Here at Teamstudio, we currently support a portfolio of twelve separate products, some of which have been in our product suite for 25 years. In that time, we’ve fielded our fair share of tech support tickets, and I can tell you that most of them arise during the installation process. I’m generalizing here, of course, but for the most part, once a product is installed and working, the number of support issues goes down significantly. The same could probably be said for most software applications.
Amongst those twelve products, the one with the simplest install process, at least in theory, is Teamstudio Export. Export requires a copy of the Notes client to be installed, it needs to know where that Notes client is, where to find Notes.ini, and really not much else. So, if you have a totally standard Notes installation, with nothing out of the ordinary, you can pretty much accept all the default options in the install process, and you’ll be up, running and exporting databases in no time.
The problem, of course, is that many of our customers are Notes gurus, aficionados, and experts, and so it’s pretty rare that they have what you would consider a “totally standard Notes installation”. Notes may be installed on a network drive that’s not always available. There may be two (or three, or more) different versions of Notes installed in different locations. Or any number of small but unique factors that can cause problems.
The good news is that, by applying a bit of thought and care to the config process (which can be re-run at any time), almost all of these problems can easily be avoided. The purpose of this post is to point out which of the config options you need to pay attention to, and to explain in a bit more detail why they matter.
When you install and run the product for the first time, it will guide you through the configuration process. But if you’ve already done that and are experiencing problems, you can always rerun it by selecting “Configuration” from the File menu. Here are the config options you need to pay attention to:
Archive Folder - this is the folder where Export will create the XML archive files. It is required, and of course write access to this folder is necessary.
HTML Output Folder/PDF Output Folder - these are the folders where Export will create the HTML and PDF versions of the archives that you export.
Notes Folder - this is the Notes program folder, and probably causes the most difficulty. If you only have one copy of Notes installed, then usually this is straightforward. Sometimes people have multiple copies of Notes installed, and sometimes there may be older versions of Notes in different locations that people are not even aware of. Export will attempt to set this correctly (based on the path), but it’s worthwhile checking to make sure. A problem with the Notes folder setting will result in an error along these lines:
Notes INI Location - again, some people may use different copies of Notes.ini for testing or other reasons. Export will attempt to fill this field automatically, and again, it’s worth checking to make sure you picked up the right one. Note that, if you are specifying the location of Notes.ini yourself, you need to enter the full path of the file, including the file name.
Notes ID File - self explanatory really, other than the fact that the Notes ID you use for archiving must have sufficient access to every database you want to be able to archive. Export will respect the Notes security model, and so the archive that is produced can only contain the data that is accessible by the Notes ID file that has been used to generate it. (But see Request Full Access Admin below.)
Password - this is the password for the Notes ID file above, which is stored in an encrypted form, but it is passed to the Notes API in plain text when you create an archive. If you do not want to store a password, you can leave this blank and instead ensure that your Notes client is running whenever you run Export. To allow Notes to share credentials with Export, you must choose File|Security|User Security... from the menu in the Notes client, and check the box labeled Don't prompt for a password from other Notes-based programs (reduces security).
Request Full Access Admin - if this is checked, Export will attempt to enable Full Admin Administration mode when exporting a database. This will allow you to export databases even when the Notes ID specified here is not listed in the ACL for that database. It will also export documents that you would not normally be able to access owing to readers fields. This setting will only work if the Notes ID listed above is listed in the Full Access Administrators list on the Security tab in the server document for the Domino server.
Most of the tech support tickets we receive relating to Export have their roots in these config settings, but there are others. You can read all the gory detail in the product documentation online. Sometimes Export can’t run at all because of problems with the path to the Notes executable folder or to Notes.ini. Sometimes expected data is missing from archives because of access control issues. But in most cases, a careful review of the config settings resolves the problem. So if you see any of these phenomena, hopefully this gives you a place to start.
If you are experiencing issues with creating archives, or you just want to start a conversation about any aspect of exporting your Lotus Notes databases. click below to contact our tech support staff.