SysAdmin Tips January 2012
January/2012
In This Issue . . .
 
Newsletter archive available here.
 
FROM THE EDITOR: CHRIS' 1.0000 MMD
 
It is officially a wrap for Lotusphere and Connect 2012. You should be reading this right after the events finished and your Twitter streams are overflowing. IBM talked about IBM Connections 4, social business initiatives, and XPages at Lotusphere. At the Connect portion, it was all about being a social business, with customer stories and examples leading the way.
We saw a shift to the name IBM Social Business over and over. Even the online system changed the name from Lotusphere Online, to lsonline to the new SocialBizOnline.com for 2012. What this means for businesses, partners, and consultants is to change much about how you interact with IBM. Lotus will be around a long time to come, but immediate new business needs will revolve heavily on its new market initiatives.
This new movement is one of the reasons I focus on an OpenSocial introduction from the administrator viewpoint below. Opening your doors to other means of data integration and authentication will be asked of you as the environment grows and evolves. Gone are the days of a strict environment of just Lotus servers. WebSphere joined us a few years ago. Other platforms are soon to follow. I plan on taking you along this journey each month in the newsletters.
I also have a request for feedback from you, my avid readers. I am thinking of including a small section in each newsletter on the top blog and technical postings I find from the Lotus world. I would become a small filter for you finding some of the top things you should read. Let us know what you think about this idea. Pick any of the ways below to get in touch.
This month I get hit with a Citrix and Notes Standard question, I introduce you to OpenSocial, provide a quicktip on Lotus Traveler device naming, and finish up with Sametime upgrade issues.
You can always reach me in my VGS (Virtual Gratification Syndrome) world via Twitter, Skype, Foursquare, Facebook, Diigo, Tumblr, GTalk, AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ, Sametime, Greenhouse, BleedYellow, smoke signal, carrier pigeon, my podcasts, or my blog for your questions, comments, and ideas. Notice that voicemail isn't on that list? If those are not enough I can name another 200 ways in social networks.
— Chris Miller
Sys Admin Tips Newsletter
IdoNotes on everything, yes everything
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FROM THE IDONOTES MAILBOX: CITRIX AND NOTES STANDARD
 
QUESTION: Chris,
We are pushing more and more users to Citrix and also contemplating multi-user installs. But I am not sure what to do about memory usage of the Notes Standard clients. Do I have to go with Notes Basic? My Windows guys are saying they want Notes Basic for the users to have more users per server and I want Standard for functionality.
Anything you can recommend to help cram more users on the Citrix server?
Vince
ANSWER: Vince,
Citrix has always been a struggle for both the Basic and Standard clients in Notes. I have done some previous sessions at conferences on the topic and everyone seems to do it differently based on the Windows administrator input.
Memory usage with the Standard client is larger, by default, as you have seen even on local machines. One quick way to reduce memory usage is to enable Notes Shared Class Cache on Citrix in the jvm.properties file. The server then loads and shares some of the java classes so each user doesn't have their own loaded. You get some immediate reduction in memory usage with that single setting.
Let's talk more about what your options are after you get this reply!
Chris
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OPENSOCIAL BEGINNINGS
 
This is a new word to many of you so I am going to steal a couple of lines from Wikipedia about this open initiative. Google was a major partner in launching these common APIs back in 2007.
"OpenSocial is public specification that defines a component hosting environment (container) and a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for Web-based applications. In more recent times it has become adopted as a general use runtime environment for allowing untrusted and partially trusted components from third parties to run in an existing Web application."
The OpenSocial Wiki is a great place to see how apps are built and get the specifications on how integration will begin. OpenSocial has containers to gather information on people, relationships, groups, application data, media data and more. There was an area that is being moved into what you have heard called Activity Streams. This is key to you as an administrator, when thinking about topology and integration that will occur.
Recent changes include the inclusion of oAuth 2 support. Picture this as an alternate form of authentication besides the Domino Directory. While its current state does not support you moving your Domino public/private key structure, you could use alternate forms of authentication and data inclusion for users against public social networks that support oAuth.
One last beginning part for this issue is the idea of templates. We know how they function in Domino, and OpenSocial has the same schema developed. OpenSocial Templating (OST) lets developers make templates and then change code as needed when deploying a gadget. This is a simplified way to think about how your developers can build and deploy OpenSocial Gadgets (think databases) into your environment.
Look for more in this series as I try and include topics that will help you see the direction IBM is including in future business plans.
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FROM LOTUSUSERGROUP.ORG
 
ALISTAIR RENNIE SPEAKS OUT!
Be sure to listen to the podcast of our recent interview with Alistair Rennie, IBM Collaboration Solutions General Manager.
In the interview he discusses:
  • How the IBM Collaboration Solutions group is contributing to the growth of the overall Software group and where they are seeing market growth
  • The catalyst for the Lotus brand change on some products, the question of further changes, and the commitment to the brand
  • The 2012 marketing plans for the IBM Collaboration Solutions products
  • Some sneak peek info on Notes/Domino Next and how it fits into the Social Business/Business Analytics model
  • What’s been happening with Mobility and what we can expect to see
  • How and why IT and business leaders need to embrace working together within the organization
  • Some other cool things from Lotusphere 2012 that you'll want to know about
  • His favorite tech news of 2011
To listen to the interview visit us here.
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EMAIL CLASSIFICATION — WHY SHOULD IT MATTER TO YOU?
What is email classification? And why should you be paying attention to it?
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WILL SCIENCE FICTION BECOME SCIENCE FACT?
Last month IBM announced their annual "IBM 5 in 5" — a list of five technologies that have the potential to change the way people work, live, and interact during the next five years. IBM's 5 in 5 is based on market and societal trends as well as emerging technologies from IBM’s research labs around the world.
Here are five technologies that will define the future:
  • Energy will be captured from "people power"
  • Biometric data will replace passwords
  • Mind reading will no longer be science fiction
  • The digital divide will cease to exist
  • Junk mail will become priority mail
To read more and see a cool video about these exciting innovations, visit us here.
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QUICK TIP: QUICKTIP: LOTUS TRAVELER DEVICE ID AND NAMES OF DEVICES
 
A lot of you are expanding rapidly into deploying Lotus Traveler to devices as fast as users are getting them from the holidays and bringing them in to get connected. Once they are in the Traveler administration databases, the exact type and operating system may be tough to decipher as Traveler has some that are assigned different identifiers. Lotus was kind enough to make a table giving you the mappings!
You can find the device mapping table here.
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FROM THE IDONOTES MAILBOX: SAMETIME 8.5.2 IF1 UPGRADE FAILED
 
QUESTION: Chris,
We managed to somehow totally destroy our Sametime System Console when applying the IFR1 patch or upgrade (whatever you call it) that came out. Have you encountered this or seen the issue?
Any ideas?
Anise
ANSWER: Anise,
I haven't had the luck to see this yet, but we have only been able to apply the IFR to a couple servers due to timing issues. However, since the time you sent this in IBM did recognize this as an issue and provided some steps to help fix or prepare before upgrading. I know this is a bit late but other companies should be getting ready to apply it and this would be a big help to them.
See technote #1574839 from IBM.
Chris
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