I was saddened to read on ITNews that AMP becomes the first cloud computing client to CSC in Australia with their move to hosted Exchange and Sharepoint.

Financial services firm AMP has dumped Lotus Notes, looking to instead rent Microsoft's collaboration tools over the network from the Australian data centres of CSC.

What I found most interesting and was wanting to read, is why they chose that solution. LotusLive was listed and here was the areas in which they tested:

AMP's IT Director for service management Sharmini Sivathas told iTnews that "extensive pilots were undertaken to evaluate the end-user experience for several platforms."

This review assessed such factors as security, information risk and regulatory requirements, interoperability and integration risk, cost, mobile device support, reliability, support models available, usability and end user feedback.

I don't think LotusLive failed any of these.  It all had to to deal with AMP being a ten (10) year customer of CSC and wanting to keep their data and solutions in Australia instead. The factor of location was more than obvious in the article and should have been stressed more.

In a recent news story from Unified Communications Headsets, Plantronics beat revenue expectations with some great commentary about UC2 and a blurb on Sametime:

Plantronics also came out with new audio functions and tools for the IBM (News - Alert) Lotus Sametime and Sametime Unified Telephony products. The Plantronics Plug-in for Sametime is new software that delivers intelligent call control between Plantronics’ full UC product portfolio and IBM Sametime, providing users with exceptional online meeting and telephony experiences with enhanced audio quality.

Disclosure, I have been testing some of the Plantronics headsets, especially the UC Pro discussed in the article.  A headset I would definitely check out for Skype, Sametime and any VOIP calls.  Join Plantronics as a SIlver sponsor at IamLUG in just a few days.

What the heck does it take to fill the very last slots at IamLUG after a couple recent cancellations?  How about free stuff from the awesome sponsors this year?

What you see in the title is correct.  giveaways are building daily and these are the recent announcements:

• Crossware - iPad

• Panagenda - free Android phone
• Sherpa - Amazon Kindle
• Plantronics - free VOIP headsets
• PSC - AMEX gift card
• some other surprises along the way we are saving up...

So there is one heck of a list already folks.  Last slots, then waitlisting.  You must be present to win.  You must have registered.  You must not work for the sponsor.  We are debating if working for IamLUG counts or not, these are looking too sweet.

Join Kathy Brown as she returns to provide you a fun session on August 18th 2010, 10am CST,  covering the following:

Thanks to Lotus and Domino’s rapid application development platform, many developers find themselves in a deploy-and-pray application release cycle.  That can be fine for simple applications in uncomplicated environments, but what happens when the feature requests get more and more complex?  Come hear about different techniques for managing Lotus and Domino application deployment and how to get beyond deploy-and-pray!

You can register for the event immediately right here.

Looking at the IamLUG 2010 agenda, I just came to realize there is an entire free day of XPages training.  A bootcamp, of sorts, to jumpstart your coding goodness.  Have you seen the list and finally convinced yourself to register for the last seats?

• Ten XPages Design Patterns - Matt White
• XPages Beyond the Introduction - David Leedy
• The XPages Revolution - Nathan Freeman and Tim Tripcony
• Using XML and RDBMS Data Sources in XPages  - Paul Calhoun

Sean Burgess throws in some jquery for UI enhancements, Developer Tips for Every Developer, TDI, location services and mobilizing applications round out the development track across two days.

IamLUG is happy to have IBM as the Platinum sponsor for 2010 and offer these XPages training classes for free.

In a Levi's sponsored video, a stop action video was shot using a Canon 5D Mark II of a man walking across the United States in a cool short video.  I noticed they made sure there was no other product placement but the Levi's at the end.

I was lucky to catch Ed Brill as he packed his bags and begin his walk to St Louis for IamLUG taking place Aug 2-3 2010.  IBM is a Platinum sponsor of the event and will once again bring a ton of information.  Last year we were lucky enough to hear about the Lotus Knows launch.  I wonder what will come out of it this time around?

The keynote from Doug Cox, vice president of development and support for Lotus and Websphere Portal, will be live broadcasted with the recent announcement from IamLUG and uStream.

There are literally only a few seats left for you to grab to attend IamLUG - the North American Lotus User Group.  Please join Ed and IBM at the event.

IdoNotes podcast is a Spiked Studio Production .    You can download the audio file (for non-iTunes or Zune subscribers) right here.

In this July 2010 issue I talk about bandwidth for granted and the following:

IN THIS ISSUE #60
* From the Editor: Chris' 0.152847 ZAR
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: How Do I Remove Recent Contacts
* Recent Contacts - A New Evil?
* Quick Tip: Domino 8.5.1 FP3 Forgot the Router FIx
* From the IdoNotes Mailbox: Lotus Notes 8.5.1 Client Crashes

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
* catch up on the entire Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes (GAMLN) series here on IdoNotes

We left off finishing the advanced configuration document for the Google Apps Migration tool for Lotus Notes (GAMLN).  Besides establishing security for the database, we move on to the actual site configuration.  A single site document is required before any user migration occurs.  You may have multiple site documents later, but a first one is necessary to even do testing.  Pick a name for the site that makes sense and walk with me through the rest of the General settings.

• A timezone for the site is required.  This gets interesting if you have a centrally located server that handles users from all over as our customer does.  Your choice is the location of the server, the location of the company headquarters or where most of the staff is.
• The site administrators are normally the Domino administrators handling the migration.
• The system can read your Domino Directory for the mail server field and begin registering users assigned to that Domino server into Google.  We chose to do a batch and not use this option.  The default was off. If a user is not found in Google it skips that user during migration.
• However, we did leave the next section enabled.  The migration tool is to do a check to make sure the user being migrated has already been established as an account in Google before migration begins in the GAMLN tool.
• You can also provision user accounts in the Google domain if you enable the next section. In order to provision you must enable it to check accounts in the Google domain.
• Establishing the migration start and cutoff times are important.  You want good communication and testing before you roll this out to an entire server.  We would always allow the users to continue migration even after the cutoff date.  That always make me laugh across systems.  As we would not take a user after a certain date?
• The number of feeder databases and and maximum users per database are highly important to the performance of the tool balanced with the time it will take to move the users to the Google domain with the Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes tool.  We covered some basic scenarios in earlier posts on how to configure the feeders.  Marie Scott chimed in with some excellent knowledge on this as well. The maximum feeder databases allowed are 10. The agent runs at 30 minute intervals, so the size of the mailfiles will matter greatly in order to get each one done in 30 minutes.

We will move through the other site tabs next.

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

Google updated the Apps Migration for Lotus Notes tool to version 2.2.1 (GAMLN) in an announcement on their blog last week.  Some new features were also added of note:

Pre-migration Estimator: It is now possible to gather user statistics prior to migration for selected users.

Error Threshold Setting: In earlier versions of this tool, if any migration errors were encountered the system would keep the user at Active status until the error was resolved, manually flagged as complete, or the administrator moved the user to "Complete" status. It now allows the administrator to set a site level threshold for errors.

To catch up with the Google Apps Migration for Lotus Notes series I have in progress, you can read the articles blow in the 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

We left off the Google Apps Migration path from Lotus Notes for the client a while ago entering the Advanced tab information.  Let's quickly walk through some portions and descriptions of these choices.

• The integrity checker at the top runs the agent to verify there is no save conflicts (and replication in a distributed setup).
• we left the token refresh to 23 hours which is just below the Google time reset of 24 hours.  After reading their comment about possibly locking out accounts that request new tokens too often, we decided to leave it as far out as we can.
• Humorously, we always strive to keep individual message sizes shrunk down, this forces the issue with a maximum size of 25MB per message, including attachments.  Any message over the Google max is not migrated.  You can reduce this size down to strip larger attachments and force users to place them in other places.  We found this works well to make users filter and use things like Quickr.
• The length of Google labels frustrated users with tons of nested folders with long titles.  Google strips them down to the maximum of 40 characters no matter what.  So this is a UI issue in need of training.  You can fix this before migration by having users shrink and change folder name lengths.  But, that in itself will most likely never happen for everyone.
• Additional mail forms is not an issue for this migration but can be for many.  If you have built or installed third party products that added extra mail forms to your user mailfiles, you can migrate them with specific criteria.  So the good news is some of the basic workflow can be moved that is inside the mailfile but not part of the standard Notes template.  The bad news is the lack of the total workflow that can be moved.
• We did not need to mess or add custom site level settings at all.

As the bottom part says, we had no need to change any of the settings.  It would be nice if they hid those unless you clicked some action to prevent mistakes or accidental typing.


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

After looking at numerous phone cases for the HTC EVO, I finally decided I wanted both a cover and a holster to carry it around.  The large screen made it bulky no matter what.  An added case made it bigger.  So I did some searching and ran across the Innocase line from Seidio.  It has a snap together cover that leaves the camera, flash, speaker, volume controls and kickstand open.  It raises the back of the back of the phone just enough to protect the camera lens.  Then it snaps into the holster that is covered in a felt for the screen while allowing the clip part to cover the power button to make sure it doesn't get turned on or bumped.

So if you have the EVO and are looking for a case that doubles with a holster, the Seidio Innocase is my choice.

RELATED POSTS

• My first impressions of the HTC EVO
• My video hands-on review of the HTC EVO

NOte: Yes, It is an affiliate link and comes in other colors as well.

It seems that users of Blackberry's really like the Out of Office feature even though the idea of a Blackberry is to be connected out of the office.  Lotus has delivered a nice technote on some of the issues, fixes and patches needed.  From technote #1395880 here are some items are covered:

What is the first version of BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) for Lotus Domino that supports the Notes/Domino 8.x Out of Office service?

Notes/Domino Out of Office service does not synch properly with BlackBerry devices through BES servers.

An editor level user has enabled their out of office agent from a BlackBerry Smartphone in the Domino environment.  This results the following error:

Unfortunately these are cropping up more often as we deploy more and more BES servers.  Just passing it along.

As a staunch blog/podcast supporter of Lotus Protector Mail Security software personally and even in our business plans, there was one underlying factor that never surfaced until recently.  I am not pleased with the crazy and seemingly redlining they did for hardware requirements.   Here is the link for the hardware specs (and I mean this not as a VM but an actual install on physical hardware to run as an appliance model).  The actual sentence here needs to be highlighted.

Lotus Protector for Mail Security 2.5 is certified to run natively on high quality, cost-effective IBM System x® hardware as a physical appliance

We do not run IBM hardware mainstream in the data center.  This was decided long ago and has not changed.  But, having an installer written specifically for IBM hardware makes no sense.  I should be able to take the iso and toss this Linux variable with Lotus Protector for Mail Security onto any hardware with minimum recommended space, RAM and processor.  That actual manufacturer of the hardware should have no bearing if it is able to run the same Linux version that the iso installs.  (SLES 10 for those keeping count).

Does it make sense to you that they wrote the installer for specific hardware in the attempt that enterprises want this?  Forget that it runs on VM.  Sure it can, but we want the hardware based appliance model.  Not just the VM option.

Issue #4 of the IdoNotes newsletter is about to go out the door and I want to make sure you are subscribed before I hit send.   Jump over to the right side and sign up.

This is the exact heading from Salesforce in an email I received.  I thought Salesforce was a partner with Lotus and integrator with such things like LotusLive?  Their advert states:

Thousands of companies struggle to integrate and administer their Lotus Notes apps every day. Now—faced with a costly forced upgrade—many are moving to the cloud with Force.com

I, ahem, filled out the form required to access some of the information they provide including two free hours of assessment, an online savings calculator and free online training.

I went through the calculator for a knowledge base type app in IT Management.  Savings were an amazing 50% + average.  However, I am using a standard template right out of the Lotus install.  No development, no maintenance, no nothing but people entering documents.

All of them were the same.  For some reason they feel moving it online, spending the time and effort to redo the entire application and migrate tens of thousands of documents was simpler?  Cost effective?  I don't buy any of that nor do I buy the TCO stats on the next tab.




So Salesforce is now going directly after Lotus applications and migrating people off of the system.