What do you use when you can't use Lotus Notes?

Since I had to return my corporate Blackberry and my Laptop and I've lost access to my Notes account I've been looking for a way to replace the capabilities and

look and feel of the email/calendaring/scheduling of the Notes 8 client without resorting to Outlook / Outlook Express.

It's not an easy thing to do. So far I've come up with two solutions that come close but they've required a lot of tweaking and integration.

Solution number one is a totally web based solution. Since I have a Gmail account it's built around a number of Google technologies.

The screenshot to the left is my Gmail interface – tweaked with several new Google Labs options. The Google Calendar gadget and Google Docs gadget allow me to view and access my Google Calendar and Documents files directly from the Gmail screen. The Navbar Drag and Drop option lets me move Google Talk gadget and Labels gadget to the right side of the screen. I'm using Remember The Milk for to-do list management and use the RTM for Gmail service to display my to-do tasks within the gmail interface. One of Gmail's biggest weaknesses is in the contact list. It doesn't give you any options for saving phone numbers and addresses or any other useful contact information.

Solution number two goes the mail client route. I chose Thunderbird just to prove I could work without Microsoft. I went through a whole lot of trouble trying to get my contacts exported from Notes and imported into Thunderbird but finally after manually tweaking a spreadsheet full of contact info I've got something workable. I'm using Thunderbird for email with the Lightning calendar extension.

I don't want to worry about multiple mail accounts so I'm still using Gmail as my mail server and Thunderbird is configured to use Gmail's IMAP server. The Lightning extension adds Sunbird compatible calendar support to Thunderbird. It displays events in an agenda format in the Thunderbird client. The calendar supports iCal and several other formats and I was able to find a couple of tweaks on the net that showed me how to set up synchronization for RTM and my Google Calendar entries.

Since there isn't a Thunderbird extension for instant messaging yet I'm using the Digsby IM client. This works pretty well since Digsby is compatible with MSN, AOL and Google Talk and supports webmail and social networking sites also.

In addition I'm running the Rainlendar desktop calendar on the desktop to give me instant access to calendar reminders. In order to integrate between Rainlendar and Google Calendar I downloaded GCALDaemon . The GCALDaemon can also be used to synch newsfeeds back to rainlendar, it's a pretty impressive bit of code.

For mobile support - since I couldn't cost justify a personal Blackberry or other smart phone with a data plan I added an LG-Scoop to the family Alltel plan and am paying an extra $5 / month for basic web services that gives me celltop access to my Gmail account. No new mail notification but I can live with that. I've configured Remember The Milk to email reminders for daily tasks so I can get to my task list remotely. If I wanted to eat the extra text messages each month I could configure it to send SMS alerts.

Of course none of this is a true replacement for the whole Notes/Domino experience but it does give me a familiar interface layout and interface to get work done. It takes a LOT of tweaking and configuring. Wouldn't it be so much nicer if I could just use a Notes client instead?

I could easily come up with a copy of the Notes 8 client probably even the 8.5 beta but I can't legally run it. Part of the problem we face in the market against Microsoft is the fact that the Outlook Express client is freely available on every PC or for download and the Outlook Client is included with most versions of the Office suite.

Wouldn't it be nice if we had a Notes Express client available for free for non-commercial use and integrated with Symphony. I'm very impressed with Symphony by the way. I had to come up with a replacement for Office to use at home. A Notes Express client could be look just like the Notes 8 client but only allow POP, IMAP, SMTP, iCAL,RSS protocols to provide access to existing data sources. The free version could even be ad supported by turning part of the sidebar space over to a dedicated ad widget. An express client would provide a way to give corporate Notes users a familiar interface for personal use at home. It could also introduce new users in High Schools and Universities to the values of the Notes interface. The Outlook express client is only available for Windows systems. A multipatform Notes Express client would appeal to Mac and Linux users as well.

Back in the Job Market

Well, I'm back. I decided to stop the blog after my employer was bought out by a much larger company and we were told we would be moving off of Notes.

Well the latest development on that front is that the new company decided to eliminate “redundant” positions and so as of last week I'm back on the job market.

I've never had the opportunity to be a specialist in IT. The company I worked for was small and had a very lean IT staff. My former position included managing systems administration and PC support personnel as well as hands on management of corporate networks, server infrastructure and firewall security, SAP Basis Administration.... and of course Notes Administration.

I would very much like to continue working with Notes. I'm not looking to leave the lower Alabama area but am willing to travel and work remotely. If anyone knows of a Notes Shop within 75 miles of Mobile, Alabama or an IBM Business Partner who needs to support clients on the Gulf Coast. Please let me know.

A Tale of Two Conferences

I attended the VMWorld conference in Las Vegas last week and made notes during my stay there comparing the experience with our favorite annual conference experience. Thought some of you might be interested.

Registration
Registration lines not split by alphabet. One huge monster line that snakes around to a person who sends you to a final queue to sign in on a laptop....you enter first and last names and hit confirm... Then stand in line to get to a person who pulls your badge off the laser printer... Tears,folds and stuffs it into your holder. Then you join another equally long line to get to shorter queues to pick up your conference materials and bag. Nice messenger bag with a water bottle inside also get a conference shirt. This years conference theme seems to be people without noses.

Registration Process - advantage Lotusphere - logistics and line management were much better.
Registration Materials - advantage VMWorld - nice messenger. Bag and they had shirts in 2X for those of us who are fluffier.

Welcome Reception / Product Showcase Reception
This is two events in Lotusphere but just one at VMworld. Food stations and bar areas spread throughout the product showcase area instead of wandering waiters with hors d'ouvres. Fairly large variety of food including several sushi stations. A dearth of tables to set your plates on though so a bit awkward. No entertainment.

Reception food quality - advantage VMWorld. - More variety and better quality than I've seen at Lotusphere.

Reception atmosphere - advantage Lotusphere. - No entertainment, merger of two events so vendors don't get a chance to enjoy themselves.

Opening General Session
Location Sands Conference Center in Las Vegas. The conference center is attached to the Venetian Resort, one of the most opulent, classy, completely themed resorts. There is Italian marble mosaic tile design on the floor of the bathroom in my hotel room. The lobby ceiling looks like the Sistine Chapel. There's a canal full of gondolas in the shopping area. You'd think they'd spend a couple of bucks to at least paint the walls of the Sands conference center. Instead the conference main hall is a hulking bare rough concrete cavern with all the charm of a parking garage. There are 14,000 attendees at this conference being herded over an acre of unlighted concrete cave to the mass of folding chairs in front of a half dozen big screens. Good music blaring but nothing but static images on screen until Paul Maritz steps on stage.

Technical content was great. Less market speaky than Lotusphere. No special guests no big productions. Just a couple of demos. Note: day two general session with Stephen Herrod VMWare CTO had more depth and demos but still no big names.

Opening General Session production, entertainment and venue -advantage Lotusphere.
Opening General Session content - a draw - both provide good content.

Technical Sessions
VMWorld attendees received email notices to fill out their conference schedules on-line pre-conference. The conference website even provided an automated tool to let you tag sessions you were interested in and autoschedule. Sounds better than it works - if you pick too many it can't autoschedule. Lotusphere also gives you an opportunity pre-conference to register your interest for logistical and space allocation. At VMWorld they hold you to your choices more. Sessions have two lines one for preregistered and another for nonpreregistered... This does reward those who created their schedules but it limits flexibility.

All session attendees are scanned on entry and session evaluation sheets are handed out.

Session content has overall been excellent. One tip Lotusphere could take from VMWorld - sessions are tagged in conference materials as beginner, intermediate or advanced. Speaker types are also coded as customer, partner, VMWare, analyst or academic. I only went to one bad session.

Can't comment much on the labs and BOFs because I spent my time in sessions instead. There appeared to be many self paced and instructor led labs. BOFs seemed a bit less organized than Lotusphere BOFs usually are.

On technical sessions the conferences are a draw. There are plusses and minuses to the VMWare preregistration.

Vendor/Product Showcase
In square footage the VMWare showcase area was probably twice as large as recent Lotuspheres. The hall area was much bigger than what's available for Lotusphere and so booths were sometimes much larger. There were 14 aisles with the larger vendors grouped near the front center part of the hall. Showcase opened Monday night and stayed open 9 to 5 from Tuesday thru Thursday. Food was provided in the showcase area only for the Monday night reception. The hall area was huge. Even with the vendors in place there was a large section partitioned in the back to provide each vendor with a private meeting area and at the front of the hall there were ping pong, pool and other game tables for attendees.

Giveaways were pretty much the same as you see at Lotusphere. Lots of iPod touches, nanos and iPhones. A couple of laptops. A prius. A 50" Plasma TV. Several Garmin GPS's. The freebees included.... the requisite T-shirts (though many vendors did have 2XL), stress toys, USB keys with trial code installed, tool kits, pens, tape measures, USB Hubs... I even got a Rubic's Cube.

Product Showcase - advantage (slight) VMWorld - Definitely more variety and space. Similar giveaways.

Wednesday Night Party
The VMWorld Wednesday Night Party was held at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Entertainment included - 140 mph rides around the track with trained drivers (3 passengers per car on one track 1 passenger per car on a second), go-cart rides and a bunch of race and pit themed attractions in the center area. We were asked to fill out health forms and waivers on the bus there - poor logistical planning there. There were plenty of fast food options - Pizza, burgers, hotdogs, sandwiches, etc. Good variety of food and beverages available. There was either a DJ or band playing in the center of the entertainment area the whole time. Lines were a bit long for the ride alongs and carts so I stuck with food and drink and hanging out. It was a unique venue. Logistics were a bit off. Lots of people just seemed to be hanging about (like I was) instead of doing something. Compared to most of the Lotusphere parties it was a bit ho-hum.... but it ranked higher than the All-Star Sports party at my first Lotusphere.

Wednesday Night Party - advantage Lotusphere

Website
The VMWorld website was well designed, quick and responsive. It had virtual interactive room areas to interact with vendors and peers, it linked with blogs, forums and other resources. It seemed a bit more useful and relevant than the Lotusphere websites have been. VMWare has incorporated lots of community and Web 2.0 type features into the site. Twitter feeds, webcasts, surveys, virtual pavillion, photo wall, video spot.... the site was designed for conference attendees to collaborate and share their thoughts, experiences and opinions about the conference. The site included the schedule builder for autoscheduling your calendar and the calendar data was exportable in iCal format.

Website - advantage VMWorld

Accommodations
Meals for VMWorld were held in the lowest hall level under the area we had the General Session and the decor was more of the same. It looked like they'd set up tables and chairs in the parking garage. Box lunches were available every day to those manning booths or who didn't want to sit and eat... didn't try them so can't report on their quality. The table service meals for breakfast and lunch were very good. Like Lotusphere it seemed we had themed eating days - Southwestern, Asian, California cuisine.... well themed deserts to match the meal. Always a vegetarian entree choice available. Disposable plates and eating utensils. The plastic forks and knives really weren't up to the task.

Snacks were available only once a day around 3 p.m. but they were plentiful. Popcorn, cookies, ice cream bars Tuesday, a make your own sundae bar Wednesday, mini cheeseburgers, mini corn dogs and hot pretzels on Thursday. Coffee and sodas were only available during the snack break and the only water available was from large plastic urns and small plastic cups - nothing like the ubiquitous Lotusphere water bottles.

The session rooms were adequate and comfortable. You rarely see a window in Las Vegas and the conference was designed to keep you from needing to go outside. Sessions spread over four floors. I can't comment on the WiFi quality because my laptop hard disk decided to die on the way to Vegas so I was stuck with Blackberry access and the terminals available for email use. The terminals were plentiful and had adequate bandwidth. The equipment was all HP thin client systems with 20" flat panel monitors running VMWare's virtual desktop. I was able to get to Gmail, Google home page, Google reader, Facebook and our corporate webmail. I didn't try running a Citrix NFUSE session back to the office because I didn't want to monopolize the terminal.

Accommodations - advantage (slight) Lotusphere. The atmosphere, snack quantity and the Lotusphere water availability beat out VMWorld's offerings.

Venue
Every year someone gripes about Lotusphere staying at the same location in Orlando. VMWorld moves around - next year's conference is in San Francisco. Vegas is nice but it's a bit overwhelming to me. At the Venetian all paths lead through the casino. There are great places for eating and shopping, there are theaters and great shows. Disney like care has been spent on making the place look authentic and grand. The rooms were definitely a step ahead of the Dolphin, Swan or any other conference hotels at Disney. My room (at approximately the same room rate as Lotusphere) had a living area with sofa, two chairs, desk and breakfast table, a king size bed, a gigantic bathroom with separate soaking tub and shower and a separate WC.... it also had two flat screen TVs and a stereo and someone came every night and turned down your covers and left a couple of pieces of Belgian chocolate. On the other hand if you wanted to use the internet in your room (cable connection not wireless) - you were charged $10 a night.

It's a matter of personal preference but I have to give the advantage here to Lotusphere. The location is familiar, the general atmosphere at a Disney property is a family friendly one and seems much more light-hearted than Vegas.

Overall
VMWorld was a great conference and I'll definitely go back if the opportunity comes up. The conference was much bigger than any Lotusphere I've attended but it didn't seem too crowded. I didn't feel the same level of community I've come to find at Lotusphere but then after my first Lotusphere I probably felt about the same... it took finding the Gonzo Unofficial Lotusphere site and connecting with people before the conference started to make Lotusphere feel special. I haven't yet gotten involved with the VMWare on-line community but I will.

Advantage Lotusphere - it's something special and I'll certainly miss it.

VMWorld

I'm going to the VMWorld conference in Las Vegas next week. If any of my blogging buddies are going to be there look me up.

I Ainn't Ded Yet

I'm still shutting things down when we transition to Exchange but in the mean time.... I just ran into a new weird Notes bug that I thought I'd pass along.

We've been having issues with user getting new mail notifications and then looking in Notes and not finding any new mail.... I thought.... hey it's just crazy users when it was just one or two but it soon became apparent that it was happening to everyone (except me - I turned mail notification off a long time ago.)

I looked everywhere online trying to find an answer and couldn't find anything - then today I stumbled across an IBM technote about the problem.

Turns out if you have an entry in the Domino directory with a blank username there's a bug in pre version 7 servers that will cause everyone to get random false positive new mail notifications.

You might ask.... why would you have an entry in the Domino directory without a username.... well that's interesting too.... seems a member of management traded in his Blackberry for an iPhone and wanted us to set it up so his mail was being pushed to the iPhone.... he didn't want his mail forwarded - he still wanted it saved in his Notes client. I'm sure there are several ways to fix this but our quickest solution was to set up a dummy entry in the Domino directory that actually points to his Notes database, setting up a mail group that contains the dummy entry email address and the gmail address we have set up on his iPhone and then change his regular entry in the directory to forward all his mail to the mail group. I went back into the dummy entry and put a dummy value in the username field.

If I have time I may post more about our migration off of Notes/Domino. I've been writing the transition plan and reading all the Microsoft marketing literature for Exchange and Sharepoint. I can already say the new system will be more complex, less robust and much less capable. If we'd been heavy users of clustering, encryption, had lots of current customized databases that couldn't be easily replaced then the process would be very difficult and users would complain.

Shutting down the blog

I haven't been able to be much of a blogger and now things are changing for me at work that will negate the purpose of this blog.

Our company has been acquired by a Fortune 500 energy company and the division we'll be a part of does not use Lotus Notes.

We're not really sure what this change will mean for us yet. Notes Admin is only one of a dozen hats I currently wear and none of the others are going away. Plus I'll get to put on the Exchange Admin hat probably.

Anybody got any good resources for migrating user mail history, contacts and calendars from Notes to Exchange?

Lotus Notes Related Content Will Soon Reappear

Well, I've made it through an SAP go-live, three birthday's (my mom's 80th, my 48th and my daughter's 22nd)... two graduations, Mother's Day and most importantly the Wedding.

Hopefully Lotus Notes related content will resume sometime next week.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Congratulations Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Desko

Congratulations Megan and John

May 10 my daughter Megan graduated from The University of Mobile with a dual major in English and Theology. May 13 my son John graduated from Daphne High School.

We're very proud of both of them .

Happy Birthday Megan

I don't usually post personal content on here and my daughter usually doesn't read my blog.

But 22 years ago today - my whole world changed when a wriggling, crying, wrinkly bundle of joy came into my life.

Over the years I've watched her grow and blossom, make mistakes, throw fits, torture her brother, make friends, lose friends and develop and grow in her relationship with God. I've been able to experience all the stages from toddler, to big sister, to student, to girl scout, to teenager, to band geek, to college student, to adult.

Over the next month and a half she'll go through even more transformations as she graduates from college, gets married to Andrew and begins her first real full time job. She's ready for all these new challenges and I can't wait to see what's in store for her in the future.

You're a wonderful young lady Megan. You've made your mother and I proud. I wish we could take all the credit for how you've turned out but I know there have been many other grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, teachers, mentors, pastors and professors who have helped and that in truth you are the wonderful person God made you to be and you're following the path He wants you to follow. Have a very very very Happy Birthday.

- Love Dad

How I started with Lotus Notes

Well, looks like everyone is posting about how they got started with Notes. I already posted most of the details weeks ago... but what the heck.

When I came to the gas company in 1993 PC's were rare, networks almost non-existant and the mainframe was king. I worked as the IS liason to the engineering department on a GIS project - boy they loved me, they didn't trust IS to do anyting, were running their own thin net Netware 2 LAN and a proprietary thick-net LAN for GIS workstations. The only other networks in the building were a hand full of IS systems running OS/2 on token ring and a 3 user Netware 3 network for HR.

A couple of years later the decision was made to move the accounting system off of the mainframe. We bought three little IBM RS/6000 C10 servers - one to run Lawson, one to handle NFS file systems and one to act as print server and handle other administrative issues. This led to the creation of a corporate wide network .... though it actually took several years to peal the Engineers off their own network.

With the new network in place my boss brought up the subject of email. We discussed a POP/SMTP set up, and cc:Mail and other options but I had read about Lotus Notes
and mentioned it as an option. Our first server was on an OS/2 workstation and most clients were on Windows 3.11. Within a few months we had our mail server running on one of the C10s with the OS/2 server relegated to other Notes databases. We wrote tons of small applications for IS department use one of my favorites - because I designed it and also because of it's name was the UFO's database.... this due to my boss's sick sense of humor.... we had a standard IS department form for Unplanned Failures in Operation.... so my first major notes development experience was the program bugs database.... we used it to track any user issues - that program stayed in operation through 2000.

The RAD capabilities of Notes were GREAT! In our place there were the mainframe programmers and us strange network / PC people but all of a sudden we could quickly write quick little databases to fix user problems.

Looking back now the hardest thing to believe is that from late 1995 through late 1999 we ran our mail server on a box with less than 4GB of disk space... I've got a couple of users who would fill that by themselves now.

Early Adoption Pains

I'm paying for the fact that I decided to jump the gun and update my email template to 8.0.

I'm now starting my second week without email on my Blackberry. Our BES server version is below the level required to support the 8.0 mail template. Funny thing is everything ran okay for about a month.

We had to come in a week ago Saturday to shut down all the computer equipment for the cut over to a new UPS. After the BES server came back up it started periodically crashing with a the following error showing up in the server logs.

Process C:\Lotus\Domino\nBES.EXE (3912/0xF48) has terminated abnormally

After a quick Google search I wound up with this post from Chris Miller's blog. Popped open Blackberry Manager and deleted myself from the user list, restarted everything and voila.

Unfortunately with all the problems still popping up from the SAP upgrade it may be a few weeks until we can upgrade the BES version to something that works.

Until then I guess if anybody needs me they'll have to call me.

Sapped!

Definitions courtesy of Dictionary.com.

SAP

noun

1. The watery fluid that cirulates through a plant, carrying food and other substances to various tissues.

2. An essential bodily fluid.

3. Slang. a fool; dupe.

4. A leather-covered hand weapon; a blackjack.

verb

5. To undermine; weaken or destroy insidiously.

6. To hit or knock out with a sap.

7. To undermine the foundations of (a fortification).

8. To deplete or weaken gradually.

The move has been made. Tomorrow (if all goes well) we will close the books on our first month on SAP and I'm finally sticking my head up out of my bunker to say we survived.

It hasn't been all bad. Our old system had plenty of flaws and our people have been surprisingly accepting of the new system and resilient in the face of the first troublesome weeks on a new system. The process itself forces you to examine and rexamine your business processes - since you want to avoid doing anything in a way different to the "SAP way" if at all possible. This means that you've really, really, really got to justify everything that's outside of the norm. The implementation process with it's onslaught of consultants from around the country has exposed our quiet little local group to people from other backgrounds and lifestyles. The process has also helped break down some of the internal company silos as cross department teams have struggled together over the past eighteen months toward a common goal.

We in IT still feel a bit like we're tight rope walking over the lava pits while juggling chain saws, blindfolded... but we'll make it.I hope.

Archiving Question

I have a user who's interested in backing up his email archive databases to USB memory keys. I can't think of a reason to say no to that. Any thoughts?

Decisions Made After Midnight

I've been stuck here at the office overnight this weekend babysitting the production hardware and network resources during our SAP implementation cut over. Since I was going to be stuck here twelve hours Friday Night / Saturday Morning with nothing to do except listen to iTunes, watch DVDs and surf the net I decided it would be a great time to finally upgrade my Notes Client to the 8.0.1.

Wow! It looks great! So I decided...hey! I'll just go ahead and upgrade my mail file from the slightly modified OpenNTF DWA 7.0 version I'd been running to the stock Notes/Domino version 8.0 mail.ntf. Our production server is still running at 6.5.3 but release notes say the v8 mail template is supported during migration... why not!

WARNING NOTE: It is really not advisable to make decisions about your mail file after two a.m. in the morning. If you do be prepared to live with the consequences..... i.e. rebuilding all of your folders and scouring the all documents view for all those important items that were so carefully arranged in multiple nested folders.

The built-in folders updated with no problem but all custom folders I'd created decided to "partially" upgrade when I did a replace design. Even worse opening the custom folders led to an error dialog....so I replaced the design again - multiple times. So I popped my mail file open in designer went into the folder section and unselected Prohibit design refresh or replace to modify - thinking - okay now the nested folders will update their design and stop making that annoying error noise when I open them... but nope they all just disappeared. I opened a local replica of the mail file in designer and copied the folders from there back into the primary copy - but then I had non-updated, erroring, empty folders... so I just gave up and recreated my folders anew. My folders look much better now that I've streamlined down from dozens of nested folders to seven - Newsletters, Pending, Projects, Reference, Reports, SAP and one for personal stuff.

The new version looks great. I've gotten a chance to goof around with widgets a bit. I found the Widgets articles in the new Lotus Domino Wiki that was mentioned in Alan Lepofsky's Blog . Looking forward to playing with them more.

If I hadn't already been bit by the mail file situation I might get more adventurous and try completing the Sametime install I've been working on... but no good comes from working on new projects at 5 a.m. on a Saturday morning without any sleep.

Back From the Dead but Going Offline Until After Cutover

I've been out with the flu for the past week and haven't even thought about blogging. I have dropped 8 pounds in 4 days - not a bad start on my weight loss program - but I wouldn't recommend the Influenza Diet as an option. I'm back among the living now but won't be back online for a few more weeks.

We've finally reached the end of the line and on the ERP project and this comming weekend is the cutover / go-live date for the project. Though we've been preparing for this for months and should - the next few weeks will be fairly busy and pretty turbulent - so I don't expect to be immersed in the bloggosphere until we get on the other side of this. Then on the other hand things could all go completely smooth and I could be sitting here next weekend twiddling my thumbs and reading... here's hoping.

Stuck Inside of Management with the Programmer Blues Again

Sometimes it's a good idea to let blog posts marinate a bit before releasing them to the world.... the post that went with this title was a long whine about the fact that I've lost my Notes developer skills and miss the chance to do heads down coding.

I went on and on about my history with 4GLs, database development IDEs and scripting languages. My job history leading to my current over taxed technical management / systems administration job and how the developing bug has been woken back up recently after having to poke through a few older databases and reading through some developer blogs.

Truth is... I don't have time to immerse myself in development. My last structured programming was COBOL and Turbo Pascal in college over twenty years ago. I did plenty of programming but it was all with proprietary 4GL languages or scripting systems where the idea was to do more with less coding. The great thing about Notes development when I was involved (Release 3 and 4) was the RAD development, forms designer and formula language.

The bulk of our early Notes development was small single database programs for tracking support calls or computer equipment or IT projects. The best used the functions Notes was great at unstructured data and workflow ... the worst just used Notes as a useful tool and could have been written in MS Access... the important thing was we didn't use Access and didn't walk down the Microsoft path. Remarkably they're still there - butt ugly but running fine on Domino 7.

What I'd really like is a quick and dirty way to pretty up the old databases I created in R3. Extreme Makeover Lotus Notes Edition. I'd also love a way to quickly add Blackberry support to older databases that are still in use and a way to re-skin old apps that used non-web supported functions like layout regions for use on the web. A large number of our early Notes 3 apps will work on the web but they look pitiful. It would also be great to be able to apply a single common style to all the old non-standard ugly old databases we wrote when we thought turquoise or yellow were visually appealing user interface colors.

Short of finding a magical tool that will let me do all this...I need a resource for guerilla Notes development - something that doesn't expect me to learn Lotuscript or Java but teaches me how to go back and quickly update the visual elements of my old programs. I need a tutorial or sample code to allow me to add Blackberry support for existing apps. I need a good tutorial on webifying existing data.... and I need a tutorial that walks me through the basics of designing forms, views and actions in the current IDE to let me resurrect the skills I did have with R3 to create small, useful, one-off programs with Notes - so I don't have to find a developer or use another tool.

Disaster Recovery Express

This is not specifically a Notes/Domino post - but in a small business you have to wear lots of hats... and one of mine is the disaster recovery plan. Since Domino is one of the essential enterprise services I have to be able to recover I think it's relevant.

I've received several marketing emails from IBM over the past few days about this item. Yes the Express brand extends to more than just software. Here we have a 7U chassis that runs on regular power, includes bays for up to 9 terabytes of disk storage, that can hold hot-swap modules for Gigabit Ethernet, supports Intel and AMD Opteron blades and comes with easy management tools to control the environment - they even offer an office enablement kit that adds an acoustical module to dampen sound - with a locking front door and 4U of additional space. When coupled with VMWare VI3 software, a DataDomain virtual tape library appliance (3U) and a router (1U) you have a configuration with the potential to be the perfect disaster recovery platform for a small business.

Small businesses need disaster recovery plans as much as large businesses - in fact probably more since small businesses tend to be less geographically diverse - ask any small business along the Mississippi Gulf Coast or in New Orleans. Protecting your corporate data can mean the difference between the business continuing of failing after a disaster strikes. For those of us whose companies are publicly traded it's not really even an option to not have a disaster recovery plan.... generally though smaller businesses have to outsource their disaster recovery site to a business recovery service like IBM BRS or Sungard.

Several years ago we reviewed what we were paying for outsourced disaster recovery and what the cost would be if we ever moved beyond the annual two day disaster recovery test and actually had to use the service and we decided that we could do it cheaper in-house. Luckily we have a subsidiary geographically distant enough to make it possible and some surplus older (or refurbished) equipment that could be configured to handle our core business processes. Product offerings like the one above make this process much more possible for a small business.

With the BladeCenter you will need at least two blades running VMWare with a third running VMWares Virtual Center management software,your corporate backup software and all the normal network management tools normally needed. Using P2V conversion tools that come with VMWare VI3 you can create a virtual server version of each of your core business servers (Windows, Linux and most Intel versions of Unix are supported as VMs). With the VMs converted you have a base version of your system.

The weakest link in any tape backup system is the tape. How many times have you attempted to restore from tape only to find that the tape was defective or the backup operation had failed? Tapes also require storage, movement from primary site to DR site and must be loaded and watched during restore operations. Fortunately there are now solutions to get rid of tape - and I'm not suggesting writing to DVDs. We discovered and implemented a DataDomain virtual tape library this year to help us ease the burden of backing up SAP.

DataDomain devices can appear to your backup software as a regular tape library but they include an intelligent storage server with raid protected disk storage and employ a data deduplication technique that allows for enormous compression of data. We are currently experienceing a 10.5 to 1 compression ratio - your mileage may vary depending on the type of data you store. DataDomain devices also support replication and they replicate the deduplicated data. This allows you to install a pair of their libraries at your primary and disaster recovery site and with sufficient bandwidth - replicate your data over either a private data link or a VPN connection.

If you don't have a disaster recovery plan - you need one. No matter how small a business - even if you aren't in an area effected by hurricanes, tornados, wild fires or floods - what happens when you have a fire? when the toilet in the restroom upstairs overflows?

If you have your disaster recovery site out-sourced - consider your options? Is there a business partner, supplier or associated company in the area who you could work out a deal with? What are the options in your area for co-location space? Business Partners - do you have small customers who might be able to use this as a service? The idea could be scalable - with the infrastructure supporting multiple smaller sites.

If you have any questions about using VMWare or DataDomain or about disaster recovery in general let me know. If I don't have the answers I do have resources.

Revisiting the Nifty Fifty

Thirteen years ago - the year after we rolled out our first company wide LAN, my boss asked me into his office to discuss the idea of adding an email system to the mix to join the file and print services we were providing our users. This was before Exchange existed but he had heard of cc:Mail and Microsoft Mail and Eudora. I told him I'd read about something different something Lotus Software was selling called Notes that they described as groupware.

I explained that Notes was a system that combined email, document and discussion databases and development tools in one package. I had read about the product when it was first released and was affordable for very large organizations like GM or GE or IBM...but they'd just changed their licensing so we could now afford to buy and run Notes in our organization.

In a few weeks we received a shipment of bright yellow boxes of Lotus Notes R3 for OS/2. We set up our first server on a spare workstation running OS/2. We discovered not only did we have email and the standard database templates... there was also a set of sample applications called the "Nifty Fifty". We quickly began playing with these applications and used them to initially learn to develop our own databases.

A slightly modified version of the absense approval database wound up in use in one department and there are still users here using it today... It's just as but ugly as it was twelve years ago but it works.

Many others in the blogging community have argued over the past five years for a resurection of the Nifty Fifty. I'd like to propose something similar. IBM/Lotus is focusing anew on the SMB market - it's the right time for a Lotus Notes Small Business Bundle.

One constant problem at a smaller businesses is lack of resources for custom development. If Lotus (or the openNTF community) were to put together a set of well designed, functional starter templates for Notes that focused on the needs of smaller firms it could be a great selling tool for small businesses. Even better - if the templates were designed to work as a teaching tool with all design elements open to view - well documented in help documents with well documented structured object oriented Lotusscript code, they could serve as building blocks for new small business developers like the nifty fifty did for us long ago.

I can think of several ideas - an HR intranet template - or even a generic department intranet template, a basic purchase request template, a basic help desk ticketing template, a company survey template - to name a few. What about you? What templates would you like to see in a Small Business Bundle?

Virtual Confusion

Server Virtualization is a hot topic in the computer press this year and this is not just a concern for large businesses. Smaller organizations with limited staff and floorspace can gain a great return on investment by using these technologies. VMWare has recognized this and offers specific tools for the SMB market.

Mature technologies are available from various hardware and software vendors that provide a greater degree of robustness and allow organizations to maximize their hardware utilization. Processors and operating systems are increasingly savvy about virtualization. Applications vendors are realizing that they must support customers running their software in virtual environments. The primary area where things still lag behind in the nature and complexity of licensing agreements on virtualized or partitioned hardware.

Microsoft recently simplified the license options for virtualized environments for it's server operating systems and software. They offer clear easy to understand rules about what licenses are required in a virtual environment. Their license model allows for subcapacity licensing also clearly realizes the fact that virtual machines may float between physical servers. One of the great deals to come out of this change in mindset about virtual environments is Microsoft 2003 Datacenter Server license "retails" for $2,999 per processor (two processor - socket- minimum) - while this may seem like a costly alternative considering Windows Standard edition lists for $999 - a Datacenter Server license gives the license holder the right to run an unlimited number of Windows 2003 or Windows 2000 virtual server environments on the hardware - whether they will be using Microsoft's virtualization software or VMWare. By purchasing copies of Datacenter Server for the four blades in our VMWare VI3 cluster I never have to worry about to tracking license counts en our VMWare environment. Unfortunately Datacenter Server is positioned for much larger organizations so I had to talk to three software vendors before finding one who would sell it to me since we are a small business.

Other vendors are not quite as clear or are not quite as helpful in their pricing on partitioned or virtual environments. The Oracle Licensing page in the Oracle FAQs WIKI states "As at February 13 2006, Oracle still did not recognize "soft partitioning" technologies such as VMWare and Microsoft Virtual Server when licensing by processor/CPU. Instead you must license by the physical processor in the underlying hardware."

IBM does recognize partitioning and allows subcapacity licensing of products under a Passport agreement but while their sets of documents to explain in detail all the options for a logically partitioned (LPARed) environment the rules are still quite hazy about the VMWare option and which products are offered under subcapacity licensing is also unclear. I would love to have a simple straightforward statement on running Lotus Domino, Sametime and Quickr under a VMWare cluster - do I have to have licenses for each system in the cluster? Can I use subcapacity licensing with VMWare and only license for one socket or core?

With vendors of more specialized products the problem gets even worse. We passed on the purchase of a commercial PGP encryption application to run in an 2 processor logical partition on one of our consolidated AIX systems because the vendor's pricing was prohibitive since they only licensed based on the physical hardware - a 16 processor box.

What about you? Are you using virtualization in your business? Have you run into any licensing nightmares? Which vendors do you think need to get the message most?

Admin Wizard

One of the toughest things about being an admin in a small business is staying up to date with the improved functions in new releases. Domino Admin is just one of the many hats I have to wear.... I'm also network admin, firewall admin, AIX system admin, SAP admin and manager of other admin and PC support people. We've been on Notes since release 3 and the last time I had formal admin training was for release 4.5.

I've been to Lotusphere most years and get a great overview of new features and functions in Domino and new tools for administration. I read the release notes and new administrator help documents to try and find out what new features are there. If I was rebuilding the environment from the ground up I think I could enable and use many of the advanced features that have been released in R5, R6, R7 and R8.... but I don't know how to retrofit all of those advances to my current system.

I also don't have an easy way to evaluate the new features that will provide the most return for the least effort. I also don't see any documentation that walks through these processes - like say.... implementing password recovery when you've already got an installed base of users with existing id files.... or implementing mail policies for quotas, archiving and attachment management.... or implementing the CA process ( I kinda stumbled my way through this one and "think" I have it right... but would like to know for sure).... or I don't know one of the many other new features that have been released.

Notes /Domino 8.0.1 is here now and Note / Domino 8.5 will be here soon.... wouldn't it be great if the next Domino release.... or next Admin Client release.... included an Administration / Upgrade Wizard - an application that could either look at your configuration and see what new technology has been implemented and what hasn't that could present a list of 5 or 10 admin features with explanations of what the benefit is that you could click through - answer questions and then have it go and create all the needed changes - or give you physical steps to follow.

If not from IBM/Lotus - this sounds like a good product for one of the companies that make administration tools - an SMB Admin Wizard or Admin in a Box. If it were priced for the small business market I think an admin helper would go over really well.

What do you think?

BTW - to those of you who were at Lotusphere last week and heard the continual refrain to -
"post it to Ideajam...." - I'm going to - so please go promote it.

What it's all about.

Lotusphere 2008 is now wrapped up. Even as the closing session was wrapping up Disney personnel were on site beginning the process of removing every trace that the conference happened. By some time tomorrow they will begin setting up the signs and booths and chairs and screens for the next conference.

I think this year I finally get it. What the whole message is about... collaboration. I know that it might seem stupid to say that... of course it's about collaboration... Lotus Notes/Domino is software built for collaboration... but it goes beyond that Lotusphere is about the collaboration that exists between the administrators, developers, consultants, vendors, bloggers, journalists and Lotus folks who come here every year... and collaboration is not a one way street.... it requires everyone to be engaged.... to give back to the community... and I haven't been giving back the way I should.

I've never seriously thought about starting a blog before. I've read many of the blogs in the Lotus blogging community and I'm proud to call the people who write them my friends. But I always felt I didn't have enough interesting to say. The administrators and developers who participate in the community, the people who present in the best practices track at Lotusphere are seriously talented and I feel very intimidated about my lack of technical depth when I'm around them but I have worked for over 20 years in small businesses, the past 15 for my current employer, where a part of my job is to be the "Lotus Guy" - a roll that has encompassed - administration, development, management and evangelism - so I know something about the pains and problems of small to medium businesses (SMBs).

SMBs - are a market that IBM has generally never really had a handle on and one that Lotus Notes was not initially focused on.... but many of us in SMBs could see the strength of the Lotus blend of email, calendaring, document centric databases and rapid application development.

IBM's definition of a small to medium business is anything under 10,000 employees. That range cannot be treated as a monolithic group. For purposes of discussion here I'm talking an order of magnitude lower - businesses with 1000 employees or less.

SMBs have unique issues and resource constraints. They get by with less and individually have much less of a voice within the community.... but there are a lot of us and we've got important things to say.

SMBs are much more likely to be supported by a single administrator and possibly only one developer. There may be a single person who fills both rolls or there may be a much larger reliance on outside support and development resources. It's also more likely that the Notes Developer and Domino Administrator in a SMB are covering several different jobs and have less opportunity to focus and increase their skills.

SMB personnel are also more likely to be isolated without local support community. They may be the only Notes / Domino shop in town or may not have a local users group to fall back on for advice.

My hope is to turn this blog into a place where the SMB community can be heard. A place where an on line SMB community can be formed that will allow us to create an SMB focused users group - get a BOF session on the schedule to meet and get more SMB specific sessions on track.

One of the primary new announcements in this year's opening general session was Lotus Foundations - a new class of products aimed at businesses with less than 500 employees. This announcement tied to the announcement last week of their acquisition of Net Integration Technologies - a company with a track record supporting the SMB market. Hopefully this signifies a new focus for IBM on those of us in the lower end of the user count. We'll all be waiting hopefully... but we need to push back and provide feedback on what we expect. We don't want to be pidgeonholded into a Windows only ghetto or be asked to give up features we've grown to expect in the full product.

Over the next few days I'll work on some technical and organizational tasks... in the mean time contact me if you have ideas about what you'd like to see from IBM Lotus for your small business. If you are a consultant who works with SMBs please share this site and ask them to contact me with their feedback.

Let's collaborate!