While Carl, Andy and I enjoy World Cup 2010, I wanted to leave something here for everyone that has not been following along.  If you really want to keep up with the fun, humor and sights, then peek at the group VVorldcup blog with it's own VVorldcup YouTube channel, Twitter account and Flickr group now as well.   Before I begin, know that Carl has posted an excellent summary yesterday on the blog as well as the amount of videos and pictures we are loading.

• Getting here was as far away as it looks on the map.
• American Airlines knows how to delete a ticket from their system on accident, lose your luggage but the Platinum desk and Sapphire club reservations desks know how to get it back while in the UK.  Thanks to Gab for her endless support in helping me fix it all while sitting in London.
• Johannesburg is like every other major city in the world, tons of people, business, cars always on the move
• Johannesburg is also not like every other city in the world.  Fences, security wires, patrols and armed response units.
• Johannesburg has some incredibly friendly people everywhere we have been.  From local shops, to malls, to just asking for direction and help  They were prepared for these games and are showing the support everywhere you turn.
• Everywhere you turn, people have set up shop to sell you World Cup gear.  Street corners, stores and just everywhere.  Carl made a good point in his post.  If they get an item in your car, you have just bought it.  Keeping the windows up while in major intersections solves issues.  We saw one person try to buy a flag and have hats and other items thrown in as the window went down.
• Stadium security is a joke.  Much lighter than we anticipated.  While the presence of the police is everywhere, as well as traffic and crowd marshals, getting in security has been a breeze.  As one pats you down, you walk a few feet, another asks, you say yes and just walk on.  Metal detectors are in place as well as wands.  However, we have not seen a clue of any type of violence.  We have watched our pockets well but once inside the gates it is a huge party.
• Anyone and everyone talks, shares stories, compares games and just becomes friendly while at shuttle lines, security queues, food queues or in your seats.  No one cares where you are from when they talk to you.  They ask to make fun of teams, but the spirit is in the game.  Maybe all wars should be played on the pitch instead.
• Imagine sitting in the stands at a game where neither team is the country you are from.  Which do you cheer for.  Well if you are in the VVorldcup Pool, then the one that will help you win.  If you don't care, you either pick a team by geography, or do as I do and watch in wonder and happiness at any good play going either direction.
• Traffic has been tough.  May roads were new and completed in time, but there is just sheer volume of traffic.  In the city we found some honking, but around the games everyone is fairly patient.  Outside of a few locals that know the roads and start driving the curbs, everyone else is too busy blowing horns out car windows to care.
• Our place of residence could not be better.  The family hosting us has been overly kind, helpful and a joy.  We have a loft over their garage that was recently renovated and meets all our needs plus some.  A much better choice than a hotel to say the least.
• Yes, the horns at the games are nothing like you hear on TV.  While Andy has braved each game with no earplugs, I have worn them at both.  Carl put them on the second game.  You drowns out the loudness, but still lets you hear all conversation just fine.  But it is amazing how loud the buggers are when drunk people are blowing them.
• Queues have been interesting.  Many of us are used to the Disney approach of order and flow.  Here they do not start pushing you into small lines early enough so huge crowds gather and then push some to jockey for position.  This was seen going to get on shuttles, enter security and shuttles again.  It was just noticeable for us used to Disney-bots.
• The food covers the range.  From local cuisine to things you find everywhere.  We ran across a McDonalds and KFC on our drives, but we have stuck to more local variations of things we know.
• Yes, they drive on the wrong side of the road.
• Safety has been fine.  People say it is all safe, but just stay away from this street or neighborhood.  Makes perfect sense and in reality is every city known.
• Carl snores.  Often. Loud. Period.

That is just an early summary.  If you really want to keep up with the fun, humor and sights, then peek at the group VVorldcup blog with it's own VVorldcup YouTube channel, Twitter account and Flickr group now as well.  We are linking and pushing everything through there.

We are now all in South Africa for World Cup 2010, which includes Carl Tyler, Andy Higgins and myself.  In honor of this event, we have a blog with constant updates, a Twitter account and Flickr, YouTube and more.  We have already produced enough content to flood the wifi here at the wonderful studio we had the luck and pleasure of being able to rent for the month.

Arrival was today in order to grab the tickets from the FIFA offices, watch some games on the TV and recover from 18 hours of flights to get here.  We start our game series in person tomorrow by seeing USA against Slovenia in the afternoon in Johannesburg.  Most of our games are at Soccer City (Johannesburg), with others in Rustenburg and Durban.

I am happy to announce that Julian Robichaux, of SNAPPS, has taken his LDD Search (Lotus Developer Domain or Notes Net as many of us know it) and added my Lotus Blogger Search to create a one stop plug-in shop for searching for all the technical information you need.

This awesome free plug-in adds a search option to the upper right of your Lotus Notes 8 Standard client as shown below.  It then opens a multi tabbed window so you can see your results for each part of LDD and the custom blogger engine.



As long as you have rights in your Lotus Notes client, you simply drag and drop this into your widgets and it does the rest.  Incredible work from Julian and I am happy to have the blogger search included as well to help you find the information you need.

In this June 2010 issue I talk about training and the following:

IN THIS ISSUE #59
* From the Editor: Chris' 1.60300 KES
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Billing Internal Customers on Domino Usage
* Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes (GAMLN)
* Quick Tip: How to Remove the "Getting Started" Page in Notes 8
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Installing Sametime Connect 8.5 into Lotus Notes

Make sure you:
* head over to Consultant In Your Pocket and catch one of the upcoming free webcasts or free full replays
* head over to IamLUG and register for the upcoming North American Lotus User Group meeting in August 2010

The new cd5 build of Lotus Domino 8.5.2 (disclaimer: still in beta) has a few new options.  The one in the screenshot below stuck out since it asks to now get the Directory Assistance database.  You have the option (default is enabled) to get or not get the DA.nsf database from the server specified in the hostname to get the Domino Directory information from.

As the blogs light up with a LotusKnows blogging initiative, I wanted to remind you of the resources available for keeping up with the news.

• If you do not use RSS feedreaders, I created a simple LotusKnows landing page for you in a year ago for LotusKnows and Lotusphere.  The data is being pulled from numerous searches brought together in widgets on the page.
• If you prefer a newspaper format, the LotusKnows newspaper edition exists as well.  Twitter, blogs, feeds and more.  Did I mention there was a XPages newspaper as well already made?
• I updated the full OPML file of Lotus blogs to include LotusKnows blog in the listing.  You import this directly into your feed reader of choice.  Hopefully that is Google Reader (my choice with the Feedly overlay) so you can easily share what great news you find.
• Finding the information you want was never easier with the Google Search for bloggers, Lotus technical information and more.  I shared the Lotus Notes client widget yesterday ort you can always use the search box in the corner of my blog.

I am happy to share a new widget for your Lotus Notes client that allows you to highlight any text in any document in Notes and search across over 350 Lotus related blogs and resources.  It uses the same Google Custom Search engine (above and on right of blog) I keep updating.

Right click to download and save the extension and drag into your widgets

Q. I see sometimes there are ads, do you get paid when we use this?
A . No that is Google putting ads in their search as always

Q. Is my blog listed in the engine?
A. If you think it isn't just send me an email and I will verify

Q. How often does it update?
A. Normal Google updating applies

Q. Can we get the suggested type-ahead thingy Google has?
A. Yes, I am adding that in

Please see the previous postings on the Google Custom Search Engine for Lotus bloggers postings I have done.

In the middle of the Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes (GAMLN) series, I thought you would also take interest in a web application Google has created to try and estimate the savings your company (or school) will save by switching to Google Apps under the name GoneGoogle.  The animated screen asks one simple question, your company size .  From there is has a large amount of assumptions built in while it works it's number magic.

Now one thing I must admit is the awesome way it allows you to share at the end.  From a PDF, spreadsheet or poster, all the data is there.  There is also a bunch of web content around it, even asking you to place your icon on the map when you migrate.  I think this would be a great implementation to spread the news for LotusKnows as well showing wins in Lotus and where they are located.  No names are used, so confidentiality is kept.

One downside is when I attempted to adjust some of the settings to run the tool again.  For some strange reason the tool would not allow me to change the unplanned downtime for Lotus Notes to zero.  We just do not have it between general uptime and clustering.  So if they offer 99.95 themselves, why cannot I enter 100%?

You do get an estimated cost savings dollar amount and hours saved.  You can edit average mailbox sizes, number of people on laptops, group document creation and more. The numbers did not mean much to me at the end, as migration costs and man hours are not included.  However, the idea of providing this type of experience makes smaller companies raise an eyebrow and investigate the solution.

Something to consider in marketing.

History of postings on the Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes (GAMLN) series:

• The intro,
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6
• Part 7
• Part 8
• Part 9
• Part 10

Once we worked our ways through ACL issues, database access and roles, we now enter the actual configuration of the central administration database for the Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes, or GAMLN.  

• In order for the global migration to kick off, the status must be enabled.  We decided to leave it disabled until we explored all the settings so we did not have any surprises.
• The administration server is important as that is where directory registration and maintenance takes place.  As we discussed in an earlier part, we were dedicating a server for this migration task to make sure we did not affect server load as best we could.
• Google, and myself, recommend you use the Internet Address field to create the user accounts in Google Apps.  Some sites that are larger may have another field they wish to use. But, it pulls this field from the directory in Domino, so make sure it is populated in each person document the way you want their account to be created.  A mistake here will mess up their account in GAMLN.
• The Google Domain tab is quite simple asking for the new Google domain being utilized and the email address for the Google domain administrator.  You will also enter the password for the administrator account here.  I suggest clicking the verification button before moving on.

In part 9 we will move on to the Advanced tab of the database before saving the form and then enabling the global migration.  DO not forget to catch up to the series below.  I swear this is better than Lost.

History of postings on the Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes (GAMLN) series:

• The intro,
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6
• Part 7
• Part 9

I am happy to announce that everyone that attends the webinar tomorrow at 10am CST will be able to receive the rest of 2010 free with a full license key from SecurTrac.

In an attempt to bring our info back to the top of your web page and drive some additional traffic for tomorrow’s session, I was thinking of giving away a “SecurTrac Test Drive Key”.  In essence, everyone who attends the event can request a key for the full suite of SecurTrac to run on a single server until the end of the year including the associated support.  Come Dec 31^st, they simply decide if they wish to renew the maintenance or remove the product. 

In order to get this offer you must register and attend tomorrow's webcast with Bill Malchisky on the eDiscovery Primer for Lotus Admins.

We talked about the HTC EVO on Episode 26 of TheSocialGeeks this week, but now having actually worked with the device, I am stunned and actually enjoying working with a phone.  The interface is slick.  The application choices immense and the quickness and response impressive.  Even with multiple applications open all the time.  The deal-maker for the day was when I received a quick message to load a specific app.  I did and was able to fully work with our Citrix environment, even launching the Notes 8 Standard client within the phone.

Forget the geek features like 8MB camera, 1.3 MB front facing camera for video chat, HDMI port, multi-app, kickstand, etc etc.  So far the phone is a winner and worth the change.  Oh, and Sprint named us a 4G city and I pick it up here and there as they deploy towers.  HTC has also promised free upgrades to Froyo (Android 2.2) for these phones.

Part 7 covers roles and ACL rights.  Google automatically assumes and enters a Global administrator setup and assigns it the [SiteAdmin] role.  Global administrators handle the administration database and overall management of all site documents.  Make sure you know who you list in this role.

Site administrators get configured each time you create a new site.  They are allowed to see all sites, but only edit their own plus related user profiles for that site.  In our circumstance, there will be no one outside of Domino admins touching this, so no decision had to be made of who gets additional rights.

The documentation also specifies that the administration database for GAMLN get an automatic ACL creation for -Default- set to Manager.  Not the best choice for any environment.  If you will allow users to work in the database and update their own profile during migration, it must be Author with no roles assigned.  We are not allowing users to do this during the Google Apps Migration and will go with the wonderful No Access choice for Lotus Notes.

The administration database assigns most of the roles for you as you place people in power.  So it makes it simple when you are using a select few people to manage the migration.  There is an owner right but that applies to the person being migrated.

History of postings on the Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes (GAMLN) series:

• The intro,
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6
• Part 8
• Part 9

Building a listing and selecting Lotus Notes widgets I would use daily has been a trying process.  I have added and deleted widgets to my Lotus Notes client on a regular basis.  The other problem is that some of these actually call plug-ins to be installed but begin as widgets.  These are in no order.  Just a useable top 10.  Some are not even fancy, but provide excellent function.
1.        Gist - This is what I run daily beside my mailfile to see what information exists for you in the social networks coupled with my personal address book.  From company profile, Twitter information, recent news, Facebook, picture and more, it is dynamically there by sender.
2.        Tungle - If you wish to have a meeting with me, you can schedule online with a simple click.  Tungle reads my local freetime database and combines it with my Google calendars to give a global freetime.  I even place the web widget on my blog and run the Lotus Notes Widget in the client.  Oh, and I just loaded the Blackberry version.
3.        Plantronics - A new part of my Sametime voice (and all VOIP service) arsenal.  It moves call control to the headset for a handsfree answer, hold and switch.  Oh and hang up.
4.        Recon Sidebar - from Julian Robichaux.  This awesome administrator widget for Lotus Notes allows you to quickly work with remote server consoles.  A must have.
5.        SideLog - from Jeff Gilfelt.  This allows the administrator to view the latest Domino server log events in reverse chronological order.  Miscellaneous and Mail Routing are easily opened for quick troubleshooting.  Couple that with my own QuickAdmin Smarticon code for administrative tasks and you hardly need the Administrator client open.
6.        Wildfire - This has hooks to multiple social networks from one interface allowing you to easily update your status.  For those that do not have a flow of status updates or want to do each individually, it is a great solution.
7.     File Explorer - a sidebar view to explore and drag and drop files into the operating system.  Open, rename and delete as well.
8.     Widget Library - imagine a slew of widgets in one pack.  From Flickr, Unyte, search ISBN, DeveloperWorks and Redbooks. And More!
9.     Web Widgets - Widgets pointing to Google, YouTube and a mps3 player.  Embeddable in XPage controls too
10.   Lotus Learning Widget - a no brainer.  Learn all about Lotus stuff in a widget.  Instant access to videos, tutorials and more.


Note: Please verify with your administration team your security processes. They may not understand how to deploy widgets.  They can watch the replay of Deploying Plug-ins and Widgets for Lotus Notes and Sametime from Consultant In Your Pocket.

As we have moved through the Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes (GAMLN) tool, I have received excellent input form Marie Scott on their trials and knowledge gained as well.  Now that we have the basic architecture decided, the documentation suggests establishing the migration server as a trusted server in the mail server documents (shown below) and signing the templates from Google with a trusted id source such as the server id file.

Here was a key factor I gleaned from the documentation, mainly since we cluster mailfiles between two data centers for redundancy.  Each time a message is migrated it modifies the Last Modified date.  Doing this to large mailfiles can cause heavy network traffic according to the GAMLN documentation.  They suggest you disable replication for each mailfile as you configure that user for migration.

The last step today will be to create the actual administration database we discussed earlier.  Google provides a gmail.migration.ntf template with the Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes tools.

History of postings on the Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes (GAMLN) series:

• The intro,
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 7
• Part 8
• Part 9

The process of the Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes (GAMLN) also has steps to be completed on the Google side, as well as Domino.  Previously we had walked through the Domino beginnings.  Inside of your Google Apps control panel, a simple point and click allowed us to enable the ability to provision the users through the API.

In a previous posting (links below) I talked about the basic architecture, but overlooked the changes needed to the Domino Agent Manger in order for GAMLN to process larger files.  Marie Scott did a good job and posting comments around setting they have used to date, which I recommend reading.  However, the guide suggests to modify the maximum concurrent agents allowed and increasing the maximum execution times.

Another interesting request was that your Domino server have at least two mail.box files enabled.  Hopefully, you all do and understand the benefits of such.  FInally, the conversion of mail from Notes Rich Text to HTML needs to be set on the Server Configuration document for each mail and migration server.

History of postings on the Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes (GAMLN) series:

• The intro,
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 6
• Part 7
• Part 8
• Part 9

The new cd5 build of Lotus Notes 8.5.2 (disclaimer: still in beta) has a few new options, as shown below, to begin some of the Lotus Notes processes with the native operating system.



What this means for you, as a user or administrator, is that to give a better usability experience with Lotus Notes client, part of the processes can be configured to launch at operating system time.  The thought being that when the user launches the Notes client they will see a shorter up time.  There is no hard data or number for how much longer it adds to the operating system boot or how much memory it uses in the background.  Also, if it goes away when you close the Lotus Notes client on the desktop or does it stay in the background on the operating system waiting for next launch.