April 26th, 2008
Excel import workaround that’s better than the original!
Well, you learn something new every day, and sometimes from the most surprising sources. Although we use Outlook for email, we had created an Asset Management application in Notes (using rich text fields to store scans of original invoices etc). We needed a way to export information from this application to an Excel spreadsheet to further manipulate it. This was where I discovered that Excel 2007 no longer imports Lotus 123 - see blog post from April 23.
A few days later the finance person using the Asset Tracker came back to me and said she had solved the export / import problem - just use "Copy as table" and paste into the spreadsheet! Wow - this finance person had never used Notes before, and come up with a work around that was much better / easier to use than the original process. (Note: Although cell background colors are preserved in Open Office, they are miss aligned. Background colors don't paste into MS Excel.) This just goes to show that you never stop learning, and that potentially anybody can teach you something.
April 22nd, 2008
Excel 2007 can’t open Lotus 123 spreadsheets
We hit this problem today trying to export a Notes view as a spreadsheet, and import it into Excel. Older versions of Excel could import a wk4 spreadsheet, but not so in Excel 2007. Maybe IBM / Lotus will finally provide a means to export native Excel files directly from Notes (or maybe this is just wishful thinking...!)
March 29th, 2008
New version of DocMaster: 4.1.9
Note: Busy updating Sat 29 March 2008. Updated files to follow in a few days.
DocMaster is a Single Database Document Management System. Its is used to manage large collections of loosely related documents, for example Policies & Procedures, Application Help, User Manuals, System Documentation etc. Of course the DocMaster User Manual and Application Help are written in DocMaster. Originally developed in 1994, it has been constantly enhanced over the years in response to user suggestions. Here is a link to the original DocMaster posting with more details.
DocMaster 4.0.82 is not (yet!) perfect, but there are a number of improvements over release 4.0.60, the previously published version. The attachment below contains the DocMaster help database (.nsf), and the production template (.ntf).
DocMaster_4-0-82.zip
DocMaster Change History
Below is a summary of the changes to DocMaster. This information is also in the help file.
28 March 2008: Release 4.1.9
28 March 2008: Release 4.1.8
1 February 2008: Release 4.1.7
2 October 2007: Release 4.1.6
1 October 2007: Release 4.1.4, 4.1.5
9 May 2007: Release 4.1.3
19 April 2007: Release 4.1.2
7 April 2007: Release 4.1.1
7 April 2007: Release 4.1.0
15 January 2007: Release 4.0.82
1 September 2007: Release 4.0.81
21 August 2006: Release 4.0.80
20 August 2006: Release 4.0.79
16 August 2006: Release 4.0.78
15 August 2006: Release 4.0.77
15 August 2006: Release 4.0.76
15 August 2006: Release 4.0.75
10 August 2006: Release 4.0.74
9 August 2006: Release 4.0.73
2 August 2006: Release 4.0.72
20 July 2006: Release 4.0.71
20 July 2006: Release 4.0.70
17 July 2006: Release 4.0.69
12 July 2006: Release 4.0.68
26 June 2006: Release 4.0.67
19 June 2006: Release 4.0.66
31 May 2006: Release 4.0.65
27 May 2006: Release 4.0.64
March 24th, 2008
Problems with Microsoft Server 2008?
Microsoft obviously run Windows servers, which they tout as highly reliable. Yet their eOpen web site has had a problem for the past 6 days (and maybe longer - it is just that I have been trying to download some software that we purchased for the past 6 days). I can only presume they are upgrading to Windows Server 2008. But that hardly inspires confidence when considering Windows Server. If Microsoft has this much difficulty getting their software to work, what will I experience?
The strangest thing is that I can reach the eOpen page with Firefox, but not with IE. But that doesn't make any difference, because I can't log in anyway.
March 14th, 2008
Outlook 2007 Calendar Bug
As a long-time Notes user who now uses Outlook at work, I always keep an eye open for problems / differences etc. Here is one problem with Outlook 2007 where if you drag an HTML email to your calendar, you loose the formatting & images. See the before and after images.
The original email before dragging it to the calendar 
The calendar entry created from the email 
January 31st, 2008
Thoughts on User interfaces - Pages vs Dialogs
I am one of those people who like to keep their financial affairs in order. To help with this task I have used MS Money since about 1993. A while ago problem with Money made me decide to change to Quicken. It was then that I realized the difference between the two classes of interface you find in the software world: broadly speaking they are dialog boxes versus pages.
Dialog boxes developed out of the character mode world where screen real estate was very limited. These days typical Windows applications have dialog boxes scattered throughout. A dialog box works by popping up over the underlying screen, and displaying relevant, context sensitive information when it is needed. Although dialog boxes work very well in some situations, they tend to be over used. Quicken (2006 version) is a very good example of this. When working with Quicken it is very easy to get into a situation where so many dialog boxes are open that you have no idea of where you are. And at that point the user interface has failed. What also shows up in Quicken is that dialog boxes do not scale. They work well when deployed on a small scale, but quickly break down when they are over used.
Although MS Money uses dialog boxes in many places, they also use pages to control many options. Because pages are larger, you can get more on them without cramming everything in (just like printed page layout, white space is important to help make sense of everything presented.) But there is something else going on here: it turns out that the paged interface is just easier for people to use. Our brains seem to be wired that way. As evidence I offer the way the internet has caught on. I think a large part of the success of the internet is that people relate to pages much better that they do to dialog boxes.
I spent about three months reviewing Quicken before taking the plunge and changing over. Doing my homework, reading the reviews, deciding that this was the right thing to do, etc. But very soon after converting my files and using it with real data, it became apparent that a huge mistake had been made. Now I have been working with software for over 10 years, so learning a new package should not be that hard. Yet even allowing for the fact that Quicken was a new package, I was taking 2 to 3 times longer to get the same tasks done compared to MS Money. And that was after using Quicken for two months. I can only attribute the difference to the user interface. And a large part of that is the difference between over using dialog boxes and the page interface.
About six months later when Microsoft release their new version of Money that could import Quicken files I swapped back. And, finally, I can balance my loan accounts again (you simply can't do that in Quicken.). And I get my accounts done in less than half the time it too with Quicken.
(Note: In this article I am not reviewing Quicken. I am simply comparing the Quicken user interface to the one in MS Money to illustrate the difference between the two approaches. If you have been using Quicken for years, it obviously works for you.)
December 21st, 2007
Color Blind Spreadsheets
While working on our Sox projects I was emailing spreadsheets around. To help track progress I "traffic lighted" certain cells: Green for no problem, yellow when I was waiting for someone, and red when I had to do something myself. I was using Excel 2007, but those receiving my spreadsheets were using Excel 2003. Every time I saved the file, Excel 2007 would wand me about a minor loss of fidelity but I paid little attention. That was until one user complained that there were no green cells on the spreadsheet – only yellow.
Now I must admit to being color deficient (or partially color blind). So when I chose green for the cells, it was a bit of a yellowish green. And when Excell saved my spreadsheet in 2003 format, it changed these green cells to bright yellow! My guess is that the 2007 version of the program uses 24 bit color (like a photo), whereas the 2003 version uses only 8 bit color (like a gif file). And when the 24 bit color was downgraded to 8 bit, the yellow green was changed to bright yellow – totally altering the meaning!
So beware when using Office 2007 and 2003 products in a mixed environment. Things can bite you if you are not careful.
Caveat emptor – Let the buyer beware.
In a recent Network World article IT Managers are warned against buying consumer class laptops. The logic implied is that higher prices mean better quality systems. Unfortunately my experience shows that paying more money by no means guarantees that you will get better systems.
In October 2007 I purchased four HP Compaq 8510p systems for evaluation for evaluation purposes, and supplied them to several end users, one of who was our corporate lawyer. Right from the beginning these systems had problems, with the ATI graphics card resetting and with the wireless cards taking over 15 minutes to connect.
Then things went downhill . Our corporate lawyer, who uses only MS Office, had blue screens every day with "infinite loop" error messages from the graphics card driver. (A little web research show that some ATI cards have suffered from Infinite loop errors for over 3 years). A driver update did nothing. HP sent a replacement for the corporate lawyers system. Within a few days the replacement system started blue screening. At the same time my laptop's graphics card started resetting occasionally. So HP sent two more replacement machines. When the first machine would not even boot, saying that the BIOS was not ACPI compliant things didn't look good. Sure enough, our corporate lawyer's machine started blue screening again, with increasing frequency. Eventually she gave it back to me, saying that it was useless. Another user has SAS on their machine. This one green screened – a first for me! (It looked like it went into character mode, showing rows of little green boxes).
With our Sox project taking up much of my time I just haven't been able to get these problems resolved. But apart from that, you really don't expect new laptops that cost about $2200 each to suffer from these problems. Out of 4 machines supplied every single one has a graphics card problem, and at least two of them have wireless problems. Including the replacement machines, the failure rate is over 100%! I am still struggling to get HP to resolve these problems.
Needless to say, we won't be buying any more HP laptops, which is a pity because I really liked them. While this experience can't be typical (if it was, I would expect HP to be out of the laptop business) it does show that paying more for laptops by no means guarantees that you will have fewer problems. If anything, considering the volumes sold, maybe it would pay IT manager to buy consumer class laptops.
Caveat emptor – Let the buyer beware.
December 20th, 2007
Sox
Today marks the end of a Sarbanes Oxley (Sox) project which has been consuming much of my time for months. My responsibility was getting the IT part of the company Sox compliant, and I'm pleased to say that after tying up a few loose ends the auditors gave us 100%. Considering that six months ago there was nothing in place, this leaves me feeling satisfied.
If there ever was something that cries out for tools like Lotus Notes or even SharePoint it is Sox. However, because of previous history and the consultants we were using, we ended up using the classic word doc, spreadsheet and email approach with a lot of cutting and pasting. This approach is very popular in many companies, but in reality is a very manual method. You often find it used for project management as well.
Spreadsheets track progress and summarize document content, and a significant part of the work consists of keeping them up to date. The core of Sox is developing policies and procedures (summarized in those spreadsheets), and then providing evidence that you are following you procedures. Fortunately most of these policies and procedures are well understood, but customizing them for a company involves emailing copies back and forth. Some of the documentation references other parts, and manually keeping this in sync is difficult to say the least. As I have said before it is impossible to keep any non trivial collection of documents in sync manually. And Sox certainly qualifies as a non trivial document collection. Is it any wonder that mail stores grow so fast with this approach? What really puzzles me is why some companies use such manual and inefficient methods to manage a particular process.
Now consider doing this using a workflow enabled tool like Notes or SharePoint. All the emailing of documents back and forth is no longer required. Audit trails show changes to documentation. And different views of those documents provided automatically updated summaries that replace the spreadsheets. Once you have such a system or tool in place my gut feel is that you will cut the work load by about 50%.
Which leaves the question – why is the "cut & paste" method so popular amongst IT professionals? We talk so much about collaboration, but we don’t practice it. Maybe we need read a book like Flawed Advice and the Management Trap and then take a good hard look in the mirror.
April 11th, 2007
Web Serendipity
Sometimes you can find gold nuggets in the rough. The nice thing about the web is that you can share these nuggets and everybody can benefit. Let me tell you about two that I have found recently. I enjoy travel and photography, and the web is an ideal way to make armchair visits around the globe. Unfortunately most web sites describing places are worse than useless: pictures scarcely larger than postage stamps, often lots of adds, and little useful information.
Enter Flickr and Wikipedia.
While reading an article on the BBC website about Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, I was fascinated by the stone carvings. Unfortunately the pictures on the BBC web site were too small. Now, one thing I have noticed is how useful Flickr and Wikipedia are when you want to see travel pictures of a place. Look up Rosslyn Chapel on Flickr and you will see lots of pictures taken by several people. Many of these are full resolution 2000 pixels across or larger. So if you want to look around at almost any place on the globe, just enter that name in Flickr. Most of the time you will find somebody has posted some pictures about that place, and those pictures will often give you a far better idea about the place that any tourist or commercial web site can do.
Recently an opportunity to visit the east shore in Maryland came up, and a friend suggested St Michael's as a destination. Googled web sites on St Michael's had little of interest. Then I tried St Michaels in Wikipedia - what a difference. One of the really great things about Wikipedia is that most of the pictures include links to full size images.
I don't think that using Flickr and Wikipedia as travel resources was something that could have been foreseen. But these are good examples of quite unexpected serendipitous benefits that sometimes surface.