V14 Notes, Domino, Traveler are out Now

But your Notes install may have an issue.

NOTE: This post will be updated/edited as I figure out more of what is going on. Domino install-info after the Notes client info below.

I tried installing HCL notes, only comes in 64-bit now, on 2 different machines.

The installation was on top of the existing ones.

You may want to use the NICE tool to clean up the prior install first, might save you some headache.

1st is my usual laptop, 6 months old, Windows 11 Pro which already had 1202fp2(64-bit), and while it looked ok after about 20 minutes of waiting to finish, it gave me this, with no more details. It possibly happened while uninstalling or disabling something.

And then backed out the installation.

Subsequently, what I did was extracted the installer to a new location.

Then ran the setup, RunAs admin.

And this time it worked. Thank you Marc Thomas for the hint that there may be some extraction issue and to try it this way.

So, 2 clients installed, a server with traveler installed and it took about an hour and a half including troubleshooting/retries.

The 2nd installation on my Windows Server 2019 which is a hosted VM gave me this message:

And after trying again to click ok said this:

Never had something like this happen before during an install. 

I extracted the 1202 notes client as requested to get the MSI file and then the installation continued on its way. Also takes about 20 minutes.

So the Server install completed, even after asking for the 1202 code.

Now to figure out what is wrong with my Windows 11 install.

Domino Install

If you do a custom install, like I do, you will see the options to install Nomad and Ontime and I think Verse, my screen capture did not capture, sorry.

You will also see something my beta code did not do which is confirm the Domino login name for the startup services.

You may want to be careful with that if you don't know how you are logging in because your server may not start afterward.

Time to update was between 5-10 minutes including restarting the server and updating the Directory.

Traveler is also available and installs like usual in a few minutes.

Nomad works just like it did before, so the update did not change that, but it would be nice if it told us which version it was, instead of developer code which is 1.0.9.5525-3341. How do I know if mine was even updated? Maybe 1.0.9 was what was installed, but i already was at that level.

Verse works as well. 3.2, which I had installed, need to look up what version is installed as V14.

Ontime kept my configuration, and the booking settings still work as well.

Pretty cool when you think about all the stuff HC has to verify on the Domino side given these things are now included in the installation.

SMTP BlackListing, WhiteListing and Log and Reject/Tag

If you rely on your Domino server to handle all your mail, you probably have had numerous attacks on your server over time or even lately, as I did last week.

My personal Domino server is a mix of real code, websites, and active email, with various half-coded things and weird templates or customer testing.

However, I started getting harassed by sites looking for open SMTP accounts recently and figured something was amiss in my configuration document.

The official blacklist servers worked fine, but some of these rogues were missing.

Looking at my log file, I found a few domains/IP addresses and put them into the deny access group known as the Private Blacklist Filter found in the Servers Configuration document, as shown below.

But that wasn't enough to stop them. They kept coming. 

I wondered if 12.02.FP2 had some problems, so I opened a ticket with HCL.

Turns out the problem was on my end, but I still have some questions, but first, what was the problem?

I had a default configuration document, which was fine, but I  also had a separate one for my server explicitly named a relic from a test issue.

The explicit one took over the default one, and so while I thought I was maintaining one list, I was wasting my time.

I deleted the explicit one and just focused on the default document, it is my server after all.

And all was good, sort of.

I wanted to understand why I was still getting a few spam emails.

I had set the server to Log and tag instead of Log and reject. 

Here is where the problems got worse.

I decided to block all spam and set all fields to Log and reject messages. You probably can guess what happened next.

My inbox was very clean. Very few emails came through.

I thought I would whitelist what I needed, like bank mail, and HCL support mail (not so simple, someone at HCL should look into their SMTP issues that have them on a blacklist).

Still not getting lots of mail.

Next, I looked at what else was set in the doc and saw the verify domain lookup option was set, and rightly so as this does a great job.

However, I have learned that many organizations don't have good, clean SMTP/DKIM/SPF entries, and thus, they are getting blocked.

Sadly, I had to revert back to Log and tag to interact with customers and business partners.

Customers of mine with issues were notified, as was HCL, but if you have been playing with SMTP, something else always pops up. It needs babysitting.

While my mail is more stable now, I know I lost a few entities that got the denied server message and probably will not resend anything in the future. Which is a problem as some are bills and other items of usefulness.

If you are a new Domino administrator be careful with how you edit your Configuration document.

Data Extraction Help for Rich Text Field

Preamble:

This post is being written more for my long-term memory benefit than for its genius of development.

A customer wanted to export their data from an NSF to import into Salesforce.

They thought they could just export the view.

Sure, if the view had all the data, which of course, it did not.

Thus how it ends up in my inbox.

Action:

I created a view and proceeded to add a column for each field in their form.

No problem, done this many times.

When I verified the data before giving it to them, I found it was missing one field.

For unknown reasons, one can not see rich text in a view column even when specifying the field. Oh, and you can't specify a rich text field, either.

Developer friends are shaking their heads, they understand, but us admins, we figure it should just work, right?

Work Around Solution:

UPDATED EDIT: Thomas, in the comments pointed out, rightly so, that "Rich Text items can contain not only formatted texts, but tables, images, file attachments and more. But the abstract item will only contain the unformatted text." 

In this case, my client only has some textual notes in the field, but if they had other items, you should seek a proper developers help.

This is what I did after mentioning it in the openntf.org Discord chat, where I learned about the @abstract formula.

I used Jake's blog post, from 2001, http://www.codestore.net/store.nsf/unid/DFOU-4PRG73?OpenDocument, as the guide. But that was only one part of the story, and I had to fix the code.

Jake wrote: First thing to do is to create a Computed field, of type Text, and call it something like "Abstract". The formula for this will be somthing like :

@If(@IsAvailable(name_of_the_rt_field); @Abstract( [Abbrev]; 200; ""; "name_of_the_rt_field");"" )

Jake included a * at the end of the formula. My designer client balked at it, so I removed it, and it accepted the code as shown above.

I added a field to the original form, called it Abstract, and set it to type Text and Computed field.

Then entered the formula, substituting the name of my Rich text field, where Jake wrote name_of_the_rt_field.

I also changed the 200 to 2,000, so I could get all the text in the field. 

Saved it all, refreshed my view, and ..... nothing.

2nd Part Work Around Solution:

Further Googling found that the rich text field would only show up now if it was resaved.

I tested this, and sure enough, I resaved a form and magic, the rich text was shown in my view.

Great, but, I can't re-edit all 1,500 documents, nor know even if they have anything in the rich text field without opening it, so what do I do?

I asked Bruce Lill what he uses, and he said to create an agent, with a Forumla and a target set to none.

The formula to include is @Command([ToolsRefreshSelectedDocs])

And after saving it, selected a few forms and ran the agent, and now the rich text shows up.

And I can give the client their data for importing into Salesforce.

Conclusion:

Domino developers have dealt with this for many years and created workarounds for it. Admins have just lived in pure ignorance all this time about this issue.