IBM just released lotus notes 8.5.3, available from IBM Passport Advantage website.
This is the new features of lotus notes 8.5.3
Lotus Notes 8.5.3 delivers significant enhancements to support social businesses and help users get their work done fast, for example:
- Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.3 includes entitlement to the IBM Connections files and profiles components adding significant capabilities to help clients become a social business
- Enhanced new mail notification which optionally provides a pop up preview (containing both sender and subject) of new mail messages as they arrive.
- Improved sorting on email subject content that ignores the “Re:” and “Fw:” prefix, from reply & forward respectively, providing a more accurate sorting of your data.
- A new option to search by sender or subject available when you right click an email.
- Optionally leave countered meetings on your calendar. Allow countered meetings to show up in a unique color, with the time the meeting was originally scheduled for as well as maintaining the ability to act on the original calendar invite and with hover text indicating the new proposed time.
- Optionally notify existing invitees when adding or removing attendees from an existing meeting, informing them of the change and updating the invitee list on their calendar invitation, as well as other options which negate the need for a user to process any meeting updates for anything other than a change in time, eg. a reschedule.
- Significant improvements to recent contacts, allowing end users more control over who gets added to recent contacts and improved data integrity.
- Geographic and time zone information is be displayed in the business card.
- Apple Mac usability improvements for e-mail gestures include the ability to drag one or grouped files to the Lotus Notes icon on your dock, and a new mail message will be created with those files attached.
- Embedded IBM Sametime is upgraded to V8.5.1 with an incremental installer to IBM Sametime 8.5.2, and embedded IBM Lotus Symphony is upgraded to V3.0.
- Additional platform support includes RHEL 6.0 Desktop, Citrix XenApp 6.0, and enhanced 64-bit toleration for Microsoft Windows.
- Added ability to remove signature file from a thread
What is interesting is that is now lotus notes can sort the subject easily, without problem.
Prior this version, user have difficulties to sort emails based on their subject, because the “Re: ” and the “Fw: ” are treated differently. Outlook users do not have this kind of problem, but now lotus notes client too 
. Better late than never.
Hope that IBM much more open mind to user inputs than before.
Popularity: 6% [?]
How to speed up Lotus Notes client 8.5x
The first time I migrated MS Outlook to Lotus Notes, most users complain about the speed, and they said that MS Outlook is faster in any operations when compare to Lotus Notes.
I had to agreed with them.
I had to live with it, and thought that because it just they way it is, because Lotus Notes is not only an email client, but also a collaborations tool, that why it is slower compare to MS Outlook.
But I was wrong.
When I brought this up to IBM support, they came with a suggestion that I modified a file to increase the performance of Lotus Notes. And they were correct, with it Lotus Notes performance is a faster than before.
These are the steps:
- Close lotus notes.
- Open the folder/directory where you install lotus notes client, in my case c:\lotus\notes
- Find the file “\Lotus\Notes\framework\rcp\deploy\jvm.properties” and edit.
- Within the file, find the line “vmarg.Xmx=-Xmx256m” and change it into “vmarg.Xmx=-Xmx512m”
- Within the file, find the line “vmarg.Xms=-Xms48m” and change it into “vmarg.Xms=-Xms96m”
- Save the file.
Now, try to run Lotus Notes and see the differences. You can also play the setting, depend on your work load and your RAM. If you have more than 2 GB ram, you can try to increase the settings to:
vmarg.Xmx=-Xmx1024m
vmarg.Xms=-Xms256m
This improvement not only affects windows client, but also Linux or maybe Macs.
Please note that, if you apply the fix pack, the setting will be restores, so you need to re-edit it again.
Added: 2011-09-26
This also come from IBM support
If you feel that you have a network problem while using Windows Vista or Windows 7, you can follow this suggestion.
Run this command (without the quotes) from command prompt from Windows vista or Windows 7, make sure you run it as administrator.
“netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled ”
This command will disable the windows network auto tunning, see here
And better to apply the latest fix pacth, the latest fix pacth as I’m writing this post for Lotus notes 8.5.2 is FP3.
Popularity: 5% [?]
White House email server down
Duh, why I did not received this big news earlier.
This is a big news, for people who maintains email servers everywhere in the world.
That the White House email server was down almost for a day. Yes, the White House, where they should hire experts from around the world.
But the email server was down.
How is it possible that the e-mail system for the White House could go down that long, a caller asked? Press secretary Robert Gibbs had just apologized on live television for the lack of any e-mail contact.
“We still don’t know,” the help-line guy said, adding that two e-mail servers had been rebooted but that two others remained mysteriously down, with no immediate explanation.
He then abruptly put the caller on hold, returning momentarily to say that he was no longer authorized to answer questions.
Remained mysteriously down, lol, that is very funny.
As of Tuesday morning, the White House was once again sending its regular slew of e-mails.
Press secretary Robert Gibbs acknowledged the outage during a briefing to reporters Monday afternoon. White House aides at the briefing had to pass out photocopies of the executive orders signed by the president that day, rather than e-mailing them to reporters. The outage, however, did not appear to cause any major disruptions at the White House.
Well I guess email is not really important in the white house, while many other business depend heavily on email traffic.
And that what will hapen if they used MS Exchange as their mail server.
Or, maybe they should change it back into Lotus Domino/Notes system? Maybe now they regret the migration?
Popularity: 1% [?]
Problem outlook express can’t start
Before I begin this post, first of all don’t use outlook express for your daily works simply because outlook express is not reliable. Ms Outlook is a much better pop3 and imap email client, or for enterprise try lotus notes with lotus domino. Don’t use outlook express.
So many times that users with outlook express loose their emails, so I have to recover their emails. If they got lucky, I can recover their emails. If they not, the emails is lost.
One user came to me because her outlook express can’t start. I tried to start it and wait for 1 hour, nothing happen. Form the task manager I can see that outlook express is working because the process use almost 100% of cpu resource.
The Outlook express simply can’t start. Usually when this kind of problem happen, I will boot up to safe mode and run outlook express. Most of the time that will solved the problem. But not this one. I already tried to boot to safe mode, run outlook express and wait for more then another 1 hours and nothing happen.
So I tried another way.
I create another identity in outlook express, and try to import messages from the original store folder. First, it start to import the messages but then it stop.
Curious, I start again. And again it stop.
So, I tried again, but now I import one folder at a time. One folder imported, another folder imported, and it stop when I tried to import the inbox folder.
Curious, I did it again and it gave me the same result.
So, the conclusion is the problem caused by the corrupted inbox folder. I moved the inbox folder to another folder then start outlook express, and it started fine. Outlook express will created a new inbox folder.
All I have to do next is to recover the inbox folder into many eml files, then copied them back to the new inbox folder. Solved.
So, I just wasted my full day of work just to fix one unreliable outlook express email client.
Popularity: 3% [?]
A few notes about nupgrade.exe
I do many times migrate from outlook pst files to lotus notes nsf files. Some are easy to do, and some are not.
For small pst files, the migration are flawless. Small pst is smaller than 5 GB. While for big pst files, there could be many problems.
I just encounter problem when trying to migrate about 20 GB pst file into lotus notes. It just crash with dump file that I can’t understand. I tried to split the pst file into several smaller pst files, and it really help in migration.
Do not try to compact pst files, I just spend more than 8 hours to compact 20 GB pst file, and it only reduced into 19 GB. Better create new pst file, and move the folders. It alot faster and compact.
One thing about the migration process, if only there is a verbose mode in nupgrade that will really help. Right now, there is only few information in the nupgrade console. Only when nupgrade found error, it will displayed in the console. So the switch like ‘nupgrade -v 3′ to display verbose mode will really help us to know what is going on in the process.
By the way, the 20 GB pst file is the result of imported from outlook express dbx files. And it took me about 8 hours to import them into outlook pst file.
Right now the time is 11:10 pm, and still running the migration.
Popularity: 7% [?]