off the Hook - 911's Chief Lot...

I am really looking forward to the upcoming North American Lotus User Group meeting (IamLUG) August 3-4 in St. Louis, and I am honored, nay humbled,  to be included among the distinguished speakers - a real who's who of Lotus gurus.

I hope we see a lot of new faces, whether it is because you are new to working with Lotus software or because you haven't been able to attend any other events the past few years. I sincerely believe that there is valuable content whether you are a developer, administrator, or IT leadership.

My session "A universal use case for the business value of the Lotus collaboration suite" will illustrate how business processes that we can all identify with, regardless of organizational size or industry, can benefit from the latest collaborative software solutions from Lotus. We will cover how looking at the Lotus product portfolio as a "suite" (think Microsoft Office) rather than separate pieces of software can help you build a highly valuable and cost-effective collaborative environment that your business can implement to weather the financial storm or catapult past the competition.

We will also discuss strategies for responding to the most common objections to achieving these goals, such as:

• We don't have the budget right now.
• We're too busy with other projects.
• We're moving off of Notes.

The session might as easily be called "How to defend, better leverage, and expand upon your Lotus environment while reducing costs" but that sounded too much like an infomercial.

At the very least, you will leave the session with some ideas on maximizing the value realized from your existing investments in Lotus software as well as several tips you can put to use regardless of your job description or skill set. My hope is that you will walk away with some concrete ideas of how to directly impact your organization's efficiency using the skills , interests, and tools for which you already have the foundation.

So as you look through the sessions you want to attend at IamLUG this year, consider this: All the great technical knowledge you're sure to gain is only meaningful if you can justify putting it to use.

I realize that for many of you reading this, despite the fact that the event is FREE, it may be difficult for you to even convince your boss that you should have the "time off" and travel expenses to attend. My advice to those of you in that category is to emphasize how this event gives you DIRECT PERSONAL ACCESS in a not-so-crowded setting to some of the foremost Lotus implementation specialists on the planet (or at least this side of the pond). If attending helps you solve even one problem you are facing, it's probably worth the trip.

If that doesn't work, give them my phone number and I will do my best to convince them for you.

Hope to see you there!

Scott

With all the publicity (OK, TV ads ) I've seen about Microsoft's new search (err... "decision" ) engine, bing.com the past couple of weeks, I finally gave it a try today.

The query on my mind happened to be the $99 iPhone 3G. So first, I typed "$99 iPhone" into bing.com. The top result was a link to a "Boy Genius Report" article from December, 2008 (that'd be six months ago ) SPECULATING about a $99 iPhone. The rest of the results weren't any better.

Then, I went over to Google and searched for "$99 iPhone." The result? A link to an apple.com page actually describing the $99 iPhone and how to get it (otherwise known as "What I was looking for" ).

The only "decision" bing.com helped me make is not to use it. Don't get me wrong, bing.com does have pretty backgrounds that change every day for those that don't have a screen saver already doing that for them.

P.S. This humorous video pretty much sums it up too.

P.P.S. Want even better results? try my new favorite search engine at http://twoquick.com.

I have recently been watching the public twitter stream of the word Lotus (some might say obsessing). First, it is amazing how many people twitter about the lotus flower, lotus position, clubs called "Lotus", and the Lotus automobile line. Side note: If you want a decent Twitter search string, try lotus -position -elise -flying -flower -yoga -lounge

I was specifically looking for complaints about Lotus software. There are far fewer than I thought there would be. I am only finding about 3 or 5 per day from the public stream. In fact, the praise outweighs the complaints significantly. Almost all of the complaints have been generic, like "Lotus Notes sucks". But hey, you only get 140 characters so I didn't expect a lot of detail. Each time I spotted one, I would reply to it and offer assistance if they would provide more detail. Most people didn't respond. My hypothesis is that most people don't want to have their minds changed about something they "like to dislike." However, most that did, quickly revealed that their complaints were not actually legitimate "suckage" of Lotus Notes, but rather poor implementation, poor management, or lack of training. Many were running 6.0, which is 6 or 7 years old now. Now wonder they're displeased. The only legitimate complaint with 8.5 was about sluggishness on PC's with less than 2 GB RAM, which I'll acknowledge. In almost all cases, I'd say that I was able to significantly diminish if not completely resolve their complaint, or at least inform them that they should upgrade to a more recent version before giving up on it. 

So I encourage you. The next time you see or hear someone complaining about Lotus Notes, ask them why, then help them realize the truth.

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For anyone who despises Microsoft or Vista or just needs a laugh, check out the featured video at checkoutlotus.com (a youtube channel). 

I have created a channel on youtube at checkoutlotus.com where I have posted and linked to some videos about Lotus collaboration software. I envision this as more of a marketing site than a technical site, but I'm open. I will be posting videos that are created by the community, as well as linking to videos posted by others. If this interests you, check it out and subscribe to be notified when new videos are created.

Foundations 1.1 was announced today, finally making the Foundations platform a more broadly applicable solution.

Lotus Foundations 1.0 was a great concept, combining Lotus Notes with an autonomous Linux-based platform that also included anti-virus, anti-spam, file sharing, and integrated backup with autonomic recovery and an easy-to-use browser-based management console. It allowed businesses without a formal IT staff to benefit from all of these capabilities seamlessly. Unfortunately, 1.0 could not be integrated with an existing Lotus Notes/Domino environment, or extended by additional Domino servers to take advantage of features such as replication, instant messaging or Blackberry.

The release of Lotus Foundations 1.1 finally delivers the ability to add Foundations to an existing Domino environment and/or add additional Domino servers to allow distributed computing, instant messaging, Blackberry, and more. It also adds support for VMWare 2.0, which allows multiple virtual servers, including Windows servers and applications, to be run from one physical server, and supposedly Windows servers can perform better on the Foundations VM than they do natively on Wintel hardware.

This release also allows Lotus 911's TruePresence add-on for Lotus Foundations to extend all of these capabilities by adding a Voice-Over-IP (VOIP) telephone PBX that is integrated with Notes and Sametime, meaning that you can now run all of your communications tools, including a turn-key phone system, from one easily-managed, self-healing server. 

For more information on Lotus Foundations, go here.

It simply amazes me that this still isn't fixed, and that my internal IBM contacts continue to ask me why I am not on their Sametime server. Can someone please correct me if I am wrong?

BleedYellow.com yesterday launched Squawk, a Twitter-like microblogging / lightweight social networking solution that integrates with the BleedYellow.com profiles based on Domino Xpages. I'll be live blogging the OGS there instead of twitter. Join the fun if you want.

I love Chris Toohey. I really do. In fact, he saved my butt this very morning by helping me correct some broken links in my blog entry. But he also posted this blog entry, which caused me a bit of hearburn, not because of him, but because of the technology he wrote about. Since I trust Chris implicitly, I got excited when I saw his entry about using Google Sync to publish his Notes Calendar to the web for internet users to see using my Blackberry as middleware. So I immediately signed up for a google account (no, I did not have one before because gmail is way inferior to Notes). I then started synchronizing my Notes cal to that Google cal. That was a week ago. First, I noticed that it wasn't synching everything. OK, no biggie. I can deal with that. It even told me that it couldn't sync everything because "another program" was (that'd be Notes). Fine, at least some were going through, so I left it going for a week. Interestingly, it was synching most (not all) of my new calendar entries. But I noticed it was draining my Blackberry battery, and I can't afford that at Lotusphere, so I decided to "sign out" of Google Sync on my Blackberry. It warned me that it would delete anything it had synched, so I looked for an option to NOT do that - no such option. So I figured, Google is smart, surely they wouldn't delete the entries that I created in Notes, right? WRONG. It wiped out 8 weeks of my appointments, and the Blackberry diligently sent cancellation notices on all of the meetings to the participants I had invited. Nice. Thanks Google (not so much).

But there is a (relatively) happy ending to this tale.  Since I am running the Notes 8.5 client and 8.5 mail template (on a Notes 8.0 server BTW), I simply went to my Notes calendar and clicked Add Calendar / Google Calendar, provided my credentials, and BAM, there are all of the Google calendar entries on my Notes calendar again. Thanks Lotus (sincerely).

In response to: Nice performance, what about putting the result as a prize for Partners ?

As Tim Kounadis indicated at the end of the session, you can bid for the Mona Lisa painting made at BDD Day by going to http://bdd.bleedyellow.com. Enter @Bid and the dollar amount. Winner will be announced at the reception Monday night.

Last year BleedYellow.com was a smash hit, and the community has continued to thrive over the past 12 months with over 3,000 members, 220 blogs, and 70 communities. This year, we have added some of Lotus 911's new social networking solutions onto the Bleed Yellow site to make it even better, including Squawk™ micro-blogging (including a widget for the Connections Home Page), Crowded Wisdom™ idea collaboration for site feedback, and the BleedYellow Marketplace™, where Lotus business partners can post their solutions for sale, consolidating many Lotus solutions into a single online store.

Feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you think, or register for an account and get involved!

Thanks to the whole team for working so diligently to enhance the community over the past few months.

Sincerely,
Scott

My mom, a most-of-the-time-workaholic herself, called me last night and was concerned about "how hard [I have] been working lately." Admittedly, I have had several 16, 20, and even 24 hour days of "work" over the past few weeks and I took very little time off for the holidays (and I continue to work today), but looking back on it, I don't resent it. Everyone else at Lotus 911 has been doing the same thing.

Lotusphere is our annual celebration of our passion for the amazing and transformative things that the Lotus brand of solutions can allow us to achieve. I know we are not alone. The cumulative energy of the six to twelve thousand of you that join us at this event every year somehow erases the sleep deprivation of the preceding weeks. The opportunity to show what we have done, see what you have done, and reaffirm the direction we are all heading provides more than enough motivation to keep doing it for another year.

Simply put, "this is what we do" - and I feel blessed to have the opportunity to do what we do. And in the evolving global "network of social networks," it is getting inreasingly infectious. So as we embark on this week together, thank you for being part of this community. If you share my sentiment, leave a comment so that my mother doesn't think I'm crazy.

Yes folks, that's an 87% disk space recovery (from the active production files). Your mileage may vary .Maybe we just have a lot of attachments, but the mere potential is worth the upgrade.

User	Before DAOS	After DAOS
Allen	66,664,348	13,369,344
Colin	121,686,570	27,262,976
Chris	504,170,773	115,867,648
David	660,534,209	158,859,264
Jennifer	124,751,321	44,302,336
Jimmy	7,821,658,977	796,917,760
Luz	237,849,503	26,738,688
Mike	320,268,903	49,283,072
Robert	38,714,523	17,563,648
Scott	2,025,744,098	214,433,792
Sheri	743,389,930	158,859,264
Ted	157,455,235	38,273,024
Tim	288,323,304	51,118,080
TOTAL	13,111,211,694	1,712,848,896
SAVINGS	11,398,362,798	87%

*** Update *** My oversight, not including the size of the DAOS store, which is about 7 GB. STILL, that is 4 GB back, and a 33% reduction in storage and from a sample of just 13 users. In a larger organization, this would almost certainly increase since more users would have more attachments in common.

US World and News Report, the New York Times, and the Uskawilla Penny Pincher picked up a story from the Associated Press this morning confirming that all possible .com domain names had finally been registered. "I realized it when I tried to register yellowskunk.com this morning and it was taken," said former Lotus Notes Developer turned sales executive Scott Hooks of Lotus 911. "I figured, 'hell if THAT is registered, everything else must be,' so I whipped up a quick Domino app to try every possible combination of known keystrokes up to 256 characters in length against godaddy.com looking for anything that I might be able to register. 30 minutes later, it was confirmed - no .coms remained."

Upon receiving Mr. Hooks' report of this, the FBI hunted down known domain name hoarder Nathan T Freeman, who under "undisclosed interrogation techniques" confessed to being the culprit and agreed to release select .com domain names such as lotinator.com, penguinpatdown.com, and badhairmistakes.com, back to the public community for purchase if he were referred to henceforth as the "Mastermind of the .com Coup."

"It's good to see Nathan do the right thing," said colleague Tim Tripcony. "There may be a small business person who has built a great business model and dreamed their whole life of owning partypickle.com, but couldn't afford to pay Nathan's exorbitant rates."

I'm glad to see I can finally register fermentme.com now," said Michigan resident Devin Olsen. I knew that no one else could have possibly had the same legitimate idea as me.

Nathan's press secretary refused to comment other than to say she heard him mumble something about .bs as he walked away.