Who is Professor INI?

It's been a whole year since "Ask Professor INI" first appeared in Iris Today. In honor of that anniversary, we thought we'd give the people behind Professor INI an opportunity to introduce themselves and talk a little about the column itself.

Who, exactly, is Professor INI?
Dick McCarrick
This may or may not surprise some readers, but Professor INI is not a single person. Instead, the good professor represents a small group of writers in the Domino/Notes User Assistance group. Of that group, I've been on the team the longest, over 11 years. When I joined, R2 was in beta and our worldwide customer installed base was something like 50,000 users. It was very much a startup-type atmosphere. And even then, I was hearing complaints that our NOTES.INI documentation wasn't sufficient.

Amy Smith
I joined IBM/Lotus just after R5 shipped. Interestingly enough, at my previous job, I had worked on a major project to organize and compile "configuration file options" for the product we made. Configuration file options are very similar in function to NOTES.INI variables, so I felt very much at home being part of Professor INI!

Phil Bocko
I've been with Lotus for a year and a half. It's interesting to see how passionate many users and administrators are about NOTES.INI issues. The time I've spent on the subject has afforded me the opportunity to see not only how the NOTES.INI file has evolved, but given me a long and broad view of the evolution of Notes itself.

Kevin MacDonald
As the newest member of the team, having just completed my first year with IBM/Lotus, Professor INI provides me with the chance to learn about Notes/Domino from the inside-out, along with our customers.


Dick McCarrick, Kevin MacDonald, Amy Smith, and Phil Bocko

How did Professor INI come into being?
Dick McCarrick
My group and I have been primarily responsible for providing NOTES.INI documentation for more than ten years. Throughout that time, we've never really been satisfied with it. Neither have customers, if the feedback we've received over the years is any indication. One problem is the subject matter itself. NOTES.INI information is scattered throughout Domino and Notes; you can't go to one single, all-encompassing source. Plus, from release to release, variables come and go and change and mutate into something else. It's a real documentation challenge. Then there's the inherent limitations of the medium of documentation, particularly printed books. Variables often change much more quickly than we can update the doc. And many get introduced in MRs, where the only place we can cover them is in the Release Notes, which not everybody reads. We needed a quicker, more flexible way to get NOTES.INI information out there.

Amy Smith
We thought that perhaps something interactive, like a monthly "advice" column, would address immediate user concerns while helping to keep the NOTES.INI information current, too.

What is Professor INI's purpose?
Kevin MacDonald
We're trying to help you work with NOTES.INI safely and effectively—with the emphasis on "safely." Let's face it, in a perfect world you might never need to modify your NOTES.INI files at all. But in reality, we know many of you do edit your NOTES.INI files, often to solve problems we might not have thought of ourselves. So what we're saying each month is, please don't edit your NOTES.INI if there's any other way to accomplish what you're trying to do. But if you do need to do it, here's some information that can help ensure you get the results you want. Along the way, we highlight variables that may be useful—and point out others that you should never touch.

Amy Smith
It's our experience that most users, especially Domino administrators, rarely, if ever, touch their NOTES.INI files. But sometimes users just want to know what's going on in there, especially if they work with business partners or Lotus Consulting, who often add special variables to get specific tasks done or to resolve problems.

How does Professor INI fit in with the rest of the Domino/Notes documentation?
Phil Bocko
The column augments the documentation. There's a number of important ways it does this. First, we can describe variables that, for whatever reason, aren't documented—they got added to the product too late, we didn't know about them in time, whatever. Then there's the column's ability to describe brand-new variables that get added to the product between major releases, for instance in an MR. We can also present information in certain ways—for example, devote a column to variables that provide better performance or more efficient space usage.

How does a typical monthly column get put together?
Dick McCarrick
It depends on the "theme" for that particular month. My favorite columns are the "from the mailbag" ones where we answer different types of customer questions, maybe because I feel guilty about the backlog of questions that we have. Other columns have a more "best practices" focus, where we talk about how to use NOTES.INI variables to solve a particular problem. Our recent article on security is an example. Some topics we can cover more or less off the top of our heads, by virtue of the fact we've been doing NOTES.INI documentation for so long. Others require more research. These are often the most interesting because they give us the opportunity to do research and learn something ourselves. There's lots of NOTES.INI information out there, in the KnowledgeBase, on the Web, and so on. Plus we'll go talk to the Domino/Notes developers and get them to fill us in on the more obscure variables. We then pull all this stuff together into one place, which hopefully is useful to the customer.

Amy Smith
It's a plus having several writers work on this, as we can take advantage of our different backgrounds and interests. For example, my real "day job" is to write the Domino security administration doc. Phil writes about the Notes client, while Kevin publishes Release Notes. We all come across NOTES.INI information that we can use for "Ask Professor INI."

Kevin MacDonald
And it's not only our customers who benefit; sometimes it's the Notes/Domino developers who learn something, too.

How do you decide which variables to talk about and which not to?
Dick McCarrick
From the beginning, the one thing we decided Professor INI would not do is describe every variable we came across. As every Domino administrator knows, there's lots of variables that aren't covered in the product documentation. Most of them have a legitimate reason for not being documented—they're temporary and intended for internal testing purposes only, they're unsupported and should never be modified, and so on. If readers ask about one of these variables, at most we'll just mention it briefly and tell readers not to fool around with it. There are many other variables that aren't covered in the product documentation but are described elsewhere, for example in a Tech Note from Domino/Notes Support, or in an Iris Today article. In such cases, we recognize the variable has been publically disclosed, and customers have a right to consider it "in play." We'll talk about variables such as these in Professor INI, even if they aren't included in the documentation. And of course, we'll include all caveats that may apply to their use.

What has been the reader response?
Amy Smith
Overwhelming! When we started, we knew there'd be interest, but we really weren't sure what to expect. We thought maybe five customer questions a month might be typical. But from day one, response has far exceeded expectations. We've received literally hundreds of customer questions in our first year. We read each and every one, although unfortunately it's unlikely we'll ever be able to answer them all. Any people looking for an immediate answer would probably be better off contacting Support, since it might be months before we can publish a response. But the questions are the lifeblood of the column since they provide all the topics we write about. So please keep them coming; it reassures us we're filling an important need.

What else have you learned over the past year?
Phil Bocko
We've learned a lot about how people use NOTES.INI—sometimes in ways that never really occurred to us as documentation writers. For instance, some examine NOTES.INI programmatically, to determine certain states and status in the Notes client. They do this by reading the dynamic environment variables—often the ones with the $ in front of them. This presents an interesting dilemma from a documentation perspective. Up to now we've never discussed $ variables in the doc, except to say that you should never, ever modify them. And this of course is true. But if you treat these variables as "read only" and use them in the way described above, you wouldn't necessarily be doing anything dangerous. So this begs the question: Should we document these variables, with all proper caveats about not editing them? It's something we certainly need to think about.

Kevin MacDonald
Beyond that, we've learned there are third-party offerings out there aimed at NOTES.INI usage. For example, there's a product from Seville GroupWare called Inside NOTES.INI. It's a documentation database that covers a large number of NOTES.INI variables. We obviously can't support third-party products or ensure their accuracy, but readers who want to learn more about NOTES.INI might look into some of them.

Amy Smith
And that the scope and breadth of the NOTES.INI file is such that there will always be a need for Professor INI!

What can we expect from Professor INI in the future?
Phil Bocko
If possible, we'd like to figure out how we can be a bit quicker in answering reader's questions. We can't operate as a Support group and have no intention of even trying. But it would be nice if readers could see answers to their questions in a reasonably timely manner.

Dick McCarrick
We'd like to be more integrated with the Domino/Notes documentation. In future releases we plan to provide links from the on-line Help to applicable Professor INI articles. This lets users access the information exactly when they need it. Other than that, it'll be largely more of the same. We plan to produce Professor INI for as long as Iris Today readers indicate it's useful to them.


Do you have a NOTES.INI question? Send it in to Professor INI. We'll answer as many questions as we can in future "Ask Professor INI" columns. Keep in mind, however, that we may not be able to answer every question, nor can we quickly respond to requests that require immediate attention. If you need an immediate response to a question, we recommend you post it in the Iris Cafe Notes/Domino Gold Release Forum where someone from the general Notes community might be able to help, or contact Lotus Customer Support.