IBM prefers MS Word ...

I don't like making posts like this but I figure its the most effective way of embarrassing IBM into actually doing something about fixing up its archaic and poorly maintained web site.

I recently passed my certification exams for R8.5 System Administration and Application Development and sought to claim the exam fees back from IBM under the 'You Pass - We Pay' benefit included with my annual IBM/Lotus Partner fees.

If you google IBM + 'You Pass - We Pay' and select the second document displayed "You Pass/We Pay Reimbursement Claim Form", then you wind up with a claim form and claim process valid for January 1st, 2000 to June 30th, 2001 complete with fax numbers ... what's a fax number used for again? Don't remind me!

Even worse than that is the fact that there is no way to navigate to the 2009 claim form. Having fought with IBM's web site before, I knew enough to admit defeat early in the game. I logged into Partnerworld and traced through the menus until I found the screen offering me a download of the current claim form in Lotus Wordpro or Microsoft Word format.

Sorry guys... I use Lotus Symphony. It's a great product that's been available for a couple of years now and I really think you guys at IBM should try it out sometime soon. Now since I don't have a copy of Wordpro or Microsoft Word and your document won't load in WordPad (see error below) then can someone tell me how I can claim back my exam fees?




Shame on you IBM - go and fix up your own backyard.
.

Documenting the Lotus skeletons in the closet

Folklore.org is a collection of anecdotes about the birth and evolution of the Apple Macintosh. I'm sure there's a shipload of similar stories about the birth and evolution of Notes/Domino and all we need is a dedicated nerd to build the website.

I may be a nerd and I may be dedicated but three-month-old Melanie Rose and her four-year-old brother Adam take up all of my free time.

Any volunteers?
.

How to succeed in selling Lotus services ...

I added this comment to a Linked-In group earlier this morning but I figured it was a valid blog post in it's own right... Merry Christmas to all my readers.

Comments about Lotus lack of marketing and mistakes with IBM Workplace and losing market share etc are soooooo last year. Get over it and get into the future! If you are going to stay with Notes (like me) then get your finger out and DO something about expanding the market for Domino. There are managers at IBM/Lotus in Australia who can and do help Lotus Business Partners. If you go to them with a great idea then they'll help you. All you have to do is show them a Win-Win scenario and they'll come to the Party. I have two ZERO-COST (apart from phone calls) marketing programs running with IBM right now and the results are fantastic - two new paying clients this month and two similar client appointments lined up for January plus a public marketing event scheduled for February.

If you are not based in Sydney then I'm happy to give you some ideas that have worked for me with IBM/Lotus. Contact me on 0435 094 694 or via email on 'gdodge - bcd - net - au'. I presume you can fill in the blanks :)

Microsoft Business Partners need not apply. Nothing personal, but I want to work with people who don't take a bet on every horse in the race. If you've got the cojones to stay Yellow then I'll show you the money.

BTW... I guess the same marketing techniques would work in other geographies so I'm happy to pass these tips onto non-Australian Business Partners. I can't promise that your Lotus sales office will respond as positively as Lotus Australia has done.
.

How do you measure productivity in Lotus consulting work?

IMHO John Cook's blog about why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity sums up the major problem in the IT consulting industry. The problem (restated) is that IT consumers have no easy way of determining the productivity of their incumbent Business Partner. Here's an example:

Last month I was called into a customer site to help fix their Domino cluster. Their previous Business Partner (who had also been providing PC support services plus new hardware plus anything else they could sell the customer) had been unsuccessful in setting up the Domino cluster and that had been the last straw for the client who showed them the door and then set about getting new service providers for Notes and networking and everything else. I was one of the Partners recommended to him by a Big Blue friend and so I got the Notes work.

Now reinstalling a Domino server and setting up a Domino cluster isn't rocket science. I'm sure 90% of the readers of this blog could have done the same job without any fuss, but this job was clearly beyond the skill set of their previous supplier. So why do customers continue to pay good money to incompetent Business Partners?

My guess is that customers have no easy metric to measure IT tasks. You can tell a Postal workers that s/he must deliver xxx letters per day or a brickie that they must lay yyy bricks per day but how do you measure the productivity of IT workers? In old-style programming you could ask for zzz lines of code per day, but how do you create a similar metric in XPage web components or in system admin work?

I believe the trend towards System Integration has accelerated this problem. A traditional Lotus Partner takes pride in their product and their skill set and associated Lotus certifications, and has no problem in declaring comparative ignorance in (say) Windows networking issues. They would rather stick to their knitting and are happy to see other IT work go to other specialist IT providers. On the other hand the non-specialist 'System Integrator' has no clear boundaries on what they will sell to a customer and has the temptation to work towards grabbing the customers entire IT budget and then finding a way of providing lower cost services (while still charging at the original skilled rate) in order to maximize their profit. If Lotus consulting services aren't making a profit then they might consider reskilling their people in Sharepoint and getting their technicians to multitask with Lotus and Sharepoint consulting work. If the volume of Sharepoint work is increasing then maybe forget about doing Lotus work entirely (but keep demanding the right to sell annual Lotus license subscriptions to existing customers).

The problem is that (apart from failing their certification exams) there is no obvious bottom line for a consultant when maintaining their technical skills in Lotus software. The atrophying of their Lotus skills happens one day at a time and their customers don't notice that they are receiving a sub-standard consulting product because they have no external 'nnn-bricks-per-day' IT standard with which to measure their supplier.

I've blogged on this topic before, but this time I'm asking a question:

How do you show your own value-added technical superiority in Lotus software to a customer when the customers doesn't have sufficient Lotus technical skills to see through the smoke-and-mirrors they are being fed by their current incompetent incumbent?

Or, in John Cook's terms, how do you demonstrate that your productivity with Lotus software far exceeds that of your competition?
.

Microsoft takes one on the chin - I bet that hurt!

As of last night the US290 million patent infringement judgment against Microsoft has been reaffirmed and the injunction that bars the company from selling current versions of its MS Word software has been reinstated. This also applies to copies of Microsoft Office because they include Microsoft Word as a component of that software suite.

After the initial adverse judgment in August, Microsoft had persuaded the Federal Appeals Court to stay the injunction while it heard the appeal. Now the appeal has been heard and the Federal Court has affirmed the original judgment.

This is going to provide some interesting gossip over the Christmas break.

There's still time to buy your loved ones a copy of MS Word for Christmas. The injunction doesn't take effect until 11th January 2010.
.

Oh no, Lotus... surely you wouldn't ...

Installing Lotus Foundations on a client PC is normally a straightforward job - click here, click there, then twiddle my thumbs for five minutes while the code copies down from the server.

Not this time. The install script kept bombing out with 'unable to create file' errors. Two minutes of checking with a text editor found the problem:

set noidfile=no
set logfile=c:\Notes850_Setup.log
echo -------------------- >> %logfile%

A hardcoded 'c:\' in a setup script without a prompt to warn the person installing the software? Surely Lotus wouldn't ... but alas, Lotus did. Of course, this works wonderfully when you are setting up on a PC with a c:\ drive but not so well when the local drive is set to h:\ and a c:\ drive doesn't exist.
.

The Mythical Man-Month meets the Yellowverse

In 1975 Fred Brooks wrote a book that he called 'The Mythical Man-Month'. In that book he claimed that assigning more programmers to a project running behind schedule will make it even later, due to the time required for the new programmers to learn about the project, as well as the increased communication overhead. I suggest that with the introduction of corporate social software Fred's theory is no longer automatically applicable to the world of software development, because when I want to add a new programming resource to a project I don't always need to involve a new programmer.

Let me explain...

Serious social software tools (which excludes Facebook) foster a community of software resources who are willing to add value to your project without being formally involved. They post code samples and tutorials on their blogs (thanks Declan et. al.) and respond to technical questions in software forums. We all have different reasons for doing this but the end result is that our skill set is made available to other Lotoids without us needing to be fully briefed (or even aware of) their project. So a Man-Month of work for a clued-up developer can be made more productive on demand by incrementally adding the diverse skills of the Yellowverse as required.

The other side of the Man-Month is very real financial pressure felt by larger IT organizations who have a need to optimize their resource usage. If they are paying a developer $100k per year then they naturally want that person to be billable for as many days as possible with minimal management intervention, and the easiest way to do that is to put them on a customer's site for a large slab of time - three months is good and six months is better. And if they can find a way to justify a Team Leader and another Software Specialist in the project then that makes even more profit for them.

In my experience the smaller Business Partners don't work like that. When you are a team of only three or four consultants it doesn't make sense to tie up one third of your resources for six months at a time. You want to get in there and finish the work ASAP to free yourself up for the next opportunity.

So if we look at a paying customer who has a half finished spec (hey... he's a Retailer, not a Business Analyst) then how does he get maximum value for his money? Is his need best met by an organization whose business model thrives on throwing more bodies at the problem (thereby raising the total cost and invoking Fred's curse on his project), or does he get better value by engaging a Business Partner who knows how to work the Yellowverse and how to tap into the zero-cost skill sets of the Lotus Legends?

The answer is obvious... the problem is finding a way to say that into your proposals to customers.
.

Running BES and Traveler on the same R8.5 Server

Is it possible to install Traveler on a Domino R8.50 server that is already running BES 5.0?

The server runs on Windows Server 2008.
At first glance I don't see a problem, but has anyone done this before?
Are there any gotchas I need to know about?
.

Backup software for Domino R8.5 servers

Yesterday I started working with a customer is having all sorts of troubles getting his integrated backup s/w to work with newly upgraded (R8.02 to R8.5) virtualized Domino servers. Now I'm not going to mention the backup s/w name at this point since negotiations are still underway with the vendor about what his documentation meant when he said it " ... supports Domino R8.x ", but I am interested in what experience other people have with backing up R8.5 Domino servers.

What software do you recommend and what do you curse?
.

A useful tool for all computer gamers

I play the odd computer game and once I figured out that waiting three months after release halved the price of most boxed games I found I could even afford to play them. My biggest problem has been trying to read the system specs written in 2 point Myopia font on the bottom of the game boxes, but now I've found a website that will do that for me. Well actually its the other way around. The 'CanYouRunIt' site reads my computer specs and advises me whether my PC will support a game selected from their list.

Their list is not exhaustive - no sign of the Diablo franchise (but I already know I need a new computer before Diablo III arrives sometime within the next three years). Still, it's a useful site to bookmark.
.

What is the $$$ cost of migrating Notes applications?

I've just started talking to a customer who is looking at migrating away from their R6.5 Notes environment with the help of their current Business Partner. They have the usual half dozen CRM + Helpdesk + Asset Manager apps and " ...will migrate them when the email migration is finished."

OK, we've all heard it before, but what I need is a White Paper which exposes the pain and the cost of rewriting Notes applications in other environments. Does anyone have anything beyond anecdotal evidence which can be presented to a CIO?
.

Channelling Don Bradman

I blogged previously about the recent Lotus Cricket day in Bowral and now the intrepid Matt Paddon has posted photographs of the day. I appreciate that our American cousins may not appreciate the finer points of this noble sport however let me draw your attention to the pristine conditions of the grounds and the gentle beauty of the surrounding countryside.

Wouldn't you love to play a social game of your favorite sport on such a beautiful park?

... unless you're into ice hockey I guess.
.

Putting the Microsoft Cart before the Lotus Horse

Ed Brill and Thomas Duff have already commented about Microsoft's suggestion of 'discarding' applications that aren't completely supported by Windows 7 or, as Microsoft's Norm Judah puts it...

“There’s also the question as to whether customers really need an (incompatible) application,”

IMHO any Operating System is only useful insofar as it facilitates a users interactions with their chosen software applications which drive their business. If Windows 7 is incapable of supporting those existing applications for a business then it is Windows 7 that is incompatible and should be discarded. After all, a computer with a shiny new operating system which won't run your chosen applications is like the proverbial chocolate teapot.

I probably wouldn't have blogged on this issue except this example of Microsoft's approach to marketing their shiny new technology bought the phrase 'Big Lie' to mind, and while googling that term I came across the following description of ... well, you can guess who (the underlining is mine):

"His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it".

If Bleeding Yellow meant I had to behave like that then I'd want a blood transfusion ... I guess the standards are different in Redmond.
.

No more Mister Nice Guy

We've had an interesting 24 hours with the CMSWatch saga since Carl Tyler first broke the story about the Adriaan Bloem's assertion that IBM was phasing out Notes.

Adriaans response was completely inadequate - he complained that when he wrote 'fact', people thought he meant a 'fact' when actually he didn't. Then his colleague wrote a weasel word retraction claiming that Adriaan 'mis-spoke' when the truth was that Adriaan just didn't bother to check the truth. Now (in comment 13 of Carl's original post) Adriaan is asking if he can borrow a VM Image of Notes to get some experience with the product.

So how can CMSWatch consider themselves competent to write and sell IT industry reports when they have such an enormous chasm in their staff's education. These guys position themselves as vendor-neutral technology experts (I quote from their website: "CMS Watch™ evaluates content-oriented technologies, publishing head-to-head comparative reviews of leading solutions."), yet they seem to have paper-thin technical expertise with regard to Sharepoint's biggest competitor and (apparently) don't have any in-house Notes resources who can help sort out Adriaan's confusion.

So well done Carl for putting CMSWatch on the spot so they could get the caning they so richly deserved. It may not change their product bias but it will make them think twice the next time they want to regurgitate the old Microsoft mantras. I suggest the same 'Boots And All' treatment is applied to any other professional publishers who take the same shortcuts. NOTE: I do not condone abuse or other unprofessional behavior - I am talking about flooding offenders with accurate comments to show where they are wrong and not putting up with weasel word replies.

No more Mister Nice Guy!

OK... OK... the Horse is dead. I'll stop flogging it.


EDIT: The intrepid Michael Sampson has pointed out to me the difference between CMSWire and CMSWatch.

• CMSwatch is the analyst house who penned the Sharepoint Report and also hosted the writings of Adriaan Bloem.

• CMSWire is a totally different organization founded by Brice Dunwoodie.

I have, at times, confused the two - mea culpa. I apologize to CMSWire for my mistake.
.

The CMSWatch Emperor has no Clothes

Carl Tyler set the cats among the pigeons when he blogged about CMSWatch's article on 'The Difference between SharePoint and Lotus Notes'. The original CMS post had stated

" ... the fact that IBM is slowly phasing out Domino in favor of newer platforms ... "

and they were quickly smothered by a plethora of Yellowverse comments deriding their lack of knowledge. CMSWatch quickly backpedalled and admitted that they just 'mis-spoke', however it was interesting that it wasn't the original author who issued the retraction and apology (providing you accept that using the weasel word 'mis-spoke' is actually an apology).

So do you think those antics are good enough for a professional advisory service? Most of us get paid nothing for our blogs and that's a fair wage. Now and again one of us generates something of real value (Declan's X-Pages tutorials come to mind as does every second or third post from Nathan Freeman) but the majority of PlanetLotus feeds are just the day-to-day technical soap operas of a bunch of us IT folk - and that's fine by me.

However these CMSWatch people expect you to pay for their opinions. They will sell you an intranet site licence for all of their reports for a cool $16,000 per year or only $950 if you just want to read the Basic Sharepoint Report. But how the heck can their Sharepoint report be of any value when they obviously know so little about the main competitor to Sharepoint?

The list of people featured on their webpage who recommend the Sharepoint report made for interesting reading:

• Barb Mosher, (Senior Editor, CMSWire.com ) ... would she be the person who reviews their work for publication under the CMSxxx brand? If so, then her comments do not constitute an independent review.
• Hugh McKellar, (Editor, KMWorld Magazine ) ... who had just held a joint webinar with CMSWorld about Sharepoint so there is an existing commercial relationship with that reviewer.
• Two quotes each from Michael Sampson ( President, The Michael Sampson Company Ltd) and Paul Culmsee, (IT Consultant, Clever Workaround) ... doubtless they are highly skilled people but their respective websites show that both of them are one-man band consulting outfits who sell Sharepoint consulting services, so once again we don't see evidence of independent review.

There were two other endorsements that I didn't check beyond the ten second scrutiny I gave to the people listed above, but when you combine their demonstrated lack of knowledge about Notes/Domino with the thinness of the Sharepoint Report reviewer's credentials then IMHO CMSWatch have a looooooooooong way to go before they can be taken seriously as 'impartial reviewers' in the collaboration space. These guys seem like Sharepoint Fellow-Travellers who just jumped aboard the 'Let's-bash-Notes' wagon before checking their facts. The problem is, people are probably buying and reading and believing their stuff these guys write.

'mis-spoke' ... what a great word!
.

Y us crptc var nm?

There was an interesting article in Omninerd about the need for coding standards and, although you've probably heard most of it before, I'd be interested in feedback about one particular point - cryptic variable names.

We all do code maintenance and (I'm sure) we all encounter code which seems to make no sense at all until we mentally remap the existing variable names into something more understandable.

So why do people call a variable 'dtFHire' when they could name it 'DateOfFirstHire' (or even 'dtOfFirstHire')? Is it an anachronistic habit from days when memory was scarce and variable names limited in length? Is it because they don't like having their code run wordwrapping when they write:

WeeksOfLeaveAccumulated = ((LastPayDate - DateOfFirstHire)/NumberOfDaysInAWeek) * DailyLeaveAllowance) + BonusWeeksAccumulated - NumberIFirstThoughtOf

What is the reason?
.

Is Symphony losing the 'hearts and minds' battle?

I use either Notes or Symphony for all of my business doc needs and I'm a firm believer that Symphony is a good investment for IBM and for users. The big problem I see for the product is that it seems to be marginalized by the reviewers. Look at this review by Infoworld which looks at the ongoing battle between Microsoft Office and Google Apps - not a mention of Symphony anywhere in the article.

I know that the current Google/Microsoft war for Apps and OS is sexier than the (yawn) ongoing IBM/Microsoft 100 Years War over email but use awareness is the name of today's game and IBM marketing needs to work harder and smarter to stay in the battle. Maybe if IBM followed Google's lead and provided a competitor to Windows and then put some marketing dollars behind it...
COUGHLotusFoundationsServerCOUGH...

No, I'm just dreaming...

Yes... I know about the 'Lotus Knows' campaign. That's a different type of marketing investment compared to getting the Symphony name into these product-specific reviews done by industry analysts.
.

So this blonde walks into a bar ...

Well, not really, but I would guess that 99% of readers would interpret that title as an indication that this post contains a blonde joke... and they're right.

Last year I replaced all the computers in my office with those new energy efficient kind from IBM, and today I got a call from the IBM Business Partner who installed them. He was complaining that the work had been completed a whole year ago and I still hadn’t paid for them.

HELLLOOOOOOO…………..just because I’m blond doesn’t mean that I am automatically stupid.

So, I reminded him what his fast talking sales guy had told me then, that in ONE YEAR these computers would PAY FOR THEMSELVES!

Helllooooo……??? It’s been a year already!

There was only silence at the other end of the line, so I finally just hung up..

He never called back. I bet he felt like an idiot.

.

Same Planet ... Different Worlds

I've been through two apparently unrelated incidents in the last 24 hours which have set me thinking that Earth is actually a multiverse with everyone living in their own reality.

Today's incident occured when I went to pick up a package from my Post Office. The attendant behind the counter was quite confrontational and said that I must have lost a notification that the postman had left in my letterbox. Despite my explanation that I had been eagerly checking my mailbox for this package (a new battery for my completely dead mobile phone) for the last week and I had not received any such notification, the attendant aggressively insisted that I was at fault. When I told him I was going to report his confrontational attitude to his management his reply was "You wouldn't do that if I was a white man". Anyway, I've now made the complaint and I'm happy to let the Australia Post Customer Service team review the video footage and decide what action to take. I can shrug off bad customer service but I don't take gratuitous accusations of racism from anybody. My question from that incident is how on earth did this man decide that a complaint about his customer service must be racially motivated?

Yesterday's event was equally baffling. I was at an IBM roundtable meeting which is where Big Blue invites selected Business Partners to chew the fat on selected topics and hopefully gain some consensus about the best direction to take on those issues. One of the key topics at that meeting was about negotiating commercial relationships between individual Business Partners and one of the people present didn't like the idea because (in his words) "I don't trust anybody".

OK, we've all been burned by people we trusted and I'm sure we could all name some business partners who are lacking in ethics. In my case I chose not to trust those who have screwed me in the past (you know who you are) but I'm certainly open to working with new faces on new opportunities. To hear a business person declare that they don't trust anybody seems completely out of this world. You want your customers to trust you, but you're not willing to trust anyone else... what's wrong with this picture?

Let me clarify that I have known this Partner for many years and he is a thoroughly decent person who deserves the success he has achieved. I'm just baffled by his decision not to trust anybody regardless of the circumstances.

Anyway, both of those incidents left me unable to see where the other person was coming from and I now need to (regretfully) walk away from spending more time figuring out what they were thinking.

Same Planet ... Different Worlds.
.

Microsoft eliminates Blue Screen of Death!

Prevx reported today that the dreaded Blue Screen of Death has finally been eliminated from Windows. For Windows 7 (and future releases) the "Blue" screen has been upgraded to a "Black" screen of Death. A spokesman for Microsoft said:

"Customers have been complaining for years about the Blue Screen of Death so we finally acted to remove the problem while still retaining backward compatibility with the BSOD acronym. Note that this new feature will not decrease the frequency of the problem but it will bring comfort to millions of users who can see that we are in control of the situation."

Unconfirmed reports suggest that Microsoft has already made this feature available as a free upgrade for Vista and XP and slipstreamed it into an automatic update that ran in the last week of October.
.

Strike Two! Cloud Computing loses more customer data

Last month I highlighted an incident where users lost their data which had been hosted by a Microsoft subsidiary. Now a similar problem has hit Palm OS devices and once more the hosting provider is 'working' with users to assist in recovering their data.

The way I read it, the data is gone forever but the loss to each individual user is far below the entry cost for a lawsuit so the maximum downside for Palm etc. is a PR hit for a couple of weeks then back to business as usual. One day a hosting provider will lose a lawyer's data and then it'll be pass the popcorn while we watch the customers fighting the PR flacks with lawsuits at dawn.

If anyone wants to tell me that the Palm and Danger scenarios weren't technically Cloud Computing then perhaps you can preface your remarks by telling me the difference from a customer's point of view... "I gave you my data and now it's gone. Everything else is irrelevant."
.

Things I'd like to see - Suicide by fish knife

You've probably heard of Puffer Fish - that Japanese delicacy which can kill you if it's not prepared properly. Now an enterprising company has actually bred a non-toxic version of the fish which sounds an eminently sensible thing to do since the fish chefs "...are traditionally bound to commit ritual suicide with their own fish knife should one of their customers expire after eating one of their meals..."

However there is apparently only a small commercial interest in the safer version of the fish:

It's a very tasty fish, but that's not the only reason people choose to go to a fugu restaurant," said Shinichi Ueshima, the chef at the Dote fugu restaurant in Yokohama.

"It's obviously more than a little exciting to go to a restaurant knowing that it might be the last meal that you ever eat," he said. "Where is the enjoyment in eating something that has no risk in it?"

Now I know why people deploy Microsoft software...
.

Will Domino R8.51 run on Windows Server 2008 R2?

A customer wants to run Domino R8.51 on Windows Server 2008 R2 but that version of Windows Server isn't listed as a supported OS. I'm sure the answer is that it runs OK, but can someone point out an IBM document that approves of that configuration?

A customer wants to know...
.

There's just one catch ...

I normally stay away from Infoworld. Their technique of splitting a short article across multiple pages to force you into viewing 3-4 times as many ads as other web sites is a pain in the butt and I am also mildly disgusted when IT publications use pop-up ads. Sure they get some money for it but it puts them in the same classification as websites for Acai berry weight-loss treatments. So these days when I choose to read an article in Infoworld I just select the print button and read through the straight text without the ads. But I digress ...

I was reading Infoworld's review of Microsoft's new web-based application suite which they will be throwing into the ring against Google Docs and IBM Symphony, and this line caught my eye:

But there must be a catch, right? Sure, and it's a doozy: Microsoft's applications don't really work. During the Technical Preview, documents imported into the online versions of Word and PowerPoint are read-only.

I think that line sums up the entire Microsoft marketing strategy since they moved away from their core Windows and Office strategy: "Sure we have products that we position against Notes / Java / Mozilla / Internet Search / Google Docs / any other new market, but they don't really work (unless you let Microsoft provide the definition of 'Work')",

Microsoft software: Just say No.

.

Loti of Australia v. The Rest of the World ...

... and unfortunately the Australian Loti lost. The event was the first annual Lotus Cricket Challenge held at the Bradman Oval in Bowral and the teams were reinforced by selected Lotus Business Partners and customers all set for a day of fine sport with perhaps a half glass of Chardonnay over lunch.

There could not have been a finer locale or conditions for the day. Bowral oval was the home oval for Sir Donald Bradman, the all-time champion batsman whose sporting records are STILL unbeaten some 60 years after he retired from the game. The Don's career average of 99.94 is fifty percent higher than the next highest scorer (R.G. Pollock on 60.97) with the rest of the world's past and present batsmen all trailing off into lower figures.

For yesterday's match the scores didn't matter. Australia lost on the day but we all had a wonderful day with only the gentlest of sledging ( e.g. "Your Mother uses Outlook!") to ruffle the batsmen's concentration

There were some minor injuries with the RoTW Captain (Tim Royle) flicking a ball off his bat and onto his chin, but he merely retired hurt to wash off the blood and see a doctor then returned to bowl out the Australian tail in the afternoon. Well played sir!

A good day had by all. My thanks go to Lotus for organising the day and inviting me along.
.

EDIT: Two days later and I'm still sore. I might need a few days of training before next year's match.
.

How to roast an IBM executive (with tomato sauce)

It's always fun when IBM send over a suit from the USA to host a meeting of local Business Partners and to offer him up at a ritual sacrifice of tomato pelting and slow roasting. The event was called 'Business Partner & Lotus Roundtable with Mike Garbett' and Mike (Director of WorldWide Sales for Lotus Collaboration) took most of the input on board with good grace. Unfortunately I had to leave before the red wine was exhausted but I'm sure my fellow BPs finished off my share of the Merlot.

The amazing thing about these events is that the local Partners tell the same thing to EVERY visiting executive from the USA and yet our comments are always met with an open-mouthed 'gosh... no-one ever told me that' response by the newest blue-suited arrival. I sometimes think that IBM tells its execs that Australia is like a little town somewhere in Texas so as long as you talk slowly and smile a lot you'll get on just fine. The reality is that with a population of over 22 million we would fit in as the next largest state of the USA after Texas with about 3 million more people than the state of New York.

More critical than our size if the fact that we have a different corporate infrastructure than the USA. Most of our larger employers have their HQ overseas and therefore we have a limited ability to influence strategic purchasing decisions. We also see the lions share of Australian licencing revenue being creamed off by overseas Business Partners who have cozied up to the Head Office buyers in Main Street USA, but that's life.

However what IBM could do is to make their own products more available to the Australian market. I'll quote from my own blog post about the reality of SMB in Australia with comparable USA figures in square brackets:

* Large firms: ......200+ staff .......5,876 .... (0.3%) .... [0.28%]
* Mediumsized firms: 20-199 staff ....78,304 .... (3.9%) .... [0.79%]
* Small firms: ......5-19 staff .....228,313 ... (11.3%) .... [4.75%]
* Micro-enterprises: 0-4 staff ....1,699,277 ... (84.5%) ... [94.18%]

So if most of the opportunity in Australia is in the sub-200 user space then why is there a lower limit of 200 users for Lotus Live? IBM is just taking its own products off the radar for all but 6,000 businesses in Australia. Mike got that message loud and clear yesterday and I'm repeating it here for the IBM execs that haven't yet been roasted at an Australian Business Partner Barbeque.

I saw Mike taking copious notes at the meeting but only time will tell whether the next exec to visit Australia has bothered to read those notes.
.

Should you pay less for multi-skilled consultants?

While clicking away at the multiple choices in my R8.5 Application Development update exam this morning I came across a piece of Javascript that I didn't comprehend. It was one of those questions that gives you a scenario and asks you which piece of code would Randy have used to accomplish the desired outcome and I can't go into more detail without violating the conditions of the test.

Anyway, I probably failed that particular question (but comfortably passed the test anyway) and it left me with an interesting question about the need for self-education with software development ie. How do you put a limit on the education effort that you need in order to be a professional application developer with Domino R8.5? Obviously if I try to learn ALL of Javascript (ha!) then I'm probably spending too much time Learning and not enough time Earning, but at least I can justify the self-education effort with Javascript on the grounds that it enhances my Domino programming abilities.

So (tongue in cheek and waiting for the barbed responses) how do individual Domino Developers who have decided to learn Sharepoint and .NET (or Google Apps or any direct competitor to Domino) justify selling themselves at their same old consulting rates for Domino work, since their Domino skills must inevitably have suffered from the decrease in their staying-current-with-Domino time? Should customers demand to pay less per hour for multi-skilled consultants on the grounds that those consultants obviously can't be fully skilled in any technology - Jacks of all Trades and Masters of None? That's not a slur on the technical ability or character of anyone, but there is obviously a limit on how much technology any of us can learn. Or perhaps more accurately, they might have been Masters in the older versions of Domino but are no longer at the Bleeding Edge of the Yellowverse.

I'm interested in knowing how other people decide how to put an upper limit on what they learn with Domino and (if they are moving to the Dark Side) at which point do decide to stop the serious self-education effort with new Domino technology such as XPages, Themes or Lotusscript classes.

Anonymous posts are acceptable (and expected).

.

Quality Journalism? Who needs it?

So Rupert Murdoch is upset because he believes Google is stealing his 'quality journalism' and therefore his ad revenue. Well frankly I've never been impressed with 'quality journalism' the way he (or any other newspaper publisher) defines it. I want to know about the things that interest me , not about the things that Rupert's editors want to load up into the headlines. Sherlock Holmes summed it up best when he dismissed Watson's discussion of the Copernican system with the words:

"What the deuce is it to me? You say that we go around the sun. If we went around the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."

Amen brother! Talk to me about Domino v. Exchange or Gilbert & Sullivan or the American Civil War or World in Flames or dealing with a crying two-month-old baby and I'm all ears, but I really don't care if the Hawks beat the Demons on Saturday or who won the car races at Bathurst or that a bank was robbed somewhere and I'm probably not even interested if we change Prime Ministers because of some political scandal.

Murdoch's other problem is that no news organization carries a sufficiently high reputation that they can demand money for something that is available for free elsewhere. Mind you, I could be wrong on that point. Millions of people buy bottled water every day when they have a tap at home in their kitchen.

I pay my monthly access charges to my ISP to receive the news and I don't care who is stuffing the the pipeline with the factoids at the other end as long as they are accurate. I haven't parted with money to buy a newspaper for (probably) the last ten years and I can't remember the last time I turned on the television to watch the evening news. Quality journalism is in the eye of the beholder and Rupert Murdoch's publications just aren't worth the paper they're printed on.

Now where was that Wikipedia article on Jeffrey Dahmer ?
.

Free Technical Training for Notes/Domino R8.5x in Sydney

Over the past few months the talented Holli Konig and her All-Dancing Business Partners have been running R8.5 'Proof of Technology' seminars across the USA. These seminars are targeted at IT Managers, Application Developers, System Administrators and Architects evaluating IBM Lotus Notes/Domino.

Now this two day seminar is coming to Sydney with hands-on sessions for System Administration ( Domino Attachment and Object Service plus ID Vault and Shared Login) and for Application Development (Composite Applications and Xpages). The dates for this two day course are next Thursday 19th and Friday 20th November and the venue is the IBM Innovation Centre at 601 Pacific Highway St. Leonards.

This is NOT a marketing event. IBM are providing the facilities for the seminar but the course will be presented by technically skilled and certified IBM/Lotus Business Partners.

The seminar treads a middle ground between management and technical issues eg There are hands-on exercises in building an X-Page but there is also discussion on why an X-Page is a better web construct than a legacy 'webified' Notes application from a business process perspective.

Attendees are encouraged to bring their own questions and to partake in a vigorous and free-flowing discussion about the technical 'how-do-you-do-this' nuts and bolts of working with Notes/Domino R8.5. On Friday morning there will be a 30 minute opportunity to quiz Mike Garbett (Director of Worldwide Sales - Collaboration, Lotus Software) about directions for the Lotus Product suite.

Did I mention that the seminar is free? Attendance is restricted to 24 people (one PC per attendee) and there is a limit of two attendees per organisation. If you are interested in attending the event then contact me on 0435 094 694 or by email on gdodge at bcd dot net dot au.
.

The hidden cost of Cloud Computing

There are real advantages in Cloud Computing but this is not one of them:

TBST claimed its normal monthly communications bill was about $320 but it was billed for almost $3000 during a period when the network was needlessly backing up several gigabytes of data daily to synchronise the iDisk data using Apple's MobileMe. This is a subscription service for so-called "cloud computing" where users pay to store data on what is referred to in PowerPoint-speak as the "internet cloud".

If you're going to advise your customers to put their data into the cloud then I suggest you help them calculate the new bandwidth costs before they do the migration. If you don't, then you might find out that their budget allocation for software consulting for the next few quarters gets diverted to paying the phone bill.
.

Should old Notes databases just be left to die?

I've always been impressed by the backward compatibility of Notes. Late in 2008 I re-met an old client who was still running a Notes database I had built in Notes R1 (yes, R1) some 20 years ago. His Domino server had moved up to R7 by then but the app was still chugging along storing client records and printing sales summaries. It sounded like a story for the IBM marketing machine except for the fact that he was in the process of replacing the system with a purpose-built CRM product.

Then there's the customer who wants me to paste a quick-and-dirty XPage front end onto a database he had downloaded from Open NTF. In the end I advised against that approach since it would take a couple of weeks to reverse-engineer and rebuild the undocumented lotusscript agents buried within the existing Forms.

We can also consider one Business Partner's six figure commercial software development project that was originally designed with R7 Lotusscript and is now being retrofitted with XPages to make it more appealing to new customers. I know there are some good people working on that project but maybe they can't see the forest for the trees - new clothes do not make a new man in the world of software.

So how far can you stretch the rubber-band? Sure you can take an existing DB, upgrade the ODS and whack in some XPages over the weekend but is that a good thing? Aren't we just creating the 21st Century equivalent of 1980's COBOL spaghetti code?

Maybe Microsoft does have some benefits with their 'rip and replace' approach to technology. Applications developed with their tools may be over-budget and over-schedule but at least the code is fresh.
.

Foundations DynamicDNS doesn't do everything...

The Dynamic DNS server included as part of the Lotus Foundations software does a good job of keeping your server visible to the world when your ISP randomly changes your IP address. Unfortunately, the DynamicDNS update process doesn't update everything...

>

So if your email is still being delivered and is accessible via iNotes, but other types of access aren't working (Notes Designer client in this case) then check your Fast Forward settings.
.

An IBM Call Center goof...

I've been working through a Lotus Foundations technical support issue with IBM over the last couple of weeks and my call has been bounced between call centers in Australia, India and Canada during that time. The Indian call center asked me to send them a server snapshot to assist them in understanding the problem and they also asked for remote access to my server. I don't have a problem with either of those requests and dutifully sent off the information. The Indian Call Center blew their credibility when they reviewed my server configuration and emailed me:

"I got following IP address eth0 192.168.0.1 and eth1 xx.xxx.xxx.xxx from snapshot. However unable to access LFS from both IP address. Please confirm correct IP address to access server remotely. "

I believe that people from India can be as smart and professional and technically adept as anyone else, but when a technician tries to remotely access a customer's systems using 192.168.0.1 then I think some basic network training is urgently needed.

BTW The Australian IBM Call Center was polite, professional and knew their stuff. They even assisted by sending me a CD by overnight courier when I admitted I'd already blown my 10gb internet cap for the month and couldn't download a required system update. My thanks to Graham Gill and Daniel Lui on the 127.0.0.1 Team.
.

A question on formatting Text in XPages

I have an XPage and on that XPage is a table and within that Table is a Computed field containing the formula:

@DbLookup(@DbName(),"LKRegion","South","Area")+ "\n" +
@DbLookup(@DbName(),"LKRegion","South","Population")+ "\n" +
@DbLookup(@DbName(),"LKRegion","South","Value")

I'm getting out the values that I want, but the line spacing between those values is set too high - looks like 1.5 lines above and beneath each line. eg

170 sq km

470,000

>30 million

I would prefer to see it displayed as :

170 sq km
470,000
>30 million

In Notes I would go to the properties box and change the line spacing but I can't see how to do it in Xpages. I'm not using any Style sheets in this application and all of the style-related Margin/Padding/etc settings are on 'Auto'. Could some kind guru tell me where to find the line spacing setting or do I need to find a clever way to do it in Javascript?

It would also be good to change some of the text attributes depending on the calculated values eg change the 'Value' color to red if greater than $50 million.

170 sq km
470,000
>60 million

I could do it in Notes by preformatting the individual results and then using Lotusscript to concatenate them and then paste them into a Rich Text field, but I think it might be beyond Javascript.
.

Microsoft DID warn you...

Naming their subsidiary 'Danger' was only a subtle hint, but the hint was there.

My last post highlighted the problem of maintaining a secure Cloud Computing environment in the face of easily guessed login names and general password apathy. Now Microsoft has had to admit that their cloud may not be as resilient as they hoped it was. One of their subsidiaries (aptly named 'Danger') has lost customer data. Note that this data is not just misplaced or waiting for a restore of backup tapes - it is no more, it has ceased to be, it has expired and gone on to meet its maker. It is ex-data.

If you were an IT Manager and you had just 'lost' some data, imagine explaining that situation to your boss. What are your chances of escaping this situation with just a formal apology and an offer to forgo your bonus for the quarter? Probably quite small, but I'm betting that's exactly what Microsoft/Danger will offer. A snail-mailed letter on good quality paper printed where-ever its cheapest and an offer of an additional three months service for free. But first you must manually re-enter all of your data into our system...

I was also interested to read of a potential problem where lost data can be retrieved, but because of a massive server farm breakdown (terrorist attack?) there is insufficient bandwidth to restore all of the data in a timely manner.

Am I the only one worried about this? Sometimes I feel like Private James Frazer from Dad's Army with his oft-repeated observation of "We're dooooomed". I see many advantages in Cloud Computing, but the whole thing is moving too fast and aiming too high for my liking. My advice? Make haste slowly with the cloud and keep on-site backups of everything.
.

Is outsourced email fundamentally insecure?

How secure can you make a hosted service? I was reading about the recent Hotmail/Google username blunder and the thought struck me that the security model might be fundamentally flawed. After all, if they force the use of an email address as a login identity then you have automatically given away your login identity to everyone whom you have sent an email, and by extrapolation a hacker could figure out the login for most other employees in your company eg

'Let's see now... if "John Smith" becomes "jsmith@xyz.com" then his boss "Rita Rose" should be "rrose@xyz.com".'

The same article pointed out that around 40% of people had the same password for every website they used and when you consider that most people on that list had a very simple password then it shouldn't take too long for a dedicated hacker to get external web access to a couple of email accounts in your corporate system.

Am I missing something here or is this a time bomb waiting to explode in Google's face?
.

Be careful displaying your Testimonials!

Uh oh... look out boys and girls... we now need to declare our Freebies and prove our Testimonials. The FTC has decided that bloggers need to declare all freebies associated with their reviews of products and to be more careful in displaying their Testimonials.

I think it's a good idea in principle but the Devil will be in the Detail. How are they going to enforce that US law on (say) an Australian citizen living in the UK publishing a blog on a Canadian website with the data hosted in China?
.

Murphy must have heard me :(

Well, we were the second most livable country in the world until 2pm this afternoon when our Reserve Bank raised official interest rates to 3.25%. It's supposed to be a good sign that indicates Australia is coming out of recession but all I can see is the extra money I'll need to pay my mortgage each week.

It's interesting how Banks always take weeks and weeks to pass on a reduction in official interest rates but it'll probably only take them a day or two to pass on this increase in official rates.
.

OT: Australia - even at second best is still a great place

News like this makes me sit back and think how lucky I am:

AUSTRALIA has the second best quality of life in the world and could pip Norway for top spot next year, the author of a UN report on migration and development says.

Australia was ranked second among 182 countries on a scale measuring life expectancy, school enrolments and income in the United Nations Development Program's Human Development Report 2009, published yesterday.

The US slipped a spot to 13 and Britain was steady at 21, based on the latest internationally comparable data from 2007. Niger ranked lowest, followed by Afghanistan and Sierra Leone.
.

All your viruses belong Microsoft... and your personal information also.

It sounds too good to be true. The Evil Empire has repented of its ways and is actually giving something for FREE to the IT community from which it has drained so many billions of dollars over the last few decades. Step right up folks and download your free virus scanner guaranteed to totally screw up Norton's and Symantec's cash flow for the next few years until they go out of business.


Oh... and the fine print gives Microsoft the right to harvest and review all of the virus related information on your computer or, with Advanced Membership, possibly even your personal information. Ummm... it looks like they left off the option to choose to send NO information back to Microsoft.


>

Well, at least they gave it a suitable name - "Microsoft Spynet".

Whoever said there is no truth in advertising?
.

Fancy a spot of industrial espionage?

The British Government is recruiting some new secret agents. Seriously. Try their aptitude test and see if you have what it takes. The skills might come in useful if you want to bluff your way into the next Microsoft Developers Conference.

I scored eight out of ten.
.

I will prostitute myself for one day only...

I don't twitter and I don't tweet and I draw strength from a recent study I read (no - I don't have the URL - my bad) that showed 40% of tweets are meaningless drivel a la

# Yawn. Late night playing Warcraft.

# I h@te Microsoft

# I've just had this wonderful bowel movement - let me tell you about it.

However for one day I'm willing to sacrifice the purity of my well-known technology-neutral persona and hop aboard the social bandwagon in order to publicly state:

#Lotusknows

Rock on Lotus!
.

OK! OK! Technology neutral I am not, but I still see no redeeming virtues in either Facebook or Twitter from a corporate perspective.
.

Google down the gurgle... again!

Google mail went down again today. These Google failures are becoming a regular (monthly? bi-monthly?) occurrence and I've got to wonder about the economics of this model. Sure you might save some nice round numbers in short term dollars by slashing your IT budget but how many zillions do you loose in productivity (and sales and PR image) when your entire staff can't do their work?
.

London Stock Exchange rejects Microsoft

Whenever I see a foreign language story like Albert Buendia's post on the Microsoft:FAIL at the London Stock Exchange, I reach for the handy Google Translate button to read the English Language version.

Give it a try and see what the rest of the world is thinking.
.

Lotus Knows how to embarrass themselves...

I decided to check out the Lotus Knows website and discovered the following anomoly ...



...get you to the following error message ...



But if you send a message to that email address you get the following response:



It's bad enough that we get sent to an IBM hardware page to have an error message generated, but then to have the error report rejected is beyond frustrating. C'mon IBM, don't your web guys test these links before they load them?
.

OT: Melanie Rose arrives seven weeks early

I took Belinda to Norwest Private Hospital at 10am this morning because of some minor medical issues this morning and Melanie Rose popped out at 1:24pm this afternoon. Since she was only at 33 weeks we figured we still had some time to finish the spare bedroom but we were wrong.

• 1,940 grammes
• normal delivery
• less than half an hour in labour (Belinda's secret is available on request)

Doctors are quite happy with Melanie's health although she will be in neo-natal intensive for monitoring for the next four weeks. I'm told that is standard procedure for 33 week babies.

Belinda is in Norwest Private Hospital, 11 Norbrick Drive, Bella Vista in room 216 (ph: 8882-8616) and can have visitors between 3pm to 4.30pm and 6.30pm to 8.00pm.

Melanie Rose is in neo-natal care and only immediate family can visit her (sorry - hospital rules).
.

Microsoft wins the right to keep selling MS Word

The US Court of Appeals has granted Microsoft's request to put off an injunction that could have forced it to stop selling Office Word as of October 10.

While I have no particular love for Microsoft I do think this is the right decision because if Microsoft win the final appeal then their business will not have been harmed by the court delay while if i4i win the case then they can just collect another few hundred million dollars in damages.

Neither result will affect the amount I pay on my mortgage so my interest is academic at most.
.

Arguments against Cloud Computing

Google have been pushing Cloud Computing it for a while but I shrugged off their initial enthusiasm because when all you have is a website then everything looks like a web application. Then Microsoft jumped on the bandwagon but I figure they'll jump on any new idea just in case it spawns a serious competitor and they miss the chance to kill the opposition before it grows bigger than they are. Now IBM has joined the party by selling LotusLive so it seems that all Three Emperors have New Clothes made from the same cloth. On my grumpy days all of this Cloud Computing stuff just seems to be just a repackaging of Domino Hosting from the 1990's - ie a useful product but not the answer to everything.

So it's reassuring for me to read this post from Cory Doctorow who's more cynical than I am about the whole idea.

...the main attraction of the cloud to investors and entrepreneurs is the idea of making money from you, on a recurring, perpetual basis, for something you currently get for a flat rate or for free without having to give up the money or privacy that cloud companies hope to leverage into fortunes.

There are some interesting comments following his blog post but I did notice that a significant number of the pro-Cloud comments were made by people who were selling Cloud-related services.
.

How do *you* determine your consulting rates?

Customers can pay IBM's $300+ per hour domestic on-site rate or outsource the work overseas for $20 per hour (you know the countries I mean) or pay something in between to have your smiling face walk through their door. In my experience software consulting rates are one of the most volatile costs in the IT industry.

Let's ignore the two extreme cases for the moment and look at the middle. Let's even ignore your personal stable of tame clients who know what you're worth and are willing to pay over the odds for your services. I'm interested in the long term domestic trend when bidding for new customers. Are you charging your time out at less than you were two years ago just to win the business?

Personally, I don't charge top dollar because I want to win the work and I don't want to give that new clients a reason to ever look anywhere else. Certainly I'll negotiate for a big project ("Three months full-time work for one of my people? Let me just sharpen my pencil here and see if we can make the deal more attractive for you") but normally there's only $30 per hour difference between my new-customer-with-an-emergency-at-1am rate and my long-term client rate. My point is that those rates haven't moved for a couple of years despite increases in cost of living.

So is it the consulting market rate perpetually stagnated because of the off-shore alternative? Will it dive further because of all of the down-sized IT workers opening up their own shop and competing for your customers? What's your opinion?

There's a joke in there somewhere about people putting in their two cents worth, but I'll leave it to the comedians to work out how to phrase it.
.

Evaluating a Consulting company based on their website

Here are some rules for evaluating IT consulting companies based on their website. The idea is to give the work to the supplier who has the highest score at the end of this process:

• Start each company with a score of 100.
  
  
• Subtract 1 for every meaningless (ie unprovable) adjective on their website - look for words like "passionate", "committed" and "highly skilled".
  
  
• Subtract 5 for every graphic on their website depicting a person who doesn't work for their company.
  
  
• Subtract 10 for every client reference on their website where the consultant(s) who did the work are no longer employed at that company. If possible, use Linked-In etc to track down where those top-gun consultants are currently working and include their new employers on your list of potential suppliers.
  
  
• Subtract 20 if their website lists a technology (eg Lotus Domino) without identifying a specialized skill set within that technology (eg System Admin v. Application Development v. integration with SAP v. software upgrades)
  
  
• Subtract 50 if the staff they want to assign to your project don't have current technical certifications in any of the technologies listed on their website.
  
  
• Automatically disqualify any supplier who outsources the care and feeding of their own website to another IT company.
  

Then pick the three companies with the highest score and mention to each of them that you're going to run your shortlist past the Vendor and ask for a recommendation. If any of them offer you a free lunch or other bribe at that point then take it and subtract 10 from their score.

... or you can just pick the supplier who gives you the cheapest quote. That seems to be the way most customers work.
.

The GMail Outage Autopsy

Apparently yesterday's problem with GMail was caused by some hardware being taken off line for routine maintenance but the remaining boxes met a spike in the message traffic and weren't up to the job so some of them closed down which threw more work onto the hardware that was left resulting in more of them closing down (Rinse and Repeat).

In looking at this issue I've learned three lessons :

1. Obviously Google can't (and won't) adjust its upgrade schedules to avoid everyone's deadlines so these problems will continue to occur at inconvenient times. All that you can predict is that in future they will do their upgrades after 9pm USA time (which, of course, is prime working shift for the rest of the world).
   
   
2. If Google's hardware redundancy is so bad that it can't handle a spike in message traffic when they're doing a PLANNED upgrade, then I don't see how they can hope to handle an UNPLANNED emergency.
   
   
3. When you're using Google to search the internet for information on Google Applications, don't type the word 'GAPE' into your search bar and hit the 'I'm Feeling Lucky" button (don't do it! trust me on this one!).

The article concludes:

The problem was fixed once Google brought more routers online and spread the traffic among them. Google says it is tweaking its architecture so that the problem doesn't happen again.

Sounds like it needs more than a tweak.
.

Telstra follows Google into the Black Hole

Being Australia's largest provider of telecommunication services didn't stop Telstra from sharing an hour's worth of unscheduled network downtime today.

Telstra's national internet network went down for an hour today, the company says.

The outage is understood to have affected all Telstra home and businesses broadband and mobile internet customers nationwide.

All services were restored by about 8.50am, a Telstra spokesman said.

The company formed a major incident response team to investigate the outage. It's not yet known what caused it.

So all of those companies using Google Apps had a somewhat lengthy coffee break while companies running internal Domino servers just kept on running. I think the hardest part of running your company on Google Apps would be when your IT person tells you (quite truthfully) that there is nothing they can do except wait for someone else to fix the problem.
.

Another GMail outage...

Google had two separate outages this week.

One was a small outage on Monday that wiped out email to only a "small subset" of users.

Tuesday afternoon's outage affected "a majority" of Gmail users and lasted about an hour and 45 minutes until the problem was fixed, the company said.

Clinical reports of Google email outages don't reveal the angst of the businesses that suffer loss of service. When it's your own servers that are down you can get rapid status updates from your IT staff and decide whether to invest in additional system redundancy. When it's all in the cloud then all you can do is twiddle your thumbs and wait.

The same questions about system uptime apply to the Microsoft and Lotus offerings in this area. I'm not an expert on the cloud but it all seems terribly fragile to me.
.

What Vaughan meant to say...

In recent months IBM/Lotus has been revamping their software distribution model and part of that process was to change the criteria by which a company could be an authorized reseller of IBM/Lotus software. Vaughan Rivett spent some time preparing a slideshow presentation about the new business model and (at last count) attracted over 100 hits from Planet Lotus. I respect Vaughan's technical expertise but he's missed a few critical points about the new Business Partner model and I'd like to clear up that confusion.

NOTE: The criteria for IBM Business Partners in ANZ are slightly different to those for other regions so please check the details before you post 'corrections' to anything I say here.

To be an IBM/Lotus Business Partner in ANZ you need to...

1. Get Member-Level membership in the IBM PartnerWorld® program - Go here to get your free membership.
   
   
2. Register with the A/NZ Business Partner Program Manager - Either call your local IBM office and ask for her name or send me an email and I'll give you her details.
   
   
3. Nominate a Brand or Product group - IBM/Lotus please.
   
   
4. Obtain 2 Lotus technical certs for that product group - No problem...I'm a Certified Lotus R8 Application Developer and Certified Lotus R8 System Administrator.
   
   
5. Obtain a Lotus sales cert for each location you have registered in PW - Yep... I've got that certification also. Note that the IBM Business Partner criteria are different to the IBM Partnerworld criteria for Advanced-Level status because Partnerworld imposes a two-certification-per-person limit while the IBM Business Partner criteria allows all certifications to be held by the same person.
   
   
6. Submit your client reference document - OK, that might be a problem if you're just starting out because you haven't got any IBM/Lotus customers yet. Have a chat to the ANZ Business Partner Program Manager and see if you can negotiate an extension on this point.
   
   
7. Submit your Business Plan (via PartnerWorld online tool) - Ten minutes work on-line to type in my numbers.
   
   
8. Register to participate in SVI or VAP - Another five minutes of paperwork.
   
   
9. Accept the additional resell terms and conditions - And even more paperwork.
   

There's also the matter of paying the annual USD$2,000 partner fee to IBM but that's the cost of doing business.

So it really comes down to getting three Lotus certifications (one sales and two technical) and paying your annual partner fee, and if you chose not to get the certifications then you can't be a Business Partner. I think Vaughan's major problem was that he presumed that one person could not hold all of the certifications, but that is incorrect. I believe the requirements are similar for the Tivoli, Websphere, Rational and DB2 crowd but since I don't play in those ballparks I'm not sure of the finer details.

I have my disagreements with IBM (don't get me started on any Lotus Foundations issues here) but I believe they are heading in the right direction with the new Business Partner model. For all of the Business Partners who made the effort and retained their certified status after the September 1st cut-off I think we might be pleasantly surprised by the benefits coming out of the renewed relationship with IBM.
.

Lotus Knows... that Australia is asleep at 1:30am

Listening in on the "Lotus Knows" awareness campaign discussion with Kristen Lauria, Sandy Carter and Shaun Jones sounded like a great idea until I realized that 11:30 AM on Monday Eastern Time (US & Canada) is equivalent to 1:30 AM on Tuesday Australian Eastern Standard Time.

Hey, I'm keen on knowing about Lotus, but not quite THAT keen.

However Deborah Cole (Lotus Channel Marketing and Communications and winner of Miss Congeniality 2009) advised me that the call will be replayed at a more sensible hour in the not too distant future. So if you were planning to listen in to the call but were put off by the inconvenient Time Zone, then all is not lost. Register here and wait for the replay.
.

I lost a Lotus Foundations sale yesterday :(

A few weeks ago I cold-called into an opportunity where the client was looking to throw out their Notes R6.5 mail system in favor of MS Exchange. I rapidly pitched Lotus Foundations against MS Exchange but lost the deal mainly because the customer was only using Notes for mail and Exchange was seen as an adequate substitute. There was also the issue that their regular trusted IT provider was pitching Exchange while I was the new boy on the block.

So what did I learn from this?

• Lotus Foundations needs more airtime. The client hadn't heard of it and was wary about moving their key SMB architecture to an unknown OS.
• Lotus Notes is still perceived as "just email" in some companies. In this case MS Exchange was seen as an equal competitor to Lotus Notes/Domino and talking about the free application databases available at OpenNTF just didn't push this clients "tell me more" button.
• SMB relies heavily on their key IT supplier and if you're already selling hardware and network services into a company then you have pole position for helping them pick an 'email solution'. OK, that observation isn't rocket science, but while multiple IT suppliers are acceptable for larger companies, the average SMB might accept higher prices and an inferior product as a fair trade for maintaining a single 'go-to' guy for all of their IT problems.
  

This brings me back to my previous post about the role of the IT consulting company. Would I be a better IT provider to this client by offering them the MS Exchange option? My guess is that I'd probably still have lost this sale to the incumbent IT provider but, more importantly, could I have honestly recommended MS Exchange over Lotus Notes/Domino and still consider myself as a Partner to IBM/Lotus?

I don't think so.


BTW I agree that it makes business sense for an IT provider to embed themselves into a client and become an integral part of that client's decision making process. There is obviously a better opportunity to professionally guide the client to choose your IT services over those of your competitor, and I don't have a problem with that scenario because I make no pretense of representing my competitor for professional services in that customer. However I don't see how an IT Provider can claim to represent IBM/Lotus if they don't seek out every opportunity to sell IBM/Lotus products ESPECIALLY when the customer will be equally well served by Lotus Domino or MS Exchange.
.

If its good enough for Sherlock Holmes...

"Still learning at the same old university" was the response given by Sherlock Holmes when Inspector Lestrade asked him why he was investigating a minor crime, and I think the same credo holds true for all of us who spent the time to promote, demote and otherwise comment on the ideas found at the recently concluded Lotus IdeaJam.

In the end I only added one idea (since my other ideas had been already added by other people) but I had a great time promoting and demoting other peoples ideas. The best part was that along the way I got a close look at what other consultants/customers/Loti were thinking. I did waste some time reading misplaced feature requests (wrong Jam guys... this one was for strategy) but even those posts helped me become more aware of what is happening in the Yellowverse.

Of course there were the inevitable wankers (can I say that here? I guess I'll find out) who only wanted to tell the world about their own Notes application and why it should be bundled with every Domino server licence sold by Lotus, but even after automatically demoting each of those posts I still found myself incredibly... well... better educated I guess.

Thanks Lotus, for asking our opinion and a warm fuzzy hug to everyone who voted.


PS: I think Eric Mack's GTD is getting close to being a candidate for auto-bundling with Notes/Domino licences but not until he fixes the problems with Domino Web Access.

PPS: A Knighthood for Ed Brill... sheesh... what'll they think of next?
.

Why does IBM allow Lotus to behave like this?

Everyone who works with Lotus software has the right to expect strict corporate control from IBM but it looks like the blue-suited executives are just turning a blind eye to this problem. Speaking personally, I am really worried at some of the suggestions that are getting airtime over at IdeaJam. Hey, don't get me wrong... there's lots of good stuff too, but some of the ideas are just plain dumb and its just possible that Lotus management might take those ideas seriously.

Thankfully Ideajam also gives visitors the ability to vote against an idea. Even if you have no ideas of your own to throw into the pot, get your butt over there and vote against some of the stupid stuff that people are suggesting:

• A knighthood for Ed Brill....
• Change the Lotus logo to a picture of Bhudda...
• Move Lotus Corporation to the Isle of Man as a tax shelter...
• Don't sell Lotus software south of the Mason-Dixon line...
• Revoke the US Declaration of Independence (that one came from somewhere in England)...
  
• Re-release Lotus 1-2-3 as a commemorative edition...

... the list goes on and on. Unfortunately it seems that IBM is standing back and letting this event run for the full 72 hours so it looks like its up to us to fix the problem. If you want to protect Lotus Management from stupid ideas then you know what to do. Click here then Vote early and Vote often.

I know I have!
.

OT: IBM's plan to silence Business Partners

I've figured out IBM's nefarious plan. By golly, they're a sneaky bunch and they even got Ed Brill to leave the country while they did it. Now Ed can claim 'plausible deniability' of the whole scheme on the grounds that he was on the other side of the planet at the time.

It's obvious when you think about it. They put up this IdeaJam web site and then invite all IBM/Lotus Business Partners to add their two cents worth during a 72 hour blitz. Now imagine what happens next week when you call up your Lotus rep to have your regular Weekly Whinge about All Things Yellow. Your rep will just read off the following prepared statement currently being distributed to all Loti:

"Your call is important to us. Unfortunately the Lotus feedback line has closed for 2009 and no further correspondence will be entered into. Please hold on to your thought until August 2010 when the lines will be reopened for another 72 hours. Have a nice day."

Don't let IBM get away with it! Get over to IdeaJam right now and add your years worth of marketing thoughts and helpful suggestions before they close the phones.

BTW: I've heard that Ed Brill is buying a beer for everyone who registers at Idea Jam. I'll check out that theory at the Sydney Lotus User Group meeting on Monday night.
.

How big is the largest company without email?

I was reading yet another article about who owns what percentage of the Fortune 500 email market and I started to wonder "What is the size of the largest company (measured by Full-Time Employees) without an email system?". Obviously blue-collar manufacturing or shop-front retail companies have an advantage here but they still require administration staff and those employees all need to communicate. I'm looking for a company that never moved beyond WordPerfect 3 and Lotus 1-2-3 R2.01 and probably never will. Maybe they (gasp!) never even bought computers?

Lets set some ground rules here. The organization must be:

1. a registered-for-profit entity (charities have different dynamics and lots of unpaid workers).
2. have been in business for at least two years.
3. not a company dedicated to proving some email-replacement technology eg twitter
4. not a single store retail shop eg. a local shoe store

You don't need to name names, but if you nominate a company you must be able to back up your nomination with information about how their staff communicate and co-ordinate.

Any guesses what the magic number is? I'm guessing we'll top out somewhere between 20 to 30 but I really don't know.

BTW for the purpose of this post Microsoft Exchange DOES count as an email system.
.

OT: Lotus IdeaJam on the Australian Plan

"On August 19 at 8:00 am EDT US" is fairly meaningless to the rest of the world. For those of us living in eastern Australia (and that includes Ed Brill for the next few days):

The IdeaJam will open: Wednesday, August 19th at 10:00PM AEST
The IdeaJam will close: Saturday, August 22nd at 10:00PM AEST

Register now at http://lotusknows.ideajam.net/register
.

OT: Passwords passwords everywhere...

For a while I used the same password everywhere except for access to financial records but even that got too difficult to co-ordinate when I accessed sites that made you change your password on a regular basis. Now I need to keep my passwords in a file and as of two minutes ago I have 63 current passwords stored in that file. This is getting ridiculous!

So how many passwords do you have and how do you keep track of them?

BTW: I'm not going to tell you what my password file is called or where it's located or what piece of obsolete software I need to use to read that file but I will tell you that it doesn't have a .doc extension and it doesn't show up in 'Recent Documents'.
.

OT: When is an IBM Business Partner not a real Partner?

What is your definition of a Business Partner? There are some IT shops who have 'Business Partner' relationships with both IBM and Microsoft... and maybe Google and a couple of other technology providers who also play in the Notes/Domino space.

There's nothing illegal in doing that but I suggest that IT shops who sell both Notes/Domino and MS Exchange/Sharepoint are not worthy of being called 'IBM/Lotus Business Partners'. Call them resellers if you like but I don't see how someone can be your Business Partner and yet still sell your competitor's product.

These schizophrenic resellers may say they are providing a choice for their customers and that they run two independent consulting practices just like accounting firms run separate auditing, tax and compliance divisions but IMHO that's just a crock. Accounting firms can certainly cross-sell services but winning a client for your Audit division doesn't mean that you automatically lose that client for your Compliance division. On the other hand, winning a sale for Exchange is a direct hit to your Notes license revenue and a slap in the face for IBM.

For my part, I'm an IBM/Lotus Business Partner and I won't ever wave a Microsoft Exchange/Sharepoint or Google GAPE flag. I tell my customers that fact up front so they know where I stand. Maybe I'm missing an additional revenue stream by not hedging my bets but I probably sleep better at nights.

And IBM knows that whenever they introduce me to a client they don't risk that I'll be upgrading that client to a competitor's products simply because I can make some short-term money selling additional licenses and even more long-term money supporting a consulting-intensive product.

So where do you stand? Are you an IBM/Lotus Partner or just a reseller?
.

Foundations: Revisiting a Previous Post

DISCLAIMER: I've never met Bob Baehr nor do I have shares in his company. The only financial relationship we have is a promise to buy each other a beer if I ever get back to Lotussphere (but with a 4 yo son and a daughter due in November that dream is still a few years away)

I blogged about Bob Baehr's Advanced Web Configuration for Foundations! in a previous post but I need to talk about it again. At the risk of stating the obvious, I do a lot of thinking about Lotus Foundations Server and I really think that Bob's product has permanently changed the playing field for that product. I think it's great that Lotus includes Apache Web Server in the Foundations product but I have no desire to learn that product. There's only so many hours in the day for soaking up new technologies and Apache Web Server is way down on my list somewhere between learning ADA and conquering the Zune API.

So although I had previously accepted that I would never fully exploit the Apache web interface of Foundations I now find myself using Domino Designer to quickly and easily code multiple web sites for my Foundations server. If you use Lotus Foundations Server then go visit Bob's web site and have a look at what he has done with making Foundations support Notes databases as web sites.

Here's a second round of applause for a great product.
.

OT: The Unfinished Symphony...

Hey IBM,

I went to your web page and clicked on the link to download Symphony 1.3 but only received an error message. Having dutifully filled in the form to report a broken link I figure I'm now entitled to complain in public.

Please fix the link.
.

Methodology v. Advertising

Julia White (Director of Exchange Marketing at Microsoft) has been having a bad week. She was smacked down by Ed Brill regarding her overly creative use of statistics and now I'm going to do the same with her attempt to rewrite the laws of economics.


THE BACKGROUND:
Julia suggests...

"With Notes, the skills are dwindling and expensive. With SharePoint, they are booming and in-demand."

Julia's mantra is that companies are deserting Notes in droves so therefore the demand for the Notes skill set must be dropping rapidly. Classic supply and demand theory holds that price drops when there is an oversupply of goods and services - so if Notes skills are no longer in demand then the price paid for that service must drop. But Julia claims that Notes skills are expensive so either:

A) the supply of Notes skills is falling faster than the demand, or
B) she is talking out of her butt.

Since Lotus Notes has been around for around twenty years so there are plenty of people who have Notes skills in their resume. Even if some of them have been seduced by the Dark Side they have the experience to maintain existing Notes infrastructures so those skills are still available to the market. Hmmm... I think I'll go with Option B.

EDIT: There is always option C... the possibility that customers aren't deserting Notes and any decrease in available Notes jobs is caused by mature corporate infrastructures requiring fewer Notes administrators to manage the same environment after they have upgraded to R8.5.


THE QUESTION:
Julia claims that Sharepoint skills "... are booming and in-demand.", so the price of those 'in-demand' Sharepoint skills will be increasing which will drive up the cost of supporting that infrastructure. How can we reconcile that situation with her claim that Notes is more expensive than the comparable Microsoft solution?


THE ANSWER:
Julia acknowledges that Microsoft shops need two separate products (Exchange and Sharepoint) in order to play in the same ballpark as Notes but she relies on a survey about the cost of supporting an email infrastructure to make a cost comparison. So she includes Sharepoint as one of the components in the MS solution stack without adding in the costs of running that Sharepoint infrastructure. D'Oh!!! Who needs a methodology when you have an advertising budget?


I'll bet Julia used Excel to add up the numbers. I don't expect her to respond to this post. After all, the USA does have a constitutional provision against self-incrimination :)
.