Thursday, June 26, 2008

Weird @TextToTime Behavior

This isn't really a Show-n-Tell Thursday post, even though it is Thursday. I'm having a problem with a @TextToTime formula and I can't find any documented reason why. When I pass it the string "R. Marshall" it returns 3/1/2008. In fact, if I pass it "Ma", it returns that date. As long as it doesn't have "ma" at the start of any word in the string, it returns nothing (which is what I'd expect).

Has anyone else seen that? Can you duplicate it?

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Don't Do This in Notes 8

I started writing this the other day but gave up because I wasn't sure what caused this to happen. I'm still not positive, but I have a better idea.

I'm running Notes 8.01 on Windows XP SP2. If I turn on the LotusScript debugger, go to my client and open a composite application, like my mail database on the 8 template, I get a debugger window. So far, so good. If I say "Oops, I didn't want the debugger for that" and click the Continue button, the debugger is replaced with a window of my first mail message. That has a title bar and a menu bar but no toolbars, and there is no way to make it go away. I have to kill the client processes and restart to fix it.

This only seems to happen (so far) with a composite app. And I haven't done exhaustive testing (because I'm trying to get my projects done!) to know if there is something specific that is a trigger or if it is just something weird about my installation (see my last post for Sametime oddities).

I'd be interested to know if anyone else can reproduce this problem.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Have You Seen This in Notes 8.0.1?

We have a few people who have moved to the Notes 8.0.1 client and are planning the rollout to the rest of our clients. However, we have been seeing some problems in the client that we can't explain and want to try to sort out before continuing on.

The machines we have upgraded are our developer/admin machines, so they had the Notes, Admin and Designer clients installed (all 7.0.2). We did an upgrade rather than uninstalling 7/installing 8 and none of them had an 8 beta installed. These are all Win XP machines. We also had Sametime Connect 7.5.1 installed and I'm not sure if that was uninstalled before installing 8. The one thing we may not have done that is in the installation guide is to stop all other Windows programs before installing.

What we are seeing is that the embedded Sametime client does not always start correctly. It will be OK sometimes, but other times will not login and will not allow us to login. Other times it will login but the system tray icon will show as "disconnected". Sometimes when logged in, it will not open a chat window. Restarting the Notes client usually resolves the issues.

We can't figure out if it is something to do with how the client was installed on these machines, if it is related to how our environment (OS) is secured or something else. We did have local admin rights on the machines when we installed the software.

We're worried about the impression these kinds of things will leave, and we really have no desire to remove all traces of 7 before installing 8 (that seems to resolve the problems) because of the extra work it will cause everyone in setting up their Notes environment again. Any thoughts would be appreciated - no idea is too crazy at this point.