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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