more exchange "fun"

This post shoots two rabbits:
1. Story about how Exchange looses mails, on Rocky's blog
2. Story on the new (old) backwards compatibility issue for the new Exchange server (2008 or somethin'), on Ed's blog

some of those reading my blog might know that I've started into the Exchange 5.x business, before my definitive conversion to IBM, more specifically Domino (well back joining IBM as employee).

Add these two stories to my personal hearing of stories of lost emails to Romanian Exchange shops, backup/restore Exchange failures, plus change all your hardware to get the new version, and you've got yourself a pretty good nightmare and a pretty bad ROI.

So, who wants that ? :)

You're still saying Lotus interface sucks ? Get up to date information and do yourself a favor by searching for the Lotus 8.0.1 interface, then say more.
We, the Domino fellows, are waiting for more pro-Exchange arguments in this context. Good luck :)

running on Notes 8.0.1

yep...I've waited for this. And a funny thing happened. I downloaded from the IBM's catalog the part numbers:

C19U0EN, which is said to be Lotus Designer, and
C19U1EN, which is said to be Lotus Client.

First I thought: why do they say only "Lotus Designer" ? Is it something already changed, do we have the new Designer ? ... hmmmm

So, to cut the story, on my machine, I was running 8.0 All Clients (plus Designer, plus Admin). I wanted to upgrade this installation with C19U1EN. No Luck ! An error saying upgrade was not possible. Cool :)

Last evening, it occured to me: what is listed as "Lotus Designer" client is actually the full fledge of Lotus Client. So, I managed to finally upgrade to 8.0.1 using the part number C19U0EN.

Now, the first impression: client performance improvement of about 10% (not more, unfortunatelly). As for the rest, did not had the time to play with. Not just yet.

Best Practices for Building Web Applications for Domino 8

For those learning from redbooks it's an old news that IBM's strategy for creating them has changed. Now it's going to be wiki based. Here's one of them: Best Best Practices for Building Web Applications for Domino 8, LO-8001-R01.

I am curious to see the outcome of this strategy, the future will tell.

IBM products InfoCenters

During past 8 or 9 years of profession, I created to myself this principle of 'being able to search for info when I need it'. This means that whenever I need to dig into some issue, I really need to know where to look for. Fast and easy.

In this category of information digging I could put the Info Centers for all IBM products I'm interested in. The methods I use:
- bookmark the Info Centers links in my Firefox install (I use Google Toolbar/Bookmarks for this). More recently seems that Lotus 8 and 7 have their own links. You can grab them here (thanks Ellen for the links): http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nflsblog.nsf/dx/ND8_InfoCenter
- use IBM Support Assistant (great tool, I wrote a piece about it). At this point I might add that this tool contains other useful tools for log and core dumps analysis.
- There's another option if you work offline and need the Infocenters for documentation: grab those which interest you locally and put them to use through 'IBM Help 301'. This is working much like a local web server, allowing for Infocenters to be browsed. If you need several Infocenters there's some tweaking to be performed but all in all it's working.