Winter Keeps Coming Back, Like Customers

January was busy, February was like the snow storms, problems dumped on us and no matter what we did, more kept coming.

Oddly enough they all also went away as fast as they came.

When you think you have reached the end, there is no end in sight sometimes.

Products need fixing, patching, servers need rebooting, routers need replacing and if companies are hiring again they need licenses, computers, telephones and office furniture.

Who is doing this for your clients? If it isn't you, does it bother you? What could you do to change this?

At some point a network can not really run based on one person knowing it all or owning it all. It just leads to a very long delay in anything ever getting accomplished.

So how do you get out of this rut? Hire temporary employees? No, they take your knowledge and leave.
Hire more permanent staff? Perhaps
Find a local business to work with? Hopefully but not always likely in every situation.
Bring in a Business Partner? Preferred

Why a Business Partner?

Because IBM, HP or whatever the company is really is not designed to help every customer based on size or location. However, they all have business partners which are trained, experienced and ready and willing to help you....but you never call.

Is a Business Partner more expensive than a temporary employee? Sometimes
Is the BP going to be cheaper than the original vendor company? Always
Will the BP get the project done correctly or manage expectations appropriately? Usually, no one is perfect and we all have had situations that were not so rosy. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.
What if the BP doesn't do X,Y or Z? They should have in their organization other vendors to work with to accommodate your needs. Admittedly some requests are way out of scope but most are well within a domain of people they know and trust.

If you need electrical work done do you call a plumber? No, and neither should you ask your local PC support people to fix your infrastructure, unless they have a corporate/server division or can recommend one for you.

Yet many times we hear on our client sales calls how:

the vendor sold us their product and then we never heard from them again and when we had problems we couldn't get help so we bought a new product and moved on.

Not always in such nice terms of course, but this is no different if you sell cars, tax services, computers or televisions.

Some people say "we will call you when we need you".
But if you leave it at that, you may never have any other business. Or worse, for you, your competitors may get that business.

Sometimes you do need to have some space between contacts as part of the normal business schedule. It's hard, but stay on target, gentle reminders via phone, email, IM or Twitter, etc will get some answers. And if you aren't asking for business, you aren't receiving any business either.

Today it's cold weather, tomorrow will be warmer, then cold again next week (I live in South Florida after all) and customers always need help. Sometimes when the power is out or just restored is the best time to call them and lend a hand, honestly help them if possible and work with them even if it causes you some logistical issues.

You can't help everyone all the time and sometimes it may seem like no matter what, you can't find any business, other times business finds you based on the effort you made upfront.

So think about how to bring your customers back before they need you or look elsewhere for their help. It may be as simple as a phone call once a month but make the time, do it right and keep them coming back for more.

Calendar Profile "Errors " for Forwarded Email

Not sure why this is an error at all.

Yes, I read technote #1260359 entitled:
Forwarding mail to another address prevents busytime from recording Calendar data

In a mixed environment of Lotus and Non-Lotus users this is a common occurrence. Yes, there are some ways around it, but the simplest way is to just add the forwarding email and let all mail relay internally.

Now, if you enable DDM(Domino Domain Monitoring) which hopefully you do and then set the events you wish to track and be notified about through email, logging, database or whatever way, this will drive you insane.

Every time you start a server these "errors" are generated. In a small group or server you may not care, but with 100's or 1,000's of users this will start causing all kinds of issues. Admins will stop monitoring it, and you can exclude it by being more specific in what notifications you do want to receive.

However, when at a new client, who isn't using DDM, I like to run it and see what I get. Needless to say if email notifications go out you have swamped or crashed a mail router or at least delayed a bunch of important emails.

So I posted this on Ideajam to encourage IBM to adjust this one error accordingly.

What would Steve Jobs do?

An interesting question/game played by few but discussed by many.

If you had a problem how would you tackle it, so to speak?

I hadn't seriously pondered this until reading a sales blog/newsletter which discussed what could be done in 90 days if one "wanted to get to the other side of possible".

Maybe this is what you do regularly, maybe not, but it put a new spin on some things which have been nagging me lately as I have been offline more or less and posting sporadically.

How long does it take you to make a User ID?

This one is for those of you billing hourly.

In truth I have seen it take seconds to a few minutes, average probably is about 1-2 minutes depending on machine, network, etc.

BUT today I, and IBM Priority support, experienced THE definitive hands down winner for the longest time waiting for an ID and mailbox to be created. (I know some of you have similar stories, so just comment and join in).

From the moment I clicked Register(7.0.2 client to an 8.5 server and they are in 2 different locations by about 50 miles) to the time I received the success pop up window was a whopping 80 minutes (+/-)! One would think I was on a modem from 1995 not 2010 T-1 lines.

Needless to say I let IBM off the hook after 40 but there was a reason for this and once we solve that problem will post about it.

DAOS Rocks again, 2 clients details

A sampling of data from one client.

8 of the largest files were run today as a proof test and the results were the following:

Space saved % saved of mail file
3,023,524,000 79
773,532,000 17
1,712,269,000 40
15,903,000 16
512,000 4
72,386,000 7
15,611,000 28
2,412,858,000 51

Low of 4% to a high of 79%

Average for these was 891,843,889 per mail file saved or about 27 % per mail file.

Almost a GB per person saved is a good start we think.
Of course the new server has a TB, the old one 80GB.

Looking to put all of them on and then get a final number.

Second Client saw this when we moved them this week, 18 executives files:

Physical size Originally: 15,987,641,383
Logical Size After DAOS: 1,778,384,896

DAOS: 14,209,256,487
Percent Saved: 73%

Some as much as 92 and a low of 30 % reduction.

Putting this into perspective in a 1,000 or 10,000 user mail system will provide huge benefits in reduced server tasks processing time at night, backups, SAN storage and of course bandwidth traffic in general.

My Review of IBM LND 8.5.1 The Upgrader's guide

I haven't read anyone's reviews on this as I wanted to have an open mind.
I received a free copy of the printed book itself.

My mind was open but this didn't fill it up at all.

Not that I expected a step by step effort, but the truth is this book should be retitled and offered as "Getting to know Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1 for those coming from R6 or R7".

It reads more like a what's new pdf than a guide to upgrading. Very weak on the upgrade and heavily leveraged the exciting new features. Not that there is anything wrong with it, but the title is truly misleading.

I am going to recommend some clients, especially the recent movers from R5 to R8, read it to get a better handle on where Domino and Notes are today. Few people, beyond techies read what's new or the readme for each version so this is a much better alternative, though at $50 the book could be a bit hefty for some price wise.

The chapter on the differences between Notes and iNotes and the iNotes versions themselves, is truly worth it if you have these kinds of discussions or trade offs in your environment to think about.

As an administrator with over 18 years on this stuff I did find a few items that were new to me or more likely forgotten. One example? DirLint.

What? you never heard of it? I searched my 851 admin help and got ZERO references. I had to look this one up and Chris Toohey was right, he is the top and perhaps only one to post about this...until now.

For a book about upgrading I ponder why there are chapters devoted to Lotus Symphony, Composite Applications and building web apps as well. I could also do without the 3rd party apps being promoted for 40 pages. Also the code provided to export the DCT should be posted and available some place. THAT could be really useful and helpful.

So for those looking to provide a client with a great overview, this will do, but do your admins a favor and don't buy this for them.

Mail Redirector Series #3, Login Page Edits

Funny how you follow your own guides only to realize something is missing.
Well, not really missing but neglected in the previous posts.

When I discussed putting links to other sites or services, I should have added this, but didn't as I was focused on the Domino login form.

Domino login pages by default get grabbed from all over the place. Quickr and Sametime have their own, as well as Domino of course, then there is the SSL one and Traveler. When I have time and a set up with them all will grab some screen shots.

As an example, the Quickr login page is:
quickplace/resources.nsf, to replace the default entry.
Next to Target Form, type QuickPlaceLoginForm in the Domino Web Server Configuration Document.

But how can you manipulate this all to your benefit?
John Rolling wrote a nice article about it here. With more detail that I went into below.
Plus, Jake Howlett added this post on the login forms as well.

Create the domcfg.nsf (domcfg5.ntf), otherwise known as "Web Server Configuration" database.

In reality it does nothing unless told to do so. So create it using the Domino Web Server Configuration template found under advanced templates.

You will see 3 different choices. Sign in Form Mappings is first.
Click on add Mappings and set the options as you require. Leave target database for now and the form. Keep the form name in mind.

Now save it and then view the database in designer. Admins don't fear you can do this with little or no help depends on how much you want to include.

Locate the form, loginuserform, copy and paste it in there and change the name slightly, say companyloginform. The reason is when you update the template it will wipe out your form, if you don't change its name from the default one.

Now double click on your new companyloginform and proceed to add your own text, graphics or whatever you want to it and save it.

Go back to the database in your Notes client and edit the mapping you created earlier and replace the loginform with companyloginform.

Go test it at your browser, no need to restart HTTP or anything. This is also how you can add links to other sites or information for your employees, like emergency phone numbers or whatever you need and everyone will see it.

You can do the same with the other 2 options in this database. Depends on your time and interest.

So not something new, Jake's post goes back to 2005, but something which I should have included previously and was remiss.

Thank John and Jake if you see them.

Continuing on With an R5 to 851 Upgrade

So we got the server squared away...sort of.

It seems, unknown to us, that an individual we were asked to remove from the system was an old administrator. Admins are already shaking their head, they know what is coming next.

Yes, the person had signed everything...that the current admin had not.
Evidently even the names.nsf. So naturally everyone suddenly could not get to the server or open the NAB among other calls we received.

Quick answer was to sign the names.nsf with the server ID. We subsequently created an application ID and starting signing all the applications.

The fun of a 10 year old environment.

Next up was the clients updates. On a hunch, I decided, after backing up a user's notes installation, this was R5.0.7, to just let 851 install over it.

I know some people do not like this and there are valid points but the customer preferred it this way...if it worked.

Happy to say it did work, perfectly well too I might add.

Only thing we had to do was configure preferences and some pointers for the new server, connection document etc.

However one peculiarity popped up, totally not a Lotus issue, but it prevented installation.

Error 1330 and a winverify error for data1.cab. A few searches eventually revealed the problem to be a specific dll which needed to be Windows registered.
So open a command prompt and type: regsvr32 initpki.dll

Wait for it to pop up with a window saying it's been added then proceed.

I started testing each machine, after 2 in a row had this problem, by upgrading everyone's Java code from www.java.com. That also threw the error, prior to the regsrvr fix.

So then install Java and if that is okay, do the Notes install.

If you still have a problem, check the Windows Update and make sure their root certificates have not expired, among the other countless patches. This cured another machine.

So the moral of the story is old server can equal old clients and peculiar configurations which make for more fun at your clients. But now you have a fix for it as well.

We got to play football on the Super Bowl field

Last night I took my oldest 2 kids with our friend Josh and his son to the stadium where the Super Bowl was played on Sunday.

Season ticket holders went on Monday and everyone else could go on Tuesday.

It was the first time I had been on the field since The Who concert in 1989. But back then the field was covered with wood.

The field was not badly beaten up and everything was still there from the big game.

The podium where the awarded the trophy was there and if we had patience could have waited in line to get our picture with a copy of the trophy.

The kids tried to kick field goals, punt and Josh and I attempted some hail mary passes to the end zone from the 50, although I was much more accurate from the 40.

Great fun, lots of pictures and a video which I posted to YouTube of a 360 from the field so you can see the whole stadium.

Server Side Includes a bug since 6.5, Hotfix 851HF360

At least per IBM tech support.

When I last discussed SSI the other day I was waiting on IBM.

It seems that they were able to validate that Firefox did not work with the SSI since 6.5 of Domino. Granted this may not affect many people and the info on the web is sketchy but here in better detail is what I was told, thanks to Jason Bean of IBM Support:

We have found the problem and created a fix to resolve this issue! After digging into our code some more, we discovered that when a SSI directive is triggered while rendering, a sub request is spawned for the resource referenced in the include. The creation of this sub request was inadvertently dropping the first header listed in the GET, which in the case of Firefox is the "host" header.
The result is that Domino is not able to map the sub request to the appropriate web site (since we don't know what hostname it is for), causing the include directive not to be processed. This also explains why making the site a "Default Site" or placing a copy of the includes in the default html directory resolved the issue.

I was asked yesterday to make the site with the problems the default site in my internet documents. Which I did and it worked fine, but was not a great solution as we did not want that site to be the primary one.

Imagine my shock this morning when I got an email saying a hotfix was not only tested but approved for usage. Less than a day after it being submitted. Kudos to the development team at Iris or the IBM labs who did it. A small little piece like this to be done was impressive to me and the client. Thank you again.

Oh, if you need this fix, ask support for it (hopefully it will make it into 8.5.2) or email me if you need it as I can't post the ftp for it.

The name is 851HF360_w32.exe and is a small little thing at a few 100K.

LotusLive Q&A with it's Product Managers

In discussing LotusLive with sales, tech people, Business Partners and clients there are a number of questions I have still, both from a client perspective and a Business partner perspective. This is not about a specific offering, although probably mostly aimed at LotusLive Notes, but in general I am listening to opinions.

After an email to Sean P. I had a great discussion with Beverly Dewitt who used to be part of the same team as me, but she was in the US, not EMEA. Her role now is to work with the Business Partners on LotusLive. She pointed me to the BD day session which I was unable to attend due to the SRO of the small rooms and I apologized for my ignorance on some topics. She also put me in touch with John Beck, PM for LotusLive. But for those who are not privy to all the Lotuslive knowledge here are some of the questions with some answers.

From the client's view:

1) Security - Login/password is NOT enough for some customers. VPN access would alleviate this a bit, SecureID perhaps?
Answer- VPN is possible, so are many other routes, but the customer should be able to leverage their existing security. We as Business Partners are working on the best practices for these connections to Lotuslive. It can involve many parts of your organization so be aware and think about the choices. We are here to help.

2) Support - Who provides it and for what? The Business Partner? No, IBM manages the hardware, OS and Domino updates so any problems must go to them.
Answer - In short, yes, if the service goes down, call IBM. Since the life of LotusLive Notes is very basic and vanilla currently, not much can go wrong. The downside is you as a customer give up the rights to customization(until 2nd Half of 2010) of the mail template. Ideally this will work for those in a pure email usage case and heavily relying on Notes. Your Business Partner can handle administration of the service, though not via a full Domino administrator client but a custom LotusLive management console as well as management of users accounts.

3) What about our Domino applications? Even if we can put them on LotusLive, will we always have the capability to NOT upgrade the Lotuslive site because of potential update problems in code?
Answer - No Domino applications are going to LotusLive Notes...yet. You can of course host them but for now this is not an option. When customized mail templates are available, John Beck said IBM will test the template customizations for compatibility and approve them accordingly. There will most likely be some cost to perform this, a setup fee most likely but still yet to be determined.

4) Once the customer goes to Lotuslive, as a service partner, once you get locked in to someone's cloud it is really going to be hard to go to another one.
Answer - Perhaps in some cases, but LotusLive Notes, which runs on Domino, should not be difficult. However, it may involve GTS (IBM Global Technology Services) rather than your own staff or Business Partner. I have a follow up call on this subject with GTS. But I am comfortable with it for my clients.

5)What is still needed when you go to LotusLive Noets?
Answer - ID/User admin and training. SaaS solutions requires provisioning users if you utilize them. Customization of UI and other similar services will be coming in the near future and may be of interest to some companies. Archiving is NOT part of the offering of LotusLive as one example of a 3rd party connection.

6) What about other applications like BES, Traveler?
Answer - At some point in 2nd half 2010 these will be options and may or may not involve a small monthly fee.

7) Will LotusLive Labs provide an option to customers for their own "sandbox"?
Answer - No, the sandbox is NOT for customers to use. However, IBM will have BP apps up there. These will mostly be SaaS applications NOT likely to be Domino related.

LotusLive Meetings is very active in many companies and makes more sense as a pure Cloud offering perhaps compared to email. Why? Because until mail template customizations are allowed or Domino applications (stand alone ones that do not require links to other depositories) and Traveler support is included it may not work for everyone just yet.

On the plus side, IBM lowered the minimum number of users required to use the LotusLive Notes solution to 25 from 1,000 and that will go far for those small to medium businesses who really could get the most benefit.

If you are a company with 5-10,000 people you may not see the benefit as easily. However, market segmentation of your employees may show people who could benefit from LotusLive iNotes or LotusLive Notes and reduce your maintenance/licensing fees accordingly.

This is the future, no denying it, but how long till everyone gets there is the question?

Qantas Outsources their brains too?

By now most people have read or heard Qantas has decided to go to Outlook after being on Lotus Notes for 15 years or so....because their strategic partner, since April 2009, Fujitsu, said so.

This quote is interesting

"Subject to satisfactory piloting, we anticipate the migration to be substantially completed by the end of the year."

Qantas employees, fight this. Not because of Outlook or Notes but because of your job and the precarious nature of where this expense may send your company and thus your job.

Satisfactory piloting? Sounds like Mr. Hall is skeptical perhaps? After all this is the man who wanted to cut $100 million from his expenses. And the reason provided is

"This is part of the Qantas technology group's focus on leveraging technology to improve efficiencies for the business and enhancing communication effectiveness across our workforce,"

And this will do this how? Leveraging Outlook? It's a client side product. Exchange leveraging? I guess if one has the other pieces of the Microsoft puzzle it makes sense, but one could and should argue they would have been better served using LotusLive Notes or iNotes...but I don't think Fujitsu would do so. They would never allow IBM to get another foothold on their customer. Interesting to see if they go to Exchange in the Cloud or some hosted by Fujitsu version or wait for it...because Fujitsu probably wants to sell hardware as well. Sounds like the usual game and Qantas, or rather Mr. Hall bought into it big time.

I have said it before and will say it again. If you as the CIO/CEO/CTO want to leave Notes, pay for it out of your bonus because you are wasting your companies money. If you believe so strongly this move will not only save you money...but make you money then share in the wealth. but you can't because you know the truth and it's NOT about your company.

You will be very hard pressed to provide any cost benefit for making a change like this. While it may appear wise financially(somehow?) in the short term, the long term shows quite clearly that you will lose. But of course, the average tenure of an executive in your position is 5.3 years so you will be fine before the next huge bill comes back to the company. Especially if you start this process in year 2 of your tenure.

By the way, if you own Qantas shares get ready to sell them. If past histories tell us anything it's that companies that leave Lotus Notes to Exchange(or some other system) go into free fall for at least a year. Think about it, if you were blowing a few million for nothing, when will you get that back? And your internal IT systems wreck havoc with employees and various applications have to get rebuilt. Right, Fujitsu support staff knows Exchange but not Domino, so support costs will go down? Excuse me while I can't stop laughing. An increase in servers and staff and what will almost definitely be a hybrid environment for years to come. Fujitsu, or Mr. Hall, let us help you, contact me so we can show you the error of your ways.

A mess that anyone with some intelligence would look at and question. Instead try asking how else could we extend our systems. Hint, those millions you are spending could have gone VERY far, especially to staff that probably deserves it more.

Domino server slow? Have you checked...

Domino gets a bum rap from many people as a bandwidth hog and a memory hog. The truth as has been proven many times over is far from these 2 erroneous conclusions.

Based on the client I have been at this week and some other past customers, here is a list of what to look for before one blames Domino for any performance issues.

Note: I will not describe notes.ini tweaks or any other server setting type things, the best practices from Lotusphere on Server Performance is a good place to start as are some redbooks and wikis.

Let's start simple.

1) Hardware - Your server is so old, the nameplate fell off when the original admin retired. Or the dust accumulated in it's case/fan is thicker than mashed potatoes. Seriously, this has zero to do with Domino.

Now having said that, Domino runs perfectly fine with whatever you give it to work on, but if you need more than a small office on it, this could be your problem in a nutshell. Add some RAM or another drive as a new temp/swap file or for transaction logging. A $100-300 dollar investment that will pay you back well. Or just buy a new server.

2) Switch/Router/Hub - Raise your hand if you still have one running someplace that ONLY does 10MB. Raise both hands if you have Token Ring running to your server still.
Yes this is an issue. No, you don't have to update these every year but do a check of speed and transfer. If you are getting, as we saw recently 33kb/sec you REALLY need a new box. Swapping from switch A to B raised transfer rates to 11MB/sec. Better but still slow. So check it, think about it, spend the money on some new ones. Rule of thumb is about $10 dollars per port. Get 1GB switches.

3) Cables - Yes, your cables may be from the Clinton years and NOT Cat 5E or CAT6 so check them as well and invest in a box of cable and cut some new ones. Nothing worse than using cable than forces you to be trapped at 10MB.

4) Firewall - What does this have to do with anything? Have external users or VPN access? Forget the fact it probably doesn't support Windows 7 but how have you survived on a device which is probably out of support/maintenance and maxes out at 100MB and you aren't even plugged into that port but the 10MB port. Again, your network is your lifeline, save it and save yourself and your employees.

5) Backup solution - Do what you need but keep in mind that if your backup is taking 6-10 hours you have more issues on your hands. Backup is easier and cheaper now and even replicating all your dbs to a second server is a better idea than a massive backup window because of old hardware. Why does this affect Domino? Because it interferes with users working and more importantly the server's processes that should run every night.

6) Disk Space - Already alluded to but a lack of disk space will cause full text index failures and potentially hold up server reactions for users attempting to open a mail file or an application which requires on the fly indexing(hopefully you are doing this correctly) or some similar type action. Like an agent on opening. Drives are cheaper than a whole new server, but you know once you start using an external array of drives or a SAN you really should get a new server.

All is NOT lost, all of this equipment can be reused as demo/test equipment or for stage/dev type functions. Donate it to a non-profit or school in a part of town that really needs anything they can get their hands on. Many public school systems are in budget constraints and while some have up to date technology, many do not.

Lastly, give it to your kids or design a network that runs on purpose slowly for younger grade children to learn about how a network works. Sure they want it fast, but now you can walk them through a full loop and the processing will still be running so they can see it all happen not just click here and get it.

Oh and get that Domino server upgraded to 851fp1 or whatever R8 you want because THAT is within your scope to fix and it is easy too.

SnTT - Reminders for those Upgrading from R5

Yes, I said R5, 5.0.9a to be exact.

I have been quiet for a few days as I have been off site reminding myself why I hate Windows 2008 and why I loved R5.

Windows 2008 seems to not be configured for SMBs out of the box. No surprise there.
But when it is a stand alone server so to speak in an SMB(should have gone Foundations in this case, but that's a whole other post for some other time) well it just takes a little longer to make it useful, say compared to Win 2003 or even 2000. This is now the 2nd server like this in 2 weeks, so if someone has some better advice I will pass it along to the server builders.

First if you want the new server to see the old server, or anything else, you have to enable some Services like UpnP and Computer Browser. And Netbios will help too.
Make sure network discovery is enabled on the windows 2008 machine too so others can find it, like this poor old Windows 2000 R5 server.

Now that R5 server in this case was setup with some odd settings. For instance, a made up FQHN (Fully Qualified Host name). Because they weren't using it for web mail or web apps(they do use it for email and apps just not web).
So when you go to build your new server(in place upgrade was not likely given the new hardware and other reasons) you probably think you can just enter the old server name and get the NAB? In this case you would be wrong.

You see IBM decided that these days everyone uses a web server or some other reason for a FQHN and now will not talk to the older server, no matter what IP, name or anything you try IF the FQHN is not valid. What is worse is if you try to tell the new server to get the copy of the NAB you have in a file or on a cd...it still demands a server name and FQHN to work!

OK, even knowing that(it's in the info centers of R8 admin)it would never occur to me, or you probably, that the name in the field in the server doc was....invalid! Dead, not used, not even in the domain! So I started thinking way back to R5 time and how we used to build servers. Which to be fair isn't much different today, but in this case saved me some time.

The Domino server name did not match the computer name which in turn did not match anything else. The Port name is what helped. Copied the port name to the FQHN field and restarted the server and poof, all completed.

No more 20% complete and server not responding error.

Between these 2 things I spent the better part of the afternoon. Oh and then their firewall which is out of date and support and maintenance would not let me see the server from the web to test traveler or webmail. I tested them using Wifi and my phone but we took more time to figure out the firewall. Remember this, if you find a R5 server in the wilderness, you will also find the equivalent firewall, pcs, routers and switches from 5-10 years ago. So load up on memory, ancient memory, and just go do it but think before you leap as the old configuration really worked well and you have to reconfigure it for the modern era.

There is also a long discussion going on about how they use Domino for outgoing emails only and they use an outside ISP for incoming and use Notes as their email. We are moving it all back to Domino but I never cease to be amazed at the configurations I find.

DAOS will be a big bonus for them in time as will the new switch they have to get after we found the one we were using was only doing 33kb/sec. No wonder they thought the mail server was slow. Now it moves at 10-15MB/sec while we reconfigure the hardware. Sometimes it's really NOT Domino's fault.

And yes, the iPhone CEO is really happy with traveler.

SSI and it's not about SSL

SSI stands for server side includes.

I am not a developer but general website work I do perform. And recently we moved a domain to our web server and ran into some problems.

The problem is Domino and how you format these.

It took quite a bit of effort to sort out but the ">technote, #1162842. You also need this technote as well, #1084915 to fix your httpd.cnf file.

Syntax, got to love the syntax formatting but suffice it to say you MUST create an includes directory in your html sub directory and the file calling the SSI must be in .shtml format.

It took me a while but the code must look like this in your html file, which you have given an .shtml extension. So your index.html file becomes index.shtml and your footer file, in this example, becomes footerinfo.shtml

<!--#include file="includes/footerinfo.shtml"-->

This is basic HTML files, no Domino db. Lots of pages involved so if there is a better cleaner way to clean up the old ASP codes let me know.

The problem is Firefox can not see the SSI and IE7 shows it properly.

Thanks to Bruce Lill for his help in explaining it further but I await IBM's answer about what is wrong with Domino 8.5.1 and how to fix this. Anyone have some input it is appreciated.