Best Practice Makes Perfect | Comments

Same Problem with CSS Style Tags

Sven Hasselbach — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:41:03 PM -0400

The same problem occurs when you are using < sytle > tags to define a CSS style.

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Working the system to get bugs fixed

Andre Guirard — Wed, 15 May 2013 08:55:20 -0500

Chris, I wasn't able to reproduce the opening-database issue in 9.0. So maybe it is indirectly fixed, or maybe you just didn't explain the steps specifically enough.

I was aware that support contracts aren't free; I guess I was assuming that most partners would either already have a contract themselves, or have a customer with a support contract on whose behalf they could do a report. After all, we're talking about the kind of issues that affect everyone, right?

It's a hard call for management; they can only spend so much on development, and there are certainly bugs that aren't worth fixing compared to the value we could deliver thru new features with the same amount of development effort. The freaky infobox thing, for instance; apparently occurs only with slow connections, and not always then, and slow connections are becoming rarer, and there's an easy recovery action. And, again, key factor: just the one report. No decision not to fix is ever really final -- they all say in the SPR (RHOE822LNS in this case): "Support should continue to log customer reports against this SPR. If weight increases sufficiently, it may be re-raised for triage for an upcoming maintenance or feature release."

And there’s more...

Chris Hudson — Wed, 15 May 2013 07:48:03 AM -0400

Try opening a database from the files menu in the Administrator client while you have the properties box open. The database won't open until you close the Properties box.

The Admin client is now the poor cousin to the Designer and Notes clients and seems to suffer from the fact that the other two clients now have Eclipse wrappers.

Making life difficult for Administrators is not a good move as we are the ones who are often called upon to defend criticisms of the product and if we are also experiencing problems it gets harder and harder to mount such a defence.

A programming error was found but will not be corrected

Chris Hudson — Wed, 15 May 2013 07:37:53 AM -0400

... and there are those things that don't affect the users but make life difficult for Administrators... For example...

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...which apparently will never be fixed despite being recognised as a bug.

Do they charge !?!

Steve — Tue, 14 May 2013 02:32:35 PM -0400

Yes, they charge it's called annual maintenance and support. If you don't have that I believe you have to pay per incident for support.

I have been very persistent in the past with support. Regardless the persistence the answer is usually the same, no plans to fix, working as designed. At one point I told them well then it's designed poorly and was told I could submit a written business case to try to get an enhancement request approved. After careful wording of our business case, the enhancement was denied, working as designed. So....you can be persistent but it still doesn't net good results, at least in my experience.

Re: paying to report bugs

Andre Guirard — Tue, 14 May 2013 08:44:30 -0500

Oh, do they charge you for PMRs? I suppose they don't want people just calling up to complain whenever they feel like it, but to show that they really want something. It does seem like there should be something in between. Of course, management does pay some attention to IdeaJam and IBM Connect questions -- you just need more voices to be heard in those venues. Again, if you want something fixed, rally the troops.

Think very hard about this statement

Nathan T. Freeman — Tue, 14 May 2013 09:13:08 AM -0400

"A certain amount of persistence may be required. Insisting on opening a PMR on the issue is the key thing."

Andre, how do we file PMRs on the PMR process. Because clearly, THE PROCESS IS BROKEN.

For instance, as a business partner, I have to pay to tell you about a bug in your software.

Working the system to get bugs fixed

Andre Guirard — Mon, 13 May 2013 11:37:46 -0500

I don't have occasion to call Support myself, because I can just drop a line to the relevant developer. So I'm not sure exactly how many hoops you need to jump through. A certain amount of persistence may be required. Insisting on opening a PMR on the issue is the key thing. If you let yourself be fobbed off with a "probably not," there's no record of your call in any system that product managers look at.

Sounds good but...

Steve — Mon, 13 May 2013 11:47:37 AM -0400

There are times(many) I call support and I'm told, "that's a known issue and there are no plans to fix it". We can try to submit an enhancement request, but it will probably be rejected.

So there are issues that will remain unresolved because IBM has deemed them as such. I think by now most users and administrators have just come to terms with the fact that Notes will always have some quirk, bug, issue to deal with. This isn't from a lack of calling, it's from constantly being told, sorry no fix and we're not going to fix it by IBM. So most admins figure why bother.

Is the tool available ?

Mathieu Pape — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:51:55 AM -0400

Andre, is that tool made available in the meantime? Thanks.

Invalid characters in folder names

Andre Guirard — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 11:53:15 AM -0400

There's an SPR, number AGUD8USQ68, about adding validation to the UI for creating folder names. It's currently marked as "no plan to fix" because there are no customer reports.

An explanation from someone in the field of how much trouble it is to recover from the end user entering an illegal name, might do much to raise the priority of this issue.

Another folder script idea

Mathieu Pape — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 08:16:25 AM -0400

Thank you for this tip Andre !

An other folder related question we often see is how you can mass-rename folders. This happens because you don't get a warning when you use non-authorized chars in folder names (a backslash for example).

Also see :

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AMEN

Maureen — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 03:32:55 PM -0400

You are so right on and FUNNY! Sad....

The Eclipse Sequel?

charles a Ross — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 10:32:42 AM -0400

Eagerly awaiting something about the new way to work with toolbar items.

ohhhh nice...

Nathan T. Freeman — Tue, 8 Jan 2013 05:14:56 PM -0400

I just thought of a use for this in my Lotusphere presentation. So thanks very much! :)

Stull happened right now

Annette — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 06:58:06 AM -0400

V 8.5.2, copied from an Agent wchich runs fine??? Still investigating...and found that!

deleted documents are getting recreated by Compact

Srinivasa Tenkasala — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 09:35:13 AM -0400

Well. I have read all the scenarios posted in this link and tried most of them. Ours is a huge lotus notes database( >15 GB) with >2000 users replicating and also there are agents which frequently ( every 10 mins) updates the documents in the db. We had a similar issue where deleted documents started reappearing. To prevent this we increased the purge interval to 1095 days, so that to prevent creation of deleted documents by some users who do not replicate regularly. This could not help and documents kept reappearing in regular interval. The creation of deleted documents usually happens on a Monday. and compact job is scheduled to run on every Sat/Sunday.

As it was not possible to identify the users nor to prevent we decided to create a new database copy( Yes very hard). We asked all the users to delete the existing local replicas and and create new ones. After this we had a sigh of relief that for another at least 3 years( as purge interval is set to 1095)we will not encounter this issue.

STRANGELY, documents getting reappeared, that's too with a user name who do not even had a local replica on his machine. This happens now on a MONDAY!!. Hence we came to a conclusion that it is the compact job thats doing mischief( however there are no evidences right now). Any help/suggestions are welcome to resolve this issue

Vote to bring the Sandbox back

Peter von Stöckel — Fri, 7 Sep 2012 09:14:54 AM -0400

You're also welcome to vote on to my idea at IdeaJam: { Link }

/Peter

Sandbox

Doug Finner — Fri, 7 Sep 2012 06:28:51 AM -0400

For what it's worth, when you post in the Notes 4/5 and 6/7 forums, there's a link to the FAQs on the submission form. The FAQ of FAQs includes a link to Peter's copy of the Sandbox.

It kind of sucks that the FAQ link is gone completely in the Notes 8/8.5 forums. Rather like the Sandbox, the data is old but still quite relevant.

thanks!!

amit b bathia — Thu, 6 Sep 2012 10:38:37 AM -0400