Thomas Hampel

 12 November 2015
Your first step towards the cloud is to build a hybrid environment e.g. to support a proof of concept in your environment.
In most cases customers would like to move a few users to the cloud to experience the onboarding process, confirm seamless coexistence of on-premises and cloud environments, and explore new features of the cloud such as IBM Verse.

Although IBM provides a full training course for setting up a hybrid environment, I still would like to (with friendly support of Hagen Bauer) provide a checklist for customers to support this process and getting started as quickly as possible.

Warning:
This checklist may not be perfect, you should still read the documentation and talk to your certified IBM expert of choice.
It is supposed to be a checklist for customers, not for certified onboarding specialists that will move your IBM Notes mail to IBM Cloud.
Suggestions and ideas for further improvement are always welcome.

Overview
This is a graphical overview of a hybrid environment. On top are your (On-Premises) servers, at the bottom are cloud servers and in between (red) the internet.


Steps

• Check your inventory! Are current servers available? Are they accessible? Are they placed in the network zone they are expected to be?
  See graphic above and verify positioning of:
  #1 = Domino Administrator Client
  #2 = On-Premises Mail Server
  #3 = On-Premises Directory Mail Server
  #4 = Passthru Server in DMZ
• Complete this table with data from your environment. Make its correct and complete.
• Configure your Firewall for inbound and outbound traffic.
  Check twice, and verify Firewall settings once again before claiming to be done. A mistake at this point will cause headaches later on.
• Make sure your passthru server is using the same root certificate as your HUB and MAIL server?
  Can the Admin client (see #1 in the graphic above) access the passthru server?
• Create a new OrgUnit based on your current Domino certificate. This certificate will be used later on for all your Domino servers in the cloud.
  Example: "/SCN/Company" or "/Cloud/SRV/Company"
• In your current environment, does your Global Domain Document meet those requirements?
• Make sure you still have the SmartCloud activation email available. The one that contains the SmartCloud activation link.
  Oh, and make sure the link has not expired.
• In the SmartCloud Notes account initial setup, did you choose "Hybrid Account" ?
  If not you need to request a full reset of your account by contacting support@collabserv.com
• Define a name prefix for your cloud mail servers. Choose a short but remarkable prefix and dont pick something too fancy.
  Example: **Cloud-**/SCN/Company
• Are you prepared to create new and modify existing DNS records for your company domain?
  Make sure you have control over your DNS records.

Conclusion
All of the above steps are part of the documentation, but not in a single place. I hope you can make use of this reference in your SmartCloud onboarding project.
Feedback is very welcome, so drop me a mail or send a tweet

References:

• Course: Hybrid IBM SmartCloud Notes
• Worksheet: Configuring the SmartCloud Notes Account Settings (PDF)
• Hagen Bauer - Checklist for SmartCloud Notes POC (German)
• IBM Connect 2015 - ID105 Extend Your Security Into the Cloud with IBM SmartCloud Notes

Thomas Hampel

 12 January 2015
Moving mail files from server to server is a simple task, AdminP handles this job properly. It does even work across domains... and it worked perfectly in numerous projects in the past.
Until today when I ran into a problem where the same process 'all of a sudden' (**what else**) caused an error in AdminP - but only for a specific group of destination servers.

After creating the AdminP Move User request (using our internal tools), the AdminP request "Check Mail Server's Access" failed with this error:

Errors:
Title: Domain's Directory Path: Domain's Directory; Name: Admin Lastname/OU/Org;
Error: Both the signer and the author of this request must have Editor access or Author access with the UserModifier role to the Domino Director

Analysis
We checked access rights on both sides... several times....but everything was set up correctly. Even restarting the server (to refresh the name lookup cache) did not change the situation.
Finally after a few chats with my colleagues they indicated it could be related to a problem they had seen before, referencing an old bug ( LO81200 ) and also pointing to a new SPR

SPR # JPAI9FEKCP, fixes a Notes Client issue where if a local NAMELookup cache has been created it is inappropriately being used as opposed to doing the NAMELookup on the remote server. This may result in Notes Client errors indicating insufficient access to perform any number of Notes Client operations such as Admin Client move user or simply signing of databases.

Although the SPR reads like it would apply to Notes Clients only, I can confirm it does apply to Domino Servers as well, at least for that specific AdminP request type "Move User"
We did a few tests and quickly found a workaround, so here is what you can do about it:

Temporary Solution:
Don't use groups to grant the specific access rights.
In our case putting the name of the person who signed the AdminP request >directly< into the ACL of the Names.nsf of the destination server fixed the issue.

This is what the AdminP Move User reuqest should look like before the user authenticates


Permanent Solution
Apply Domino 9.0.1 FixPack2 now or wait for Domino 9.0.2 to be released.

Lessons learned:
1.        Always install the latest version of Domino
Note: The destination server in question is not maintained by our team.
2.        What an awsome team we have :)

References

• SPR # JPAI9FEKCP
• IBM Technote # 1091068 - Steps taken by the Administration Process to move a mail file to a new server
• Download Options for Notes & Domino 9.0.1 Fix Packs

Thomas Hampel

 6 February 2014
After a migration from Exchange to Domino a customer reported that some folders are not visible iNotes but are available for the Notes Client.
In this particular case the folders not showing up have been created as private folders...and private folders are not supported in iNotes as documented in IBM Technote 1445118

Changing the field flags of the folder design element from private to public turned out not to be working anymore. A script which I have been using to resolve this problem with earlier versions of Notes did not work and just created a folder which can not be deleted/moved/renamed.
So I wrote this small script to fix the problem by creating a new temp folder -which will not be private by default- and moving documents from the private folder into the newly created folder. Once done, deleting the private folder and renaming the new folder.

One small drawback is that the original folder design will get lost because we are creating a brand new folder from the default folder design.
However, feel free to use this script at your own risk.

Convert-Private-to-Public-folders.lss