Social Connections V – StarWars all over again?

Posted on April 3, 2013 by notesbusters

If you are reading this you are social and somehow are involved with the whole IBM software stack relationship social thingamajig or another …. So, unless you live under a rock you have heard of the – very successful – SOCIAL CONNECTIONS shindig that happens on a regular basis and is instigated (among several other, very hardworking individuals) Stuart McIntyre.

In spite of being the model of British reserve and gentleman-ship, Stuart is well know and renowned for his strength in the “the Social Stuff”, or as we like to say – the FORCE is strong in him . . .

Social Connections V is coming up this June and somehow I managed to weasel my way into it and am speaking this year. Thank God Stuart chose the neutral country of Switzerland to host it, that way my antics are unlikely to break up the European Union (it is not a member), set off a minor border conflict (nobody messes with the Swiss) or cause a rise in sea levels (no ocean, but they do have part of the Alps).

Here is a link that the very kindhearted and capable Femke Goedhart tweeted earlier today with a sneak peek of what is in store. Personally, I think most people will come of the Swiss chocolate, the alphorn blues band that will be playing in the lobby and lederhosen that Stuart is planning to wear in celebration of his newly discovered Swiss ancestor who is distantly related to Wilhelm Tell. It is a fascinating story that he is sure to recant to you if you just prod his modesty enough – he is quite shy about his fame as we all know. I also surmise that Tim Clark might have an interesting tidbit or two to share and with Gab “No Problem” Davis around there will be enough interesting content to cover for the fact that my session will be dealing with the finer points of Swiss Cheese Fondue . . .

So, if you think you are interested …. and have the time to watch all the amazed/shocked Swiss who will be gather around the hotel to stare at us in wonder – you should attend … even if it is only to hear hear Gab say “Not a Problem!” in that droll accent of her’s ….

PS: if you are wondering why I mentioned StarWars in the title – no reason other than the big Roman Numeral “V” in the title and that I turn green and shriveled like Yoda when I drink green beer on St. Paddy’s day . . . Switzerland will never be the same after this. I pity the Swiss, really . .

Filed under: Admin Conferences, IBM, IBM Connections, Lotus User Groups, Social | Tagged: , , | 4 Comments »

Technote: Connections iFix / CR installation problems

Posted on March 24, 2013 by notesbusters

Just a quick one:

IBM Failed to perform extraction error when applying CR or iFixes to IBM Connections 4.0 – United States.

 

This technote just came through and I thought it was rather timely since I was battling this very scenario with one off the test/DEV environments at my current client a short while ago.

If you read the document you will see that it mentions “if the shared files space has changed” but there is another scenario under which this can happen (though related) and deinstal and subsequent re-install of features or the whole application - especially if you switch between a root and non-root install in AIX/Linux.

The details on what files to review/update are in the technote above and I suggest to anybody who has ever had an iFix or CR not go quite as they wanted to review the settings and file this nifty technote away in their little “I know this” storage space for future reference.

 

Filed under: Documentation, IBM Connections | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

IBM Connections: Metrics / Cognos and the HTTP timeout . . . .

Posted on March 19, 2013 by notesbusters

Let me preface this post with a statement:

I really, really don’t like Cognos. Metrics is a pain as well.
And .. in case it lacked sufficient emphasis … I really, R E A L L Y don’t like  Cognos.

 

This is an interesting one that I have been battling with for quite some time at my current client. We had been running into errors with Cognos reports not finishing and the only errors we saw were in the syemOut.log files for HTTP sessions suddenly being reset:

 [3/5/13 11:51:05:341 EST] 000000b8 CognosBIReque 3 com.ibm.connections.metrics.reportgeneration.cognos.CognosBIRequestProcessor processCognosBIRequest post jobTemplateSearchPath=/content/folder[@name='IBMConnectionsMetrics']/package[@name='Metrics']/folder[@name='static']/jobDefinition[@name='jobtemplate5']

[3/5/13 11:56:05:532 EST] 000000b8 SystemErr R java.net.SocketException: Connection reset

Metrics sends Cognos 5 HTTP requests for each report time range – these correspond to the Jobtemplate1 – Jobtemplate5 reports in Cognos that are called and executed. These HTTP requests are synch calls so they have to stay connected and wait until the Jobtemplate call is finished so metrics can update the process. for all successful calls yo will see HTTP status 200 results and that is exactly what you want. We were seeing the above resets for calls to the Jobtemplate4 and Jobtemplate5 calls – it was KILLING ME.

Metrics was not at fault – it has it’s timeout settings in the metrics-config.xml file (secsPerRequest) and that was set to 3600 so it was off the list of culprits.

We reset the HTTP servers plug-in.xml setting for timeouts (ServerIOTimeout) first to 400 seconds and then to 600 and we saw no change.

We then did a test – we changed the interService href in the LotusConenctions-config.xml file as follows – btw that only works because we have a single Cognos server, not a clustered pair:

sloc:serviceReference bootstrapHost=”" bootstrapPort=”" clusterName=”admin_replace” enabled=”true” serviceName=”cognos” ssl_enabled=”true”> 
<sloc:href> 
<sloc:hrefPathPrefix>/cognos</sloc:hrefPathPrefix> 
<sloc:static href=”http://connect.domain.com” ssl_href=”https://connect.domain.com“/> 
      <sloc:interService href=”https://cognosserverFQHN.domain.com:9443“/> 

Drum-roll ….. Here we go, it fixed the issue, but now the progress display (“xxx% complete”) on the metrics page to be permanently stuck at 0%. What this did do was point ut to the problem …. the F5 load balancer that we in front of the dual HTTP servers. It had a permanent 5 minute http thread timeout set and was killing ANY thread that was going over 5 minutes.

 

The Takeaway:

Metrics/Cognos spawns exactly 110 jobs for each Community metrics update request, many of these requests will go over 5 minutes and you should check that any device/server in your network has a higher HTTP timeout seting.

 

Filed under: IBM Connections, IHS, Websphere | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Sametime Video Chat Widget for Connections – Supposedly it still works in V4

Posted on March 18, 2013 by notesbusters

My current client had this implemented in their V 3.x environment and we asked IBM if it will still work in V4 …. supposedly it does.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/downloads/sametime_videochat_plugin.html

I am implementing it now but there are some inconsistencies with the ST server so I will have to dig through the ST logs and God only knows what else to make it work. Not sure if IBM is working on a version that is “more compatible” (it ain’t English but I have no better way of saying this) to Connections  V4.x, but I hope they are. This one is not very pretty to look at when it is added to a community at it’s current build.

 

I will keep y’all updated on the progress.

Filed under: IBM Connections, Lotus Sametime | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Connections 4.0: Tails from the Upgrade Part 2 – Oracle

Posted on September 9, 2012 by notesbusters

This is an interesting one for all of you out there that utilize Oracle as your database server.

Character Set:

The approved character set for Connections is AL32UTF8. You  might have a look at your database and discover that you are running some other character set but that you are seeing no issues – at least in Connections 3.x

 

In comes Cognos . . .

Cognos will NOT install (fails to connect to the dB without errors) if your Oracle character set is anything other than AL32UTF8. The reason is that it expects a certain date format that it will not find in another character set.

Funny enough Connections would probably work – both the update wizard and the subsequent install but you will not get Cognos to work – sorry. You will need to create a new Connections database in the correct character set, export the data from the old one and import it into the new dB and THEN run the upgrade wizard – or alternatively run the individual SQL statements (allot of DB Admins prefer that – this way they can change temp folder settings etc.).

Depending on your V 3.x database size that can be quite an undertaking, fro what I hear from Oracle dB admins (I am definitely NOT in that league) the export and re-import into a new database is the way to go.

 

 

More to come soon . . . .

Filed under: IBM Connections | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Connections 4.0: Tails from the Upgrade Part 1

Posted on September 7, 2012 by notesbusters

As a few early risers might have already read on some blogs and press releases, IBM has released Connections 4.0 to the general public this morning – here woudl be Ed Brill’s blog as one of the many announcements.

I have been working for a client I shall call TWSSU (=”They Who Shall Stay Unnamed”) and been part of a large Connections implementation since last year.  As part of this environment we have been working on a V4 upgrade for quite some time, to the point where we started developing new look-and-feel designs and customizations on every code drop of the Beta cycle (that is a tale onto itself) and received the Connections V4 code early along with some “interesting” draft documentation for V4 … I know it’s unfair and mean, but sometimes it is fun to be me!

I have been under and NDA until today (general availability - finally!) so I have not been able to talk about any of the interesting items that are likely to pop up during a migration.

To that end I will start this tale  in small doses and hand out some of the more interesting tidbits in several blog posts, starting with the basics right here:

OS Requirements

Ditch any old Windows 2003 servers you still have, they are no longer supported. If  you were planning to re-use some of your existing infrastructure and they are windows 2003 … sorry. You can still run TDI and probably DB2 on them but anything with WebSphere on it will require Windows 2008 or AIX/UNIX/Linux. time to buy that next license pack from Redmond if you want Linux, otherwise Red Hat/CentOS is your best bet.

The detailed system requirements are here - be patient with the new design for the document for right now … it is still work in (design) progress and – as I find it personally - rather confusing. From what I hear IBM looked at it and is workgin on it. Hey – it is still better than some of the documentation that I have come up with over the years … :)

WAS Version: 7.0.0.21 – SDK/JAVA

This was a painful experience for me – and partially self inflicted. Well, I had the excuse that the documentation was not yet ready. when IBM says that you have to install WAS FP 21(and a few more fixes separately) they don’t just mean WAS FP, IHS and Plugin FP- they also want you to install the SDK part of the fix pack. For most of us this is not something we are used to as most applications bring their own SDK or at least update it during the install process.

Connections has been significantly re-architected (more on that later) and contains a feature called “Comon” that is in charge of serving up all the static content, along with jsp’s, scripts/code and all the fun stuff that the features share among themselves. This feature will not initialize correctly – UNLESS – you have the SDK installed since it is only certified to run with a minimum Java version of WAS 7.0.0.21. The install works and throws no errors, all the other features will start but common will not initialize (the errors in the systemOut.log are confusing and I needed serious IBM help to find the root cause – THANKS DAVID!)

Configuration XML files – There are ALLOT of them

There are about 19 features running on a full blown Connections environment now so there are naturally more configuration files. Also, the configuration of some items was moved to separate xml files (I like that – more later) so you can’t just port over all your old files, and in many cases not even the settings since they have changed.

I suggest to run a dif between your existing config files and the new ones, I use Beyond Compare for that (my favorite tool!). That will show you quite clearly what settings are different, what new settings exist and what the default settings are. Not all of the settings are documented in detail in the WIKI so  … be careful and start slow.

Cognos … The uncharted land

This is a new one for us. I have never touched Cognos before and without the help of my main man Vijay F. (full name shall remain secret to protect the innocent …) I am not sure if we would have gotten through the experience unscathed.

We found a few problems in the install that have already made it into the documentation so you have the benefit of our sweat and Vijay’s expertise. Just make sure you install Cognos first and have the right client version of the DB system you use installed.  AND – having more expertise in SQL than I do helps – it seriously helps. More on this at a later stage.

 

Stay tuned for more . . .

This is the end of part 1, more will follow next week: database upgrade/migrationss and new iFixes for V4 that get released along with the new version … yippie! We will have fun!!

Filed under: IBM Connections, Lotus Software | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Newsflash: Connections 4.0 WIKI/documentation is out!

Posted on September 5, 2012 by notesbusters

Great news – just found it!!

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lcwiki.nsf/xpViewCategories.xsp?lookupName=IBM%20Connections%204.0%20documentation

But keep in mind, itis still in the process of being edited and will improve over time. Don’t look at the System Requirements pages yet – they will be updated soon as the current format is  bit confusing.

Filed under: IBM Connections | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

WebSphere – The backupConfig script your friend

Posted on July 25, 2012 by notesbusters

This is just a short post – But the built-in utility you get with the backupConfig script is worth looking into for everybody!

if you have worked with WebSphere for any significant time you have come across the built-in backup and restore utility that each WebSphere server has by default: [backupconfig.bat] or on Unix/Linux [backupconfig.sh] and the corresponding restore scripts [restoreConfig.bat] and [restoreConfig.sh]. 

At my current client we are working on application customizations and testing them on new servers. This is where the backupConfig comes in handy as it does not just back-up your application server(s) but the deployment manager and all the node(s) configuration as well – so you can replay a whole server configuration along with the installed applications and any application specific configuration. backupConfig can also be used to migrate servers from one piece of hardware to another (or VM server or, …. any combination is possible).

The process is simple: find the scripts in the [/bin] folder of either the Dmgr or the node,  execute the script and it will check your servers configuration, stop all server instances including nodeagents and then create a zip file of ALL files necessary for the back-up – and all of this wonderfulness is  unencumbered by the human thought process … :)

Whenever I am about to install a new application, install any fixes or make configuration changes to a WebSphere  server I run the backupConfig script once first and keep a copy of the zip file it created on a local machine – just to be safe.

Where to run:

Depending on your architecture you can run it on the Deployment Manager and/or all nodes. When you run it on the Deployment manager it will grab all the configuration for the Dmgr, nodes and application servers in one go. This is essential if you have to restore an environment. On a managed node (separate HW) it will capture the configuration and applications installed on that physical node – so you might need to run it on each physical WebSphere server in your environment once to get a total base back-up. Once I have that I usually just run the scripts on the deployment manager as most of the work happens there anyway and all changes are synchronized out to the nodes.

Restores:

On windows it is simple – just run the restoreConfig script and tell it which zip file to use … and presto. On Unix/Linux you have to think a bit more. The backupConfig script does not keep any file rights or ownership information, when restoring it basically sets the file ownership to the account being used to run the script – so make sure you are using the same account and have read/write rights to the folders involved. 

Here is the link to the documentation in the WebSphere Infocenter - I hope you find it useful and make a back-up of your servers soon!

Filed under: IBM Connections, Linux Related, Upgrades & Migrations, Websphere | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Connections 3.0.1.1 and Sametime Proxy Server 8.5.2 IFR1 fix OBEN-8SDLGS – RECALLED

Posted on March 27, 2012 by notesbusters

I just got a mail from IBM support on the Sametime Proxy Server 8.5.2 IFR1 fix OBEN-8SDLGS that is mandatory for awareness between Connections 3.0.1 FP1 and Sametime.  It appears this HF was recalled (not sure what he exact problem is) which explains why I have not been able to get awareness to work with Connections 3.0.1.1 – no mater what I do.

That there is no updated, specific documentation for Connections 3.0.1.1 and ST awareness is not a good sign either but that is why I opened a PMR with IBM when I could just not get awareness to work correctly – and here I am a week later and still nothing to show for my efforts .

I will blog again once I hear back from IBM and a new ST HF is released.

Filed under: Documentation, IBM Connections, Lotus Sametime, Lotus Software, Support | Tagged: , , | 7 Comments »

Bosch opts for IBM Connections software – automotiveIT International

Posted on March 16, 2012 by notesbusters

Interesting article – shows that Connections is more and more in demand not only in the US but also internationally.

I find that some of my clients go the “Social Software” route to “get rid of email”  which is one way of saying they want their people to spend less time in their mail in-boxes and more time being productive and sharing knowledge. This is a very large change – a true paradigm shift that can pay off – as long as it is managed well and actually gives users what they need to get their job done. Change though, is never easy – I find my job often revolves more around how  to coax people into eversomuch (think snails) changing how they approach their workday and less around how to set up and configure a product.

================================================

Bosch opts for IBM Connections software

MARCH 15, 2012

IBM will help Robert Bosch provide its employees with social-media tools

Robert Bosch has decided to use IBM Connections software to deepen the integration of social media in its office procedures.

The German automotive supplier decided on IBM because the US based IT services and computer company offered a highly standardized package of software that is easy to use and can be expanded down the road.

“With IBM Connections, IBM doesn’t just offer a powerful platform,” said Josef Maichle, vice president corporate information systems at Bosch. “Based on its experience in the area of social business, the company has also positioned itself as a trustworthy partner for the changeover.”

Bosch in the past year evaluated how to implement social media software across its operations. It wanted to provide employees with the ability to form social communities and other internal cooperation tools.

Selection criteria for Bosch were functional areas of coverage, intuitive operation and the possibility to introduce the new software without having to make major changes to existing systems.

Ivo Koerner, vice president software at IBM Germany, said companies see the efficiency benefits from social media, but worry about the required shifts in working practices.

Said Koerner: “The change into a social business is a big cultural challenge for many companies.”

IBM Connections software provides employees access to everyone in a pre-defined professional network. The software offers moderation, blogs, a media gallery and other social-media tools that help provide faster access to information.

via Bosch opts for IBM Connections software – automotiveIT International.

Filed under: IBM Connections, Lotus Software, Training | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

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