Been working with a client moving them from R5 to 853FP1. A big jump and not so simple as one would think. The usual Domino items do work properly and as we move people over all is well and good, but along the way we found some gotchas that, well, if you were not around in R5 time, you may not realize the nuances.

Traveler of course is a key part of why they are upgrading. NOT for iPads or iPhones but for Android devices. An added bonus to them is the Sametime entry which is a FREE entitlement with their Domino licenses.

They were using a pair of Dircat's. Dircat for those who did not grow up with the term stands for Directory Catalog. The idea behind these was to provide, don't forget this was R5 time around 1999-2000, a condensed address book so laptop users over modem lines could easily address emails. Naturally this was a huge benefit to people like IBM with 250,000+ people at the time and a massive set of NAB's which could be shrunk down to about 150MB which in those days....

You created a database from the dircat template and then told it which directories (Notes or LDAP) to pull people or whatever fields you specified into it. Simple right? And it worked well. I demo'ed this in beta in Athens at the IBM EBU in 1999.

Flash forward to Traveler time and you see Traveler likes to work with DA (Directory Assistance). No problem, took their file and set up the DA database and configuration. And nothing happened. Show XDIR included the file but no lookups on Traveler.

After a little bit of poking around the file, it turns out the file the client told us to use was really a DirCat, not a regular Address Book. Traveler was not happy, now I knew why. Looking at the config doc I found the original file it was based on. Edited the DA and restarted the server and like magic it worked properly.

Lotus Notes Traveler just wants to see proper address books when doing lookups from your device.

What is really nice is the search finds people FAST and given this is over 13,000 names, not including their own NAB that's a huge win for everyone. Remember you need to type 3 letters before you see any hits but you can adjust that if you wish. See this wiki page for more details on lookups and configurations.