IBM = I'm Buying Microsoft?

This is the first time I've seen IBM insist that people use a Microsoft product when an alternative product is available. To add insult to injury, this error can only be seen by IBM Business Partners logging in to the IBM Partnerworld website to update their Business Plan for selling IBM products.




Now I have to dig through my hard drive to see if I still have IE on my computer.

grumble grumble
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OT: Microsoft's Windows revenue slips 16% in Q1

There's been Doom and Gloom talk about how Lotus revenue slipped 12% (IIRC) in Q1, but IBM is not the only company suffering at the moment. Microsoft is also hurting:

**************************************************************************************
Sales [for Microsoft] in the last quarter slipped 6% to $13.6 billion, falling short of analysts' expectations for $14.1 billion in sales.

Microsoft makes most of its profit selling the Windows operating system and business software such as Office. Those divisions were hurt when PC shipments fell for the second straight quarter as consumers and businesses sharply cut back on technology spending.

The Windows division's revenue sank 16% to $3.4 billion, while the division that makes Office saw sales drop 5% to $4.5 billion.
**************************************************************************************

What will be interesting is seeing whose sales recover most strongly over the rest of the year.
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eProductivity v. Domino Web Access - A tough choice

I'm putting my review of eProductivity on hold because I've run up against a technical anomoly. I run a Domino 8.5 mail client and use Domino Web Access for mail at least a half dozen times a week. At present the eProductivity template doesn't support DWA and I need to make a choice between the tools.

DWA wins out because I need to keep my business going. When eProductivity does support DWA then I'll install the new template and resume my review. It's a real teeth-grinding shame because I could see how eProductivity was ... well... making me more productive.

Eric, you're invited to post a response here to comment on your plans and schedule for eProductivity and DWA.
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OT: Which part of "NO" don't you understand?

Having a Microsoft Hotmail account has a number of drawbacks. For a start, you can't set it up to automatically forward your emails to another email account. I'd guess MS organize it that way so that you can't just do an auto-forward and then let the account just wither away from disuse - which is exactly what I'd like to do with it.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that it has the Microsoft Marketing Team behind it. Have a look at their latest email...

***********************************************************************

Dear Windows Live User,

We are contacting you regarding your communication preference settings for Windows Live and MSN.

Currently, your settings do not allow Microsoft to send you promotional information or survey invitations about Windows Live and MSN. We would like to communicate important product updates to you, so if you would like to change your settings, please visit your account profile here [link]to change your preferences.

Sincerely,
The Windows Live Team

***********************************************************************

Now how can I set my preferences so MS aren't allowed to ask me to change my preferences?
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eProductivity: Automating a Mess gives you an Automated Mess

I run three email accounts:

• a personal hotmail account that I've had since the Dawn of Email.
• a business hotmail account that I ran for a while until I started ...
• ... a business Notes email account running off my own Lotus Foundations Server.

In my last post about eProductivity I pointed out the difficulty of setting up meaningful Projects when I was working from a disorganized email environment. My attempt to straighten out my business Notes email account led me inexorably to my other email accounts and the painful realization that my lack of email organization included a lack of boundaries between my personal and business email accounts.

So after deleting well over a thousand obsolete emails and sending out a mailstorm of "Please use my other email address" missives I am almost back to Square One of evaluating eProductivity. The setback was painful to fix but a real eye-opener at the same time. This time round I should be able to build on a more solid Foundation (pun intended).

So when was the last time you flushed out your mail file?
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OT: Shoes... who needs them?

I think most men get by on three pairs of shoes. We have the pair that we wear to work, the pair we wear to casual occasions and the pair that we wear everywhere else. Two years ago I replaced my work shoes with a pair of steel-capped black work boots which I keep finely polished. They are comfortable, will last forever and, at the ripe old age of fifty, I don't feel the need to make a fashion statement. When the subject of these boots ever comes up (only by me mentioning them - no-one ever notices them), most women look baffled and most men say "What a great idea! I'll do the same when my current work shoes die!"

This post is about my 'everywhere else' pair of shoes who died completely a couple of weeks ago. Now while I'm quite comfortable in my work boots I don't wear them around the house owing to the overwhelming sound effects when I walk on polished floorboards, and since I had misplaced my casual shoes, I was getting by at home with bare feet or sometimes with socks on cold nights.

My Road to Damascus moment came with an urgent trip to the hardware store. Since I had been working down the back yard in bare feet I just hopped in the car 'sans sabots ' and mentally prepared myself for the outraged stares of the sartorially sensitive members of the community. While standing at the Hardware Store checkout I realized that I was actually enjoying the feel of the carpet on my feet and I began mentally listing the benefits of not wearing shoes:

• Escalators give you a foot massage.
• Puddles of rainwater and flooded drains are irrelevant.
• Grass feels good too.
• My feet don't ache.
• My feet aren't sweaty and toxic after a long day.

I will get another pair of 'everywhere else' shoes soon, but in the meantime I'm enjoying my back-to nature moment. Give it a try and see if you like it.
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What value is IBM Top Gun Virtual Learning?

Yesterday morning was the end of my three-day stint logged in to the IBM Top Gun Virtual Learning seminar and I enjoyed the experience more than I expected. It was the first Virtual Learning I had done in this classroom format, and as I sat at my desk at home, unshaved, wearing trakkies, and drinking my own coffee I thought to myself "All mornings should start like this".

(I listed the curriculum in a previous post so I won't revisit it here.)

eLearning has a number of advantages compared with a regular classroom format:

• It's easier to get international speakers - we had maybe ten presenters logging in from multiple worldwide locations and only one speaker came from Sydney. If I wanted to hear from all of those guys in a classroom format it would have cost IBM a few zillion dollars to fly them in and the event probably wouldn't be held in my town anyway. Sydney might have got the world premiere of the new Star Trek movie but IBM is a little more pragmatic than that.
  
  
• Sitting at my own desk meant that I could multi-task more effectively and I didn't have to close down my business to attend the seminar. While the course was going on I could answer my own emails and phone calls without disturbing anybody. Obviously I only "stepped out" to handle urgent stuff, but it's reassuring to know that I had the option of juggling both balls at once.
  
  
• You can tune out during the boring/repetitive stuff - I probably already knew 80% of the stuff in the course and I'm sure many other attendees were in the same boat. I don't blame the organizers for that - the course curriculum was publicized well in advance. It would have been impossible to persuade myself to attend a three day classroom event covering the same material.
  

Is the course worth attending? It was for me, but I can't answer that question for you. My objective is to position my company (Binary Concepts) with IBM as a skilled and reliable business partner specializing in the Lotus software brand, and doing this course and passing the subsequent exam was one way of showing IBM that they can confidently recommend us to their customers.
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eProductivity for Lotus Foundations - Post 2

The install of eProductivity was fairly painless but the next step was less so. Now that I have modified my mail file to support eProductivity I need to reclassify the data that's already there. Fortunately I don't keep every email I get but until now I've never had a fixed set of criteria for determining which emails I discard. It all depends on my mood at the time.

Now I haven't read David Allen's book but from glancing through other people's blogs about eProductivity I've picked up three principles for dealing with information:

• Write it Down: Information needs to be effectively stored if I want it to be available later. This means make an entry in my EPD ("eProductivity database" - previously known as my mail file).
  
  
• The Two-Minute Rule: If an item (email, task, idea, whatever) can be completed in less than two minutes then do it now. If not, then see Rule One.
  
  
• Dispose, Delegate or Defer: Pick in of these options for each new item in my EPD. In the past I've been heavily reliant on a fourth 'D' word - "Delay". BTW the snailmail in-tray on my desk is about 15cm high (6 inches for you Imperial die-hards) and there are documents in there dating back to mid-2008. I probably need to Dispose, Delegate or Defer all of that also.
  

The new features in my EPD include the ability to convert each incoming (and outgoing) email into a new Project or a new Action within an existing project. That's quite handy because it makes me think whether I need to keep that email. I'm reasonably up-to-date with filing my email In-Box but I still have occasional meltdowns about what folder I should be using to file a particular email. eProductivity allows me to file things where I like but still track them by Project.

After a frustrating twenty minutes of failing to process my mail effectively I had a light bulb moment and realized that I hadn't created a strategic approach to my mail. Let me emphasize the point that this frustration was not the fault of eProductivity - it was my own failing of not having a defined process to deal with email. It's sort of like watching my three year old son sweeping a room. There's lots of activity and the mess sometimes accumulates into little piles (more by good luck than good management) but there is no predefined process to move the dirt from the floor into the final repository. In the past I've been very good at getting email out of my InBox but now I've recognized my system of filing email wasn't tailored to support my business objectives. That Aha! moment alone was worth the effort of installing eProductivity.

So today I'm stepping back from the coal face so I can look at my email from 30,000 feet and ask myself a few questions.

• What Projects do I want to be working on? Have I been letting the quantity of incoming email for each project determine my work priorities for the day? Hey! Who's in charge here? Me, or the people sending me email?
  
• How do I determine which emails I keep?
• How do I determine which emails are assigned to which Projects? Maybe I need to slice and dice my projects under different categories.

Can the Old Dog learn New Tricks?
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eProductivity for Lotus Foundations - Post 1

Like most of the citizens of PlanetLotus I've seen the posts about eProductivity around and even clicked through a few of them when the fancy took me. So why did I take up Eric's offer to blog about it?

Firstly, because I can see a synergy between Lotus Foundations Server and a Personal Productivity tool (be it eProductivity or otherwise). A large segment of the target market for Lotus Foundations Server will be a SMB directed by a single leading individual and it makes all kinds of sense to help that leader get as much as possible out of their day. Gaining an additional 20 minutes a day productivity out of a janitor might save a SMB ten dollars per day in overtime but generating the same productivity boost for the CEO might add another 5% to the bottom line. I'd like to show that kind of benefit to my customers.

Secondly, because my company (Binary Concepts), is a SMB and I'd sure like to add another 5% to my bottom line.

Third, because in the past I've tended to see these sorts of tools as a commercialized version of one man's desktop. eProductivity is the first personal organization tool I've heard of that is based on a productivity methodology and I want to see how it's different to all of the other PIMs, notepads and glorified calendars I've worked with previously.

The web site for eProductivity lists five activities leading up to installing the software. Now I hate watching advertising as much as the next guy but if I'm going to give a fair evaluation of the product then it's only fair that I RTFM first. Here are the five steps:

1. Listen to a 3-minute testimonial from David Allen.... Well, its actually four and a half minutes, and it expands on the three points listed on the David Allen page.

• eProductivity lets me quickly get things into Notes, into the system I can trust.
• eProductivity, gives me the ability to have both perspective and control,
• eProductivity gives me pretty much every tool that I need inside of Lotus Notes;

You can probably skip it.

2. View some screen shots.... A dozen or so screen shots showing different parts of the application. Move along... nothing earth-shattering to see here folks.

3. Watch the video tour and explore eProductivity.... This is 45 minutes long and is absolutely essential. The video tutorial explains the relationship between the different components of eProductivity.

4. Experience eProductivity: download an interactive demo.... I'll pass on this one. I want to get straight to ...

5. Try it! Use eProductivity for 21 days at no cost.... OK then! Let's start downloading!

The download and installation process was simple enough - basically you are replacing your mailfile template. I dutifully stepped through the documented process but found that the instruction videos all had a common feature ie descriptive text of "Video coming soon..." It was simple enough for an experienced administrator to download and install the template but perhaps it would be better to remove all references to the videos until they are available. I'd say it's a two hour process to watch the video then download and install the template.

The next step is to categorize my mail file into Actions and Projects. Stay tuned.
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Time to drink the Lotus KoolAid!

From tomorrow I'll be joining dozens of other interested people in attending the on-line IBM Top Gun Virtual Learning: Lotus Foundation class. (NB: This course covers the entire Lotus range - the word 'Foundation' in its title is misleading). This is three consecutive half-days of training across the entire Lotus product line. Here's the blurb:

*************************************************************************************
This IBM Top Gun Virtual Learning class provides a look at the Lotus offerings from a non-technical sales standpoint, focusing on what the products deliver and where they fit in the marketplace. An overview of the Lotus product strategy kicks off the class, building a framework for the more detailed product sessions to follow. Product features are explained and the types of customers to target are identified. This class can serve as a prerequisite for attending a face to face IBM Lotus Foundations Top Gun Class.

Topics include:
* Surveying the Overall Lotus Product Strategy
* Building an Understanding of the Lotus Product Family
* Identifying Target Customer Types
* Previewing Competitive Insights

Duration
The class is held on 3 consecutive days for 4 hours each day.

Audience
Any seller who needs to understand the Lotus portfolio, including Sales, Services, Business Partners, and non-software sellers who wish to enhance their sales by including Lotus Software.

Objectives
This class builds foundational skills and knowledge for enabling students to:
* Gain a basic understanding of the Lotus strategy.
* Understand the Lotus product offerings and their functions.
* Identify the target audience for Lotus products and solutions.
* Recognize potential opportunities for Lotus solutions early in the sales cycle.

Agenda
Day 1
* Lotus Software Strategy Overview
* Lotus Notes / Domino
Day 2
* Lotus Sametime / Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC²)
* Lotus Quickr
* Lotus Connections
Day 3
* WebSphere Portal
* Portal Accelerators
* Mashups
* Wrap-up and Final Test
*************************************************************************************

I've been selling and supporting Lotus software for over twenty years - that's no big deal, so have many other people - and the song sheet has changed a fair bit in that time. Time to make sure that I'm up to date with the current Top Ten Hits. If you sell any part of the Lotus portfolio and you want some street cred with IBM then maybe you need to check in for a music lesson also.

The bit that annoys me is that Day Three of the class is scheduled for the morning of Easter Friday. As an IT consultant I normally don't worry about Public Holidays, but Easter and Christmas carry a special significance far beyond the average Labor Day or Bank Holiday. I do think Lotus could have been a bit more sensitive on the timing.
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OT: Just when you think you're getting your Ducks in a Row...

... life comes along and messes them up again. Last Thursday night started normally enough with getting number one son to bed and then playing an hour of whodunnit murder mystery on the computer with my lovely wife. We still don't know whodunnit but we're getting closer.

Belinda went to bed about ten but got up half an hour later with severe abdominal pains and [lots of needless details omitted]. Neither of us have family in the immediate neighborhood so we drafted a nearby friend to watch over our sleeping son while I broke a number of speed limits getting Belinda to the nearest hospital. Four days and an emergency operation later we have hopes of Belinda getting out of hospital tomorrow and then we can pick up our lives where we left off late last week.

The only benefit I can see out of all of this was it bought home to me quite sharply where my priorities lie. Lotus software has been my career since 1987 but it will never be the most important thing in my life. Yeah, that guy standing outside the San Hospital Emergency ward crying his eyes out was me. Thanks to Nurse Annie Howard in San Emergency who watched over Belinda like a hovering angel.

I've got a meeting with IBM tomorrow at 10am and I hope they forgive me if I'm a little distracted.
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Installing VMWare on Lotus Foundations

I've had a question about loading the Vistualization module in LFS and I decided to make it into a separate post of its own. There are three downloadable components required to run VMWare. The LFS update to version 1.1 and the Run package are both downloadable from where-ever you obtained your original LFS software but the VMWare module is only available through IBM/Lotus Business Partners.

You also need to create a free account on www.vmware.com and request Linux licence keys. VMWare will send you an email with a validated login and once you follow the link in the email to get your licence keys you will have the licence keys to paste into the appropriate dialog box when you run the VMWare install. When all of that is done, if you select the 'Add-ons' option from the left hand menu you should see the following entry in your list under the 'Status' tab.

Status = (Tick)
Team = lf-virtualization
Add-on Container = Lotus Foundations Run 1.1
Enabled = Yes

At that point the VMWare module is installed and ready to go. Click on the 'Virtualization' tab adjacent to the 'Status' tab and then click on the button at the bottom of the page labeled 'Advanced Virtualization Settings'. This will open a new LFS interface communicating via Port 8333 and you can begin to create Virtual Machines.


The only problem I had was the ever-persistant Firefox glitch that sees any new web interface with LFS as a security exception.
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Application Design: "In the long run, we're all dead"

A recent post over at edbrill.com got me thinking about design philosophy. 'Jason' was talking about his role in migrating existing Notes apps onto the MS framework and declared...

" ... most Notes apps start out poorly designed, have tons of little bells and whistles added over time and as it becomes unscalable developers bandaid the whole thing together with scheduled agents and buttons and all sorts of nonsense. It's hard to just migrate that mound of crap overnight. If a company does it right, they'll spend the time they should have spent originally with the Notes app project and put together a sound design and data model...."

Now there's all kinds of emotive language tied up in his post but lets skip over that for the moment. Of the millions of Notes applications in use today there will be a high percentage which either were built decades ago using Notes R1 / R2 / R3 / R4 or R5 development tools and reflect the technical limits of those tools, or were built to serve a particular need and were so successful in that role that they 'grew like topsy' to fulfil other roles.

Jason's beef seems to be that those Domino applications don't map to his definition of a "sound design and data model". I'd say Jason is falling into the trap of taking a subjective set of criteria (in this case, the capability of the MS toolset) and using it to judge the business value of the existing application. It's a classic IT beartrap - seeking to define the success of a business application using non-business criteria.

When designing applications it's certainly important to pay attention to accuracy of data modelling but its also important to ensure that the application is affordable and available. Unless a business is already far advanced with their implementation of a Business Maturity Model then it's highly likely that their data models and workflows will not fit neatly into Jason's definition of a sound design and data model. Sure, you can take a long term approach and stall the database development until the business gets all of its Ducks in a Row, but in the long run, we're all dead. Incomplete design models and ever-changing business specifications are a fact of life. The Power of Notes is that it has always been capable of helping a business 'where the Rubber meets the Road' and providing good IT applications for the Here and Now. Perhaps Jason should just upgrade his toolset to Domino Designer 8.5 and see if his problems are still insurmountable.
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OT: Dammit Jim I'm a Marketing Man... not an English Teacher!

I watched the trailer for the new Star Trek movie last night and I was struck by the typo in the description of the clip. Remember that this isn't a pirate clip uploaded to YouTube by some geek from GalaxyQuest... this is an official publicity release in a major metropolitan newspaper.


Star Trek: Trailer 2 (02:04)
J.J. Abrams' second Star Trek trailer gives a peak at what we can expect.

I was going to send an email to the editor but I realized that they hadn't responded to my last four emails pointing out typos on their web site.

I must be getting old.
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Exposing Domino Web apps under Foundations

You can publicly expose a LFS-hosted Notes database on the web via port 4443 eg https://www.xyz.com.au:4443/mynotesdatabase.nsf but the documentation is silent about what Notes web features will/ won't work in that environment. Note that you need secure HTTP (probably because that is the webmail port) which raises the question of how you authenticate visitors BEFORE they get to your application.

The Nitix Knowledgebase lists ports 1352, 2222, 4443 and 8585 as being available through the Nitix Blue/Lotus Foundations Start server firewall but I've only been successful with web access through 4443. I would guess that 1352 is limited to NNTP but I'm curious about the possibilities of 2222 and 8585.

Anyone used those ports before?
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Foundations can be so boring at times...

I was hoping to get a really meaty post out of my upgrading my server to Foundations 1.1 and Domino 8.5 (plus installing VMWare) but it all went according to the manual. Less than an hours work of copying files and rebooting the server when instructed.

Boring.
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The score so far: Humans 1 - Foundations auto-config 0

A customer based in a serviced office has an installation with the eth0 port connected to his internal network and the eth1 port plugged into a communal switch which eventually leads the connection out into the internet. LFS allows manual IP configuration of eth0 (lets call it 192.168.0.1) but insisted on doing its own "search and configure" for the internet connection. When we first set it up it found the right address (lets call it 111.111.111.111) and everything was fine and dandy.

Then the serviced office provider decided to install a new firewall and his customers had to endure some connection downtime while that happened. When all of the systems were reconnected my customer was perplexed to find that his rebooted LFS server was now showing the firewall's external IP (lets call it 222.222.222.222) as its own eth1 IP address.

We did toy with the idea of adding new DNS entries to LFS to try to work around the problem but I dislike those type of bandaid solutions - they tend to come back and bite you further down the track when you're solving some other unrelated configuration problem.

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth and consumption of coffee we found an answer by connecting the LFS eth1 to a reprogrammed router which that been isolated from the rest of the network. The router range was limited to a single address (111.111.111.111) and when we ran the LFS netscan command the LFS eth1 picked up the magic number and permanently stored it into its configuration file. We then pulled the eth1 cable out of the router and plugged it into the regular network switch and everyone was happy. We still haven't figured out why LFS was picking up the Firewall external IP and that question might stay in the too-hard basket for some years to come. I think a review of the Firewall configuration might reveal some interesting anomolies, but we aren't allowed to examine that hardware.

Every day is a new adventure.
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