Keyword tags and email

In Q2, 2007 I changed companies, which also meant a change to Outlook email. The immediate frustration of Outlook was the inability to put an email message in more that one folder. (You can copy a message to multiple folders, but this duplicates messages). On top of that the Outlook 2003 search is anemic. Upgrading to outlook 2007 helped searching, but the problem of how to file email remained.

Then I discovered an Outlook add-in product called Taglocity which allows you to add keyword tags to messages. After using keyword tags for several months I realized that this approach actually woks better that filing messages in multiple folders. The reason is that you can search on multiple keyword tags. Its a bit like searching for a message that exists in multiple folders. Although that is something I never did with folders, I do it all the time with keyword tags and find it very useful. The only problem with Taglocity is that it is an add on to Outlook, which means that if I use the web interface, I don't have access to my keyword searching.

The interesting thing about using Outlook now for over two and a half years is that it is no better or worse that Notes email; just different. And that although the Exchange back end has been reliable, there are just as many calendar issues with Outlook as there were with Notes. It seems like the calendar is just a very difficult problem to solve.

SharePoint Adventures

My present company is a Microsoft shop and, although we have a very small Notes setup, we decided to use SharePoint as a collaboration tool. So far we have WSS 3.0 up on VMWare, and plan to go to the full MOSS as soon as we have the data center question resolved (more on that in another post). Obviously each product has its weaknesses and strengths, and it has been very interesting comparing the way things are done in SharePoint with the way things are done in Notes. Here are a few little things that I have found in SharePoint that I really like.

A Thought on SharePoint as File Server 2.0

A while ago Ed Brill had an article in his blog which mentioned SharePoint being described as File Server 2.0 (a phrase coined by Sean Burgess). This got me thinking - originally Vista was going to have a new data storage and management system called WinFS. I had even read somewhere that WinFS was going to be very much like Lotus Notes in the way it handles data. Then in June 2006 Microsoft shelved those WinFS plans. Did they pull the plug because SharePoint was going to fill that need? Basically could they make more money packaging the functionality as SharePoint that they would building WinFS into Windows? Of course there is no way to know one way or the other, but the phrase File Server 2.0 certainly did get me thinking.

More Excel Woes!

Although the technique "copy as table and paste into spreadsheet" works, it is limited, e.g. if the view is too wide, you can't copy it as a table (but shrinking the column widths does work). Also, graphic icons in a view don't get pasted.

An alternative thought occurred to me: Why not export the view as a Lotus 123 file, and then import it into a IBM Symphony spreadsheet. Surely two IBM products would be compatible with each other? Surely...? Not a chance! The error message is "IBM Symphony do not support this file format." (love the grammar!) Unfortunately Open Office can't import Lotus 123 spreadsheets either, and I haven't yet been able to find any filters on the web. I'll keep trying because there is a need coming up in a few weeks.

Excel import workaround that’s better than the original!

Well, you learn something new every day, and sometimes from the most surprising sources. Although we use Outlook for email, we had created an Asset Management application in Notes (using rich text fields to store scans of original invoices etc). We needed a way to export information from this application to an Excel spreadsheet to further manipulate it. This was where I discovered that Excel 2007 no longer imports Lotus 123 - see blog post from April 23.

A few days later the finance person using the Asset Tracker came back to me and said she had solved the export / import problem - just use "Copy as table" and paste into the spreadsheet! Wow - this finance person had never used Notes before, and come up with a work around that was much better / easier to use than the original process. (Note: Although cell background colors are preserved in Open Office, they are miss aligned. Background colors don't paste into MS Excel.) This just goes to show that you never stop learning, and that potentially anybody can teach you something.

Excel 2007 can’t open Lotus 123 spreadsheets

We hit this problem today trying to export a Notes view as a spreadsheet, and import it into Excel. Older versions of Excel could import a wk4 spreadsheet, but not so in Excel 2007. Maybe IBM / Lotus will finally provide a means to export native Excel files directly from Notes (or maybe this is just wishful thinking...!)

Problems with Microsoft Server 2008?

Microsoft obviously run Windows servers, which they tout as highly reliable. Yet their eOpen web site has had a problem for the past 6 days (and maybe longer - it is just that I have been trying to download some software that we purchased for the past 6 days). I can only presume they are upgrading to Windows Server 2008. But that hardly inspires confidence when considering Windows Server. If Microsoft has this much difficulty getting their software to work, what will I experience?

The strangest thing is that I can reach the eOpen page with Firefox, but not with IE. But that doesn't make any difference, because I can't log in anyway.

Outlook 2007 Calendar Bug

As a long-time Notes user who now uses Outlook at work, I always keep an eye open for problems / differences etc. Here is one problem with Outlook 2007 where if you drag an HTML email to your calendar, you loose the formatting & images. See the before and after images.

The original email before dragging it to the calendar


The calendar entry created from the email

Color Blind Spreadsheets

While working on our Sox projects I was emailing spreadsheets around. To help track progress I "traffic lighted" certain cells: Green for no problem, yellow when I was waiting for someone, and red when I had to do something myself. I was using Excel 2007, but those receiving my spreadsheets were using Excel 2003. Every time I saved the file, Excel 2007 would wand me about a minor loss of fidelity but I paid little attention. That was until one user complained that there were no green cells on the spreadsheet – only yellow.

Now I must admit to being color deficient (or partially color blind). So when I chose green for the cells, it was a bit of a yellowish green. And when Excell saved my spreadsheet in 2003 format, it changed these green cells to bright yellow! My guess is that the 2007 version of the program uses 24 bit color (like a photo), whereas the 2003 version uses only 8 bit color (like a gif file). And when the 24 bit color was downgraded to 8 bit, the yellow green was changed to bright yellow – totally altering the meaning!

So beware when using Office 2007 and 2003 products in a mixed environment. Things can bite you if you are not careful.

Windows Server Llimitations

We have run into an interesting scaling problem with Domino on Windows Server 2003. We have 6 Domino mail servers with about 850 users on each, about 5000 users in total. These systems are configured as 3 Windows servers, each supporting two Domino partitions. With a corporate policy of unlimited mail file size this means about 6 TB of data total, or about 2 TB per Windows server. Due to the high volume of open mail files, Windows can't quite cope, and occasionally corrupts mail files. When you see the message "Insufficient system resources..." in the Domino log, you know database corruption is not far away! The problem is caused by the way Notes uses the Windows Page pool to cache files (See IBM technote 1093511 and Microsoft document Q312362), Of course you can disable OS caching altogether, but, as IBM says, this will seriously impact server performance.

Initially we were alerted to the problem last December when massive data corruption occurred on all mail servers in the space of a week or so. That first occurrence was shortly after we completed our server consolidation project, putting two Domino partitions on one Windows server. After this cache problem happens, Domino finds some mail files with thousands of corrupt documents. It then removes those documents (i.e. deletes them without leaving a deletion stub). Missing documents are replaced from the clustered mail server in the next scheduled replication, and life continues.

Since this is a known limitation on Windows, server operations teams patched the Windows NetApp drivers. They also tweaked the servers to increase the size of the Page pool cache. That certainly reduced the problem, but in the first 3 months of this year we had another 3 minor occurrences, seemingly at random. There certainly seems little correlation between server load and the problem happening. In fact, it is possible to go for quite a while and not noticing the problem. Unless it happens to the CEO's mail file, which it did on Monday.

We are tackling the problem on a number of fronts. Short term we are adding a new (clustered) server, and moving about 100 user off each Domino server to this new server. That will reduce the number of open files on each Windows box by about 200. In Q3 we are upgrading to Domino 7.0.2, and we will upgrade Windows to the 64 bit version at the same time, which increases the size of the page pool cache.

I am also curious to see how well Linux fares under a real production load, so long term we are setting up a production mail server on Red Hat Linux. Fortunately Domino supports application level clustering, which means we can leave the current pairs of clustered Windows servers in place, and bring up a Linux server as a 3rd member of the cluster. We will then migrate users over to it slowly (can you tell I am risk adverse?!!). Finally we will restrict access to the current main production server, and run Domino on Linux with a full production load. This is a long term project, and I doubt we will get it complete this year. But it promises to be very interesting comparison to watch.