Server based mail templates / boiler plate paragraphs

Walking around the other day I noticed people cutting and pasting from Word documents into Lotus Notes emails.   The legal assistants were being sent the standard working and attachments to use in certain cases which lead to this practice.    The issue with this is that people were saving the boiler plate text and attachments to their home drives, so if any updates occurred this could be embarrassing for the practice.

Here's my solution to this:


1.  Create a document database that holds the templates for each email or paragraph.  Users should be set to Reader and managers (ie people that can edit or add Documents) as Editors.

2.  Create a new ToolBar button with the following code
database := "Mail-inDB\\Stationery\\Templates.nsf" ;
server := "SERVER/ORG";
WindowTitle := "Paragraph  Email Templates for LA";

　
choicelist := @DbColumn("" : "ReCache" ; server : database ; "($All)" ; 0 );
dockey := @Prompt([OkCancelList] ; WindowTitle ; "Please choose the document title containing the content you wish to paste at the current cursor position." ; "" ; choicelist) ;
@PostedCommand([FileOpenDatabase]; server : database ; "($All)" ; dockey ; 1 ; 1 ) ;
@PostedCommand([EditDocument]) ;
@PostedCommand([EditGotoField] ; "Body" ) ;
@PostedCommand([EditSelectAll]) ;
@PostedCommand([EditCopy]) ;
@PostedCommand([FileCloseWindow]) ;
@PostedCommand([FileCloseWindow]) ;
@PostedCommand([EditPaste])

2. Add this to the users ToolBar. 

When they need to use a boiler plate text or email they open a new emails then click on the button, this calls up the document database and they select a document.  This is then cut and pasted into the current email, this works for boiler plate paragraphs as well as full emails

Domino Configuration Tuner

I wanted to check the setup of our servers today so I thought I'd download the Domino Configuration Tuner (DCT) to perform some of the analysis for me.    If you've not used it before its been around since 2008 and will tell you all sorts of useful information about your servers and make recommendations based upon best practices.

You can download a copy of the NTF here:
Domino Configuration Tuner

Installation is easy create a new database from the template.

When you open the database you get "Before you can use the Domino Configuration Tuner you need to restart your Notes Client."  it looks like this:

So you restart your Notes client only to get the same error message.

The issue turns out that the dct.jar file is either missing or the folder (.....notes/jvm/lib/ext) has date older than 11/06/2008 if that's the case delete it, then open DCT it should then redeploy the required files.
If you do this and it still shows the error message you need DCT.JAR
(download and put onto the ...notes\jvm\lib\ext folder on your client

Strange view indexing issue..............

We've just moved people over to the full 8.5.3 client from the basic client (yes we are slightly behind in doing this but we have also only just upgraded to Windows 7 as well from XP - all down to the limitations of the Citrix farm and hardware etc etc).

As we moved people over we were getting strange calls along the lines of "my Inbox is showing the contents of a folder...."  "everytime I go into my Inbox Im seeing a different folder".

Taking a look at this I first thought it was an issue with the $Inbox getting corrupted so ran view rebuilds against this, sometimes that worked sometimes it didn't it was all hit and miss and the issues nearly always came back!

Eventually while looking at this I noticed that the folder that was maskerading as the Inbox had a space at the end of the name so "Folder1\342234 James Good ".  Using Ytria tools and checking the STitle and $Name field I was able to see the full folder name "Folder1\342234 James Good |" notice the | at the end of the name.

Removing that from these fields then saving the Inbox then started to show correctly.
All well and good until you realise that some people had a ridiculous number of folders 2000+ (I work for a large law firm) so the issue is how do you identify which folders were affected.  The answer was really simple once you realise that the search bar shows the name of the folder.  All I had to do was to goto a folder then back to the Inbox.  The this showed "Inbox" all was well, otherwise it showed me the name of the affected folder, simply a case then of updating the $Title and $Name fields and removing the "|" then repeating the process until the Inbox showed.

Turns out talking to a few users they were copying the details from an internal web based system to create the folder names in notes, interestingly this must of been happening a long time as if you switched to basic mode all was OK.