If you have implemented Notes Shared Login, or if you are thinking about Technote 1405060 New 8.5 Notes Shared Login “Gotchas” should be of interest to you. First off a couple of points of clarification. There are two different features Notes has available to allow an end-user to sign on to Lotus Notes with out providing a password when launching Notes. Both methods work on Windows based machines only. Notes Client Single Logon to use this feature during the installation you must select to install the “Client Single Logon Feature”, once enabled when the user first logs on to Notes they will receive a prompt to change their Notes password to match their Windows password. There are some limitations detailed in the Notes & Domino Infocenter
OS and Domino password policies must be aligned as closely as possible to allow password synchronization to work. During OS password changes, the Notes Network Provider must be able to change the Notes ID to the new password provided by the OS. Notes is notified of the new OS password only after the OS password has been changed. If the new OS password does not meet the Notes password quality and history requirements, the Notes password change will fail. During Notes password changes, the Notes client must be able to change the OS password to the new Notes password. If the new Notes password does not meet the OS password quality and history requirements, the OS password change will fail.
Operating system (OS) password changes, that is, password changes that are initiated outside of Lotus Notes, occur in the system access control environment; therefore, the NOTES.INI file and the Notes ID file must reside on a local drive.
The key point to understand about Notes Client Single Logon is that the Notes ID still has a password, it is simply synchronized to the Windows password and being passed by Windows at Login. The second feature is Notes Shared Login in this case the ID file no longer has a password, and authentication is done at Windows Login. Before we go any further it is worth noting the cases where shared login will not work.
You cannot use shared login if any of the following conditions is true: -you use a computer that does not run Microsoft Windows -you use a Smartcard to log in to Lotus Notes -your User ID is protected by multiple passwords -you are a roaming user that uses a roaming ID -you run Notes on a USB drive -you use a mandatory Windows profile -you are running Notes in a Citrix environment
One of the fun parts of my job is that on any given day I speak to people all over the world, and in the process I learn quite a bit about different ways people live, work, play or in this case even look at a calendar differently all over the world. Speak to most Americans (myself included) and you will find that week numbers are not a particularly big deal, but talk to many Europeans and you find that quite a bit of planning is done based on week numbers. So a few weeks ago I started receiving questions about the week number for the week beginning December 28, 2009, I took a look at my Notes calendar which told me it was Week 1 of 2010 however what I was being told by my colleagues was that it should be week 53 of 2009. A quick google search led me to my friend Mikkel who had picked this up and explained it as follows
Got a call from a customer the other day who could not understand that the week numbers that showed up in his Notes 8.x calendar was different from the ones on this printed wall calendar. The reason for this is that by default Notes 8 uses the operating system default for calculating week numbers. Here in Denmark we use the ISO 8601 standard which is a little bit different. It is my understanding that previous releases of Notes automatically used the ISO standard. I could be wrong though. Thankfully the Notes developers know about these regional differences and there is an option to change the way week numbers are calculated. To change it open File/Preferences… and open the “Calendar and To Do/Regional Settings” page. On the bottom you’ll find a option to change between using the operating system default and using the ISO standard. There even is a way of doing custom week numbers if that’s needed.
lekkimworld: A word about week numbers Seems logical enough so I went in to my Notes Preferences / Calendar and To Do / Regional Settings, and changed the setting from “Use my operating system” to “Always use the ISO standard” sure enough I went back and checked my calendar and it was now week 53 So far so good, Notes lets you pick the style that works for you. Now lets say you wanted to push this out via a policy, you can do so by pushing out a Notes INI Entry as follows FooterWeekNo=1 = Use my operating system regional settings FooterWeekNo=2 = ISO Standard FooterWeekNo=3 = Custom Week Numbers If you choose option number 3 you then also need to set FirstDayInYear=1 (where 1 is Sunday, 2 is Monday etc) MinDaysInFirstWeek=1 If you really want to understand the finer points of all this you can read the explanation of the ISO 8601 Standard (I strongly recommend a strong cup of coffee to go along with it!)
I have blogged here on a number of occasions about Tivoli Directory Integrator (TDI), most of my work around TDI has been related to Lotus Connections, where TDI is used to populate the Profiles database. What appears to be a fairly well kept secret though is that if you have ND8 licenses you are entitled to use TDI. When you download software check off the box to “see associated products at no additional charge” and among other things you will find TDI So you might be wondering why you want to use TDI, and how you would get started. TDI comes packaged with connectors which give you the ability to read and write data from a large variety of systems here is a partial list, and with Domino, LDAP, and JDBC alone there is a huge number of possibilities right there. As for getting started first look in your TDI install directory where you will find an “examples” directory here are just some of them In addition there is a TDI Users Group web site which contains a collections of tutorials on getting started with TDI, and includes specific examples on TDI/Domino Integration. Here is one of the video examples, there are many more available The examples are all based on TDI 6.1.1, TDI 7.0 recently shipped, with a new Eclipse based IDE, but is not yet entitled with the ND8 licenses. But don’t let that stop you, take advantage of this entitlement and see what you can do with TDI in your environment today, the only thing I have not been able to get TDI to do for me is make my coffee (but hey maybe that is a feature in 7.0 🙂 )
Back in October I blogged about “Help is on the way for duplicate calendar entries” which I ran across during the Beta. Today Technote 1326680 The Repair Calendar feature in Notes 8.5 was published with details on the feature. The technote covers -What is the Repair Calendar Feature? -How do duplicates occur? -How does the Repair Calendar feature work? To use the Calendar Repair feature you need to be running a Notes 8.5 Client, and your mail file needs to be based off of the mail85.ntf. While it would be better if we didn’t need this feature, it is a welcome addition for anyone who has ever had a calendar problem especially with a repeating meeting.
Updated: Mystery solved thanks to @pherrmann, Lotus Mobile Bonus Pack ( I never saw it as a download in passport before, they really shouldn’t tease me like this) As has been widely reported already this morning Notes/Domino 8.5 is GA. I am wondering what this download is as it is listed on the passport site, but not yet available for download To any one who might say oh that must be Traveler, there is a separate entry for that Can anyone solve the mystery or do we have to wait for press releases later today?
If you have been using Notes as your calendar for a while at some point you have probably had to deal with a duplicated meeting entry, and especially if it was a repeating meeting it was next to impossible to resolve the duplicate, you were generally better off leaving both entries and dealing with it. I had heard that in Notes 8.5 there was some work around resolving issues with duplicated calendar entries, and this morning while straightening out my calendar I came across this Saying OK did not seem to have any negative impact on my calendar, though I am not sure I ever saw a duplicate for the particular entry in question either. A quick search of the Help and Admin Help did not seem to yield any further clues on this new feature so I will have to go bother John Lance and see what he can tell me about this. I am also curious if this can be controlled by policy to just let if repair entries without displaying a dialog box or if the text could be customized. Regardless I am glad this is finally being worked on and is in 8.5.
You might have already seen that in 8.0.1 on many error messages there is a new button to “Search Technotes” According to the technote
This is a new feature to Notes 8.0.1, activated for error messages that have been cited most frequently by customers for previous Notes client releases.
If you are running Domino on systems with more then 2GB of RAM at some point you have probably had to tune the amount of memory available to Domino (especially if you are running on AIX). There are a number of ways to do this most commonly by implementing either PercentAvailSysResources, or ConstrainedSHM/ContrainedSHMSizeMB in your notes.ini. This controls how Domino calculates the size of the UBM (unified buffer manager). If the UBM grows to large Domino is prone to crash. In previous versions of Domino the UBM was allocated by taking a percent of the memory available to Domino, in Domino 8 by default the UBM is set to 512 MB, which according to testing is the most efficient setting, though NSF_BUFFER_POOL_SIZE_MB can still be used to increase the UBM if desired, but it is not recommended. Keep this in mind when upgrading servers and strongly consider removing any of the previously mentioned ini parameters from the notes.ini and let Domino 8 manage the memory with it;s default setting. I won’t be upgrading my production servers to 8 until next year, but am considering setting my 6.5.x servers to NSF_BUFFER_POOL_SIZE_MB=512 and removing ConstrainedSHM which should allow my 6.5.x servers to allocate memory the same way Domino 8 will by default. Technote 1268988 New default limit on UBM size in Domino 8
For those of you who are not aware, IBM has their Sametime environment open to the public, if you want to connect Chris Pepin has detailed instructions on how to set up your client. I have been logging in to the IBM Community for well over a year now, and it saves me quite a bit of phone tag and time in my daily dealings with IBM. Sometime around Notes 8 Beta 3 the Sametime client ID in Notes 8 was changed preventing it from logging in to the IBM Sametime community, since they limit logins to specific client ID’s. So for the last 6 months, I have been using Sametime in Notes 8 to connect with in my company, but still had to launch the stand alone 7.5.1 client to connect to IBM. In August when I saw Chris Pepin, I asked him when it would be fixed, he promised to look in to it. In September when I saw Chris the first thing he said to me was “October 13th”. Well true to his word, I can now log in to the IBM Community with the Sametime client integrated in Notes 8. Thanks Chris!
however what I was being told by my colleagues was that it should be week 53 of 2009. A quick google search led me to my friend 
sure enough I went back and checked my calendar and it was now week 53 
So far so good, Notes lets you pick the style that works for you. Now lets say you wanted to push this out via a policy, you can do so by pushing out a Notes INI Entry as follows FooterWeekNo=1 = Use my operating system regional settings FooterWeekNo=2 = ISO Standard FooterWeekNo=3 = Custom Week Numbers If you choose option number 3 you then also need to set FirstDayInYear=1 (where 1 is Sunday, 2 is Monday etc) MinDaysInFirstWeek=1 If you really want to understand the finer points of all this you can read the explanation of the 
and among other things you will find TDI 
So you might be wondering why you want to use TDI, and how you would get started. TDI comes packaged with connectors which give you the ability to read and write data from a large variety of systems here is a partial list, and with Domino, LDAP, and JDBC alone there is a huge number of possibilities right there. 
As for getting started first look in your TDI install directory where you will find an “examples” directory here are just some of them 
In addition there is a 
To any one who might say oh that must be Traveler, there is a separate entry for that 
Can anyone solve the mystery or do we have to wait for press releases later today?
Saying OK did not seem to have any negative impact on my calendar, though I am not sure I ever saw a duplicate for the particular entry in question either. A quick search of the Help and Admin Help did not seem to yield any further clues on this new feature so I will have to go bother 
According to the technote