Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Today's Traveler issue - Name lookup and the power of Getting Social

Had a weird issue come up today that I hadn't seen before.  One of the support team came to me today saying that someone with in our organization couldn't find their name when they do a name look-up against the corporate directory on the iPhone.  But here's the kicker.  The person has a last name with just 3 characters.  And, his first name has just 3 characters.  So here's what I did to troubleshoot.
1.  Looked up other names.  Like mine.  No problem.  Both first and last name.
2.  Looked up other people I knew, but first name only, that had 3 character first names.  Can't find them by first name, but the longer then 3 character last names returned their name.
3.  Checked it on the Android and the Windows Mobile.  Worked fine there returning 3 character last names.
4.  Opened a ticket with support.
5.  Twittered the problem.
And Declan Lynch fired back with the answer within minutes. It's a configurable setting in a config file.  That's when support got back to me with answer, too.
  • On your Traveler server, go to the \Lotus\Domino\data\traveler\cfg folder.
  • Locate the file NTSConfig.xml 
  • Open the file in notepad, and locate the line <PROPERTY NAME="NAME_LOOKUP_MIN_LENGTH" VALUE="4" /> 
  • Change the value from 4 to 3.
  • Save and close the file
  • Restart the Traveler task on the server.
  • Bingo.
Note that this appears to be only an "issue" with the iOS devices.  Droid and Windows Mobile worked fine.  Not sure about Nokia, since we don't have any of those to support.  So thanks to the power of being social on Twitter and Lotus Support, an unknown problem was resolved in minutes!  I blogged the other day about the "Get Social" theme from Lotusphere this year.  It works.  Join the conversation, if you haven't already.  There are a lot of good people out there like Dec and Gregg, (who also fired a response) that are willing to help.  The Lotus community is something else.  Thanks, guys!

2 comments:

Gregg Eldred said...

You are very welcome, it's part of what I do. :-) I've been hammering at Traveler lately and am planning a nice little series of posts on that topic.

Michael said...

Slight type in the info center however some more info is here - http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/domhelp/v8r0/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.help.lnt851.doc/Customizing_the_corporate_directory_lookup.html