Foundation and Empire

Migrating 20,000 Exchange users to Notes?

2010-05-21T12:51:00.002+10:00

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

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The Cobbler wears no shoes

2010-05-21T10:25:00.004+10:00

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?

2010-05-21T09:56:00.007+10:00

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 :(

2010-05-03T10:01:00.004+10:00

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

2010-05-03T08:17:00.003+10:00

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?

2010-04-23T17:55:00.006+10:00

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

2010-04-15T10:07:00.003+10:00

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

2010-04-14T12:05:00.009+10:00

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

2010-04-12T09:23:00.005+10:00

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?

2010-04-09T14:53:00.004+10:00

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?

2010-04-09T14:38:00.010+10:00

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

2010-04-09T10:28:00.005+10:00

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

2010-04-09T08:10:00.006+10:00

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?

2010-03-31T12:50:00.004+11:00

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.

2010-03-30T12:52:00.007+11:00

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

2010-03-29T07:12:00.007+11:00

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

2010-03-17T08:44:00.004+11:00

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

2010-03-17T06:54:00.005+11:00

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."

How do you divide your Passion between five lovers?

2010-03-13T12:13:00.007+11:00

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.

2010-03-13T07:23:00.005+11:00

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!

2010-03-10T11:10:00.005+11:00

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!

2010-03-09T13:05:00.004+11:00

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

2010-03-09T10:02:00.003+11:00

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...

2010-03-06T09:33:00.007+11:00

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?

2010-03-06T08:57:00.006+11:00

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

2010-03-04T11:13:00.006+11:00

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...

2010-03-02T07:43:00.006+11:00

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?

2010-03-02T06:53:00.005+11:00

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

2010-02-21T07:50:00.004+11:00

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

2010-02-20T07:32:00.006+11:00

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

2010-02-19T07:49:00.003+11:00

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...

2010-02-13T09:58:00.005+11:00

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'?

2010-02-12T09:35:00.006+11:00

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?

2010-01-21T06:56:00.009+11:00

"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...

2010-01-20T15:53:00.006+11:00

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...

2010-01-18T20:21:00.003+11:00

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

2010-01-17T08:02:00.004+11:00

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.

2010-01-16T20:11:00.010+11:00

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?

2010-01-16T10:25:00.004+11:00

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?

2010-01-16T07:34:00.005+11:00

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?

2010-01-13T08:35:00.005+11:00

"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...

2010-01-12T12:46:00.004+11:00

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.

2010-01-12T06:50:00.013+11:00

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!

2010-01-08T10:09:00.007+11:00

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

2010-01-08T09:20:00.005+11:00

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 ...

2010-01-07T08:32:00.007+11:00

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

2010-01-05T20:09:00.003+11:00

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

2010-01-05T12:04:00.008+11:00

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.
.

Free Domino technical training in Sydney

2010-01-05T07:54:00.007+11:00

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 ?

2010-01-04T08:38:00.002+11:00

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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IBM prefers MS Word ...

2009-12-30T11:50:00.008+11:00

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

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

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

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

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

Shame on you IBM - go and fix up your own backyard.
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Documenting the Lotus skeletons in the closet

2009-12-24T10:52:00.003+11:00

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

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

Any volunteers?
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How to succeed in selling Lotus services ...

2009-12-24T10:20:00.004+11:00

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

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

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

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

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

2009-12-24T09:29:00.005+11:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or, in John Cook's terms, how do you demonstrate that your productivity with Lotus software far exceeds that of your competition?
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Microsoft takes one on the chin - I bet that hurt!

2009-12-23T06:34:00.008+11:00

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

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

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

There's still time to buy your loved ones a copy of MS Word for Christmas. The injunction doesn't take effect until 11th January 2010.
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Oh no, Lotus... surely you wouldn't ...

2009-12-19T14:19:00.012+11:00

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

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

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

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

2009-12-18T10:00:00.005+11:00

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

Let me explain...

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

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

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

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

The answer is obvious... the problem is finding a way to say that into your proposals to customers.
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Running BES and Traveler on the same R8.5 Server

2009-12-16T12:08:00.003+11:00

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

The server runs on Windows Server 2008.
At first glance I don't see a problem, but has anyone done this before?
Are there any gotchas I need to know about?
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Backup software for Domino R8.5 servers

2009-12-12T15:33:00.004+11:00

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

What software do you recommend and what do you curse?
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A useful tool for all computer gamers

2009-12-10T20:43:00.005+11:00

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

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

2009-12-10T12:45:00.004+11:00

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

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

2009-12-10T06:34:00.002+11:00

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

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

... unless you're into ice hockey I guess.
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Putting the Microsoft Cart before the Lotus Horse

2009-12-09T20:48:00.007+11:00

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

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

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

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

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

If Bleeding Yellow meant I had to behave like that then I'd want a blood transfusion ... I guess the standards are different in Redmond.
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No more Mister Nice Guy

2009-12-08T07:41:00.005+11:00

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

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

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

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

No more Mister Nice Guy!

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

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

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

CMSWire is a totally different organization founded by Brice Dunwoodie.

I have, at times, confused the two - mea culpa. I apologize to CMSWire for my mistake.
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The CMSWatch Emperor has no Clothes

2009-12-07T08:04:00.011+11:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'mis-spoke' ... what a great word!
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Y us crptc var nm?

2009-12-07T06:46:00.005+11:00

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

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

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

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

What is the reason?
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Is Symphony losing the 'hearts and minds' battle?

2009-12-06T06:46:00.007+11:00

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

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

No, I'm just dreaming...

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

2009-12-04T09:52:00.002+11:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Same Planet ... Different Worlds

2009-12-02T17:00:00.008+11:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Same Planet ... Different Worlds.
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Microsoft eliminates Blue Screen of Death!

2009-12-02T07:08:00.005+11:00

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

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

Unconfirmed reports suggest that Microsoft has already made this feature available as a free upgrade for Vista and XP and slipstreamed it into an automatic update that ran in the last week of October.
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Strike Two! Cloud Computing loses more customer data

2009-11-30T18:31:00.005+11:00

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

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

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

2009-11-30T12:18:00.004+11:00

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

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

It's a very tasty fish, but that's not the only reason people choose to go to a fugu restaurant," said Shinichi Ueshima, the chef at the Dote fugu restaurant in Yokohama.
"It's obviously more than a little exciting to go to a restaurant knowing that it might be the last meal that you ever eat," he said. "Where is the enjoyment in eating something that has no risk in it?"

Now I know why people deploy Microsoft software...
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Will Domino R8.51 run on Windows Server 2008 R2?

2009-11-27T16:16:00.005+11:00

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

A customer wants to know...
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There's just one catch ...

2009-11-27T06:46:00.004+11:00

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

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

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

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

Microsoft software: Just say No.

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

2009-11-26T07:05:00.006+11:00

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

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

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

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

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

EDIT: Two days later and I'm still sore. I might need a few days of training before next year's match.
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How to roast an IBM executive (with tomato sauce)

2009-11-18T06:49:00.007+11:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

I saw Mike taking copious notes at the meeting but only time will tell whether the next exec to visit Australia has bothered to read those notes.
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Should you pay less for multi-skilled consultants?

2009-11-17T12:44:00.013+11:00

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

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

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

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

Anonymous posts are acceptable (and expected).

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Quality Journalism? Who needs it?

2009-11-13T05:57:00.016+11:00

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

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

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

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

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

Now where was that Wikipedia article on Jeffrey Dahmer ?
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Free Technical Training for Notes/Domino R8.5x in Sydney

2009-11-12T07:16:00.004+11:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

2009-11-04T06:53:00.003+11:00

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

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

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

2009-11-03T11:34:00.006+11:00

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

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

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

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

Maybe Microsoft does have some benefits with their 'rip and replace' approach to technology. Applications developed with their tools may be over-budget and over-schedule but at least the code is fresh.
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Foundations DynamicDNS doesn't do everything...

2009-10-29T12:56:00.005+11:00

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

>

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

2009-10-22T08:54:00.003+11:00

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

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

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

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

2009-10-13T21:40:00.008+11:00

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

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

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

170 sq km

470,000

>30 million

I would prefer to see it displayed as :

170 sq km
470,000
>30 million

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

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

170 sq km
470,000
>60 million

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

2009-10-12T07:02:00.009+11:00

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

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

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

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

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

2009-10-08T11:37:00.007+11:00

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

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

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

Am I missing something here or is this a time bomb waiting to explode in Google's face?
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Be careful displaying your Testimonials!

2009-10-06T17:32:00.007+11:00

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

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

2009-10-06T15:40:00.003+11:00

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

It's interesting how Banks always take weeks and weeks to pass on a reduction in official interest rates but it'll probably only take them a day or two to pass on this increase in official rates.
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OT: Australia - even at second best is still a great place

2009-10-06T06:36:00.003+11:00

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

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

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

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

2009-09-30T15:31:00.032+10:00

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

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

>

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

Whoever said there is no truth in advertising?
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Fancy a spot of industrial espionage?

2009-09-28T16:54:00.002+10:00

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

I scored eight out of ten.
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I will prostitute myself for one day only...

2009-09-27T19:39:00.006+10:00

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

# Yawn. Late night playing Warcraft.

# I h@te Microsoft

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

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

#Lotusknows

Rock on Lotus!
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OK! OK! Technology neutral I am not, but I still see no redeeming virtues in either Facebook or Twitter from a corporate perspective.
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Google down the gurgle... again!

2009-09-26T06:33:00.003+10:00

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

2009-09-21T21:32:00.005+10:00

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

Give it a try and see what the rest of the world is thinking.
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Lotus Knows how to embarrass themselves...

2009-09-21T20:51:00.009+10:00

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

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

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

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

2009-09-16T20:42:00.001+10:00

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

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

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

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

Melanie Rose is in neo-natal care and only immediate family can visit her (sorry - hospital rules).
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Microsoft wins the right to keep selling MS Word

2009-09-06T21:01:00.003+10:00

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

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

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

2009-09-05T09:17:00.007+10:00

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

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

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

There are some interesting comments following his blog post but I did notice that a significant number of the pro-Cloud comments were made by people who were selling Cloud-related services.
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How do you determine your consulting rates?

2009-09-04T16:25:00.004+10:00

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

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

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

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

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

2009-09-03T13:49:00.015+10:00

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

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

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

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