Just as I did last January, I wanted to point out to my new readers the different currencies I pick for each month's newsletter. You might not notice, or at least, you never ask where they are from. I'm once again using MMD, or Mickey Mouse Dollars, for the pending Lotusphere event. You should be reading this newsletter just before or while at Lotusphere.

I decided to make another change back at Lotusphere 2009 and to introduce a location-awareness service for the event called IdoCheckin. I partnered with Brightkite to make this service possible. While most location services allow you to say at what address you are located, there is no way to break down where you are inside the address. With IdoCheckin, we accomplished this task. So as not to bore you with details, I already posted on the Web. Visit IdoCheckin.com or read about it on my IdoNotes blog.

Why did I do it last year and was it a success? After the past 12 Lotusphere events I've attended, I found the actual logistics of interacting and socializing in person difficult. Imagine before there were cell phones: You wandered around looking for people, seeing thousands you did not know. With the recent moves in technology, there are numerous ways to contact someone: cell phones, Twitter, SMS, Facebook poke, etc. But even that era is vanishing for many early adopters. I want to voluntarily broadcast where I am so countless people can easily see it or query it and find me. I want the new administrators who've come alone to be able to interact and meet new friends. I want all of those blog readers (for all bloggers, not just me) and Twitter followers to be able to step beyond the virtual and actually have a conversation in person. Hundreds of accounts were created and even more check-ins at each location have been pulled in the statistics.

Lotusphere is an incredibly busy week that never seems to stop moving. You leave full of information and drained of all your energy. Meeting a few new real faces along the way proves to be invaluable later. So join in and find me at Lotusphere, and read what else I dealt with this month. Meeting just one new person this way makes it a total success in my eyes.

After you check in at Lotusphere or home, feel free to read about business card photos in the Domino Directory, Sametime 8.5 planning, disabling remote images in email and Quickr file attachment limit settings.

You can always reach me in my VGS (Virtual Gratification Syndrome) world via Twitter, FriendFeed (now bought by Facebook), Brightkite, Facebook, Diigo, Tumblr, GTalk, AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ, Sametime, Greenhouse, BleedYellow, FourSquare, 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.

— Chris Miller
Sys Admin Tips Newsletter
IdoNotes on Twitter
IdoNotes@IdoNotes.com
www.IdoNotes.com

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QUESTION: Chris,

We are investigating placing photos of employees in the Domino Directory for use in Sametime business cards and maybe in Lotus Connections later. Is this a good idea and is it easy to do?

Jacob

ANSWER: Jacob,

First, make sure you clear with everyone whether it is okay to place their photo in the directory. Even though your company might even have name badges with pictures, some people feel it is an invasion of privacy to have their pictures online and stored. Your company should generate a policy around the placement and usage.

Next is the technical step. Lotus does a good job of outlining the instructions to prepare the directory for business card photos in technote #1250874. It was made for Sametime 8.5, but will work for versions before that as well.

Limiting the size of the photos you include will only benefit in performance on directory size, indexing and the speed of pulling the information from the server. There is a balance between tiny and grainy pictures and large ones that must be resized and cached in the client.

Chris

Just weeks ago Lotus was happy to announce the release of Sametime 8.5 to anyone and everyone. If you are looking to upgrade or implement Samtime 8.5, you should be aware of necessary changes to your architecture and server environment. I would need pages to inform you fully, so I'll give an overview of the most important portions you should be aware of.

The first thing to remember is that the core presence and chat services as we know them will still run on Domino and operate as before. You can even run meetings the exact way you do now, just under the name Sametime Classic. You maintain the same functions, with little change.

The big change is in the meeting services, which will require an increase in the number of servers you need to support the new features. The meeting server will include:

• Websphere Application Server
• DB2
• A LDAP server (which might exist in your environment now)

Then there are optional components you may want to run that require more hardware, including:

• Media Server, for audio and video services
• Proxy Server, for a new web chat client

Even more hardware that runs Websphere and DB2 will be needed.

In essence, this does not include clustering, scaling or anything else for you to take advantage of the new Sametime 8.5 services. I suggest informing yourself on deployment, architecture and capacity planning as you plan the migration. Use online resources, or speak with someone knowledgeable and involved in Sametime 8.5.

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NEW PODCAST: WILLIAM MALCHISKY JR.

In the first podcast of our Live From Lotusphere 2010 coverage, Scott Treggiari, Program Director for LotusUserGroup.org, talks with author, presenter, and Lotus expert William Malchisky Jr., Managing Partner and Chief Technical Architect at Effective Software Solutions.

Listen to this informative and entertaining interview and find out things like what Lisp had to do with Lotus Notes (and Bill) in 1993 and how Bill and Effective Software Solutions are involved with Lotus today. Bill explains the IBM Smart Work methodology and how it can get you home at a decent hour each day. You'll also hear what Bill has been doing with the IBM Client for Smart Work, some options available to you, and how the customized client can save your organization some hard-earned money over a Microsoft desktop. Bill talks about the session he is giving at Lotusphere with Antony Satyadas, "Raising the ROI of IT with IBM Client for Smart Work," and why you should attend. Plus, hear about Bill's favorite non-Lotus techie innovation of 2009 and see if you agree.

Check out the podcast today!

If you are fearful of you or your users receiving inappropriate images or uncontrolled external images, you can enable a setting that forces the user to click to show them.

While the policy to set this is an enhancement request, the setting in Notes 8 through 8.5.x can be found in:

File → Preferences → Mail → Internet under the section "Image Security"

It is a simple on and off checkbox to enable and disable.

QUESTION: Hi Chris,

We have been having issues with our new Quickr environment when trying to upload big presentation files. I have looked at the settings and cannot figure out why large files fail to upload. Any suggestions where to look for how we messed up?

(name withheld)

ANSWER: You ask a great question that many people face with the growing deployment of Lotus Quickr on Domino! Quickr has a few places to investigate when trying upload large files. The first place to begin is the notes.ini file. A strange place to start, I know. You need to establish whether two variables are present and set correctly. Also, make sure they do not exist higher in the notes.ini with lower values.

The two variables:

• QuickPlaceLargeFileRequestOnFile=1
• QuickPlaceLargeRequestDirectory=[exactly where you want the working directory]

The second variable must be writable and accessible all the time for this to work. Usually, picking a large temp area outside of where you might place transaction logs and the operating system is a good choice.

Next, you must set the maximum attachment size in both Quickr and Domino. If one is lower than the other, the lower one is obeyed. Quickr is in the Site Administration → Other Options via the Web interface. Domino is in the server document on the Internet Protocols-HTTP tab. The Maximum Size of Requested Content must be established to meet your needs. One last location is the Maximum Post data size limit on the Domino Web Engine tab.