SnTT - Rooms and Resources Accidentally Delete a Resource and the Reservations

Last week I gave a session where I outlined a bunch of things I would like to see in the new Rooms and Resources database template should it get updated.

Yes some things were just more defined views, but other things that would make it more useful to admins, and users, were also included.

Well yesterday I learned the hard way about some things I knew, but I guess had not quite gotten to fix yet. Let me explain.

One of my clients has some very full RnR databases, 1 per region. Sometimes, against my preference, names or very similar names, are used in different places.

Tasked with clearing some old rooms, I set out to do just that and get on with my day.

And, of course, as you may have guessed, I deleted an active room.

Very active room.

400 reservations active.

As I saw when the pop up asked me if I wanted to notify people. I said no to that, knowing I can fix this. Well a few hours later, here is what really happened.

Oh.Yes.I.Did.

Domino problems are caused by admins, truth (except for developer agents that run amok).

I say, no problem, go to trash and undelete it. No Trash View in this R9 template. Note to HCL, please add one. Go into developer mode figuring it would be in the hidden view.

No

Call client developer and ask what they think, SOL. Soft deletion was not turned on.

Damn. Thought we had enabled it after last issue, but maybe the template got written over in an update or a restore and maybe we had only set soft deletions in the database itself and not the template.

In any event, I was blocked this route.

Call restore team, can you provide me with a backup from the prior 24-48 hours ASAP?
Yes, no problem they said.

Great, restore completes and I go to try to get back the data and...it shows me what I see now, not what I should have seen for a day ago.

AGH!

Call restore team, ask how it is possible. Well replication was on, ok, try again, turn it off this time.

And get notification, go open it up, same problem!

Well now I am confused. Got the team together to figure it out, and it seems they do incremental backup sand logs.

I said I don't want logs just data.

And 3rd time lucky, I open it up and it is the old data. Perfect, I start to copy a doc to test that pasting it back in will work.

BAH! No dice, this database doe snot allow pasting of documents.

WHAT!?!?!?!?!?!

Call back the developer, ask how I, as the admin, can not do this. Well, she knew why and where to look to fix it. And now I will let you know because someone out there will read this after pulling their hair out.

Open the database in the Designer client and go to the views section.

Find the view you need to paste into, you will need 2 of them.
The first is the resources view itself because you need to copy back the deleted resource.
The second is the view of Reservations, by Resource so you can paste back all of the reservations you killed accidentally.

Once you have the view open, locate the Querypaste section as shown in the graphic below and REM out all of the code there and save it.

Once you do this and reopen the database you should be able to paste everything back in.

Then run a Fixup and Updall to get everything cleaned up and reindexed and then test making a reservation that honors used and open times.

You learn something new every day, even after all these years.

EDIT: Adrian asked me on twitter about Adminp and Busytime. I forgot to discuss it, so here is what we did and what you should check.

Adminp at the customer is set to run on a set schedule, so it did not worry me, but you should go into the database and clear the delete request otherwise you will lose the setting in the names.nsf for the resource.

Busytime, I did not rebuild it because my tests showed it was working. Presumably because the dates/times had been in the database already and did not update but if you run into problems, you should follow the technote and clear the old busytime and let a new one start.

Connect2013 Tip #3 Exporting Your Notes Calendar

Just a few more days and a whole new world will open before your eyes at Connect2013!

But for now, we have to build up interest and what better interest is there than various tips for users?

So far I discussed Lotus Notes letterhead and Sametime Goodies and for today I decided to discuss a Notes Calendar trick. This is helpful not just for the reasons described but if you need to do compliance work or some other similar areas.

If your calendar looks like mine for next week, you may be going to Connect.

  

What if you needed to get this on to a different mail file, say your Notes9 test site and it is not in your domain? Or in my case I want all my personal and company meetings to merge properly. 

Fellow IBM Champion Mat Newman outlined some examples to get an ical feed for your Notes calendar and getting Facebook birthdays and events in your Notes calendar in case you are wondering. In this case I am unable to bridge the domains and see each others mail. You may find synching to Gmail and then back to your phone works but not in my specific case. So here is how i got around it.

1)Bring up your calendar and change the view to show summary from the drop down on the Right side of the page

2) Now check all the events you want copied over

3) Now click File-Export from the menu bar and enter a name, I used week and make sure to  select calendar file (.ics). Also put the file someplace accessible from the 2nd machine, like a network share or a dropbox account or email it to the other domain.

4) You will be asked if you want ALL your documents exported, be sure to only click Selected Documents.




5) Now swap over to your other machine or client, open your calendar view and select File-Import. locate the file and open it.

6) You will see a pop up window asking about importing into your calendar with a preview of the entries. You may choose not to use notify me, your phone or client would be going off all the time.

7) Click OK


8) Done, simple enough. if you had similar entries already in place at the other location you will be prompted what to do with them

Maybe not as much fun as the other tips, but just as useful.

See you at Connect!

White Space? Doesn't everyone have an Email system?

Evidently not.

Yes, there is life on the planet that does not have a corporate email solution in
place.

Sure, there are some small outfits or startups who don't have anything, but this is a company doing some serious business with offices in 3 locations, 2 in the US and about 100 people.

But they use FREE tools. How cool! How cheap! How....frustrating!!!

Seems the IT person/people had a great idea to use web tools (not ones I even know, but to each their own findings) and Linux file servers running some homespun email, and well, you get the picture. They have serious issues with a failure of various services, some web 2.0 software they used going under, their file server platform needs to get restarted daily, they use an ISP mail server, they have no calendaring/scheduling, they use a (1)Google calendar for everyone to manage their calendar, but send invites via an Outlook like program and track other bits of meeting info in a spreadsheet, which is shared between the AA's and... well it's amazing they get it all done.

We were asked to discuss LotusLive(LL for the rest of this post).
We ruled out LLiNotes because they also want a full client, they can't depend on Internet access for everything all the time.
LLNotes was deemed appropriate because of their need for a mixed client and browser requirements to accommodate everyone's way of working, I can appreciate their forward thinking on this.
LLEngage was included as they want collaboration, sharing of files(inside and out), Meetings and parts of the Lotus Connections which is in the offering.

After meeting with the executive in charge, we sat down with some people who setup meetings and we learned how they work and their frustrations. Something I learned over 15 years ago is always ask the administrative assistants if you want to know what works or doesn't in a company and just what they do every day, because these are the 10% of people who use 90% of the product, really, so befriend them if you know what's good for you...and them. Done with lesson.

So they proceeded to detail how they set a meeting.

First, they go to the great Google calendar they use to see what time is free...for everyone. Yes, most of the employees time is kept in there. Then they find a time(somehow)that works for everyone.

Second, they must find a phone line which is available for the conf. call. They use...a spreadsheet to track this. Evidently their Google calendar does not have a resources option. They provide a line they think might be open based on anything scheduled around the meeting. I kid you not.

Third, they have a location which uses....Outlook. Not Exchange or so I was told, just Outlook for their calendar and email. So these poor AA's have to send an Outlook invite to those people and a Google one to everyone else, I gave up asking why after a while. Suffice it to say they need a little direction as they are expected to double in size next year.

Fourth, they then have to track everyone that accepted or not to merge the 2 different calendars plus outside people. I immediately thought of Tungle and advised them to use it. And save a huge amount of time and effort, but they don't want to learn something new and then another thing after(the LL they meant). While I explained it works together, decided it better to push forward.

Fifth, there is the problem with seeing someone's email, especially if there is NO server for email. Sorry did I forget that part? All emails are downloaded to each person's pc. Never mind Business Continuity or Government requirements(we also discussed what they should or should not do, I suggested their corporate lawyers provide a guideline and then we can discuss it, I am not a lawyer and can not advise on that properly). So they almost have to play phone tag with people to verify times/dates, some people seem to use an IM or Skype but not enough.

I could go on, but you get the picture.

Now, after all this, I sat down with my laptop and showed them 3 different ways to create those same meetings requests. I used LotusLive, Notes and the Domino iNotes clients. Imagine their faces, and comments, as I showed them the meeting options in the Notes and iNotes side include the LotusLive details for dialin and meeting details, Group Calendar option, colored layers(they have that in Google but not one for themselves and everyone else), free time lookups, resource reservations, auto processing for meetings and a few other items they asked about.

Happy to hear them say things like "Something really does all of that?" or "OMG, we don't have to deal with 4 different lookups and systems?" and my favorite "We can't do this in Outlook!".

At no time did anyone voice a bad opinion about Notes or IBM. True the exec was in the room, but even after he left, everyone was just amazed and impressed at what they saw.

Next thing is to setup a demo for the AA's on some items they asked about so they can walk through a few meeting setups on their own to make sure we have all the pieces they use/need.

So the next time you hear there is no new opportunities out there, just remember, you see what you want to see.

Did I mention these guys have an office inside a building where Microsoft has offices. I almost went to the MS office just to go talk to their local evangelist but as our meeting ran over by an hour or so had to get home. Maybe next time I will check it out. That might be an interesting post.

More Sidebar Coolness and perhaps confusion in 8.5.1

Something else which is really nice to have is the ability to drag an email over to your sidebar and drop it on the data/time necessary.

Amazing time savings and effort. Of course now I have to retrain people to use the Sidebar.

This is a good thing.

The downside is they will ask why can't they drag and drop the email into the little calendar piece instead of the hourly line which is shown above in the picture below?

And why can't they drag an opened email to it? It only works if the email is in the inbox.

This is fine if used in preview mode but what about those who don't use it? Or worse don't know it exists?

But it's here it works and so far saved me a ton of extra effort already.

PS - I still can not drag an email to the To Do Window :-(

Time it was and What a Time it Was, It Was

NOT!

I missed an appointment this morning, well a phone call actually, with a person I want to do some business with when I am in London this summer.

By mistake, mine, I entered it in the wrong time period.

Oddly enough I have another meeting soon and Google sent me a reminder about it as well, but their reminder shows the wrong time. It's is 4 hours off, not 5.

This one I have properly, we both used Lotus Notes.

So if you are going to Gmail, better watch yourself on those across time zone schedules.

Fud Buster Friday #37 - Exchange 2010 is Going to Kill Domino

While perusing InfoWorld magazine this week I came across an amazing piece of fluffy reporting from someone who should be able to do better.

His quote

Reliability has improved in Exchange 2010

Damn well hope so! One of our clients who we are migrating from Exchange report failures monthly if not weekly. Conversely my Domino servers stay up until I down them for upgrades(OS,Domino,Java etc.) once a quarter.

So aside from the great title, "First look: Exchange 2010 beta shines", what is so great?

First, Support for Windows Server 2003 is dropped in favor of Windows Server 2008 only. Okay, so we will see more push to move up to Windows 2008.

OWA (Outlook Web Access) will finally be ported to work with Safari and Firefox. Nice, iNotes and DWA under Domino has had it for some time, in various iterations(yes I know version specific, but at least it exists today).

Voice Mail Previews? OK, it provides a speech to text way to read your voice mail. Hmm, so why send the vmail at all as an attachment? Google just showed this recently. Nice piece actually, I hate listening to vmails and my phone doesn't play them so this I would like to see in Domino.

Users can create server distribution lists. WOW! And to think users had that capability, with proper security in place since version 1 of Lotus Notes. Welcome to the security world Microsoft.

Managers can search other employees mail files. With approved security. I hope so!

And they could not do it now because? Microsoft saw no reason to let you do it. Only Admins could search across mail files.

"The Exchange Control Panel (ECP) allows users to control their own server settings. Changing a user's mobile phone number in the global address list used to require a help desk call." It does? Really? Granular security coming to Microsoft finally. Thanks Ray for adding Lotus Notes functions that are 20 years old!

He says

Users can also control who can see their calendar information and in what detail: I might want my supervisor to know when I have a doctor's appointment, but all a colleague needs to know to schedule a meeting with me is when I'm free and when I'm busy.

What a concept, again, where have you been Exchange?


Mailboxes can now be moved live without taking the user offline. Isn't that how it should always be done? Again, Microsoft plays catch up.

But he says

Moving a mailbox from one server to another formerly required taking the user offline for at least a couple of hours, not to mention night and weekend hours for the mail administrator.

OUCH!

There was also this amazing insight:

Exchange 2010 now allows mail federation between trusted companies. This is especially powerful when it comes to scheduling meetings using shared free/busy calendars; suddenly, you can schedule meetings with your business partners as easily as you can schedule meetings within the company. You have the same fine-grained control over the detail that business partners can see in your calendar as you do over what colleagues can see. Another improvement in scheduling is that conference rooms and other meeting resources can be scheduled along with the attendees.

Ho Hum, thanks for following the Lotus Notes world, again. And that improvement in scheduling is also nice to hear so you can gain some parity with Lotus Notes calendaring.

So your boss wants to stay, or go with Exchange because he likes being the laggard instead of the industry leader?
You can also go back and read Ed Brill's post from last week about this and the volumes of comments about it.

Calendar Profile...Don't you hate that error?

Keith Taylor commented about it from my last post, Fud Buster Friday #29, and I realized I never blogged it before although I see it EVERYWHERE.

There are numerous errors and issues, some are more obvious than others. These appear when you first start up Domino and the server is checking various points of interest, well points of it's own interest. You can also find these, if you never noticed them, in your statrep.nsf(using the infamous name, Monitoring Results) file. Select Events, By Severity.
This will also show you what is wrong in your server(s). Before you do this, be warned, not everything you see is bad, so pay attention and react accordingly. If you need help, ask me.

I will try to hit the main ones in this post.

1)Keep in mind, the most common reason, if you as the Admin open up an employee's mail file and look at the preferences under the more option in the mail file you will see YOUR name NOT the employee. You can either have the employee login and fix this by selecting their name or you will have to run a lotus script agent to resolve it. See more details here(technote #1088892). This is usually the way to do it but I will list a few more possibilities in case you see other messages.

2) SchedMgr: Error processing calendar profile document
(NoteID: NT0000XXXX) in database mail\UserMailFile.NSF: Can't find user in Name and Address Book

Basically what it says is the mail file exists but the user no longer does.
Move the mail file out of the Domino directory to your file server and this goes away. For more details(it's an adminp issue based on what YOU the admin tell it) see the technote #1089324.

3)"SchedMgr: Error processing calendar profile document (NoteID: NT0000xxxx) in database filename.nsf: Can't find $BusyName field on profile"

Also somewhat cryptic but obvious. If you can't find a name on the preferences field of course this won't work. Right? Right.

So you have a few ways to resolve this, read the technote it goes into detail and includes code for you to fix this.

I would have included more except IBM's support search site went down and I need to head out. May update this or post a 2nd entry on this topic if anyone has more odd profile issues they want answered.