This post is designed to collate information and guide you towards moving away from Lotus Notes and into Outlook and therefore increase productivity by about 3000%.
Requirements
- Lotus Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook (DAMO) Interim Fix 6 – This is the IBM developed plug-in for Outlook that will do all the work.
- Outlook - I have only tested this with Outlook 2010.
Setup Guide
- Download (See link above) and install DAMO.
- During installation you will be asked for the following information:
- Lotus Domino Server Name – In Lotus Notes 8 go to File->Locations->Manage Locations->Edit->Servers. For example, for me the server was d23ml006/23/m/ibm. Note that I had to remove the appended slashes to get the following: d23ml006.
- Lotus Notes ID File – This is essentially your user profile. Its location will depend on where Lotus Notes is installed for you. For example, for me it was in C:\Notes\Data\myUsername.id. If you still can’t find it, do a search for *.id.
- The installation will create a MAPI profile for Outlook to use, which is basically a collection of settings for talking to your Lotus Domino server.
- Start Outlook and select the newly created MAPI profile.
- Note: If you get an error that Outlook cannot access a file, it is because in Windows 7 you must elevate Outlook to administrator. You can do this by right clicking on the Outlook icon in the start menu, and selecting properties->compatibility, and checking the “Run this program as an administrator” checkbox. Please note that running Outlook as an administrator is a bad idea in general, so please set this option back to normal once you have completely setup DAMO.
- The DAMO plugin will launch another setup process and retrieve mails and other settings from your domino server.
- Note: You may find that DAMO will not download all of your data or stop. This is ok. It often takes several restarts of Outlook to fully download all of your data. Be patient.
- Close Outlook if requested.
- Done! Enjoy a new life free of email evil!
Known Issues
- If you are an IBM employee, certain emails that access the Domino databases such as Payroll and Claim receipts will not render in Outlook. It is suggested that if you want to keep these emails that you open Notes and print the email to PDF and store it elsewhere.
The Issue
A few months ago a client came in from another part of the business and had an issue where the DHCP server appeared to not have given the PC any DNS entries. This of course was a big problem – DNS is critical to any PC wanting to talk outside of its own broadcast domain. I only had limited time to find a solution to the issue so I had to put together a work-around before coming to the root cause. The work-around was simple enough – Manually supply the DNS addresses and move on. But before the client left I managed to take a Wireshark packet capture of the DHCP event, and sure enough the DNS server addresses were definitely in both the DHCP offer and client response. So something was wrong with the clients’ PC.
All my research turned up was people with similar issues and no real pattern other than a certain sub-set of NIC chipsets. So when I saw it pop up again this week on a HP workstation I immediately got excited about the possibility of nailing this bastard of a problem. I recorded the NIC chipset details and went to work on isolating the issue. I first had to make sure this was really the weird DHCP problem described earlier – I made sure it wasn’t some DHCP scoping problem or an AD group policy of some sort, and finally I did a Wireshark capture. Sure enough, the DNS server addresses were definitely in there. So again, the PC knew about the DNS server address, but it just didn’t apply them. Why?
Luckily, after a lot of Googling I believe I’ve found the fix…
Last year I decided I’d bite the bullet and learn C++ with the end-goal of being able to finally design and build my own applications and games. So I went and got the fantastic C++ video tutorial library from 3D Buzz, which I strongly recommend any new C++ video game developer go through – They take you right form start to finish. All the way from an ASCII rogue-like game to a sprite-based game. Furthermore, its all designed in pretty OO.
As I began the 6th and last series of the 3D Buzz tutorials – Creating a 3D OpenGL engine – I decided I’d like to focus less on the core mathematics of displaying pixels and more on the creation and design of actual games. I’m not a very good mathematician after-all, and getting into that kind of stuff requires low-level efficient code. Code I really don’t have the skill to write just yet.
So I started looking around for graphics engine libraries that’ll allow me to focus on the game itself. There are a startlingly huge number of graphics engines out there, both free and not, and while I went through quite a damn few I want to talk about just one.
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I usually don’t care much for DS games, or any games from a portable game device, but Scribblenauts is just too unique not to have a crack at. Since I don’t have a DS and don’t really like the idea of having to buy a DS just to play Scribblenauts I figured I’d enter the ol’ Emulator scene in the hope this game plays nice with the most popular emulators of today.
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Little script I made. Pretty self explanatory. Works real well.
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There comes a time in a games life that it just doesn’t cut it anymore and it refuses to work flawlessly in modern day operating systems. That’s usually a good sign that the game should be thrown out and forgotten. But there are some that you just can’t do that to – Dungeon Keeper 2 being one of them. So here I will show you how to get DK2 working fine under VISTA SP1.
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Don’t have a DS but want to play GTA: Chinatown Wars on PC? Or just cannot be fucked having to bust it out every time you want to play a game? Great, because it works fine on PC! I’ve only been playing it for 5 minutes but it appears to work 99% correctly – A little slow at times but otherwise great. Haven’t tried saving the game yet so I’m not sure there.
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I’ve been using the iGoogle home page for quite some time now, and it is an exceptional online tool – Infinitely modifiable to ones wants and needs. I have mine setup nicely so I can jump on and instantly see whats going on in all the areas that interest me. It is effectively a ‘Next-Gen’ newspaper, and one I cannot easily live without these days.
But some time ago Google forcefully rolled out a new version with the Canvas View feature, which adds a tab bar down the left hand side and makes a lot of the gadgets capable of maximizing to the width of the page without having to actually load a new page. It is very cool in some respects and I’m sure many people simply love its usefulness. I am not one of those people.
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[Update 13/09/09]
Thanks to a commenter below, it looks like one can simply hit the space bar on the keyboard to fix the issue!
Opened up Photoshop CS3 today to find that none of the tools worked at all. No matter what tool i selected the mouse cursor would stay stuck on the hand icon and attempting to use the tool anyway did nothing. I was really quite confused. I couldn’t find a thing on the internet about it at all. I restarted the application several times with no dice. In my frustration I went to grab a drink. When i came back, the Photoshop application i had left open was working just fine *shrugs*. Odd huh?
I took another look on Google about it later and saw a few people discussing it. Some claimed it was a memory issue, some said you needed to reset all the tool and window preferences citing that the preferences file was corrupted. Seems to me a healthy dose of time is all it needs. My guess is that the thread managing the tools got held up doing something trivial such as looking for updates over the net.
Anyhow, thought I’d shout it out as i was pretty annoyed over it at the time.
I recently got my first of hopefully many wallet-busting Terminator collectibles in the form of a life size T-800 (or 101, depending on who you talk to) endoskeleton bust, and he is a beauty. This is the Combat (Battle Damaged) version of the bust, which is identical to the chromed version except it has been painted up a little. Full review after the jump.
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