, acronyms and then the additional procedures.

The foundation exam was fairly straight forward.  I had read the book and completed several practice exams.  In the end I received quite a high mark and was feeling confident that the self learning experience was working.

Last week, I took the more difficult Practitioner exam.  This was very tough, compared to the Foundation exam.  I have had quite a bit of practical experience using Prince2 in a couple of environments and for many projects, but the exam proved to be quite extensive and challenging.  All of the 23 of us who took the exam found it tough.

I am pleased to say that I passed with a much higher grade than anticipated.  There are no grades, as such, but just a simple 55% pass mark, which I passed very comfortably, achieving more than 80%.

My new on-line backup service

Today our life is saved on a little electronic devise where we hold all our memories, favorite music and copies of all those important documents.  Imagine the hard-drive failing and loosing it all...

 

We have a solution for you that will give you peace of mind.  We are launching an online back-up service.  You will be able to backup all of your data daily and retrieve it anywhere in the world through our web portal, or even through your web enabled mobile phone.

 

There is no need for additional hardware, or remembering to run a backup, it's so easy to set up and you can upload files by click and dragging them.  The backup will continuously check the PC against the files in the backup.  As a bonus, it will keep the previous 30 versions of any files that you update or delete.

 

Its safe, secure and only for September we are offering this service with unlimited storage for just £25.00 (instead of £44.99).  All you need to do is follow the link and sign up for the service.  You can find more information here on the website, or read the FAQ section.

Teaching a new dog old tricks

We came across a new problem on my project last night.  It seems that the "Preview in Web Browser" menu option is not available to users without the Designer client with version 8.5.2.  We have a department who are using a Lotus Notes application for their Content Management System, which must allow the user to review their draft documents in a web browser.

I do not recall this menu item missing with previous releases, however, after a little research I have discovered that this menu option is not available in 8.5.2 if you do not have the Designer client installed.

I created a new text file in notepad and saved it with the name of "Designer.exe" and started Lotus Notes.  Hey presto! ... we have the menu option.

This little trick was used in the days of version 7, when you wanted to install Notes Designer....so, you can teach a new dog old tricks...

An update on what I have been doing

I have finally left a company that I had the pleasure of work at for more than three years.  As a contractor, that is a long time.  It turned out to be 43 months in all, which I really enjoyed. 

I left at the end of May and moved straight into to a new contract for a large supermarket chain in England.   The work is not what I expected.  I am tasked with leading a small team to upgrade machines from Lotus Notes v7 to v8.5.1.  This was sold to me as a development team leader role, but is in fact a desktop migration project and not a coding project.

…. hence the lack of technical blog posts recently.

I am making the most of this opportunity to improve my Team Leading and PM skills,  I have even picked up my MS Access skills since being here.  I do not have access to the developer client for Lotus Notes (first time since 1998) and therefore I had to improvise.  The previous team leader had set up a large spreadsheet which was being maintained by many people and was struggling from size and usage, so I suggested we simply import this into a multi-user access database.

It is strange to lead a team and a project in an area where my skill set only touches part of the project.  I do not have in-depth details of how to install software on machines using SMS/SCCM and how firewalls setting must be configured, login scripts written in vb and many other intricate details… but I do know Notes and how it works and is configured. 

I can contribute to the technical discussions when discussing details around roaming and Single Sign-on, location documents and ID Vault.  Thankfully, I have a Technical Lead in the team and another guy that seems to have a wealth of knowledge of notes, machines, vb and a is a general all-rounder.  It is strange, but enjoyable, to be hands off and trust these guys to make the technical decisions, as I am the one that used to be in that position for development projects.

I have decided that I am liking the Team Leader / PM type of role and have committed myself to self-learning of Prince2.  I am planning to have passed my foundation by the end of this month and plan to take the Practioner (if I can) before my holiday in August.  More of that in a future post, I am sure.

Button to open db on a particular server

We have many servers in our environment and we try to make sure users use their local server for their applications.  Below is a simple button to force a user to open an application on a particular server, which will place this replica on top of their replica stack.