IdoNotes (and sleep)

From IamLUG 2013 comes Kathy Brown and Troy Reimer of PSC Group in this little gem of a picture I wanted to make sure made it out of the photo streams.  They jointly did a great presentation on  Don't Roll Your Own, Integrate..Collaborate On the Ground and in the Clouds.

However, their simultaneous prep was too funny

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On Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013   by Chris Miller        

Connectria is happy to announce we were ranked the number one cloud provider in response time and availability aggregated for 2012 by CloudSleuth.net ahead of Rackspace, Google and Amazon.
From Sys-Con:

Connectria Hosting, a global managed and cloud hosting provider with cloud data centers in St. Louis, Philadelphia and Dallas, has been recognized as the 2012 Top U.S. Cloud Provider as reported by ReadWrite.com.
Connectria’s Cloud received the highest overall ranking when measured by average response time, availability and consistency based upon Compuware's CloudSleuth, an independent cloud performance monitoring service

The local news stations were kind enough to pick up on the story and featured us in a story you can watch above.

Our CEO Rich Waidmann, took the task of handling all the media and had a great quote in MarketWatch and other magazines/websites:

“We’re very excited to be recognized as the industry’s number one cloud provider,” Connectria President and CEO Rich Waidmann said. “Given that Connectria’s Cloud was compared against all other providers over a full year demonstrates that our number one ranking is no fluke.”

So if you have been debating who to use for any of your cloud hosting needs, there you go. We offer cloud computing, managed hosting and custom hosting for more than 1,000 customers in over 30 countries worldwide.

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On Tuesday, May 21st, 2013   by Chris Miller        

Qantas is in another article about migrating off of Lotus Notes. Now into their fourth year it appears to me they didn't understand how deeply integrated Notes was in their environment for daily operations according to a Delimiter article.  While they finished moving email users in 2012, the applications are taking their toll.

The nation’s largest airline Qantas has revealed that it’s still in the process of migrating its corporate email platform off IBM’s Lotus Notes/Domino platform and onto Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange system, with the rollout now into its fourth year.

What confused me is how they are splitting all of their users up into different on premises and cloud based offerings.  Not one but now three.

..some of its staff would instead be moved onto Microsoft’s Office 365 package. In the airline’s statement today, it described the Office 365 migration as “a separate but parallel project”.

Qantas’ migration mirrors moves at its low-cost brand Jetstar, which announced in July 2011 that it would keep most of its head office staff on Microsoft’s Outlook/Exchange platform, but shift about 2,200 staff onto Google’s Apps alternative

But back to the applications themselves.  Qantas is now trying to consolidate applications down into fewer and possibly make them web enabled from what I took away.

What I want is everyone to go visit and take away from the Delimiter article is the comments section as people start to dispute complexity to move applications from Lotus Notes into other platforms.  One comment even states 85% of the work can be done with a utility, CIMtrek (I wrote about back in Oct 2010), and a couple clicks.  Sure, yes 85%. If you only use a document library.

Join in here or over there, just join in.

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On Monday, May 20th, 2013   by Chris Miller        

The Fellowes I-Spire Series Tablet Lift (model 9311301) is a one piece stand for your tablets, phones and other devices that do not exceed 1/2" thick. It will support the iPad, Samsung Galaxy, Kindle and more in both landscape and portrait modes.

I found it handy for setting the iPad almost level with my monitor to provide another screen, as shown in the video.  It was stable and did not have the bounce I expected when first opening the box and seeing the Fellowes I-Spire Series Tablet Lift. The tab on the top is important to make sure the tablet has something to lean against, so I suggest not accidentally breaking it off.

Also, I was lucky that the case I use on my Ipad doe not make it larger than 1/2" wide or the slot would not have held it.  Take that into account when either selecting a case (see my review of the awesome Acase F1 Hard Shell Case Folio for iPad) and the stand as a combination.

You can get the device below and please let Amazon know these reviews helped you as well by clicking the Yes button on our review.

http://idonot.es/fellowestabletlift

Make sure you keep up with all of the product reviews from Spiked Studio from our YouTube playlist .

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On Monday, May 20th, 2013   by Chris Miller        

I have been using Copy.com as an alternative to Dropbox for splitting work and personal storage. Right now Copy.com is offering 15GB free cloud storage for new accounts.

The performance of the service on Copy.com has been great. Upload speeds have been quick and folder management easy.  I am waiting on their mobile apps to be released to make it even better.  All the sites offer different upgrades and enhancements like password protection of files, expiring shared links, and more.

So why do I use multiple sites like Copy.com, Dropbox, Box.net and more?

• Well free storage is one with the amount of data everyone now has
• Separation of personal and business data is another.  I know that any folder I share on one service would never contain the other information. Call it a simple obscurity step to also reduce making mistakes. Like family photos, vacations and stuff like that would then not appear on the business one

So how do I easily manage it? Simple. I have two folders inside the syn folder.  One is set for business and one for personal.  I then have subfolders as needed under them and then they automatically get synchronized with  Copy.com and Dropbox.

So go get 15GB free on Copy.com while they still offer it for new accounts
https://copy.com?r=CPTn0g

Disclosure: That is simple a referrer tracking link so I might get some extra free space by helping share the 15 GB free on Copy.com

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On Thursday, May 16th, 2013   by Chris Miller