How to get secure, remote access to IBM Lotus iNotes with Lotus Mobile Connect Sunday, Nov 9 2008 

Tech Tip ozkanerk 12:37 pm

Using IBM Lotus iNotes together with Lotus Mobile Connect clientless option provides secure remote access to enterprise iNotes servers from various devices like PDAs, notebooks, PCs, etc. With Lotus Mobile Connect, the security is provided with the following two options:

  1. Lotus Mobile Connect provides a virtual private network for which the Lotus Mobile Connect client is installed on various supported user platforms.
  2. For HTTP-based applications - like Lotus iNotes - Lotus Mobile Connect provides a clientless option. This option does not require any additional software to be installed on the remote device; instead, it provides secure authentication through a browser-based logon.

 

How to modify font and color properties of unread/read documents in Notes 8.0.2 Sunday, Oct 19 2008 

Tech Tip ozkanerk 1:52 pm

In Lotus Notes 8.0.2, you need to modify the notes.css including in a JAR file for modifying font and color properties of unread/read documents. To update this jar file, you need to follow a special process.

  • Stop your Notes Client
  • Backup the initial jar file (com.ibm.notes.branding_8.0.2.20080809-0430.jar).
  • Extract the notes.css, containing in the “themes” folder.
  • Create a folder “themes” with notes.css in the folder “\framework\shared\eclipse\plugins”
  • Modify the notes.css : For unread mail in red color, you just need to change the color value as described below:

            mailtable>row>unread {

              color: red;

              font-family: Tahoma, Times, Helvetica;

              …

  • Launch the following command :

          jar uf com.ibm.notes.branding_8.0.2.20080809-0430.jar themes\notes.css

  • Restart your Notes Client

 

How to give someone else access to your e-mail Saturday, Oct 18 2008 

Domino and Tech Tip ozkanerk 1:23 pm

When another person has access to your Lotus Notes mail file, they can perform tasks for you, such as reading your mail and responding on your behalf.You decide how much access you want them to have. You allow access to your mail file by setting a Mail preference.

  1. Click More
  2. Click Preferences
  3. Click the Access & Delegation tab
  4. In Access to Your Mail & Calendar tab under Access & Delegation click Add,
  5. In the new window (Add People/Groups window), click the arrow next to “Just this person or group” to select from a directory
  6. Select a person or group from the window opened and then Click Ok,
  7. Select the components to which you want to allow access (like Mail, Calender, To Do and Contacts / Calendar, To Do and Contacts / None,
  8. Select the arrow in the Access frame to choose how much access you want your delegate to have.
  9. Click Ok,
  10. Click Ok to save your Access & Delegation preference

After following the above steps, you can successfully give someone else access to your e-mail!

 

Virtual Loaner Program Monday, Mar 20 2006 

Tech Tip admin 2:43 am

PartnerWorld Industry Networks run a “Virtual Loaner Program”, which makes computing capacity available to developers and integrators for development, testing, certification and such.

The facility provides secure remote access to a variety of computing platforms and all registered PartnerWorld members are eligible for this benefit.

Read more about the Virtual Loaner Program

 

Technote: How to redirect WebSphere Portal fixpack upgrades to a location other than ‘/tmp’ Thursday, Nov 24 2005 

Tech Tip admin 2:59 am

How to redirect WebSphere Portal fixpack upgrades to a location other than ‘/tmp’

During the application of fixpacks to WebSphere Portal, prerequisite checks are performed to determine if there is sufficient space available in ‘/tmp’. When enough space is not available, the updatePortal command fails and you are prompted to increase the size of /tmp. You can repartition the file system to increase the size of /tmp; however, you would prefer to redirect the fixpack upgrades to another location. How can this be accomplished?

 

Technote - Reverse Proxy Administration of the WebSphere Caching Proxy Tuesday, Mar 8 2005 

Portal and Tech Tip admin 5:46 am

Slightly offtopic - but relevant for people running the Edge components in a clustered Portal or Workplace environment !

Reverse Proxy Administration of the WebSphere Caching Proxy

This technote describes how to gain access to the Caching Proxy administration GUI when the proxy server is configured as a reverse proxy server.

For related information about this topic, refer to the following IBM Redbooks publication:
IBM WebSphere V5 Edge of Network Patterns, SG24-6896-00

Introduction

This technote describes how to gain access to the Caching Proxy administration GUI when the proxy server is configured as a reverse proxy server.

The Caching Proxy component of WebSphere Application Server Edge Components V6 is both a caching proxy server and a content filter. It can be used to provide a robust, efficient proxy server with an optional cache. The caching proxy server can be configured to operate as:

* A forward proxy server for clients
* A transparent proxy server for clients
* A reverse proxy server for other back-end servers

The Caching Proxy is supported on AIX, HP-UX, Linux (Intel, z/390 zSeries, iSeries, or pSeries), Solaris, Windows 2000 Server, and Windows 2003 Server. For the purposes of this technote, the Caching Proxy is installed on a Windows 2000 Server system.

The Caching Proxy, when configured as a reverse proxy server, acts on behalf of one or many back-end servers. A reverse caching proxy intercepts client requests arriving from the Internet, forwards them to the appropriate back-end server content hosts, caches the returned data (if requested to), and delivers that data to clients across the Internet. The cached data can satisfy a request for the same pages at a later time. In this manner, a reverse proxy can reduce the amount of traffic and processing that a back-end server must perform to satisfy duplicate Internet requests for data, while at the same time improving the response time for those requests.

The Caching Proxy is administered using the browser-based Configuration and Administration forms GUI supplied with the Caching Proxy. These forms run CGI programs that edit the proxy server configuration file, ibmproxy.conf.

 

New Redbooks Tuesday, Nov 2 2004 

Domino and General and Portal and Tech Tip and Workplace admin 4:28 am

Draft Redpaper: REDP3902 Using the Domino JSP Custom Tags: An Approach to Portalizing Domino Applications (last updated: October, 26, 2004)

Draft Redbook: SG246438 WebSphere Portal Security Handbook (last updated: October, 29, 2004)

Draft Redbook: SG246378 Lotus Workplace 2.01 Products: Deployment Guide (last updated: October, 20, 2004)

Draft Redbook: SG246391 WebSphere Portal V5.0 Production Deployment and Operations Guide (last updated: October, 20, 2004)

Redbook: SG246349 Document Management Using WebSphere Portal V5.0.2 and DB2 Content Manager V8.2 (last updated: October 25, 2004)

Redbook: SG246368 Lotus Workplace Web Content Management and Content Manager Working Together for LWWCM Java Edition V2 and CM V8 Only (last updated October 29, 2004)

Redbook: SG246357 Lotus Domino 6.5.1 and Extended Products Integration Guide (last updated: October 13, 2004)

Technote: TIPS0453 User Provisioning for Integrated WebSphere Portal V5.0.2 and DB2 Content Manager V8.2 Solutions (last updated: October, 25, 2004)

Technote: TIPS0451 Deploy Large War Files to WebSphere Portal V5.0.2 Configured with an External IBM HTTP Server (last updated: October, 19, 2004)

Technote: TIPS0452 Configure Single Sign-on for WebSphere Portal V5.0.2 and DB2 Content Manager V8.2 Using LDAP and LtpaTokens (last updated: October, 21, 2004)

 

Tech Tip: problems with wpconfig.properties file Wednesday, Oct 27 2004 

Portal and Tech Tip admin 4:02 am

One of my colleagues just had a problem with their Portal server, when they were attempting to migrate the data out of Cloudscape to DB2 using the wpsconfig database-transfer-export command.

The error she got was:

BUILD FAILED

C:/WebSphere/PortalServer/config/wpconfig.xml:23:
taskdef class com.ibm.wps.depcheck.PortalValidationAntTask cannot be found

I did some searching and found some PMRs in the system which described problems people had with things like their wpconfig.properties file being accidently converted from ASCII to Unicode (probably by the application they were using to edit the file), thus rendering it unreadable by the wpsconfig task.

As it turned out, this was not exactly the problem my colleague had… her problem was that the wpconfig.properties file was not actually in the config directory !!! We suspect it had accidently been dragged-and-dropped to another folder in Windows Explorer (I’ve done this myself many times in the past !).

So, the symptoms match… if the config task can’t read the wpconfig.properties file (or can’t even find it !!!!), then you might see that PortalValidationAntTask error.