One of the many things we realize as administrators, is that normal users do not have the same machine resources that we have on our machines we use daily.  So how do we get around users that want Notes 8 but can't run the full Standard version?  Load the Standard client onto the machine and create alternate shortcuts.  We show a myriad of ways to solve issues in the ND 8 Upgrade Seminar.

After completing yet another city for the ND8 Upgrade Seminar, I am always surprised by the upgrade plans of the crowd and where they sit today.  This was no different.

• Everyone was at least in the 6.x realm for current versions.
• A small percentage (like 10) had installed the Notes 8 client on their desktops
• Most did not have enough memory on all machines so they will roll out as the basic version
• Server upgrade plans varied from a few weeks to sometime next year, yes as in 2009
• Sametime at one company was discouraged as a nuisance of sorts and was not allowed
• Everyone was happy to see the gutter return to the inbox in 8.5
• Platforms are always a discussion for the server
• A couple sites had no firm date for the upgrades at all
• No one had logged into im.bleedyellow.com
• Everyone liked the free tools we give away

I could go on, but with all the excitement in the core Lotus blog community, we lose focus often.  We play with the latest and greatest while many larger shops are stuck with whatever gets decided by management.  We should sit back and realize there are over 100 million users, most of whom never even go to PlanetLotus.org to get the latest and greatest.

In a recent NetworkWorld article titled "IBM's answer to IT skills crunch", it discusses all the new ways IBM is reaching out to universities to get them new tools and resources.  Included were such items as:

• database technology - DB2 Express C in particular
• Web 2.0 development - WebSphere sMash
• web server development - WAS community edition and Apache

But wait, I found another one and got all excited:

• team based development - Team Concept portal based on Jazz

The article goes on and on leaving off everything around the name Lotus.  No Domino, no Connections, no Mashup, No Sametime, no nothing.  For all the touting of how they are winning in instant messaging and social networking as well as enterprise collaboration, what did IBM use to select the models?

Stuart sent me his blog entry thoughts and link to the press release

While traveling, a saw Ed posted a Lotus Foundations blog entry that got some good comments and linked to some new Foundations blog sites.  As part of one of the first resellers, I addressed many of the issues that are being brought up in the comments on Ed's blog.  While I brought some of these items up before in anotehr blog posting, here is more of my impressions:

• Lotus Foundations is currently being marketed in the wrong place.  Hands down.  The only people that really know about it are Lotus shops that are already biased on how the Domino architecture works.  We have sold a few of these now and not a single non-Domino shop have heard of Nitix, much rather Foundations.
• The thought of being able to migrate a domain in or utilizing Foundations as an extension point should have been done before the release.  There is no reason this isn't built in to help push sales of this for remote workers and offices
• The restrictions of how the Org name is built defeats the way Domino works, from the first Foundations install, in terms of multiple servers.  Since it uses DNS, it creates O's of the same name for each server.  So no calendaring lookups nor native NRPC routing becomes available.
• The server and cert id are on the file system but are keyed to the Nitix environment.  You can't easily replace them without breaking the automation of the server.
• Pushing hard for extended Lotus products, like Sametime is a key selling point that is needed sooner.

I could go on some more, but I think the push needs to be expanded outside of the Lotus partner realm.  Most of you deal with Lotus customers and not in the competitive landscape of the SMB world against things like Google Apps.  So introducing this without any previous visibility to the SMB customer is an immediate hamper.

Apparently this is coming through or can be available to many cities.  St Louis will be having one this week.  It covers multiple days and has some hands-on.  Now I directly asked if this was technical enough to be construed as an actual upgrade seminar.  The answer:

There are hands on labs, but I don't know that I would call it extremely deep tech.  It's about 50/50 presentations and labs.  Notes Client features as well as Domino enhancements will be covered

So you have yet another chance in North America if you need the ND8 Upgrade Seminar for the deep tech stuff.  We have San Fran right now actually, but Toronto in July is still open.

Here is the flyer from the IBM offered event:

IBM announced this week (as seen in many places including CollaborationMatters) a page dedicated to "Web 2.0 Goes to Work" using the web as a delivery platform.  So I went back in the local machine archives and came up with this gem.



Funny how it takes the new Web 2.0 mindset to move your internal stuff to the Internet to interact with customers more

Convincing the hard to convince to upgrade to a new beta is always fun here.  Amazingly one little simple thing sold them.

• No it was not the alternate way the client starts showing a progress bar
• No it was not the new UI in the mail template only identifying unread mail better
• No it was not updated integrated Sametime client
• the list continues...

So what brought them to upgrade so darn fast from 8.0?  An old feature resurfacing...  the ability to not use Windows style selection in the inbox and go back to Notes Style selection.  Yeah, checkmarks.  You would think they never select multiple files in Windows

I have been using TweetScan for some time now to poll Twitter for those that mention Lotus Notes in their tweets.  What you find is amazing sometimes.  Here is some excerpts.  I have my scans set to email me daily..

** qrush : Lotus Notes may very well be the most over-complicated office tool ever devised by mankind. It's a UI disaster
** aaron_miller : Woo upgrading to Lotus Notes 8 tonight
**        careca : lotus notes blows! give me gmail!
** ckwebgrrl : Hating Lotus Notes... I'm starting to sound like a broken record :(
**        aaronmcohen : Lotus Notes works again....Oh Joy.....wait.....now I see all the meetings I need to go to.....damn!
**        seanjackson : oh, lotus notes, how I hate you so....
**        whitneyhess : @mariobourque Ooh you're right. There is something worse than Outlook. Lotus Notes!
**        richrecruiter : Retweeting @kellsworth: Lotus should have been left to karate and plants, and stayed away from Notes and emailing.

So what you find is people that have either bad installs or badly managed environments.  You could go on for days reading these as they come across but I thought others might find it interesting.

You can also expand this and make more scans for your company name, product or even yourself.

First things first, here are the pictures:

www.flickr.com IdoNotes' ILUG2008 photoset

Besides Paul Mooney doing the outstanding comedic warmup, Nick Shellness took over as the first keynote speaker.  As a former CEO at Lotus, he pulled out old slides to show how presentations he did projecting the future turned out.  He was not too far off in some areas surprisingly.

• Memory - try running Notes today on a few MB
• Disk capacity - picture 20MB then 200MB by 1988 as disk storage
• Screen size for attention - from 13" screens to multi flat panels now, it is all attention focus
• user interface -
• Knowledge management - organizing 80 GB of data, do things like taxonomy, auto profiling and intelligent search do this for the individual?  No since none has come truly to pass.  Social computing

Alan Lepofsky was next up... he stripped down to a "Luck of the Irish" t-shirt and took off.  His job is a Lotus Evangelist to say what they should be doing, instead of wondering how budgets work.  More moving research products to production instead. He came with prototypes and live/screen captures

• Twitter was the first topic for 2 minutes.  Alan is an attention seeking ***** he says
• http://Geekandpoke.typepad.com
• Due to time he skips the marketing preamble
• Collaboration went from document centric to people centric to community centric
• The inbox is now even hard to find info, so what tools do you use?
• How does Lotus help all of these areas after you find the tools you need (he demo'd my LifeStream map)
• Lotus is working on surfacing not only the information, but through seamless tools that fit various roles
• Next topic is social content - create, storage and share
• He went to some live demos of items that are in research
• Social bookmarking showing of Dogear inside Lotus Connections
• Now we head into attention management - importance (important to work on but due when?), urgency (to whom?) and interest.  Is there an interface that exists?

Some key area

• Collaboration in context is a future with the surfacing Lotus tools to do the work seamlessly
• Evolution of the creation of content
• Discovery versus search
• Attention management, bringing chaos together in buckets of management

Finally questions...

• Nick S. asks the first question about how the tools being developed previously were only 70-80% successful.  How does that translate in technology to ensure success rate gets increased.  Alan responds that new ways or working are being requested before Lotus is delivering them at this time.  Adoption rate is opposite, tools are coming slower than demand which grows adoption rate as fast as delivery
• Steve McDonagh asks about mining for information in searches across 26 languages using tags to return results in any language.  How do you generate the meta information to make this work?  he demod Dogear again to show tag growth
• Henri from BinaryTree brings up social networking and an example from MySpace or SecondLife, this is a huge risk that most don't seem to target.  Alan covers how bringing Connections into the corporate firewall to secure and share the data

Then we close up and head to lunch so they can prep the room for sessions..

Seems there was a misreading of the technotes surrounding the upgrade that was presented to the customer.  It should read that you should not run older directory templates on Domino 8, not the Domino 8 directory template on older servers as reported.

Makes perfect sense of course, but the miscommunication caused quite the stir.

After numerous cities with the ND8 Upgrade Seminar, where we show how to do numerous things, including upgrading your Domino Directory, in a supported fashion, before the domain is totally finished.  Well one of our wise attendees was following the directions as they have done before, and received some disturbing news from Lotus support:

Having a R8 directory on a 6.5.4 server is not supported.  Problems that can occur are corruption, data loss and performance issues.

What data loss? What performance? What corruption?  We can find no technote, article, posting or nothing that resembles this statement from Lotus Support.

I am upgrading servers and domains like crazy and have not seen a hint of this issue anywhere.  Anyone?