If you’ve been running HCL Notes environments for any length of time, you know the drill: ID files, password resets, shared login workarounds for kiosk machines, and the occasional 2 a.m. call because someone’s password expired mid-shift. It’s been the same basic authentication model for three decades. Fix Pack 1 for Notes/Domino 2026 (14.5.1) quietly […]
Continue Reading
Imagine walking through a grocery store with a pair of smart glasses on. You pick up a product you’ve never bought before. Instead of turning the package around and trying to read a tiny ingredient label, you simply look at it. Your AI assistant quietly tells you that it contains a preservative your body doesn’t […]
Continue Reading
Why Performance Tuning Isn’t Just “Add an Index” Every time someone asks me for help with a “slow SQL Server,” the first thing I do is not look at the query. I know that sounds backwards, but hear me out — over the years I’ve lost count of how many times I got called in […]
Continue Reading
If you’re running HCL Notes/Domino 14.5.1 (marketed as HCL Notes/Domino 2026), a new update just landed. HCL released Fix Pack 1 (FP1) on July 16, 2026. It’s a smaller update than a full version release, but it fixes real problems that admins have been hitting since March. I wrote about the 12.0.2 Fix Pack 8 […]
Continue Reading
Over the years of working hands-on as a database developer and DBA, I’ve run into more production surprises than any single course or certification ever prepared me for — queries that mysteriously slow down for no visible reason, audit requirements that show up after a schema’s already frozen, reports that quietly regress the week after […]
Continue Reading
The Problem: Drowning in My Own Automation As an IT Pro, I run a lot of automation. Scheduled agents, background jobs, sync processes — code I’ve written over the years that quietly does its job across various databases. Almost all of it has one habit in common: when something happens (good or bad), it […]
Continue Reading
If you’re a DBA or sysadmin managing more than one or two SQL Server instances, you already know the drill: log in, run the same handful of queries, eyeball the results, move to the next server. Do that every morning for a few years and it stops being “quick” — it’s just quiet, repetitive risk. […]
Continue Reading
If you’ve been running HCL Notes and Domino for any length of time, you already know the platform has a habit of quietly sitting on years — sometimes decades — of company knowledge. Support tickets, policy documents, contracts, project notes, client history. It’s all in there. The problem has always been finding the right piece […]
Continue Reading
If you’re running HCL Notes/Domino on the 12.0.2 stream, there’s a fix pack sitting in the HCLSoftware download portal right now that’s worth ten minutes of your attention. HCL released Fix Pack 8 (FP8) for 12.0.2 on May 7, 2026, with language kits following a day later, and it’s not a minor cleanup release. It […]
Continue Reading
If you have ever tried to open a document, run an agent, or replicate a database in HCL Notes (formerly IBM Lotus Notes) and Domino, you have probably run into this exact message: “Database has not opened yet.” It is one of the most common — and most misunderstood — error messages in the entire […]
Continue Reading