A great article with a bunch of embedded videos covering the years of Microsoft advertising.  Interesting how the first ones focus on Lotus 1-2-3 on Windows.  Ahh the good old days of Ballmer craziness.

They did a great job on the above video (link) covering all the quirks between what users expect.  Even with some good background singing .  Props to Julian for finding it!

We know they fixed it for Domino with much push by Ed.  I thought he meant all Lotus products.  Apparently Sametime has not been fixed yet or was not in the game plan

LotusLive meetings has dropped a low end price point, or actually just added more users to that same pricing.  Either way the deal works out that you can now have yourself and 199 friends in a meeting for the pricing they used to offer for only 15 people.  This is a direct shot at WebEx and some others.

 

Now available, IBM LotusLive Engage and IBM LotusLive Meetings offer new Named User (Host+199 participants) subscriptions at the same low price as the previously offered Named User (Host+24 participants) subscription. As such, the Named User (Host+24 participants) subscription SKU is now withdrawn from market.

This new pricing plan lets your customers host Web conferences for up to 200 attendees (including the Host) for a similar price of competitive services that only offer Web meetings for up to 25 attendees.

There is no change to the Named User (Host+14 participants) or Named User (Host+999 participants) subscription plans.

In order to download just about everything you need for a Windows install of Sametime 8.5 you will be grabbing about ~10GB of files.  The main reason is due to the packaging and installers needed to allow you to install across physical machines easily.

I offer a different approach they could have taken.  Instead of including WAS and DB2 in many of the parts (Media, Proxy and Meeting), the package could have been required to be placed and named a specific way accessible to the installer and then point the installer to it.  This would have saved numerous GB of downloads.

Some would say that my proposed ideas would have meant a change to the installer itself.  True, but since I need WAS and DB2 for any core piece, it is already there anyway.  Why am I forced to have it included over and over?  This would also streamline versioning across the packages with a central code repository for deployment.

I am just saying

 I tidied up the IdoNotes network page and have a lot listed with the hep and special thanks to Chris Toohey (DominoGuru) using his design for other pages.  Feel free to drop in, become a fan if you desire, and learn more about the entire network of sites I actually operate outside of the Lotus world including SpikedStudio, TheSocialNetworker, SocialStalking, EverythingTwitter and more.

In this December 2009 issue I talk about my annual goofy & geek Christmas gifts and the following:

* From the Editor: Chris' 1.0000 XMAS
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Mail Disclaimers on NRPC mail
* Configuring Sametime and iNotes (Domino Web Access)
* Quick Tip: Are You Running DAOS on i? There Are Immediate Fixes
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: BES 4.1.7 and Domino 8.5.1

Don't forget to visit CertFX from the banner above and use the coupon code "IdoNotes" to get up to 25% OFF YOUR EXAMS

Lotus made a promise some time ago to align all of the branding choices in icons and colors for the products to be the same Orange look and feel.  They made great strides in this, even changing the old Sametime blue chat bubble to the orange.  However, when loading Symphony I noticed something right away as shown here:


The Symphony Document logo is now blue, much like Microsoft Word and the Symphony Spreadsheet is green much like Microsoft Excel.  Coincidence?  What happened to the original orange ones that existed?  Bueller?

Apparently a new trend is not to take your time and enjoy speaking one on one with the actual folks who make Lotus products and the business partners that can make it work for you, but to rush quickly along.  No time to banter.  Say what you want quickly and get out of the way.  I present to you the speed sessions for Lotusphere

• SpeedGeeking - an annual event where the Best Practices speakers get together in a very loud and rapid spit in your face version of some tip or tool.  You grab a free drink and run quickly to the next pedestal at the buzzer where you are hit yet again.  Tons of fun and a must see.  I have done a couple of these and you really do wear the speakers out as they present the same topic 12 times in quick fashion, resetting their demo between drinks, I mean breaths.
• SpeedPartnering - This is a new event on Business Development Day (BDD) where business partners get together to see some marketing sessions and topics around better partnering.  The event will be Sunday evening right before the party.  The idea is to move around in six-minute conversations to find the perfect mate for your product.  Yes free drinks will be here also.
• Speed Networking - This title was under the above also, but it slightly different in my eyes.  You are not only trying to see who you can work with for ISV and other business needs, but to make more contacts socially in the business partner community.  Did I mention the free drinks?

There are some regular sessions that will also show you quick and easy ways to get things done or how to make your server and application faster.  DO a quick search and highlight those on your schedule.

I was (ahem) loading Symphony for the first time by modifying my current Lotus installation and was a bit stunned when I selected the IBM Lotus Symphony section of the install itself.  I was surprised to not see the little plus symbol showing me more options.  Here is the screenshot:



Other suites of Office tools allow you to pick and choose what portions you wish to install.  I only wanted the Presentation portion but was destined to get it all.  No one else only installs portions of tools for specific users as needed?

After discussion with the client, they finally moved to new hardware, upgraded to Domino 8.5.1 and enabled DAOS.  We are happy to report that their mail server achieved us the largest gain yet in disk savings as shown in the images below.  Total saved was 53%.



So there you have it.  ~600GB saved on a single mail server with the large files going down ~70%.  Oh and our backup system sent us a holiday card after this.

I had the pleasure to sit with Art Fontaine (Product Manager) and Sean Brown (Technical Product Manager) for Lotus Protector to get the run down on all the new features and functions of the 2.5 release.  Pay special attention to the following areas:

• Notes 8.5.1 mailfile integration
• Zero Level Analysis (an IBM exclusive)
• Flexible rules, including time of day settings
• Phishing alerts
• Directory connectivity
• Competitive buyout pricing
• Licensing of the product itself

I don't want to spoil more of what we talk about for 30 minutes.  Listen in and make sure to visit them at Lotusphere on the vendor floor and in session ID207 where they both take the stage together.

And no has has an excuse for not trying Lotus Protector, they are offering partners with the right software agreement, free licensing to run Protector Then anyone in the world a fully functional 90-day free trial download.

Visit our sponsor for this episode through our special link, CertFX , and don't forget to use the special discount code "IdoNotes" for up to 25% off your purchase.

The IdoNotes podcast is a Spiked Studio Production

It is amazing the number of presentations that are available for customers on Slideshare and other sources.  I established a group to collect these presentations and make a central point to send customers to "open source" slides sets and information from conferences, user groups and anything else.

The slides are still owned and controlled under the uploader of the set, it is just a central point of entry for tons of information.  To share a slide, simply log into SlideShare, join the group from above, go to the slides you want to include and at the top, click More, Send to a group or event.  Choose the event itself and you are done!


Spread the word.

Due to inclement weather, we were able to experience Ed Brill presenting the the St Louis Lotus User Group via LotusLive.  it worked out well with Ed using his video camera, a conference line and sharing his screen.  Performance was good as he and the computer used were coming across the IBM network.  While Ed might have pulled the old "business on top, casual on the bottom" with us, the video integration played a key part in the feeling of the presentation reaching to the audience.  Just a voice and slides never carries the same weight as seeing the person.

I walk you quickly through the OpenNTF Apache Catalog entry for the Sametime Unyte widget for Lotus Notes 8.0 and higher.  While it offers a quick way to click and access meetings through the URL and live text, there are some drawbacks and some items don't work correctly just yet.

Visit our sponsor for this episode, CertFX and don't forget to use the special discount code "IdoNotes" for up to 25% off your purchase.

The IdoNotes podcast is a Spiked Studio Production

Most know, I rarely get noticeably pissy.  I receive tons of blind ads, press releases and the like in mail, email, tweets or whatever.  But this parcel arrived today (nice big expensive padded one for no reason after you read below), from a name and location unknown to me.


Once I opened this, cautiously, I found:

•  a printout of our corporate webpage with big red circles around two parts
• a white placard with a note from this guy
• a product sheet from them behind our webpage
• his business card

All of this was paper clipped together.  So before I shredded the card and failed to pass it on to anyone here, a little lesson.  This should have been sent right to the product managers attention, even blindly.  You would stand a far better chance with selling BitWeld here if you had some tact in how you sent the cold call over.  It might be the perfect product, have everything imaginable at the best price.  But, it certainly has now been put on hold in my office.  Sending a "personal and confidential" letter to an office with no company name included, is a bit shady to me.  Sure, maybe it's a bad day, or I am taking it out, but for some reason that got under my skin.  Am I alone here?

Lotus Greenhouse has begun offering a widget for you to drag into your sidebar to get a news feed of the upcoming webcasts.  



While this is nice, I would like to see this taken a step further and make it an iCal feed that I can take right into my Notes calendar and see it around my free times.  Remembering to peek at the sidebar feed would definitely slip my mind.  The feed reader in Notes is quite weak and it just makes more sense to have a direct calendar overlay to me.

Almost forgot to mention, you must also create (you are prompted) an authenticated HTTP account that gets stored locally to pull that feed.  If you change your Greenhouse password, you will need to change the password for that local account also. Also, don't forget to place the widget on all of your clients, or in the catalog pushed via policy, so it shows everywhere.

While filling out the form for registration I noticed the question on if you use Domino currently, and then when selecting 'yes' it opened another list of choices:


Hopefully there is not many 5.x or lower versions alive out there.   But how come there was no choice for 8.0 and higher or even 8.5 to get a true idea of how many attending have upgraded?

While creating a new little project (separate blog posting coming) for Lotusphere, I ran across this article on the Ars Technica blog.  Apparently they are building a better mobile browsing experience and somehow had the support of LotusKnows by IBM.  I could find no other reference to this anywhere, ye they state they hoped to have version 1.0 out this first week in December (as in right now).

Does anyone out there in the crowdsource have more information on this?  Does Lotus Know?

I waited to post to get the assigned session number.  While the data/time/location is not yet available, the listing is:

• The Advanced Low-Down on LDAP Infrastructure (BP109) - Join myself and Warren Elsmore on Wednesday at 11:15-12:15pm in Swan 7-10 as we bring together the best of four years of LDAP session at Lotusphere into one giant session around Domino as a core LDAP source.  This will be a combination of what a 100 level class and a 400 level class would like like, wrapped into a blazing hour.
  
   Integrate all of your Lotus software with LDAP, a widely-deployed, key directory technology. Implementing Lotus Sametime, Lotus Quickr, Lotus Connections, WebSphere Portal or even remote directories? Believe it or not, LDAP is the mortar that holds it all together. Explore schema management, federation and integration with other directories through Directory Assistance and IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator.  Whew!
• IBM Lotus Sametime Gateway: The Business Case, Best Practices and Implementation (BP117) - Join me  on Wednesday at 01:30 - 2:30pm in Swan 7-10.      .   I'll help you understand the various business case scenarios in deploying the Lotus Sametime Gateway and walk through the architecture and implementation. You'll learn how it integrates with your existing Lotus Sametime architecture and the Sametime user policy changes required. We'll cover the basics of troubleshooting, configuration and controls, and discuss network placement, firewall rules, SSL and growth scenarios
  

This book was actually commissioned by IBM to be written.  Hurwitz & Associates do not mention any specific products in the book itself, just provide the basics needed for individuals and companies to understand collaboration.  IBM did provide the subject matter experts to assist and the book itself is only 64 pages long.

It seems you must be an IBM partner to download the book, yet in the questionnaire they ask if you are a business partner.  Wait, it redirects you to outside the IBM domain for the book itself.  IBM is just capturing your information.  After a Google search, the book itself is ready for download on a non-IBM site (Wiley) where it officially sits using Adobe Digital Editions.  The install for Digital Editions took all of 20 seconds, a couple buttons to agree and then a required log in for Adobe or ignore it and don't sync this issue again.  Basically a few minutes of fun.

Some of our IBM Lotus family are listed as contributors like Ed Brill, David Hsu, Don Neely, Brendan Crotty and more.  There are six chapters from 'Rethinking Business  Collaboration" all the way to the ending 'Ready, Set, Go!'  The book follows the standard icons and flow of the other Dummies books and makes for an easy read.  Chapter 2 digs into the meat of why you are reading the book and handles Collaboration 101, as one section is titled.  The section on making the game plan around collaboration asks many of the basic questions that most mid-level managers that are finally exploring this area need to ask and doesn't go way over their head.

Overall, this book hits right where it was designed and keeps it short enough not to lose attention.  It does not dig deep into what is the best product, nor does it answer questions it asks directly.  Instead, it forces the reader to make assumptions and decisions to get the movement of collaboration in their own environment and encourages checking out all the possibilities before choosing what platform you wish to build on.