Lotus Nut

Several people have been blogging about using the (now-corrected) DAOS estimator tool. Feel free to add your savings calculations as a comment here or post them on your own blog!

Bruce Currier should be saving 49%!!
I had someone ping me with his results of saving 39%!
The third comment at Ed Brill's post on the Estimator tool reflects a 40% savings!
Almar Diehl blogged his results and will be seeing around 17% savings.

As demonstrated above, your mileage may vary with the savings...

A commenter at Bruce's blog (linked above) also noted that if you currently use a service to backup your mail databases offsite, then you should also be able to save a lot of money since you will be backing up much smaller NSF's.

And speaking of backups, make sure that you review the Backup and Restore considerations for DAOS!

Are you curious to see just how much space you will save with DAOS? Well, first of all, you do know what DAOS is, right? If not, here is some information.

IBM has released a tool that will analyze a set of databases you specify and compare the duplicate attachments to let you know how much space you can save after enabling DAOS. Here is a document on how to use the tool. And here is another document with the information on how to download the tool. The tool can run against 6.0+ servers.

So....how much will you save?

IBM has been putting a lot of hard work into Lotus Connections 2.5, that should be released in 3Q09. Luis Benitez has an excellent post on what is new in Connections 2.5. Thanks Luis for the great information.

Some of the things I am specifically excited about are the wikis, more widgets, homepage (a lot more "Facebookish" in what can be shown on the top updates), profiles (allowing status updates like Facebook/Twitter/Squawk), extended BlackBerry support (go here to get the current BlackBerry client), iPhone/Mobile browser support, etc... Check out Luis' blog above for all of the great details.

For those of you who have seen it, yes, I'm a PC. For those of you who haven't - here you go!

Prior to Domino 8.5, if you wanted to enforce custom notes.ini settings or location preferences you would have to modify the design of the Desktop Policy settings form to include $Pref or $LocAll fields, respectively. I know a lot of people who have shied away from doing this because they weren't "developers" and did not want to go into Designer and modify the Directory. With Domino 8.5 this has been made much simpler.

Just open the Desktop Policy settings form and go to the "Custom Settings" tab. This gives you the following:


From here, you can click "Edit list" to get the following dialog:


You can then add, modify, or remove the Notes.ini, Locations, and Managed settings.

"What is a 'Managed setting'?", you may ask. It is a setting that controls Eclipse plugin configurations. Here is some further information on Managed Settings. If you want to enforce Notes SSO with Sametime, you would have a setting that looks like this:


Thanks IBM - this is much simpler. Now, could we have lists in the value boxes with possible settings names? :)

Last week I was talking with Mitch Cohen about what some of the software/utilities I use are. So here is a quick listing of my little bag of tricks – many of these are great alternatives to “bigger” (or more bloated!) products that you have to purchase and all of them are free (except for Lotus Notes).

7-Zip – zip software
Ad-Aware – Spyware cleaner
Audacity – for the times when you need to edit audio files. Great for creating ringtones as well!
AVG Free 8.0 – Anti-Virus
CamStudio – Screen recording to avi or flash
CCleaner – formerly “Crap Cleaner” for cleaning up temp files, etc...
CDBurnerXP – also burns DVD's and makes iso's
Defraggler – from the makers of Ccleaner and a great defragging utility. Don't forget to defrag your Notes 8.5 install!
Digsby – chat/social software utility
Fiddler – web traffic monitor
Foxit Reader – great, small alternative to Adobe Reader (which I do NOT have installed!)
Gadwin PrintScreen – screen capture
GIMP – Graphics editor
IBM Lotus Sametime Connect 8.0.1
IBM Lotus Symphony – good alternative to MS Office (which I still do have installed)
iTunes
LiveProject – MS Project viewer
Lotus Notes 8.5
Lotus Notes Diagnostic – NSD Analyzer
Mozilla Firefox
Notepad++ - don't know how I survived without this one! Work with txt, xml, html, log, etc... (hat-tip to Mitch for letting me know about this one a while back!!!)
OpenOffice.org 3 – great MS Office alternative! I was one of the first to get it's predecessor StarOffice on its release date.
Real Alternative – Real Video player that's not bloated like RealPlayer
Softerra LDAP Browser
Spybot Search & Destroy – another Spyware cleaner
UltraVNC – feature-packed VNC viewer
VMware Server – free solution that allows you to use and even create VMWare images that also work with Workstation
WinSCP – gui ssh application generally used for file transfers from *Nix systems. Also for FTP
Woopra – real-time web traffic analyzer