Migrating 20,000 Exchange users to Notes?

I'm sure there's some good marketing material in here for IBM/Lotus:


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The Cobbler wears no shoes

Since there might be a few people visiting my website to follow up my previous blog post, I figured that I should finally do something about fixing up my lack of a security certificate. I have previously registered with CACert but never finished the paperwork to install one of their certificates.

When I went there today I discovered that the cobbler wears no shoes...

What to tell a CEO who wants to migrate off Notes?

There's been a lot of useful stuff published over the last few years about how to best counter the "Move to Microsoft" mantra that sometimes comes down from senior management. I figured it would be a Good Thing (TM) if all of that information was readily accessible from one place.




Filling the application with useful links is the hard part since I won't be writing much of this stuff myself. My emphasis is on providing links to other peoples work (with proper accreditation of course). If you've got some information you think should be available through this application then please send me a LINK (not the original material) via email: gdodge at bcd dot net dot au.


BTW I did consider writing this in XPages but code re-use won out over innovation and the whole box of dice wound up taking only a couple of hours to recode from an existing application. I'll look at making it look pretty further down the track.
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It's going to be one of those days :(

First, my Lotuslive account stops working.
Then I receive the following reply after I emailed Lotus asking for assistance to fix the problem...

Maybe Comcast had a quiet word with Lotus after my last blog post?
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Comcast profits win over Net Neutrality

It's wishful thinking to suppose that corporations have a conscience or a desire to 'Do no Evil'. Sure you might get the occasional industry Titan who charts a benevolent course for their company but they will eventually be succeeded by time-serving executive seat-warmers beholden to no-one except the shareholders demanding bigger dividends. Given that market dynamic we should not be surprised at the Comcasts of the world insisting on their 'right' to discriminate against people who don't give them maximum revenue.

Comcast's recent success against the FCC's demand for net neutrality is indeed just the tip of the iceberg. I don't blame Comcast for trying to exploit their dominant position since they are just another soulless automaton trying to ensure their own economic survival in a 'dog-eat-dog' world.

However I will be mighty peeved if the lawmakers don't stop them.
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Can anyone explain this security failure in Domino?

I've never seen this problem before and I hope I never see it again.

A customer's branch office based in Sydney, Australia sends out a daily industry newsletter to their customers but for reasons specific to their industry they doesn't want any of the customers to realize who the other customers are. Consequently the author mails the newsletter to himself with all of the customer addresses in the BCC field.

Two days ago he mailed the newsletter out as normal but it bounced at one address (let's say for 'Mr Smith') because Mr Smith no longer worked at the target organization. After that all of the other 100+ customers listed in the BCC field received the Non-Delivery Report for Mr Smith addressed to themselves, and since they were given the original email encapsulated within the NDR then they could see the contents of the BCC field and thereby understand who all of the other 100+ customers were. So somehow the Router task had taken the contents of the BCC field and used that to address the NDR.

The customer had been getting random corruptions in their mail.box file on a monthly basis for over a year but Lotus support hadn't been able to determine the reason for this. Recently the corruptions had been hitting mail files also but Fixup never found a problem. I have a sneaking suspicion that the files weren't actually corrupt, and that a wayward Router Task is somehow to blame for all of this, but the server has been taken up and down more times than a Bride's nighty and there is still no end to the problem. The next step is to completely reinstall the server and patch it to R7.04 but that still doesn't answer the question of what happened.

The customer is standardized on Notes across the world and is unlikely to abandon the platform. They are looking at upgrading to R8.5 later this year, but for now they would like some reassurance that the problem won't occur.

Anyone seen this kind of problem before?

The server is an unclustered R7.02 FP3 running on Windows 2003 server. A PMR has been raised for this issue and if any Loti wants to investigate it further then I'm happy to give them the reference.
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"Microsoft's" new mailing list

I had an interesting email this morning which concluded with...

About this mailing:
You are receiving this e-mail because you subscribed to MSN Featured Offers Microsoft respects your privacy. If you do not wish to receive this MSN Featured Offers e-mail, please click the "Unsubscribe" link below. This will not unsubscribe you from e-mail communications from third-party advertisers that may appear in MSN Feature Offers. This shall not constitute an offer by MSN. MSN shall not be responsible or liable for the advertisers' content nor any of the goods or service advertised. Prices and item availability subject to change without notice.

©2010 Microsoft | Unsubscribe | More Newsletters | Privacy

Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052

Funny... I don't remember subscribing to "MSN Featured Offers". Ten seconds of detective work showed that the return address was in Russia and the "Unsubscribe" button would take me somewhere that anti-virus filters feared to tread.

I'll give them an A+ for innovation and simultaneously wish that the fleas of a thousand camels would infest their armpits.
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Google Gears shifts into reverse

eWeek have published another piece on the Google push to overtake IBM and Microsoft on the desktop, with the obligatory ten piece Death-by-Powerpoint slideware (PCMag had a similar article). I admit that I'm a little jaded after 20+ years of seeing vendor slide sets but this one really pushed the limit on feature beat-up e.g.

• The Google Drawing Editor supports Copy and Paste between applications.
• Google Docs have Rulers with Tab stops plus Spell check.
• Google Spreadsheets have a Formula editing Bar and simultaneous editing for fifty users.

You can have fifty people editing the same spreadsheet? I can understand the need for multiple people to view a spreadsheet within the context of an on-line meeting but once you open the spreadsheet up to multi-user editing then who's going to clean up the mess and verify the data afterwards? Consider that once you get more than a dozen people into a face-to-face meeting there is a high risk of the agenda being abandoned UNLESS you have a very capable chairperson. It would be unimaginably worse with an on-line meeting based around a spreadsheet ... hey, that number doesn't look right... I'll just change it while no-one's looking...

Then there was this wonderful (but totally meaningless) slide with no external references. I'm intrigued to know what measurements Google used to set the scale on the X and Y axis but I don't think there's an answer to that question.


However once you pass over the fluff and bubble there were some interesting snippets in the articles.

• Google is disabling Google Gears for Docs. It intends to rewrite that component so it can handle HTML5 and modern Web browsers. Now I don't have a problem with a software company rewriting their code to include new technologies, but it does show that the Google architecture is no more future-proof than Microsoft Exchange. In other words, Google has some good ideas but there was nothing extraordinary about their initial implementation of those ideas. On the other hand, Notes/Domino continues to provide backwards compatibility even while it evolves to include new technologies eg X-Pages. Score one for IBM.
  
  
• Google is implementing this change in three weeks time. Your company may have made a significant investment in learning and applying Google Gears to your applications but after May 3rd you're back to Square One. That's another big gotcha in the cloud computing scenario - consumers are completely disenfranchised in their preference for software versions.

Google has some interesting ideas and a ton of money to fund research into those ideas, but I'm starting to think that they just don't understand collaboration. It's not about giving everyone simultaneous editing access to the same spreadsheet - email - Wave - other file type, its about providing your people with transparent access to the aggregate intellectual property contained in your organization so they are empowered to better perform, and refine the process of, their own work. Sometimes that work occurs within the context of a meeting, but more frequently it is an individual activity reinforced by easy access to team knowledge.

Leaving aside the multi-user access, I'm thinking that all of the 'new' features Google are crowing about have been standards in Microsoft Office and Open Office for years. I'm glad to see Google providing competition in the Office arena but IMHO they need to lift their game.

I'll stick with Symphony.
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Spring cleaning the software library

Today I threw away my last stack of floppies... you know... those small plastic things that would fit inside your shirt pocket and carry less than one hundredth of one percent of the data that you can fit on a 2gb USB. I discovered these refugees from the 20th Century hiding in the back of a desk drawer and had little hesitation in consigning them to the dustbin. The only problem was finding a device to read them first to ensure that I wasn't throwing away something essential (like the certifier password to my Notes infrastructure). Fortunately I still have an old laptop with a floppy drive and ten minutes of disk shuffling showed that the disks were disposable.

The next step is going through my CD collection and tossing out all of my Notes 4.x and 5.x CDs along with the R5.x Redbooks etc. I'd be impressed with my spring-cleaning efforts except that I live in Sydney and it's certainly not Spring in Australia. Maybe I need a six month sabbatical in the USA to get my body clock back into sync.
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Something free from IBM?

IBM/Lotus have provided some excellent self-paced online software tutorials at no charge to Business Partners. Some of the tutorials need to be updated with current software versions but there's more than a few nuggets of gold in Them There Hills for the Business Partner who wants to get a toehold into a previously unexplored Lotus technology. Some examples are:

• IBM Lotus Quickr 8.2 Workshop: The Workshop will provide you with an understanding of the features of Lotus Quickr 8.2, both those that are new and those that were introduced earlier. The course will show you how to operate and manage Lotus Quickr Activities and tools. It will illustrate how to install and configure Lotus Quickr 8.2, how to use connectors to integrate productivity applications and customize Quickr themes and places, and how to manage a Lotus Quickr environment.
  
  
• Lotus Notes/Domino 8.5 Building Collaborative Applications Workshop: The Workshop will show a student how to use the Lotus Notes client to write collaborative applications that use the features of the Lotus Notes platform. The student will also learn how to package applications and deploy them to the Notes client through the Domino server. The XPages technology will be introduced and the student will learn how to develop XPages applications. After completing the workshop the student should be able to describe the primary features of the Notes and Domino platforms, describe how these platforms can enhance an enterprise’s business, define common terms used with this technology, and write a composite application and an XPages application that will run in the Notes client to provide additional capabilities. The student will be able to write Eclipse plug-ins which extend the user interface of the Notes client and deploy them to the client platform, and be able to incorporate widgets for use in collaborative applications.

• IBM Lotus Connections v2.5 Workshop: This technical skills hands-on workshop will show you how to leverage the eight integrated services for social networking delivered by Lotus Connections 2.5. You will learn how to use the functions and features that capture, communicate, share, collaborate, organize, and deliver social software for business. Setup and use of Lotus Connections features, how to integrate them with each other and incorporate them with other applications and Web sites. Learn how to use the tools and underlying servers to configure the products for use. All reinforced by hands-on labs.

These courses won't take you from from Zero to Hero but they will give you the ability to talk confidently to your customers about the products.
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Hey IBM... how about running Salestalks on a Pacific time zone once in a while?

I have a customer with c.300 Notes seats who has specifically asked me to get him information on Web Content Management. With perfect timing I received an IBM News update advising me that there will be a Lotus SalesTalk on this topic and then I realize the call is scheduled for 1:00am Australian time.

10. Lotus: Lotus SalesTalk: Put information to work at customer sites with Lotus Web Content Management
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Customers and prospects are increasingly looking for ways to reduce costs, maximise value, increase ROI, and enable top-line growth. This call provides valuable information that can help you talk with your customers about the solid ROI they'll see with Lotus Web Content Management.

Date: Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Time: 11:00 a.m. EDT (90 minutes)

We all know that IBM has historically had the majority of its software market on the North American continent and in Europe, but the markets in Asia have a significant proportion of the worlds population and a much higher growth rate than the USA. I concede that Australia and New Zealand have only 3% of the world IT market but what about India, China, Korea, Japan etc etc.

Lotus Knows that Asia wants to be in on the action also.
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Needed: An off-the-shelf Notes based CRM

I've had a request to recommend an off-the-shelf Notes-based CRM which supports mobile devices. The product would be involved in a shootout with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM so it would be worth knowing how well the recommended Notes product has scored in previous product comparisons and what its key features are v. MS Dynamics.

The customer is running Notes 6.5 and not looking to upgrade to R8.5 in the near future so no XPage applications please.
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A wakeup call for the Australian Lotus Channel

Yesterday we completed the third of our free two-day Domino R8.5 Proof of Technology seminars which takes the cumulative total of attendees to well over fifty, and we've had some interesting feedback about the seminars:

• Customers love getting two full days of technical training and product positioning for free. I think the most popular session in the last seminar was the one about the best methods to counter the suggestion that their organizations should move to Exchange and Outlook. We'll be expanding that session for our next seminar in June
  
  
• Some of our competition admire the idea and at least two of them are now putting on their own free Lotus-centric seminars (according to friends of mine who work in those companies). I've heard that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery so thanks for the compliment guys.
  
  
• Some of our competition hate the idea and claim that these seminars causes 'disharmony' in the Lotus sales channel because their present customers might wind up attending a seminar put on by another Lotus Business Partner. Well, Bollocks to them! IMHO the Customer is King and is entitled to talk to any and all Lotus Business Partners and to pick and choose between them to get the best mix of services. If our efforts in running these seminars makes another Business Partner feel 'disharmonized' then perhaps they need to ask themselves what are *they* doing to offer a better service to their customers.
  

These seminars will continue as long as the customers want them. We have our first Sametime/Quickr seminar running in May and the fourth Domino R8.5 Proof of Technology will be running in June. Now maybe those Australian IBM/Lotus Business 'Partners' who have been ignoring the Lotus portfolio will start talking to their current customers about the Lotus product range.

Because if they don't then we will...
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But do you get manuals with it?

I should know this answer but since I've accessed all of my learning and research on-line for the last few years so I don't know the answer. Does the following Domino media pack contain printed manuals? It costs c.$170 so I suspect it does... but I'd like to be sure.

IBM LOTUS NOTES AND DOMINO FOR MULTIPLATFORMS VERSION 8.5 ENGLISH DVD 128 BIT ENCRYPTION MEDIA PACK Vendor stock code: AH0ZDEN

The customer is upgrading from R5 so they have a bit of a learning curve...
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I'll admit it... I was wrong.

I thought Master Appliance Service of Hornsby NSW had the world record for bad customer service but they have been comprehensively beaten into second place by Whirlpool - the company whose appliances they were called in to fix.

A month ago I posted about our woes in trying to get our dishwasher fixed. My main beef at the time was that the repair technician didn't know which of the circuit boards on our dishwasher *might* be faulty so he wanted us to replace both of them. I objected to paying a non-refundable $950 plus service call for replacing two circuit boards when there was no guarantee that those new parts would fix the problem, so I went to Whirlpools web site to tell them of the situation and I received an automated email in reply thanking me for my input.

Fast forward to today and we receive a voicemail from the appliance repair company asking whether we still want the circuit boards. This reminds me that I haven't heard back from Whirlpool so I ring their customer support line and am told by John that they don't read the feedback they receive on their web site. However, as a consolation prize, he assures me that they do read their snail mail and offers me a postal address for Whirlpool so I can put my complaint in writing ...

Amazing stuff, but it does explain why I haven't heard back from them.
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Guess the identity of the Faceless Consulting Company

I'm always intrigued to find faceless consulting companies popping up to service the Notes market. You know the sort... "We're experienced in Notes yada yada and you can email us at 'support@newconsultingcompany.com' to talk to our expert technicians"..., but there's no names, no IBM certifications and certainly no 'feel-good' factor about who you might be dealing with. Sure, they may have a cool web-site but you can check here to see what I think of consulting companies who have cool web-sites. They say they are 'certified for IBM Lotus software', but there is no information about their certified software package.

Hey, it's a free internet and people can build whatever sites they like (subject to IBM's permission to use the IBM + Lotus logo), but would you as a customer ever contact such a site? Even if they had the most skilled Notes people in the world I wouldn't use them. I find there is something disturbing about people who won't back up their claims of competency with their own name.

So go and check out our new competitors in the Sydney market and add your two cents about their identity. My guess is that it's a full time employee of another consulting company who's about to jump ship and is putting their stake in the ground. When the day comes in a month or three then they'll add the face and name. I could be wrong, but it's fun to guess.

If you are currently managing a Notes consulting company in the Sydney market then perhaps ask yourself if any of your employees who live in Randwick and have worked for Qantas, Accenture, HSBC Australia, Lumley General Insurance, MasterFoods, Lloyds of London, Ernst & Young and Star City Casino (as claimed on the web site) have been a bit twitchy lately. It may be time to call them into your office for a quiet conversation.
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The new Lotus Advanced Collaboration Certification

There have been recent rumors and whisperings and 'delete-before-reading' emails talking about a new Lotus Certification stream which will arrive in the next few months. We will still have the old faithful Domino AppDev and SysAdmin certs plus the Lotus Portal stream and now apparently there will be an Lotus Advanced Collaboration certification requiring any two of:

• Lotus Sametime Administrator certification
• Lotus Quickr Administrator certification
• Lotus Connections Administrator certification

I think technical certifications are good things because (among other benefits) they separate the part-time cowboys from the serious players. What will be interesting is to see how the Business Partners living on the trailing edge handle the challenge. You know the sort - still certified only on Domino R7 and who think PlanetLotus is all about sports cars.

Of course, if we carry this through to the logical conclusion it means that Business Partners without an Advanced Collaboration certification soon won't be able to sell or renew Sametime, Quickr or Connections licences and individuals like me who are certified for both Domino AppDev AND SysAdmin need to have a long hard think about their career direction.

All of this is not confirmed yet. Does anyone have some hard facts about when?
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How Microsoft could achieve a 'Notes-free' planet

Perhaps Microsoft could install a software version of the LG gadget in a Windows 7 patch to detect when Notes is running on a Windows PC and then automatically delete the Lotus folders. That's one way to achieve 'Notes-free countries'.

"AN ELECTRONICS manufacturer with a history of making false environmental claims has been caught doctoring fridges to make them appear more energy efficient.

LG Electronics has agreed to compensate potentially thousands of consumers after two of its fridges - models L197NFS and P197WFS - were found to contain an illegal device that activates an energy-saving mode when it detects room conditions similar to those in a test laboratory.

The so-called circumvention device was discovered last month by the consumer advocacy group, Choice.

The device detects test conditions - typically 22 degrees - and activates the energy-saving mode, creating the impression of lower running costs and energy usage. The devices have been banned in Australia since 2007."

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How do you divide your Passion between five lovers?

I had a meeting with an IBM Business Partner last week who works in one of the non-Lotus IBM software pillars. Now I personally can't understand people having a passion for anything except Notes, but I can respect that they do and they certainly came highly recommended by IBM.

What I found interesting was our similarity of viewpoint around the impossibility of keeping a consulting mindset on more than one software pillar. Sure you can dabble in other technologies to keep your customers happy and your own curiosity satisfied, but if your company is to succeed in understanding, implementing and supporting the software you sell your customers then how the heck can you spread yourself across five IBM software pillars?

You might have staff (or contractors) with the appropriate technical certifications - a Lotus guy in Brisbane, a Rational guy in Adelaide, a Websphere girl in Perth, the Tivoli guy resigned last week but we haven't told IBM etc etc., but how can your sales and implementation teams find a passion for their product when management blows hot and cold on each software brand depending on their perception of how the market is shifting? My guess is that their passion is not with the software - it's with their sales budgets and with whatever new 'Shiny Monkey' they read about last week and that they think will bring in extra revenue of the next six months.

Call me old-fashioned but I'll stick with my first love. She may be Yellow with Big Blue on top but since I first met her some twenty years ago she's always excited me.


OMG!!! I've fallen in love with Marge Simpson!!!
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Lotus software - The Other Sister.

eWeeks article entitled "30 Reasons Why Software Rules at IBM" didn't mention Lotus until slide 25. Even then, the slide focused on Vulcan, with the rider that Vulcan's features "...would appear in upcoming versions of LotusLive, Lotus Notes and Domino, Lotus Connections, Quickr and Websphere portal." Websphere had the lions share of the slides while Tivoli and Rational had cameo appearances.

'Lotus Knows' has a long way to go to win the hearts and minds of the media.
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The Notes File Navigator - pure genius!

One of the best tools to come out through OpenNTF is the File Navigator widget available for download here. The screenshot tells it all:



If you're the kind of knowledge worker who bounces between Notes and Symphony throughout the day then you'll find this tool invaluable. I especially like the drag and drop for email attachments - goodbye paperclip! Thanks to Xiao Lei, Jian Kang and Rene Winkelmeyer for this masterpiece.

NOTE: You will have to upgrade to R8.5x to use this widget.
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Lotus moves with the times... not!

iTX is a Lotus distributor in Australia and I put all of my software licence sales and renewals business through them. Last Friday iTX held its annual software university and during the day Lotus reminded us Business Partners of the sales and technical resources available on their salestalk website (thanks Kathy).

I dutifully logged in there this morning to see if I could use any of the material in our upcoming free Sametime/Quickr seminar and was amazed at the antiquated help screen for enabling cookies (I don't feel embarrassed at following help screens - like most developers I work with multiple browsers and don't pretend to remember all of the menu commands).


Netscape 4? IE5? The resources on the Lotus site are useful but dear oh dear someone needs to update the help screen. I won't be reporting this to Lotus as a bug because it's not a bug. I'll just hang this washing out on the line and let Lotus pick it up and give the subject a rinse if they think it's necessary.
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Microsoft to kill off Essential Business Server

CRN mentioned that Microsoft is ending the Essential Business Server product from June 30th this year. EBS hit the streets around the same time as Lotus Foundations was emerging from IBM's acquisition of Nitix. I slammed the product at the time for its hefty hardware requirements while still maintaining a (IIRC) 75 employee user cap for the installation.

I believe there is a great market for a small business server like Lotus Foundations but Microsoft clearly got it wrong with EBS.
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Bringing applications back from the grave...

I had an interesting chat with a customer who was reviewing a "new" prebaked offering from one of my competitors and wanted my recommendation whether to buy the application. I wasn't really comfortable doing that since I saw a large conflict of interest bubbling to the surface even if I liked the application, however since I had no NDA with the supplier, courtesy and curiosity won out and I had a look.

Have you noticed how easy it is to tell when :

• an application was originally written in R6/R7 ?
• the developers have used that application to learn about R8.5 design elements?
• multiple designers have sequentially modified an application with no documentation to guide them?
• large chucks of the original application have been removed and rejigged to bring it "up to date"

In the end I merely commented that all of the coding seemed to be in Lotusscript and he needed to consider whether that suited his strategic direction for the future (and I hope it does). I guess the real question is whether a facelift will allow complex R7 apps to survive in a Brave New XPage-centric world, or whether they need to be rebuilt from the ground up. I suspect the latter, but I'm not in the shrinkwrap market.

Opinions?
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Who's to blame when Outsourcing goes wrong?

I don't have a problem with outsourcing. After all, every piece of IT consulting work I do is a form of outsourcing which the customer could have done in-house if they had wanted to invest in hiring an employee with the same skills I have. Unsurprisingly there are some outsourcing projects which go belly up and wind up in the courts with vast sums of money expended on lawyers and occasionally a payout from an IT company to the angry customer.

This article summarizes a report on the pitfalls of outsourcing with a particular emphasis on where the customer could improve their game. Yes, those wonderful clients who pay our bills sometimes make a mistake. Here's some high points from the article.

• " a significant minority of respondents felt they were not “close enough to the business” to give a definitive view as to the main commercial driver [for outsourcing] ."
  
  
• "... less than one third of respondents said they regularly involved business sponsors in the [outsourcing management] teams... "
  
  
• "In addition, 38 per cent of respondents said sourcing team members were often expected to progress the procurement alongside their “day job”."

And best of all (my bolding)...

"Most customer respondents wanted to form a “strategic partnership” with vendors supplying business critical systems over the longer term, but there was no consensus on what that meant and relatively few customers felt such a relationship could be mutually beneficial. From the vendors' perspective, the ubiquitous “strategic”, “partnership” or “alliance” label was too often meaningless or didn't match the reality of an aggressive procurement with a customer only interested in hammering down price or securing robust contract terms."

Well that's the vendor's perspective, but I'm sure we've all met customers like that. Outsourcing can be useful when it's selective and carefully researched however it can also be a bottomless black hole soaking up management time and money and severely annoying your remaining IT staff. I'm not surprised by what I read in the article.

This is a report about IT in Australia and maybe things are different in the US or the UK... but I doubt it.
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MS and Google struggle for the Hearts and Minds of IT resellers

I've blogged previously about the Conflict of Interest that arises when an IT reseller has an agency with two competing vendors. Here's part of an interview with Paul Cooper, director of emerging solutions,and Gerard Roberts, national cloud manager at SMS Technology that appeared in CRN. The topic of the interview was the decision by SMS - a long time Microsoft reseller - to begin selling Google products.

CRN: Do you ever pitch Google Apps and Microsoft Exchange to the one customer?

Cooper: We won't do that. We would make a decision for the client and go in with one or the other. We wouldn't put ourselves in the position of doing a bakeoff.

Roberts: If we're engaging at a strategic level where we are helping them put their roadmap forward, then we would possibly encounter that situation. But I think if that would be the case we would be above the line and wouldn't be eligible to do the implementation.

It would be seen that we would have a conflict of interest in the decision.

So my questions to these gentlemen - who I'm sure are likable chaps - are:

• What would they say to Microsoft if SMS decided to pitch Google to a client who is currently using MS software which was sold to them by SMS?

• Is Microsoft supposed to walk away from trying to rescue their client?

• Would they be upset if Microsoft introduced another MS Partner to that client?

• How do they justify the statement 'We would make a decision for the client....'. Isn't the client supposed to be the one making the decisions based on information provided by the resellers?

I think that Microsoft (and Google and IBM and Oracle etc.) are entitled to ask for loyalty from their resellers and as far as I can see SMS is falling far short of that mark.
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Just when you think customer service can't get worse...

Imagine trying to get away with this level of "customer service" in the IT world.

We have an eight year old Whirlpool dishwasher which died recently. A service technician came out and unsuccessfully tried some fixes before deciding that the problem lay in the circuit boards. I can accept that - dishwashers create lots of steam and there may be corrosion on a contact somewhere. The technician disappeared to get information on replacing the board and nothing happened for a fortnight until we followed up with a series of phone calls.

To cut a long story short, we had a call last night from a person working in spare parts who advised up that the parts were now available - two separate circuit boards costing $450 and $500. So add in a service call and we were probably looking at over $1,000 to fix our dishwasher.

• Why couldn't the technician who came out to see us figure out which of the boards were faulty - the spare parts person didn't know.
• Could replacing just one of the boards fix the problem? - the spare parts person didn't know.
• If replacing the two circuit boards didn't fix the problem then would we get the cost of those parts refunded? - Of course not... now did we want the parts or not?

The dishwasher is long out of warranty and I don't have a problem paying for a replacement part plus a service call to install the part. What blows my tiny little mind is the Whirlpool corporate attitude that puts the responsibility for diagnosing and fixing the problem back on the customer. Apparently they are quite happy to keep selling us additional spare parts until we stumble across the one that makes it all better.

Both the technician who made the original service call and the person selling us the parts were courteous but I can't say the same for the corporate policy on repairing their equipment. I'll send this information to Whirlpool and if they want to give me their give me their version of the story then I'm happy to give them equal time on this blog.

NOTE: It wasn't a Whirlpool technician who originally came out to see us - it was an appliance service organization - but if Whirlpool authorizes them to resell Whirlpool parts and service Whirlpool equipment then Whirlpool will cop the PR flack when it all goes wrong.

"Guess who's mum won't be buying another Whirlpoool".
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IBM to cut Australian workforce?

According to CRN, IBM is considering cutting 800 jobs in Australia and (co-incidently I'm sure) looking to hire c.1,200 in China and India. That may work with back-office tasks like payroll and paper-shuffling but IMHO it's a bad move when...

"... workers have been told that IBM may service all its customers besides the Federal Government from "low cost centres" in India and China."

There's nothing in the article to indicate whether the Lotus group will be trimmed. I can't say if there's any fat left in the Lotus team but I do know that some of those busy little beavers have been working fairly long hours for quite a long time. It's not unusual to get an email from one of them stamped 10:00pm or later.

When you make your product delivery into a commodity then you run the risk that your customers will see all of your products as a commodity and decide to buy on price alone. I guess the upside is that IBM will be forced to rely more on its Business Partners as its feet on the ground.
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OT: Size IS everything... I'm glad Australia is only a 4

This table shows the size of deficit as a percentage of GDP and Australia is near the bottom of the rankings.
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Free SameTime/Quickr training in Sydney

One interesting factoid that came out of the R8.5 Proof of Technology seminars that we have been running in Sydney is that not many (actually, almost none) of the attendees were aware that organisations with a current Lotus software subscription were entitled to run Lotus SameTime Entry and Lotus Quickr Entry in their environment at no extra charge.

Since Terry Boyd and I are having such fun running our R8.5 Domino seminars we have decided to start a new series of one day seminars to show people how to install and use the Sametime and Quickr software that they have already have. The seminar will be in Sydney in mid-May (date to be decided) with SameTime in the morning and Quickr in the afternoon so you can book for just half a day if you want.

The SameTime sessions will include:

• What can Sametime do - a demonstration of the full product.
• Installing Sametime - system requirements and integration with existing Domino servers.
• Administering a SameTime server.
• Advanced features - eg linking to other IM systems
  

A similar set of sessions will be held for Quickr in the afternoon.

Contact me (details on the left) if you want a free ticket for yourself or your managers to this SameTime/Quickr training. Limit two attendees per company.
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Score 1 for Twitter and Amnesty International

I've always been a bit down on Twitter because I could never see the business benefit of the technology. Sure, it's great for telling everyone that you're "Leaving work now" or "I hate my boss" or "What about those Dragons? Did you see that last goal?" but I could never see how it systematically fed into a corporate bottom line by increasing profit or cutting costs. People spoke about marketing by Twitter and I tried to imagine hordes of housewives descending on the local shoe store when they were tweeted "All women's shoes 40% off for two hours" but that picture wouldn't work for me. If this was the future of communications then I was sticking with Lotus and UCC.

I'm glad to say a penny has dropped (and if I put this with the penny that dropped about LotusLive last month then I'm getting wiser and richer at the same time).

In our R8.5 Proof of Technology seminar in Sydney this week an IT Manager from Amnesty International explained how they use Twitter to update their subscribers about the various campaigns that they run and suddenly it all made sense. When your PRODUCT is actually those small bites of information then Twitter gives you the ability to fulfill your customer's 'purchase orders' rapidly and at very low cost. Who needs a monthly snail-mail newsletter when you can feed your subscribers the information as it happens? Not everyone will have the same type as "product" as Amnesty International but "When the shoe fits, Tweet it!".

You can sign up on the Amnesty Australia twitter link here.

Now I'm going to find the next Penny before it drops... where's that Facebook site? Oh dear, I need to enter my bank account details and password first? Well, if you say so...
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Whoa there! Say that again please...

The Registar's review of Lotussphere had an interesting quote from an un-named IBM spokesperson.

In another of IBM's Lotusphere announcements, the company claimed: "From 3Q 2008 to 3Q 2009, IBM's social collaboration software install base grew by 34 per cent."

But by simply checking back to it's third-quarter earnings report, the company said that tevenues from Lotus software - "which allows collaborating and messaging by clients in real-time communications and knowledge management" - dropped 9 per cent over that same period.

Has IBM been giving the software away for free? When asked to explain how Lotus revenue shrunk while its user base grew by double-digits, IBM said the 34 per cent growth number was actually only counting Lotus Connections and Quickr software - which accounts for less than 20 per cent of the overall breadth of the Lotus portfolio.

"It's about the total size of the pie," the same IBM spokesman claimed. "The IBM collaboration segment overall is either holding or gaining market share in each of its submarkets against the competition. The problem is the whole pie is shrinking. Microsoft is losing more seats than IBM is."

OK, I understand the logic of what is being said here regarding market segments (sales of Connections are good but sales of Notes are bad), but what does this 'pie is shrinking' comment refer to? Notes seats might be moving to LotusLive but isn't that all considered as part of the same email pie?

Anyone got any ideas on this one?
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Why does the Microsoft Pot call the Lotus Kettle 'Black'?

The ZDNet Q&A with Alistair Rennie was good, but an interesting marketing point was buried in the interviewer's summary:

"For many of us, Lotus is viewed as an older brand that was popular in the 1990s. For the foreseeable future, you’ll see enterprises with Microsoft Office as well as various alternatives. IBM’s task is to make sure Lotus is always in the conversation as the Google Apps and Docs and Microsoft scrum intensifies."

I know the Redmond Mafia has done an enormous amount of work over the years to paint Lotus Notes as a 'legacy' product, and a lot of the Microsoft Mud has stuck. But if Notes (first released in 1989) is legacy software then what about...

• Microsoft Word first released in 1983 – six years before Notes
• Microsoft Windows and Excel first released in 1985 – four years before Notes
• Unix was created in 1969 – twenty years before Notes
• Microsoft Exchange 4.0 released in 1996 – fourteen years ago (I well remember the Microsoft verbal gymnastics of that era regarding the 'completely new' Exchange product which somehow was entitled to inherit its version number from the recently superseded Microsoft Mail 3...)
  

I'm not suggesting that IBM/Lotus get into 'tit-for-tat' negative marketing, but surely Microsoft's own product history allows IBM/Lotus an ethical and accurate advertising counterpunch to show that Longevity is not equivalent to Legacy.
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HP & Microsoft: So what exactly are they selling here?

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a proverb that does much to explain the periodic rejuvenation of the HP/Microsoft alliance. Although IBM pulled out of the PC market a while ago they are still a fearsome competitor to HP for services, and Microsoft has never really forgiven IBM for continuing to sell Lotus Notes/Domino.

Every couple of years the Microsoft/HP alliance comes up with a new joint offering to push into the marketplace. That's fine by me since the competition from HPM keeps Big Blue from getting too complacent about its own offerings. However I must admit I'm a little dubious about one part of the latest HP&M offering.

"Today when a customer buys hardware and software and marry it up in their IT centers, they go about the integration process themselves. [Instead,] software will be installed and optimized for throughput and performance and matched to the infrastructure underneath it and have management solutions ready to go," said Scott Farrand, vice president, enterprise storage and server software, technology solutions group, HP.

That might work if all of the customer organizations run on the 'standard' HP architecture and is tuned according to Microsoft 'Best Practice', but what if they run a mixed vendor environment or have good reason to adopt other architectures? My bet is that 100% of organizations investing in these HPM products will need to go through a reconfiguration phase for these new products to slot them into their own multi-vendor vision of the future.

So what is the benefit of HPM selling an 'optimized' hardware/software package if it all has to be re-optimized once it arrives on the customer's premises? That brings the highly profitable Services portfolio into the mix and while I certainly don't have a problem with anything that builds the services market, it does cancel out the perceived value in what HPM are selling as a pre-optimized package.

Still, I suppose it will do for another few years until the HPM machine decide to reinvigorate their alliance with a new set of offerings.
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Maybe the Cloud IS useful after all...

This article helped the penny drop for me regarding the Cloud. Sure I've read the Azure brochures and seen the LotusLive demos and talked to the assorted Googlers but until now I've never felt comfortable recommending the product to my customers. The fascinating fact is that this article has nothing to do with the Cloud - it's all about the 'fallacy' of running IT as a business.

I'll let you read the article at your leisure but I'll sum it up by saying that it recommends that IT is best seen as a fellow Business Unit within an organization rather than simply as a supplier of charge-back services. One example is the difficulty of 'selling' the company standard laptop to a business unit for $800 when they can get an equivalent-spec laptop from the local YumCha computer shop website for one third the price. Sure you can talk of the benefits of a common hardware platform and the need to implement a standard anti-virus and security model through the company but that don't mean nuttin' to the non-IT manager who thinks you're ripping him off. On the other hand, we all put up with a deluge of personally inconvenient requirements from those pen-pushers in HR or Finance because we see them as essential to the operation of the business. See the difference? If IT is considered a separate business then it will be measured against all of the other separate businesses and must lose the inevitable Price/Benefit war as well as having its wetware off-shored to where-ever is cheapest. However if IT is seen as an internal facilitator who assists in achieving the corporate organizational goals, then the dollars become less relevant.

So what does this have to do with the Cloud?

I must admit that I've been seeing the Cloud as the thin edge of an outsourcing wedge which would lead to the dumbing down of IT as it was forced to abandon user requirements to meet the packaged services provided by the vendors. However if your IT department is a Business PARTNER with the other units of the company, then it can pick and choose what aspects of the Cloud work best for the organizational IT strategy rather than the only issue being that its internal chargeback costs are more expensive than the Cloud environment.

I still believe there will be Blood on the Floor when the Cloud hits its first major security breach, but perhaps moving away from the 'IT as a Cost Center' mindset will make the Cloud a more attractive proposition.
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German Government warns against using Internet Explorer...

The German government has warned against using Internet Explorer after a security flaw left it vulnerable to hackers.

Sometimes there's nothing that a Blogger can say. The facts speak for themselves.
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Hi... My name is Graham and I'm an Information Slob

Last year I started using Eric Mack's eProductivity but backtracked when I found that it did funny things to the web access on my mail file. Recently I've had good reason to start testing it again (and you can read whatever you like into that statement) and after using it for a month I've realized that I'm an information slob. My hard drive is like a Black Hole storing every email / download / half-baked project I ever created, but Heavens knows where.

Installing eProductivity is a giant wake-up call to get my act together. In the last month I've:

• trimmed my Inbox down to c.40 emails (and I'm still pondering those)
• got into the habit of filing OUTgoing mails.
• realized what my top three projects are and started refiling old documents to support those initiatives.
• started hunting around for a paper copy of David Allen's book: "Getting Things Done"
• signed up for the eProductivity Weekly Tips Newsletter
• considered signing up for the free eProductivity Webinars held every Friday at 10:00am – 11:00am PST (aaaaargh!!! that's 5:00am Sydney time!).

Even Old Dogs can learn New Tricks.
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The Ethics of Blogging about Bugs.

As a certified IBM/Lotus Business Partner I believe that I have a duty to report bugs to IBM in order to help them fix the product. Generally I'm quite happy with the speed of the response I get from IBM/Lotus even though I don't always get the fix for which I was hoping. Whether or not the bug gets fixed, the event normally provides some Blog Fuel for slow-news days.

Late last year I had a response from an IBMer to a bug post on my blog which said, in the friendliest possible manner, that it was better to report bugs directly to IBM than to just blog about them. Normally I do both - but in this case I had just blogged about the issue and hadn't raised a bug report. Leaving that particular bug aside for the moment, I want to consider whether blogging about bugs is a positive contribution to the Yellowverse. On the Down side ...

• the risk of triggering a beat-up by Microsoft PR - "Lotus bloggers snub IBM software!!!"
• uh... [open to suggestions here]
  

On the Up side we see:

• the possibility of getting a workaround from some otherwise unknown Yellow Bleeder who has a better understanding of the problem than I do.
• the possibility of getting a permanent bug fix from some otherwise unknown Yellow Bleeder who has a better understanding of the problem than IBM does.
• a public warning to other Users that 'Here Be Dragons' and to tread carefully.
  
• gratuitous gratification at holding up IBM's dirty underwear? Maybe ;)
• a Great Reversal of the traditional vendor lock on information where the supplier can continue to deny the occurrence of the bug and there is absolutely *Nothing* that the end user can do to get more information.
• a new ability for the individual to publicly prod IBM with a pointed stick and keep Big Blue focused on fixing bugs quickly, or as Gavin said in his reply - "Somehow, blogging seems to make IBM just that little more responsive."

Allen was right in his reply to my blog last year - I should have reported the bug and I didn't (because I considered the bug to be trivial and there was an obvious workaround). Leaving aside my failure in that particular incident I'm interested in other people's opinions regarding non-emotive blogging of software bugs. Is it a good thing to do?
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Google, Apple and Microsoft are mentioned... where's IBM?

An article headed "How to get a job at Google, Apple, or Microsoft" means that IBM (who weren't mentioned at all in the main text) either:

• hasn't yet recovered from the GFC and isn't hiring, or
• is recovering, but doesn't think they need more staff, or
• is recovering and hiring, but hasn't taken that journalist out to lunch recently.

Regardless of the reason, I see this (and similar articles) as evidence that IBM software group is still struggling for mind share with the Fourth Estate.

C'mon 'Lotus Knows' ... start revving that PR engine!
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How do you filter Blue Care?

I do appreciate the effort IBM/Lotus goes to in keeping me informed of their plans. The Bluecare tool appeared in my email a few months ago and I happily installed it as a mechanism for keeping up to date with the happenings at BigBlue/Yellow.



Unfortunately the majority of the announcements aren't Yellow - they're about Rational, Tivoli and Websphere - all great products but not really where I'm at. (I have the same problem with my software distributor who keeps emailing about with the latest Cisco specials even though I've never sold hardware).

It would be great to have a product filter on the gadget where I could type "-Rational -Tivoli" etc but I haven't found that magic button yet. So I'm seriously considering uninstalling the Big Blue communicator and going back to reading the emailed announcements. Memory space on my computer (and in my head) is a precious resource and there's already enough add-ins competing for those resources without me wasting CPU cycles on products that I'm not certified for.
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Are my old coding habits still valid?

"I document my Code
I've done it all my life
It makes the job take longer
But it keeps me out of strife"

I forget where I first heard that rhyme but I believe there is merit in its suggestion. A customer recently questioned my desire to document even my smallest code modules and when I stood my ground on the matter he started picking apart my Lotusscript (beware the semi-literate customer). He was quite firm in denying the need for the 'PHASE z - Housekeeping' section that I habitually add to the end of my code eg.


' PHASE z - Housekeeping
Set db = Nothing
Set OrgView = Nothing
Set NewOrgParentDoc = Nothing
Set ContactDoc = Nothing


I must admit that disposing of objects in this manner is a habit that I developed many moons ago and I'm not sure if its still needed in today's Lotusscript. Am I being too careful here and wasting my customers coding dollars or is this kind of object recycling still Best Practice for Lotusscript?
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You bet your Life...

Buying Life Insurance is where you bet that you will die before you pay sufficient premiums to compensate the Life Insurance company for their eventual payout, and if you die early then you have won the bet. Medical insurance works on a similar logic where it becomes a worthwhile investment only if you need extensive medical care during your lifetime.

In our case we have just 'won' back approximately seven years worth of top-level Family Cover insurance premiums through Melanie Rose's five week residential in the neonatal intensive care ward last September. The stay in intensive care is SOP for all premature babies until they reach a gestational age of 39 weeks and fortunately there were no complications so she was released on schedule.

I hope that all of our future medical insurance premiums are just pure profit for the insurance company.
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RINSE AND REPEAT: more free training for Sydney Domino customers.

With just over a month to go before the second free Domino R8.5 Proof of Technology seminar in Sydney, the confirmed bookings are well into double digits. Rather than asking people to double up on the 24 PCs installed in the seminar room we've decided to hold a third seminar and we're currently taking bookings for both seminars.

Seminar 2: Tuesday 16th and Wednesday 17th February 2010
Seminar 3: Tuesday 6th and Wednesday 7th April 2010
Location for both seminars: IBM Building, St. Leonards

During the seminar there are separate half-day sessions for:

• C-level execs and IT Managers
• System Administrators
• Application Developers
• Application Developers and webmasters

Day 1 AM Executive Briefing - 3hr 15m

• 015min - Welcome and introductions
• 060min - What is the Return on Investment of Upgrading Domino to R8.5?
  
• 060min - Group Discussion: The Roadblocks to upgrading Domino to R8.5
• 060min - Lotus Traveler and UC2.

Day 1 PM R8.5 System Administration - 3hr 30m

• 045min - Short overview of the benefits of R8.5 for the System Administrator
• 075min - Hands-on tutorial for DAOS
• 090min - Hands-on tutorial for ID vault.

Day 2 AM R8.5 Application Development - 3hr 15m

• 015min - Recap of previous day
• 060min - Tools for tuning your Domino server (DDM and DCT)
• 090min - Overview of the R8.5 Design environment
• 030min - Hands-on tutorial for Composite Applications.

Day 2 PM X-Pages - 3hr 30m

• 210min - The most popular segment of the last seminar - now one hour longer to allow more hands-on instruction.

If you're an IBM/Lotus customer interested in attending either of these events then contact me (my details are on the left sidebar) and we'll reserve a seat for you. We have a limit of two attendees per organisation but we accept hotseating i.e. two people come for Day One and two different attendees from the same company attend for Day Two.
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Thanks IBM - we complained and you listened!

Late last decade (that's about a week ago) I blogged about the woeful state of the 'You Pass - We Pay' section of IBM's web site and logged a call with Partnerworld to tell them of the problem.

Within 24 hours I had a response from the YPWP people advising me of the current procedures for logging my YPWP claim by email and, very shortly after that, an email from IBM's Scott Seipold advising me they were looking at the problem. A week later the problem is fixed and the IBM web site has an updated PDF with corrected contact details.

Well done IBM - that's a great response.

My only problem is that since I've already passed my R8.5 System Administration and Application Development recertification exams I won't get to use that updated facility until the Notes R9 exams are available sometime in 201?.
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Never mind the Fine Print ... just enjoy the Spam

Linked-In is a useful tool in my business, and every three months or so I consider upgrading my account. Unfortunately for Linked-In, I can never see the USD$25 per month additional benefit to sign up for the basic paid service let alone the USD$500 per month for the 'Pro' package so after tooling around adjusting my profile for a few minutes I put away my unused credit card and go back to my regular work.

This time however I clicked through into the Terms and Conditions of the Linked-In service and found this little gem (my underlining):

You do not have to submit anything to us, but if you choose to submit something (including any User generated content, ideas, concepts, techniques and data), you must grant, and you actually grant by concluding this Agreement, a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual, unlimited, assignable, sublicenseable, fully paid up and royaltyfree (the) right to us to copy, prepare derivative works of, improve, distribute, publish, remove, retain, add, and use and commercialize, in any way now known or in the future discovered, anything that you submit to us, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or to any third parties.

Is it my imagination, or are we all giving Linked-In the legal right to become the worlds biggest spammer, with the recipients of the spam maintaining their own profile on the Linked-In mailing list?

Now I don't think Linked-In have ever spammed anyone, and since such actions would be enormously damaging to their reputation I doubt that they have ever seriously considered such a strategy, however if Linked-In was bought out by a company such as Centabank then the game might change quite quickly.

Probably just my imagination...
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How to be selfish with your wife ...

Many moons and I my wife and I streamlined our giving of presents:

• Birthdays are special - we get a surprise present and it had better be impressive! We also get to plan the day out (on a neighboring weekend if necessary) and choose the restaurant.
  
  
• Christmas is a time for buying our own c.$100 present and hiding it under the tree. Every Christmas morning I find out what I bought for Belinda for that year and (surprise surprise) it's always exactly what she wanted. And vice versa of course ...
  
  
• Wedding Anniversary is for jointly buying a large present that we've decided on during the year ... a new TV cabinet ... a weekend away etc. No surprises here but a lot of satisfaction.
  
  
• Valentine Day is just a plot by the cardmakers to get us to spend money so should be forever ignored.
  
  
• Mother's Day and Father's Day are irrelevant since neither of us have spoken to our respective parents for many years and don't wish to change that arrangement (two very long stories there).

So that works for us, and I'm sure you and your Significant Other have your own unique philosophy for pleasing each other with presents.

This year we discovered a new way to please ourselves. New Years Eve found us short on a few essentials ... milk... bread... red wine etc, so I detoured past the local supermarket for a short excursion. While there I noticed a number of mark-downs on foods whose use-by dates weren't going to make it into the New Year, and I wound up taking home a kilo of garlic prawns and some specialty ice cream.

What a great feed we had! Number One son didn't like the look of the prawns at first but after we coaxed him into trying one there was no stopping his 4 year old stomach. Sure, we'd just finished Christmas with lots of party foods but there's not much choice in deciding what you eat there - tradition has decreed the menu for most of it.

So that's how we will be selfish with my wife from now on - every New Year's Eve we'll go shopping for foods we've never bought at the supermarket before and have a bang-up surprise feast to welcome in the New Year.

Did you think I was talking about being selfish TO my wife? For shame... I specifically said being selfish WITH her.
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This T-Shirt is out there ... somewhere

OK Lotus Australia... I want one of these T-shirts and I want it now!


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The IT Man(ager), the NewlyHired Boy and the Infrastructure Donkey

I sometimes think Infoworld (and similar publications) write some of their articles just to stir the pot on a slow news day. Their latest offering suggests five 'radical' solutions to ITs woes and their first two suggestions put a cold shiver down my spine while the remaining three ideas made me wonder if this was a reprint of an article from the middle of last decade.

• IT resolution No. 1: Let employees use any PC they want: It's easy for Infoworld to say let the user take responsibility for supporting their own non-standard computers but the reality is that when users hit a dead end it's always IT that has to come to the rescue. Allowing non-standard computers also ends the tried and true technique of swapping out a flaky computer with a standby box and sending the offending unit into the rebuild and reformat queue. Infoworld suggests that "Trying to control all the endpoints is a losing game" but I don't see how they justify that comment. Just tell the users that they can have any computer they want as long as they choose the one that's sitting under their desk right now.
  
  
• IT resolution No. 2: Let employees use any smartphone they want: Frankly I don't care what technology the new hires used in University and want to cuddle up with in the privacy of their cubicle. See my previous answer. The alternative is for IT to support a Blackberry server plus an iPhone server plus every other push server ever invented and as far as I'm concerned if people are working with company assets then they need to dance to the company's technology tune. If they've got a great idea about a new technology then they should prepare a proper business case and IT management can review it . If they can't be bothered preparing a proposal and won't accept the existing corporate technology then they can get another job. Once again Infoworld suggests that "Trying to control all the endpoints is a losing game" but if IT just refuses to forward the corporate email to the Boy Wonder's dinky Linux earphone-cum-gamesconsole then I'd say IT just won that game.
  
  
• IT resolution No. 3: Shift to Web-style apps: There is some merit in this proposal but web-style apps have been in use for most of the Noughties. This must really have been a slow news day for Infoworld.
  
  
• IT resolution No. 4: Map out a strategy for the use of client virtualization: This is newer technology than web apps but it's hardly a radical idea.
  
  
• IT resolution No. 5: Deploy collaboration platforms: You mean like the Lotus Notes/Domino platform with 20+ of solid development behind it? Alas no, the article mentions Google Docs and Microsoft Sharepoint but not Lotus Domino. Maybe IBM hasn't taken this journalist out for a free lunch recently...

There are exceptions to every rule and that includes the rules I suggest for Resolution One and Two. Maybe the key Knowledge Workers in the company can justify bringing their own laptop to work but if they want to introduce a new Smartphone technology into the company then IT needs to quantify (and charge back) the additional support expenses they generate. And I don't doubt that freshly-minted university graduates can provide valuable input into the corporate computing strategy but beware the fate of the IT Man(ager), the NewlyHired Boy and the Infrastructure Donkey.

So that's another thirty minutes wasted... five minutes to read the pointless Infoworld article and twentyfive minutes to write a grumpy blog post about it.
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Free Domino technical training in Sydney

In November last year two IBM/Lotus Business Partners (Binary Concepts and Saxon Systems) ran a free two day Domino R8.5 Proof of Technology seminar for Lotus customers at IBM in Sydney. This event provided IT Managers and other decision-making executives with hands-on learning for DAOS, ID Vault, X-Pages and other enhanced features that come with Domino R8.5.

This technical training event is being repeated on Tuesday 16th and Wednesday 17th February 2010 at IBM in St. Leonards and is an excellent opportunity for organisations that are considering an upgrade to Domino R8.5 to understand the nuts and bolts of the new Lotus technology.

During the November seminar attendees were encouraged to raise technical issues relating to improving their own Domino environment and this theme of the seminar was so successful that it is being expanded in the February event. With over twenty customer attendees and four software consultants (plus a smattering of local Loti) spending two days talking about the problems of maintaining a Domino infrastructure, you're sure to get some good answers to your tough questions.

Terry (Terry Boyd - Saxon Systems) and I will also give you our unvarnished opinion on the announcements made by Lotus at the recently concluded Lotussphere 2010.

To obtain more information about the seminar or to reserve your seat at the event, contact me via email on gdodge at bcd dot net dot au.

Limit of two attendees per organisation.

Did I mention that the seminar is Free?
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Where do you draw the line ?

Today I received the following email from an IT supplier (not an IBM Business Partner) in another country:

"Dear Mr.Graham,
Pls. clarify my below questions on Lotus Foundation
1. Can Lotus foundation server keep/store all the incoming & out going mails of the users on server HDD/storage?
2. Is it possible to centralize/store all the contact(addressbook) details of customers/partners?
3. Do we need a dedicated IP for foundation server?
4. Can we install Lotus foundation server/clients on Windows Server 2008?
5. Is Lotus server appliance is a HW box with preinstalled software? If yes, what is the aprox. Cost?
Waiting for your reply.

Best Regards,
..."

I'm sure that most people with a specialized blog get a similar style of questions from time to time. For my part, I'm usually quite willing to help other Business Partners where I can and I gratefully acknowledge that I have received more than my fair share of support from the Yellow Blood community over the last two decades.

But where do you draw the line? These questions show a person who doesn't seem to understand the concept of a Lotus Foundations Server and from reading between the lines in their email I deduce they are considering selling a Foundations Server to a customer.

I know that IBM has a strong presence in this person's country and I have told the writer of the email to contact their local IBM rep for the answers. I don't mind the compliment that they contacted (Googled?) me first, but I need to draw the line somewhere or I'll never get any work done.

What policy do you have on responding to these kind of emails?
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