Traveler Dialing Error Confirmed

As a follow up from my post yesterday, there is a problem with Traveler on Andorid dialing when a field contains characters with the phone number and commas.
The problem has been tested and comes from Domino or so it appears.
When a fix or update is confirmed I will update further.

Traveler on Android Dialing Issue with Pauses

I have been playing with a Traveler issue that seems to only affect Android devices. iPhones seem to work fine. I want to know if this is a problem for a PMR(think so) or an internal issue, let me explain.

Client is on Domino 853fp1 traveler 8.5.3.2 and they use a DA with client details. Inside the DA are 2 fields, phone and extension. It has been coded to provide a dial reference into contacts that says:

305-555-1234,,325

Which in turn shows up on traveler very nicely and then I go to dial and get:
Error Invalid Phone Number.

So before we bother IBM PMR with this, can someone please test this with their DA?

Again iPhones pick it up and dial perfectly fine.

I have tried various formats and it is the extension that fails. It used to work on the Blackberries and we are trying to figure out if it is a code issue in the NAB they are using for the DA which is not a standard template.

We tested adding the same number, 305-555-1234,,325 into our NAB and tried to dial the office number, using corporate lookup directory, and it will not dial.

We have tried the options found on this wiki page already regarding using a p, and a comma.

Anone seen this or have a work around?

A Meme That Got Studied

Graphic from IBM Research

About 6 months ago or so, some IBMers started what turned out to be a storm of tweets with the hash tag #stuffibmerssay. I as well as over 700 others tweeted our own ideas to this.

A few non-IBMers were interviewed in addition to the IBMers to gain some insight for the researchers about how Business Partners and customers see and hear IBM, Twitter and the meme.

Undoubtedly inside IBM it was viewed from 2 different sides as fun and collaborative for the vast remote users but also dark and not politcially correct by those less in touch with the realities of the world around them. It is not your old IBM, it is very much a new IBM.

Happy to see the Research Scientists were allowed to not only follow up on this but presented the findings in a report and presentation recently. The link to the IBM research page is here and Dr. Jennifer Thom's interview at SXSW about it, Data as Narrative, here.

Jennifer was helpful in letting us know when this would be live so we could blog about it. I was one of those interviewed and the questions were around the basics of why would we do this, what did we think would or would not happen from it, what we thought IBM saw it as (PR, Marketing, HR benefits, financially, competitive), why it went viral, also asked about the good and bad tweets and our thoughts. As a Business Partner, and prior IBMer, I pointed out that many were a cliche but when you think that a company of 300,000+ people with most working remotely or on the go and you will get the usual conference call references, corporate speak and such.

My interest was in the fact that it shows a number of IBMers are being social and using in this case Twitter although no doubt Facebook and Linkedin posts also were out there. What if this ran inside IBM, maybe it did who knows, and how many would do it inside? Would or did the majority of the company post an update or message with their own input? THAT would be really impressive to read about the report. And this happens every day for companies who have already instituted IBM Connections or similar products. This is power. More importantly it is what gels together your company as a family rather than as an Enterprise with no heart or soul for employees to believe.

This brings up the culture vs. management discussion around social business products and why people do or do not post to them. True the outside people follow IBM guidelines not to disclose secrets and such but are free to post their alternative and sometimes negative views of the decisions the company makes. Business Partners also do this and the repercusions to those on the inside and those on the outside continues still in various degrees. In order to fully be an open and social enterprise one must be willing to embrace all sides of a discussion. The human race is still far from being purely accepting but if your culture is still a silo, you will not likely be able to have as much fun as we did with #stuffibmerssay.

But you know you want to do it, right? So go ahead, your boss is probably not on Twitter anyway, who knows maybe you too will get an IBM Researcher knocking on your door.

SnTT - Traveler Lookups, DA and Multiple Servers

Since this came up today figured it might help others troubleshoot their Lotus Notes Traveler lookups.

In the client case, Traveler sits on the home mail server, they also have some secondary servers where mail sits as well.
Clients of the home mail server can lookup employees and through using the DA (Directory Assistance), they can look up clients contact details as well. A nice solution that beats their old Blackberry way of copying around files and then local synching but that is history.

As we updated some of the secondary mail servers and users to Traveler, we found they were not able to lookup the clients.

For those that did not know it, Traveler can look at your home mail server or at a specific server for information (See this wiki page). Since the client wants full emergency options, they have traveler setup, but turned off for all but the main server. So that means we need to set each server as though it ran Traveler. Else we would use the notes.ini file setting NTS_TRAVELER_AS_LOOKUP_SERVER=Trueas described int he wiki.

So the steps are of course, create the da.nsf file add your server information and file to be used and set it to enabled.
Make sure you replicate the da.nsf to all servers involved and check the ACL of course to include the servers.you will need
Enter the da.nsf into the server document file on the 1st tab of the server document where it asks about Directory Assistance and all the other servers as well.
Restart the Domino server.

You can check if it is set properly by typing show xdir at a server console. If you see only one entry for the names.nsf you missed something.

You can also run show xdir reload when making adjustments to the DA settings.

Simple enough but if you never knew Traveler looked to the local server you would be left scratching yoru head like my client who was not as versed in Traveler.

Traveler really is that simple and great and there is no excuse for not using it no matter the size of your environment. Oh and Traveler is Free.