Blogger and techie Sean Bonner offers a dead simple way to keep all of your Facebook events synced up with your Google Calendar so you don’t have to manage two completely separate social calendars to keep your days straight.

With the new Lotus Notes Calendar features you can do a very similar action and set this up with the Notes Client.
Even if you don’t use Facebook all that often (or maybe especially if you don’t), this is a nice option. Once set up, you can check one calendar (your Notes Calendar) to see what’s going on with your Facebook friends and with whatever else you’ve hooked into your Notes Cal. Getting it set up is simple!

You can do the same with these easy steps…
In Facebook, go to your EVENTS page. At the top of that page click EXPORT EVENT.

You’ll get a pop up window with a URL, copy it.

Goto your Notes Calendar and select ‘Add a calendar’.

Select iCalendar feed and paste the url. You can also choose if you want to sync this new calendar on a mobile device.

The new calendar feed will be visible as a separate calendar that you can show/hide

After performing this simple setup, you won’t need to worry as much about missing an event just because you’re not all that big on Facebook.

Microsoft has created a tool that allows you to install Windows 7 by USB. A lot of netbooks often don’t have a dvd-player and USB is the only way users are able to upgrade their pc.

That’s the reason Microsoft has created this tool. It is 926KB and you need to use it to write an iso file to the USB key.

Click here to download the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool installation file.

This is what Microsoft says:

The ISO file contains all the Windows 7 installation files combined into a single uncompressed file. When you download the ISO file, you need to copy it to some medium in order to install Windows 7. This tool allows you to create a copy of the ISO file to a USB flash drive or a DVD. To install Windows 7 from your USB flash drive or DVD, all you need to do is insert the USB flash drive into your USB port or insert your DVD into your DVD drive and run Setup.exe from the root folder on the drive.

Note: You cannot install Windows 7 from the ISO file until you copy it to a USB flash drive or DVD with the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool and install from there.

You can find more info at the Microsoft Store.

I am so sorry I did not get a picture of Troy Reimer to add here. He is now officially my God. I should create a shrine for him.
It goes without saying that he has the best sense of humor… ever. He even told me a French joke (that I didn’t get at first, sorry about that).
But more importantly we discussed a potential Quickr-project that I’m about to do and he came up with THE best solution. The way I first figured it out it would cost me a lot of coding.
And when I say a lot a mean create several agents that would do everything in order to create a place, a number of rooms, folders, pages, forms, etc…
It took us (read: Troy because I just sat there and … waited ) less than 30 minutes to come up with a huge time-saving idea. I’m not saying that I’m home free now and can sit back and relax but I do feel that it can be done! I will still take me a lot of work but not in the same league as before.
Hopefully the project comes through and I will be blogging about this because it will be my very first Quickr-project ever. And it will be big!

Because of our brainstorm session I had to skip the first session of the day (future of Sametime by Darren Adams). Sorry about that!
In the second session Miki Banatwala talked about Quickr 8.2 but also future releases (both Quickr next that will launch in Q2 2010 and the release after that that will probably contain XPages). He showed us what has been done to improve the performance of 8.2, modifications that have been done on the connectors and also future changes. It was a true privilege to hear him speak.
More about these connectors in a later blog because I feel they deserve a separate entry.

Finally there was a recap of all sessions that were given over the last couple of days. The Sametime stuff sounded a bit like Chinese to me. I think learning Mandarin in 4 weeks would be easier than understanding what Sametime was all about.
But maybe you should’ve been there to get the bigger picture. I will go through the presentations and see if they make any sense at all… I know we’ve had some serious issues with installing Connections so hopefully the slides will guide us through it.

After lunch we got the opportunity to play with everything we saw in the design sessions. Mainly Viktor but also Troy lead us through a rather realistic scenario. They did it step by step and gave away some extremely useful (and reusable) bits of code.
I have a message to everybody who attended either Viktor’s or Troy’s sessions and didn’t make it to the Workshop: Big mistake! You should have coughed up the extra dollars ’cause they were worth every penny!

So looking back on the three days, the quality of each session was a lot higher than I hoped for. The sessions at Collaboration University are being given by a great team and each speaker really knows what (s)he is talking about!
Thank you all for figuring this all out and then sharing this with the rest of us. I’m proud the be a 2009 CU-graduate and really hope to be back next year (I hope my boss is reading this too…)

So, day two has passed and it was a full day. After seven Quickr sessions I’m starting to feel the impact of all that information being cramped into my little brain. Everything still sounds logical to me right now. But I wonder what will stick around long enough until the time that I will actually be using it.
So what has passed the revue today? Or need I say yesterday because by the time I’ll be publishing this it will be Wednesday.

The first session I attended today was Quickr Performance Tips: Getting more from your server by Warren Elsmore. The one thing that I noticed about Warren is that he needs to draw when he speaks. I have this too. When I try to explain something I tend to draw it out as I go. Warren was the only one who actually created a drawing. All other presentations contained all the content.
In fact the presentation was not a big surprise but more of a nice recap of things to consider about your Domino and Quickr server. He did give away some nice ini updaters that can help tune the server. Basically this session was all about LDAP performance, network factors like DNS, firewalls, load balancers & proxies that can slow things down, the network stack, Domino performance, DAOS and off course Quickr Performance.

At 10:15 I attended Troy Reimer’s first session of the day: Quickr Data: In, Out, Everywhere. A wide array of approaches and tools. This session was all about interacting Quickr with other systems divided in 3 different levels.
The first is the top level (3rd party tools).
The second is the mid level (views/folder feeds, Place Feeds, REST service, web services & custom views).
The last level is the lower level which is native notes database access.

After that Viktor Krantz was back with the second part of Quickr Themes: Adding functionality with JavaScript. I really, really need to dig into DOJO asap! He showed us some code on how to add additional things to your pages or forms. This was such an interesting presentation! I really hope to get my hands on the final html file that he showed during the demo! That would be so cool!

Three sessions were passed when lunch was served. I was up to it. Halfway Viktor’s presentation my stomach started making all sorts of funny noises.

After lunch Warren Elsmore was back but this time with Sizing your Quickr Servers: load testing and deployment planning. I really enjoy listening to Warren. He knows what he talks about and has the gift to bring the message to the crowd. This session was very helpful for me. I really enjoyed the Load testing part. I’ll have to talk to my boss about this!

At the end of this session Rob Novak came in and talked about Going Mobile. He showed a slide with all sorts of functionalities that should be included in a mobile Quickr version. But then… right there in front of us he announced Project Jonathan: Quickr for iPhone.
He showed us the print screens and a small presentation. Everything is very new but there are already plans for the future (Domino, J2EE, Filenet & ECM support – uploading functionality from the iPhone, …) The entire project is based on REST. If you have never heard of it, start googling because it’s clear that REST will have a more important role than web services in the near future if you want data from Quickr!

Viktor Krantz was next with a session on REST and Web services APIs. All this was about getting Quickr data from the backend. He also showed us more about PandaBear and Flippr.
What’s next for these products? PandaBear will also support files from Connections. Everything else that we find in Connections (profiles, activities, …) will be in a third application. I already know its name. Please feel free to guess… It’s not GoldFish, I’ll give you that…
A cool announcement was that in a future release of PandaBear Viktor is going to include an option to sync a file or a folder. How cool is that?!?

The session Troy Reimer did about Quickr and Domino Apps was more of a Show ‘n’ Tell in order to get a grasp on the possibilities that are out there. It was in this session that I decided that Troy wins the award of most honest remark of CU2009. Before I show you I would like to tell that I have a colleague that goes crazy every time I launch certain things (or even worse turn of my laptop) when the HDD-LED is on all the time. I always tell him that it doesn’t matter because it’s just a LED that goes on and off to give us the idea the machine is working. It drives him crazy when I do. So, sorry Kevin…

And here’s the quote:

We’ve put the little animated gif here so it looks like it’s doing something because users are stupid

You see now? Us designers really think that way!! The mind of an admin works in a different way than that of a designer.

The last session of the day was Rob Novak explaining some of the top Quickr support issues. Based on years of experience he told us some very common things that you can do to prevent problems or how to solve some common errors. Even though this was very interesting I must admit that it was time to call it quits. My head was pounding.
Question is how much info can a person process in one single day?

I would like to thank all of today’s speakers. It was a great day. Sorry Chris Miller, Carl Tyler, Stuart McIntyre and Warren Elsmore for not being able to attend your session(s). As I said before I’m here with only Quickr on my mind so no time for Sametime or Connections but I will be going over your presentations!

I do have some questions left but I’ll try to launch them tomorrow before or during the labs…

Ok, so here I am in London attending my very first CU event. I came to this event with one thing on my mind: Quickr, Quickr and … well also a bit of Quickr. And guess what? During my first day I was able to attend 5 sessions that were Quickr-related.

The day started with the opening session by Darren Adams. He talked about the advantages of collaboration tools but from a very personal point of view. I always love it when a speaker can bring something from his personal life so it was very interesting to me. I felt very related to the story.

Then we had a speaker preview and that was without a doubt the hardest session to attend that day. Why? Because everybody was talking about the sessions to come and I could hear the most interesting things being announced about Sametime and Connections but I’m there for… Quickr, remember? I would love to attend Chris Miller’s Alphabet Soup session but unfortunately I won’t be able to make it… damn!

What I did see was Chris Miller’s session on Installing and configurating Quickr. It was a typical Chris-session. What more can I say. Everybody who has ever heard him speak will know what I mean. He cramps a 3 hour session in an hour and still has a few minutes to spare for Q&A… Impressive as always.

Then of to Louis Richardson who took us to the Quickr and ECM integration. I knew most of what he was talking but it was nice that the head developer of Quickr was there. He could fill us in on future releases. That means providing meta data when dragging attachments into the connector, Domino Quickr integration with Filenet thru web 2.O, …

The next session was from Troy Reimer. He showed us 3 solutions of what you can do with Quickr Development. He only just touched the surface. To me it was more of a teaser that a actual technical session but again very interesting.

Viktor Kranz presented the first part of custom themes and server-wide extensions. Damn! I did not know all of this was possible. I spoke to a guy after the session who has been working with Quickr for about 1,5 year and he did not know most of what was said. (Note to self: I need to ask this guy’s name and email address because afterwards I had a quick burger with him in a local pub and we started drinking Belgian Stella Artois and shared the funniest / embarrassing Domino-Consultant-war stories). Anyway, again very useful session!

The last one of the day was again Troy Reimer. This time he showed us the code and some tricks on how to done certain things. I love listening to Troy because he’s a designer. You can pick them out very quick! The have a different way of explaining things than a sales person. And as a designer myself I can reflect to his way of thinking. This guy just knows so much about quickr development! Very impressive.

After all of this we had a welcome reception and then we were off to the pubs.

This first day was great. There was a lot of information. I still regret not being able to attend all of the other Sametime and Connections sessions but that’ll be for another year I hope. More info will follow later!

My day was hardly started when I got the question why mail rules weren’t moving the mails to their folders. I went over to this person and had a look at his mailfile. Turns out he had over 150 rules that all move mails into certain folders based on their subject.

Some enabled mail rules were not executing, others did what they intended to do.

After a little searching this is what I found on the IBM support site:

The revised rule numbering functionality introduced in the Notes/Domino 6.5.4/6.0.5 mail templates has a minor flaw. This flaw causes the unexpected value in the OrderNum field, as well as in the $FilterFormula_n field written to the Calendar Profile. This can result in the last enabled rule to internally overwrite the second to last enabled rule, and thus the second to last rule is not present to execute. This can also result in an edited rule not executing – this case only occurs when there is only a single rule present.
NOTE: This issue does not exist in the DWA iNotes template.

This issue was reported as a regression to Quality Engineering as SPR# KYOE6FMAPH. This issue has been indirectly fixed in the mail templates that ship with Notes/Domino 6.5.5.

Workarounds: In order to repair the current rules:
Disable all rules and then re-enable them from bottom to top.

In fact this just did the trick! After disabling all the rules and then enable them again one by one, it seems that the problem is solved.

The countdown has begun. I’m registered for the London venue of  this year’s Collaboration University.

This year I’ll be attending the event from a development point of view. Quickr is a product that starts to become more an more popular in Belgium and probably also the countries around us. I don’t think that at this point there are many business partners in Belgium that offer other services that setup and configure a Quickr server. If you’re lucky they’ll even throw in some SNAPPS templates.

We would like to change this as of Q4. We will be offering more that that! That’s the main reason why I’m going. I’ll also attend the Quickr development workshop in order to be able to really answer the future customer’s needs.

I must say that I’m very happy to be able to go and I hope to see you all over there.

Now this is nice. The database that I was talking about the other day is having a serious problem: I can no longer open the damn thing! Due to the heavy import load it seems that the ID table has overflowed. The database currently is 5.684 Mb and contains 3.393.081 documents. I still have to do 3 more imports before I can automate my weekly updates. This weekly update will be an xml file of about 11Mb.

After a little googling I found out that the only thing I can do is copy the entire database because that deletes all the view indices and all the deletion stubs but will keep the replica ids of the documents.

Here’s the technote that I found.

UPDATE: A collegue of mine just opened the database without a problem! When I tried opening the db again I kept on getting the same error. I even tried on 2 different laptops. Turns out that a simple solution was right there: I removed the db from my workspace and compated the workspace. After that I could open the db again!! This saved me a lot of time and problems…

A customer of mine is implementing policy documents in an environment with about 5000 users. An archiving policy was created and by accident this policy was assigned to a large amount of users. This was not intended and these people were not notified up front. We don’t have a program document that does a load compact -A. Still these users all have an archive now and they are not happy!

Somebody told me that ever since R8 when you do a compact -B the archiving process kicks in. We do have program documents that perform a compact -B.

When I take a look at the help file I find the following:

-b : Uses in-place compacting and recovers unused space without reducing the file size, unless there’s a pending structural change to a database, in which case copy-style compacting occurs. This is the recommended method of compacting.

-B : Uses in-place compacting, recovers unused space and reduces file size, unless there’s a pending structural change in which case copy-style compacting occurs. If you use transaction logging, do full database backups after compacting completes.

I find nothing about archiving! Can anybody tell me if this is true ??

We have created 3 Dircat program documents on two of our servers. One server is 8.0.1 and the other one is 6.5.1. Both servers run on linux.

The problem with these documents is that they don’t run… Well actually they do but for some reason we get an error indicating that the dircat process is already running. We’ve modified the command line on our first program document several times using -quit, -q, just q, … but it just won’t quit!

So what I’ve done is I’ve created 3 different scheduled agents in a notes database.

The first agent is called 1. Stop Dircat. It runs every day at 3:55 and all it does is the following:

Dim s As New notessession
Dim nnServer As New NotesName(s.CurrentDatabase.Server)
Dim consoleReturn$

‘Send the console command
consoleReturn$ = s.SendConsoleCommand( nnServer.Common, “tell dircat quit” )

The second agent is called 2. Rebuild Dircat. It runs every day at 4:05 and all it does is the following:

Dim s As New notessession
Dim nnServer As New NotesName(s.CurrentDatabase.Server)
Dim consoleReturn$

‘Send the console command
consoleReturn$ = s.SendConsoleCommand( s.common, “load dircat names.nsf -r” )

The second agent is called 3. Load Dircat. It runs every day at 4:15 and all it does is the following:

Dim s As New notessession
Dim nnServer As New NotesName(s.CurrentDatabase.Server)
Dim consoleReturn$

‘Send the console command
consoleReturn$ = s.SendConsoleCommand( nnServer.Common, “load dircat” )

I’ve also set my agent security to 2. Allow Restricted operations.

This seems to do the trick. Before I created these agents I wasn’t aware of the SendConsoleCommand. I can already see a lot of other situations where I can use this function!

Update: here is a print-screen of the server document. This doesn’t seem to do the trick. The catalog is not updated as it should be: