From the Goodie Bag: Thunderbird 3

Written by Steve Stockstill

As a long-time Thunderbird user I began using Thunderbird for it's IMAP capability some five years ago. IMAP has been gradually replacing POP3 as the dominant email protocol and is most notably known for the behavior of storing your email in online server folders, similar to Exchange server, but mostly in the cloud. In many ways IMAP was on the leading edge of cloud computing and remains so today, but that's another article.

What I like about Thunderbird 3 is the new tabbed interface and tighter integration with Lighting, the Mozilla Foundation's calendar integration for Thunderbird. The new tabbed interface allows for the calendar, open emails and other views to be automatically docked in tabs across the top of the page. An interface much like the tabbed browsing made popular by (but not invented by) Firefox.

The Lightning calendar feels more native to the interface in Thunderbird 3 and the Google Calendar integration feels quicker but that could be me.

7 Steps to a Faster Time Matters - Step 5

Written by Steve Stockstill

This tip applies to Enterprise sites and is applicable to everyone using the Contact and Matter main lists (which would be most everyone). The Contact and Matter databases consist of three SQL server tables each. For most sites the primary Contact and Matter information is contained/displayed in the first table/form tab, the other two tables/form tabs are for supporting data (this can vary by form style).

When accessing the SQL Server, Time Matters is smart enough to know if your main list needs to read the second and third tables. Bypassing these tables can significantly improve the performance of your list. Thiis can be controlled by two things 1) the fields displayed in the list columns 2) the default or underlying filter. If you are not using fields (columns) from the second or third table Time Matters will only ask the server for data from the first table. For many sites this can have a noticeable impact on performance. You can review your setup by looking at the CORE field names. CO2, CO3 and MA2 and MA3 are the prefixes for these secondary tables.

If you need to use these columns in your list or filter, make sure your default quicktab is not using them and you will still get the benefit of a faster opening list.

Windows 7 Pre-Launch Training

Written by Steve Stockstill

With Windows 7 anticipated to be Released to Manufacturing (RTM) in late July or early August (as reported by PCWorld), Microsoft has began to ready the vendor community by publishing several free, on-demand training webinars.There are many but these should be interesting to the CIC community at large.

Here's a sampling, enjoy:

The Road to Windows 7 - Part 1 of 2

The Road to Windows 7 - Part 2 of 2

Windows 7 - Application Compatibility

Windows 7 - Security Overview

7 Steps to a Faster Time Matters - Step 4

Written by Steve Stockstill

There are several optional features in Time Matters that can greatly effect your performance. As you may remember, we previously covered "Keyword Indexing" in Step 2. In that article we learned that you could simply disable the option and immediately recover the performance benefit. Not all features are as simple and obvious to recover from disabling. Case in point: the Time Matters Exchange Synchronization.

Disabling the Exchange Sync service or uninstalling the Exchange Synchronization Utility does not stop the ongoing database activities that are started when you install the Exchange Sync. The Exchange Synchronization adds nine database triggers to your Time Matters Database. Three triggers in each of the following tables: Contact, Event and ToDo. These database triggers perform extended data updates each time one of these tables is modified. That means if your Events and ToDo's are "following" you are performing one modify for the Event (or ToDo) table and two actions are initiated from the update trigger, one delete, one insert. Throw in the database maintenance, calculated field activity and the transaction log updates and you can quickly aggregate significant resource consumption.

I mentioned Calculated Field activity. Calculated fields that are based on the Record Date must be recalculated when the Follow process changes the record date. These calculations are NOT ran in the stored procedure but rather a unique second process is spawned after Time Matters is initialized. This process will "recalculate" Calculated fields for each record type. Once again causing multiple database updates for each affected record.

In summary, if you uninstall the Exchange sync make sure you finish the process by manually removing the after effects of the original installation. A new "Exchange Sync Status" test was added to SharpShooter version 1.14 to report the status of a given database's Exchange Sync.

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