I have a blog reader that needs help, what developer wants to chime in for him?

Hi Chris,

Did you ever come across what appears to be an undocumented and unfinished Notes feature that has to do with assigning expiry date to messages as you drag them into folders? This is in Notes 8 template. The form is called "(Folder Expiration Settings)" and the agents are called "(Change Custom Expiration)" and "(Change Expiration On Folder Documents)". There is also a dedicated script library for this. I'm looking for more info on this but I can't find anything anywhere. This looks like a very nice feature, something we definitely need in our environment.

Regards,

Bodek

Since Paul posted his (congrats to him!), yes it is a tough exam

I  light of the recent IBM announcement that Ed pointed to (then later pulled for a couple days as a premature linkation), IBM is attempting to enter a market that Connectria and other Lotus partners have been excelling in and building infrastructure around for years now.  There are some large gaps in cost, scalability and performance that IBM will need to address to make this function.

Since there is no viable ASP mode for Lotus Notes clients, it is presumed that IBM will have to offer you a dedicated Domino server on VM, partition or dedicated machine or make it web access only to be a true SaaS offering.  With the entry level of 1,000 users (yes for now as Ed said) at $8 USD/month, you end up spending almost $100,000 USD in a year for a hosted Domino server with only 1GB of mail per user (currently stated) and a little bit of Quickr.  It also appears that this is a messaging only license, so we need to see what else it brings to the table.

My point, without disclosing too much of what we have learned in trying to be a true SaaS model with Lotus Notes clients, you can find a partner that has been handling SMB (which means down into the 10's of users, not thousand) and up to infinity at a cheaper cost with more true experience in this market space.  Just a thought.

Oh yeah, and you can even add on just about any other Lotus or non-Lotus product you want.

Is your organization understanding the values here? It is more than just chats between two people, it is seeing data and conversations flowing throughout your enterprise that can be searched, sorted, tagged and archived.  How much is lost from knowledge archives when you do not log and publicly provide access to all the chats about projects, customers and partners?  Sure, there is some private ones, but have those in private.  The rest is for your business, about your business.  So why does it get treated like personal information.  I blogged about two other products last week and got access to two more this week.

QikCom
Another newcomer into the game, they entice you by offering free administration for your site, hoping you will buy into premium services later.  The premium service includes tabs that can be added to your user interface.  The current list was only 3 tabs for to-do's, competition and frequent numbers.  I am betting they will look to developers to offer tabs for the future growth.

 One cool part was the ability to build an organization chart of sorts for your company.

This adds a level of functionality to the mass amounts of data that could be flowing through the system. Being able to follow not only a flow of conversation, but the flow of reporting chain would be an incredible benefit.  Otherwise, it is what you would expect, a Twitter client.  Now, I did not see alternate clients like a desktop or IM integrated and that is a huge disappointment.

Another key feature is the ability to follow and manage tags for content.  So you can not just find and follow persons, but actually follow tags of conversations.  We are all learning about tags as we social bookmark, so extending this to conversations makes sense.  If this ever face to face communication we are doomed as a society, but that is another issue.

Present.ly
Presently has a few levels of membership offering which changes the landscape.  It appeared that even their free limited function version expired in 60 days, and that was very unclear.  While it said "free" it then said it would expire.  I am presuming it is more of a trial version.

They also offer some administration abilities and groups.  Groups is different than the org chart above since I can grab people from all over the organization.  You can have both public and private groups offering first time users some immediate benefit, no more hunting around trying to find people on the system.

I could not access the option for "Devices" since I was not on at least a Basic plan.  There was a long list of notification options, from email to RSS feeds for all sorts of events.  That was a nice touch on their part.


I would really like both of these companies to offer the limited function options with alternate client ability.  it would make them stronger players in the game for sure.  But enterprise Twitter functions are coming, the question is how long till your company gets on board?

Don't ask, I just blog.  Apparently SecondLife was not enough so IBM and the Palace Museum seem to have gone back in time and created a Forbidden City to celebrate the Chinese culture and explore by creating a character and dressing them up.  From there, wander around at will.  It is impressive and an impressively large download.

This has a good side and bad side (as usual with me to point out).  First, here are the steps required to allow you to sync your Notes contacts up to Lotus Bluehouse:

I want to install sync for Lotus Notes 8. What do I do?

Perform the following instructions on the workstation where you have Lotus Notes installed.

   1. Using a text editor, open the following file: [Notes Install Directory]\framework\rcp\plugin_customization.ini The [Notes Install Directory] is usually C:\Program Files\IBM\Lotus\Notes
   2. Perform one of the following steps:
          * If the following line is not present, then add it to the end of the file: com.ibm.notes.branding/enable.update.ui=true
          * If the line is present, make sure that the value is equal to true.
   3. Save the file and close your text editor.
   4. Stop and restart Lotus Notes, if it is running.

Next, go Lotus Notes and perform the following instructions.

   1. Select File > Application > Install. The Features Update box displays.
   2. Select Search for new features to install, and then click Next. The Application Location box displays.
   3. Click the Add Remote Location... button, and then add the following:
          * Name: Bluehouse Updates
          * URL: http://bluehouse.lotus.com/install/notes_plugin_install/site.xml
   4. Click OK to continue. Bluehouse Updates displays in the list of locations.
   5. Click Finish and a new window displays.
   6. Select the check box for Bluehouse Updates, and click Next.
   7. To continue, you must accept the license agreement, and click Next.
   8. Click Finish. If a window displays about trusted signers, you must select Install this plug-in and OK to continue.
   9. Select Yes when a message to restart Lotus Notes displays.

The good news is now I can move my address book up to the Saas solution to do more online work with customers and partners.  They also offer this for Outlook and an imported CSV file.  Big steps to move you to Saas

The bad news, no user should have the instructions to unlock the ability for them to do an Eclipse update.  The idea is to centrally control this ability.  The instructions should be for administrators to create a widget to include this update and push it to the right users.  Lotus needs to address that issue.  It is fine for beta users, bit not for production environments.  How about a simple account in your personal address book that I provide credentials to Bluehouse to push contacts up?

We all know that IBM has had their internal BlueTwit ability, but there was no enterprise driven Twitter like software until recently.  Then 2 bigger ones came out of the gates. I hit a big thought at the end about Yammer, so stay with me

 Let's break them down real quick and see how that they might further improve communication or displace conversations more:

Yammer - free for your company up front, unless you want more admin controls.  Then there is a nominal monthly fee.  Only users from your domain may join your group, since it uses email verification to do so.  From there you get a choice of:

• web interface
• Blackberry client
• iPhone client
• desktop client
• email, mobile and IM notifications are available

The beauty is the native tagging inside of it.  So not only do we get the short microblog feel of 140 characters, we get hashtags in postings to find and view information quickly.  If you want to add the management abiltiy it runs about $1 per user/mnth for a totally hosted solution.

Laconi.ca - This is an open source solution you deploy at your own site.  Totally free software to create your own little Twitter empire.  The good news is that desktop software such as Twhirl works against it and there is more coming.  Poeple such as Leo Laporte are already deploying Laconi.ca servers to bring in all of their site members for a more private community feeling.  There is API's, a developers community, libraries, apps and more.  There is a growing and long list of servers running the code found on their wiki too

*******
In reality, the integration with your existing systems is not there (possible with Laconi.ca) so Sametime has a stronghold.  But for those small SMB people that just want some alternative communication abilities in the 2.o world, it is an option.  I really do not see this in any way replacing Sametime, so calm down.  I do so it splitting the conversation into yet another fragmented place that will have to be controlled and somehow integrated.

• Curiously, there is no way to stop people in your company from starting up on Yammer unless you block all incoming verification messages in your spam filters.  Anyone could start it and be the manager.
• Laconi.ca does not have the same problem as you need the server installed, so my guess is that would be harder to get in place.

I wanted to test more of the capabilities of those in Lotus Bluehouse and having more connections helps in that.  Also, you can add Bluehouse as a community in your Sametime client once you have an account there.  Humorously they still use Sametime 7.5.1 as shown in this public image.