Thursday, October 29, 2020

Our Collabsphere Session about O365 from the viewpoint of an Admin and a User

Hogne Pettersen and I gave this session today at Collabpshere.



It is a mix of good, bad, bewildering, and impressive views about the whole O365 story, solution, and parts within it.

We could spend all day discussing this and are happy to do so if anyone wishes to ask for our help.

For more details, follow us on our Twitter accounts at @LotusEvangelist and @NordicCUG

My Collabsphere Session on More Efficiently Working From Home with HCL Products

 


While my session had a small group of attendees given the great sessions I was up against, the beauty of an online conference is everyone can catch other sessions afterward.

It was great to be a part of MWLUG again now known as Collabpshere.

Monday, October 5, 2020

Will 2021 Include You? Or me? As HCL Ambassadors

Please, in this time of need, I and the other HCL Ambassadors are asking you to stretch out your typing hand and give us one more effort.

No Zoom is required. Honest.

It has been a tough year for everyone, we lost 2 uncles, many people lost other relatives, friends lost jobs, companies closed, and yet, here we are, knocking on 2021 to let us be an HCL Ambassador.

What do we do, when we can't see people? When we can't speak at conferences in person? When we can barely get on a plane (where I am we are locked down, again).

Ambassadors go above and beyond their day jobs to do some of the following:

  • Bring light into the darkness when involved in competitive discussions
  • Save servers and applications from the misguided hands of users
  • Run online user group meetings with Zoom? No, Sametime Meetings!
  • They come up with ideas to help HCL get the word out better or offer up training ideas or just hold "open office" time to let people ask questions.
  • Write some tips, hint follow #HCLAmbassadorTips on Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter
  • Produce some videos about solutions and products
  • Blog, tweet, or podcast not only in their native language, I did 3 languages this year, but many Ambassadors speak multiple languages, and they are awesome beyond imagination
  • Dream up ideas for "what if we could...."
  • Spent WAY too much time, unfortunately, saving many of us, and many of us saving our customers with their help, from the ahem Cloud divorce in July, I owe a few people drinks, if we ever get together again
  • Answer questions in Slack, Skype, Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, HCL forums, and numerous other places and are not satisfied until some resolution is found
  • Help each other, to better help YOU our customers, after all, we are all global and some of us stretch most of the earth in our workday
I am sure your Notes/Domino/Sametime/Connections/Traveler/Verse/Volt/Nomad admins and developers do much of this too inside your organization, right?

Your job is to reward them, by nominating them https://bit.ly/33uANFQ, us, or me, so we can keep doing great things magically for you in 2021. 

Without our advanced warnings and meetings with HCL, we can't provide you with the full first-class service you have been enjoying. 

This is the biggest benefit that we gain by being Ambassadors, in my eyes and if you agree, please click on this link https://bit.ly/33uANFQ and nominate your SuperAdmin or SuperDeveloper.

Thank you for your support,
See you in 2021 in-person I hope at one of these which have gone virtual for 2020:
Collabsphere, Engage, SUTOL, C3UG, NCUG, SNoUG, RNUG, DNUG, Let's Connect and many others I am forgetting but might be local to you in your region.






Sunday, October 4, 2020

Skills Sunday: Traveler problems since 11.06 iOS Came Out? Help is here

Note: Edited October 6th with more details, see the end of the post.

Hello everyone, I know I don't blog so much about technical items, I have moved away from much of it towards product marketing and specifically CI, Competitive Intelligence.

But I have a few clients still that I help and this came up this week and as people posted in FB and other places about it, figured I should help the greater community.

If you have iPhone users already on Traveler, this is not needed for you....yet. These people are all fine, for now, and even using 11.06 because until it is a fresh uninstall and install, it relies on the "older" authentication method.

If you have a person who got a new phone in the last week, or maybe was a new onboard, then you were probably hit by the Traveler is not working problem.

I do not believe it matters which version of Domino or Traveler you run on the server-side. Of course, you should be on the latest version of Traveler, 11.01 Fix Pack 1 which happens to also run on Domino 10.x, not just R11.

The real problem is on Sept  29/30 release 11.05 was removed from the Apple App Store and was replaced by 11.06. 

No big deal, right, apps get updated all the time.

BUT

Not so fast.

HCL slipped in something which only was posted 2 days before the update. Take a look at this technote which in its own words, was posted 6(!?) days ago.

https://support.hcltechsw.com/csm?id=kb_article&sysparm_article=KB0082562&sys_kb_id=792782151be7d8d0beab64e6ec4bcbff

Starting with HCL Verse iOS 11.0.6, support was added for Certificate Based Authentication. There is currently only one mode supported: the server (or access gateway) requires the client device to provide a certificate only. Requiring a certificate and userid/password is not supported. Additionally, this version of the client does not alternatively support basic authentication in the event the certificate-based authentication fails.

Ok, like any other admin I figured I would follow the paper trail of tech notes which would tell me what to do to fix this. 

NOTE: NOTHING in the above technote is helpful, aside from the paragraph quoted.

Now I go searching on this Certificate Based Authentication and 11.06 I find this great session from my friend Milan Matejic (go follow him on Twitter, @Milan_Matejic90) which he gave at the last Engage conference before the whole pandemic started. His slides are here, and a video too and he provides a great example and way to create and merge this certificate.

https://milanmatejic.wordpress.com/2020/03/30/engageug-implementing-certificate-based-authentication-for-hcl-traveler-access/

BUT this is overkill, at least it was for my client. 

So try the override option below first, then if not working, go back to Milan's.

The other thing you may find is this Admin Documentation: 

https://help.hcltechsw.com/traveler/11.0.0/Android_CBA.html

This includes a freshly added Note, with the article at the end of it, the first technote up above! So circular guidance, please HCL Documentation team fix this:

Note: Starting with HCL Verse 11.0.6 for iOS, limited support was added for Certificate Based Authentcation. For more information, see this article.

What you really want, is the technote below, that HCL support sent me after I was trying to figure out what was going on, this worked for my client very easily.

How to OVERRIDE form-based login for the /traveler URL: 

 https://help.hcltechsw.com/traveler/11.0.0/httpauthentication.html

Along the way, we figured out the client also changed their notes redirector and renamed the SSL kyr file so the steps we followed caused more oddities, but I fixed those and now can log in fine. So check everything along the way.

The question is which is the right way to go? Should we follow Milan's session or do this override? I am still digging into it but feel free to comment and let me know what you think, and if this helped you, let me know too.

Oct 6 Update: After discussions with HCL, they will be updating the documentation to be clearer about the changes and what is required. 

You can continue to log in with just name/password, if you follow the overriding guide(the one that worked for me). 

What they were trying to say is IF you needed or wanted the client certification (which is different from an SSL certificate and also NOT your notes id file) then you would have to follow the other links and possibly use Milan's session as your guide and that down the road it may be preferable.

Remember this is ONLY a client-side change, nothing changed in how the server works as the server is flexible, which is why we love Domino.