This morning I was stumbling upon a very interesting issue in Lotus Notes/Domino that involved truncated documents on a server replica. This is an issue as the database on the server is the only one, besides a number of local replicas on laptops.

A bit of research on the web unveiled that Almar Diel has encountered a similar problem, which pointed me towards the right solution.

In order to get the full documents back onto the server replica I had to find the laptop that was holding the replica with the corrupt replication formula as this had to be cleared out as described in workaround option 2 of this IBM technote.

This will ensure that all documents replicated from now on would not be appearing as truncated documents anymore on the server. In order to fix the existing truncated documents though, I had to remove the documents from the server replica without leaving deletion stubs. This can easily be achieved in utilising Julian Robichaux’ stub-less delete function documented here. Clearing out the replication history of the local database and issuing a new replication did make the documents re-appearing on the server replica in there entirety.

Thanks to Almar and Julian for documenting your solutions!

If I was managing Apache web servers day after day I would have probably known the answer to that issue straight away. Instead I had to utilise Google quite a bit in order to find out how to add Office 2007 documents as mime type for the Domino web service: Microsoft Office 2007 documents do not open/save correctly when accessed over the web

Without changing the httpd.cnf file Word 2007 documents for example are recognised as “Compressed (zipped) Folder”, which makes it impossible to associate the file with Microsoft Office.

It’s not like Office 2007 isn’t around since about 2 years. How could this have slipped through the Lotus Domino 8.5.1 release by IBM?

Great news! The Traveler administration database now provides administrators with the option to set default device preferences and security settings. This is awesome news as it does reduce the need for policies in many cases. This is especially important in cases where the Traveler server is located in a different Domino domain than the mail servers.

I am truly stunned what technology can achieve those days. Just discovered that there is now the possibility to display your Google contacts’ birthdays within the Google calendar. Check out the ‘more’ section in this document.

Combine above with the new 8.5.1 feature that allows for calendar feeds to be downloaded for offline use:

Now syncronise your mail file with your mobile device using Traveler. Within a flash you got all your Google Calendar entries replicated to your mobile device using pure Lotus technology.

In case you are planning to upgrade to Lotus Traveler 8.5.1, ensure that you are replacing the index.html file in the <Domino data directory>\domino\html\traveler folder after the upgrade. The new file is provided as index_template.html and is part of the installation.

Without updating the index.html file, mobile users trying to download the updated phone client would still be getting the 8.5 version.

You can confirm that the new index.html page is in place when the Nokia Series 60 entry has been split up into a 3rd Edition and 5th Edition client as shown below.