The Notes File Navigator - pure genius!

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



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

NOTE: You will have to upgrade to R8.5x to use this widget.
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How do you filter Blue Care?

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



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

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

IIRC correctly the average Lotus Foundations Server sale included 20 client licenses which makes me think that IBM/Lotus should be focusing on software enhancements that appeal to that size of business.

Lotus Foundations Branch Office gave us the ability to replicate from a Foundations server to a Head Office Domino server and that's a valid enhancement. IMHO the inclusion of VMWare enhancement was also a good move. It neatly meets any customer objection that they still need to run some specialized archaic software on their primary production server.

So I've been impressed with the early moves for LFS but now I'm thinking Lotus is heading down a strange path. The upcoming Foundations Reach will give us instant messaging and presence awareness, point to point VoIP and video chat capabilities. Now all of those are good things but are they really make or break points for purchases in the SMB market?

On the other hand almost every customer (and potential customer) for Lotus Foundations has been bugging me about Lotus Traveller for months and from what I can tell we won't be seeing that product on Foundations this side of Christmas and maybe a few months after. I know Traveller needs to be ported to Linux - my question is, why did SameTime get ported first?

Is Lotus trying to catch a larger share of the 20 user market or are they more interested in repositioning Foundations for a larger company? Whatever the reason, the lack of Traveller will probably scuttle at least one Foundations sale for me (hopefully I'll be able to sell the customer a Domino server on the rebound).

I'm not understanding the Lotus strategy here. If we're trying to capture the SMB market then I'd have thought that including Traveller (and maybe a bundled copy of Eric Mack's e-Productivity template) would be the sort of chrome that would appeal to the SMB CEO. Instead of that we get Sametime and Video Chat.

I'm sure Lotus know more about marketing to SMB than I do, but I sure wish they'd explain what they're thinking.
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Foundations: Letting the Tiger out of the Box

Did you ever see the cartoon with a man sitting precariously on an energetically bouncing crate with one hand holding onto the wall for balance while the other is grasping a telephone into which he is shouting... "OK, I've got the Tiger into the crate. What do I do now?"

I often think that's a good metaphor for IBM/Lotus and Lotus Foundations Server. IBM has purchased, re-engineered and repackaged Foundations and released it into the market but they are still struggling to find a way to position it within the regular Lotus product line. The big problem is stopping it from cannabalising the standard Domino product line. After all, if you can get all of the features of a regular Domino server integrated with its own firewall, anti-spam, anti-virus, file and print management... yada yada yada ... for less than the cost of that regular Domino server then why wouldn't you go with it? What's to stop the entire installed base of Domino customers from migrating across to LFS?

The strategists at IBM/Lotus wouldn't really have a problem with that scenario. For a start, there's no upgrade path so everyone needs to purchase new LFS software licences and the kicker is that the Windows Server licence for all of those existing Domino servers wouldn't be renewed. More money for IBM/Lotus and less money for Microsoft. I don't think the Yellowverse has a problem with that. My guess is that IBM/Lotus are struggling to develop a sensible pricing scheme that scales from a $300 SMB server all the way up to the $30,000 Domino Utility server, and until they do, they are enforcing technical and licencing constraints with the basic Foundations product to prevent it from running as a fully fledged corporate Domino server.

I certainly don't endorse bypassing the IBM/Lotus licencing restrictions on LFS but I'm all in favor of tweaking the product to make it run more smoothly for the customers. This week I'll be looking at Bob Baehr's LOTUS.PRO Advanced Web Configuration for Foundations. If it does what it says it does then I'll certainly be recommending it to my customers.


Damn it Bob... you've gone and started me blogging again even after I swore off that activity as a waste of my billable time.
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Foundation server now supports R8.5 Domino... and I support my Telco

Now that LFS 1.1 has been released I can upgrade my Domino R8.01 server add-on to R8.5 to match the R8.5 Admin and Design clients that I've been using for the last six months or so. Since Domino is not core Foundations OS code the files need to be downloaded as a separate exercise just like the "Run" add-on module I mentioned in my last post.

• The Run module is lf-run11-5800.zip and comes in at 116mb
• The R8.5 Domino server is lfstart-domino850-5892.zip and weighs 673 mb.

So that's almost 800mb of download I need by sunset.

Just another day spent making my Telco richer.
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VMWare is now running on Lotus Foundations Server

The VMWare module for the LFS environment is now available for download and installing it is a three step process.

1. Upgrade your core server code to Lotus Foundations Start V1.1.0 which is just a standard software update and handled automatically by LFS once you give it permission to do so. Alternatively, you can install Lotus Foundations Branch Office.
   
   
2. Install the "Run" add-on which comes on the Foundations media packs and is also available as a download from IBM. The process is fundamentally the same as installing the Domino server add-on - just copy the .pkg file to the autoinstall directory then click the install button.
   
   
3. The third step - the installation of the VMWare module - is a little trickier. The VMWare module is only downloadable by IBM/Lotus business partners who are empowered by IBM to pass it on to their customers. There is no additional fee paid to IBM for this module. Once you have the VMWare module you will need to register it with VMWare to gain the linux license serial keys which you need to run the module. There is no fee for the licence keys but there is a limit of five keys per customer registration.

I hate registering my name with organisation with whom I have no regular business dealing but I think the deal is fair. IBM has tweaked LFS to run a VMWare environment but they are not selling the VMWare experience - that is just another option which they give you. On the other hand VMWare is providing a free sample of their environment to LFS customers but if you want to move beyond five licence keys then presumably you'll need to contact VMWare and start talking about upgrades.

Now how soon will it be before we see a 90 day trial of Quickr and SameTime servers bundled with Foundations?

I'm not taking bets.
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