This weekend I made some strange experience with a ‘foreign’ database design. The database consisted of a basic frame set with a navigation page on the left and the main view display to the right. The navigation had been driven by an outline that mainly linked to view design elements.

After adding a new private view to this database I dashed into some really buggy behaviour. When I closed the database while on of the private views had been focused, the next time I opened the database I ended up with an error message:

Insufficient frame/frameset handles

and a whole bunch of database links opened up on the top of my workspace.

A quick research on the web has not provided me with any clue until I started to inspect the whole design. To make it short:  the issue had mainly been caused by (missing) target frame settings. (more…)

First of all apologies in case my previous comment guided somebody into some dead end lane. I discovered today that I missed a tiny little but very important detail and I am kind of ashamed myself that I forgot the simple basics of reader and author fields.
The important bit of working with reader or author fields is that they are restricting the access to the document as soon as one of them had been added to a document. This is going to be especially important with reader fields. (more…)

Additional to the best practices linked in my previous comment IBM has now published a couple of more guides which are definitely a must read for all domino administrators. The documents do not appear on the Master Checklist yet. However, the new Notes from Lotus Support blog has linked them in there most recent article.

This documentation had been extended. Please follow up with Part II linked in the comments section ! 

Speaking about best practices there is one item to remember.

IBM describes in the users’ guide how user can prevent others from accessing their documents by changing the security settings of the document. Unfortunately nobody mentions the implications of this action for replication purposes.

Changing the access settings within the option dialogue shown below actually creates a $Readers field within the document which restrict, beneath all possible other reader fields, the access to the document to the IDs listed.

Since the user usually does not care about access settings for the server, which is necessary for replication purposes, I consider the creation of an additional reader field containing the LocalDomainServers group within each form as a best practice to make sure that these documents are going to be replicated even if the appropriate servers or server groups are not explicitly added by the user. Same could be true for OutsideDomainServers, depending on the environment the application is going to be used.

Originally I did not intend to put this list onto my site since many others have done so already. But since I had been searching for it this week again and again … well, I know there are bookmarks and things in a browser but I currently do not use them this frequently and since dog ears firstly become available with the new quickr product I need to store my knowledge in the place to be.

Here is the topic:

IBM recently published a set of best practices relating to Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino. It is supposed to be the beginning of a new series. I presume the strategy is to have some documentation on a technical level between the basic application help and the heavy, 500 pages red books as kind of survival guide for heavily overloaded system administrators as I currently tend do be. It’s a pity that the series is currently not made available as a PDF file that could be easily print and read first thing in the morning after opening or last thing in the evening before closing the eyes. But I guess this only might be some of my special habits of not being able to read documentation on a screen.

This is the list of articles currently available:

• Domino Performance Best Practices
• Domino Server Sizing Best Practices
• Domino Web Access Best Practices
• Domino Upgrade & Migration Best Practices
• Transactional Logging Best Practices

Articles to come are:

• Domino Administration Best Practices
• Calendaring & Scheduling Best Practices
• Domino Security Best Practices
• Managing Directories and Groups Best Practices
• Testing Applications Best Practices

And I can’t wait finding some time to finally read this documents beneath all the other stuff, which is waiting for my brain to observe.