Monday, March 28, 2011

The journal.nsf conundrum

Ah, Monday's.  You just gotta love them.  Mine started out like most others.  A mess and lots of different things to do.  As always the Director of Infrastructure, (who's office I unfortunately sit right outside of), seems to pick up on my vibe that I have a lot to do.  So, he calls me into his office to answer questions.  Least of which was how to sync his personal Journal, now called Notebook in Lotus Notes 8, to his mail file so that it gets onto his BlackBerry.  Okay, no big deal.  I take control of the mouse and from within in mail file go to Actions-Lotus iNotes-Synchronize Notebook.  Since he had not completed a sync yet on his new laptop, a friendly window appeared asking for the location of the Notebook application.  Ok, still, easy enough.  Since we have always used journal.nsf on our machines, I clicked Browse, got to his data directory, when to select journal.nsf...and selected busytime.nsf instead.  Doh!  Damn mouse.  Yes, we are blaming the mouse on this issue.  So now his local busytime.nsf is syncing with his Journal view in his mail file.  So the mad dash was off to find where that setting is since I could not change it back anywhere in the client.  Pulled up the Developer app even to go digging through his mail file to see if it was set in the agent.  Nope, not there.  Opened a PMR via the website, also just to be safe.  Again, it's Monday and I just screwed up the bosses Notes client. 
Brilliant.
But after putting in the right Google combination, I found the answer.  And of course, I felt like a buffoon. In the notes.ini file locally on the users machine, there is a line item that says Journal=.  Simple enough, right!?  On my machine, since I knew I was set right, it said Journal=journal.nsf.  On his machine it was set to Journal=busytime.nsf.  Close Notes client, edit notes.ini so that the line read Journal=journal.nsf, restart Notes, sync.  All is well.  Of course as I'm finding this setting, IBM called back on the ticket.  The tech got a good laugh out of it too.
So if today is any indication how the week will flow, it will be an interesting one.

1 comment:

Paul Farris said...

Thanks Andy. I was wondering why the journal had stopped synchronising with my Blackberry. Must have lost this setting from my notes.ini at some point.