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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