Lotus moves with the times... not!

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

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


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

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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Lotus Foundations licencing discriminates against Macs?

While trolling through the Lotus Foundations on-line help files (Alright! I admit it! I don't have a social life!) I came across the following anomoly:

*****************************************************
A Lotus Foundations Start CAL includes a license to run a subset of available desktop clients. The supported options are:

* Lotus Notes 8.x Standard for Windows
* Lotus Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook (DAMO) 8.x for Windows
* Lotus Notes 7.0.2 for Mac

A number of client options are not covered by this license. These include, but are not limited to:

* Lotus Domino Administrator & Designer
* Lotus Notes for Linux
* Lotus Notes 8.x for Mac

*****************************************************

I can understand that the Admin and Designer clients need a separately purchased CAL and I can almost twist logic sufficiently to forgive Lotus for excluding all Linux clients for technical compatibility reasons, but can someone from Lotus explain why you can give a user Notes 7.02 on a Mac as a valid Foundations CAL but if you upgrade their Notes to the same R8 version as the rest of your Foundations community then you need another CAL?
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Free access to kb.nitix.com

kb.nitix.com is the public address of IBM's Foundations/Nitix knowledgebase. There is no log-in required so every man and his dog can freely access the information.

It's a great bookmark to have, but make sure that the articles you rely on are flagged as relevant to Lotus Foundations server rather than just the legacy Nitix products.
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Certification for Foundations

If Microsoft can get their certification exams ready prior to product launch for SBS/EBS then why can't IBM/Lotus do it for Foundations?

And don't tell me this sucker is so simple that it doesn't need Certification. I've Seen The Elephant for this stuff and there's a lot happening under the hood. And BTW, where's that improved product documentation you were supposed to be writing? Can we have an ETA for that?

grumble... grumble...
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ETA for revised Foundations documentation?

A couple of months ago I blogged about the documentation that IBM had provided with the first shipment of Foundations. I know that the Foundations team have been working hard in this area since that time because some of their revisions have been slipstreamed into the on-line technical documentation available at the Nitix site.

So when will we see the final product guys? I'd love to get a finalized PDF that I can print out (call me a Luddite if you want but I do prefer working from a printed manual).
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Technical training for Lotus Foundations?

There are two faces to Lotus Foundations Server.

For the SMB owners and their system administrators I stand by my tag line, 'Lotus Foundations: It's easier than you think". For the consultants and integrators who are looking to present, advise on, and sell LFS the road is a bit steeper. Most Lotus Business Partners can talk till the cows come home about the technical issues involved in configuring and running a Notes/Domino installation since we know it backwards, forwards and six ways from Sunday (as we should).

Lotus Foundations is a different story.

I don't mind the challenge. To be completely candid, none of the recent developments in Domino had really pushed my buzz button the way that Notes Release 1.0 did in the late 1980s or that Lotusscript did in the mid 1990s. I can certainly see a place for Composite Applications, X-Pages and Unified Communications etc. in the IT market and good luck to everyone in those arenas. For me, the buzz is with Lotus Foundations Server.

So I'm looking forward to the upcoming battle between Lotus Foundations Server and Microsoft SBS 2008/EBS 2008. What would *really* help is some deep-dive technical training from Lotus. For the past few months I've been beavering away at learning the nuts and bolts of LFS with the friendly and supremely competent assistance of the LFS support Team in Canada. What can't change overnight is that the focus of my consulting work has been on software development and server administration with Lotus Domino rather than issues of Firewalls, IP addressing, scheduling Backups etc. Sure, I know how it all works, but in the past configuring those tools has always been a task for my OS-obsessed colleagues. Now I need to know it all.

I read Daniele Vistalli's recent blog entry with more than a twinge of envy. It's great to see Lotus getting the worldwide training machine underway. My questions are:

• When is the rest of the world going to get this briefing/training?
• If it's not going to be available in Australia anytime soon, can we at least get the slideware?
• How is IBM going to match the... "Microsoft plans to train more than 25,000 partners through events and online tools" campaign reported by ITWorld?

Now I take Microsoft's press releases with a large lick of salt - even if they did have 25,000 current Business Partners actively promoting their SMB products (and I doubt all of those assumptions), they are still working with technology designed for larger enterprises and shoehorned into the SMB market. Their products can be outsold by a properly equipped Lotus Business Partner community.

To quote Winston Churchill...
"Give us the tools and we will finish the job."
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Foundations: Where IBM went wrong...

People will have different answers to this topic but for this post I want to talk about the LFS documentation. I started keeping a list of the typos in the LFS manuals to pass on to IBM but gave up on that when I realised that the problems ran far deeper than just misspelling 'the' as 'teh' or 'you' as 'yuo'. Here are some examples:

• In the section on FTP two posts ago I mentioned the documentation issue with CD installation which cost me an hour of embarassing 'can't-bill-for-this' time on a customer site.
• In the section on 'Disk management' where the Lotus Foundations Start User Manual says... "To take advantage of RAID, you must have Lotus Foundations Software RAID Technology. Software RAID Technology comes standard with the Lotus Foundations Premium Edition" ... but the reality is that there is no Lotus Foundations Premium Edition. RAID support is part of the standard product.
• If you run the compatibility testing option from the LFS main menu then when you have finished testing you are told that you can reboot and choose to do a memory test. That 'memory test' option existed in Nitix but was removed in the transition to LFS. That's confusing for a customer trying to do the right thing and completely burn-in and test their new server before loading LFS.
  

I could talk about some other 'gotchas' and setup issues but I'm not going to list them here since I want this post to be seen by IBM as a hefty prod with a blunt stick rather than a stiletto in the back.

Allowing for the ramp-up time to the January announcement at Lotusphere IBM had over six months to get the LFS manuals into shape and most of the work was just a rewrite of the existing Nitix manuals. They now have a bigger problem in compensating for the unnecessary workload imposed on existing Domino Business Partners whom IBM want to take this product on board. We know Domino and we could work our way around errors in an upgrade to a Sametime manual, but LFS is a whole new ballgame. Some prospective Business Partners might now decide the LFS technical merry-go-round is too difficult without an accurate roadmap and choose to invest their time in a different technology.

The saving grace for IBM is the outstanding support given by the LFS technical support team in Canada. Hats off to Rob and Allen and the rest of the team who have always gone the extra mile to get me over a technical issue. I did my own two-year stint on the Lotus Hotline in Australia some twenty years ago and I know the effort these guys have to put in to deal with support calls. Thanks for your help.

OK... my rant is finished. Over to you Kevin and Bilal. I know that this isn't your personal responsibility but you guys are the public face of LFS for Business Partners. When are we going to get a corrected user manual for Foundations?