In the past week, I was asked to come to a small site that uses Domino for one critical application, and numerous other office based apps. The customer believed that an upgrade may be necessary, and they wanted my opinion. Being a consultant like any other, this is always a nice opportunity to promote new features and product lines in the IBM range (and try to get some work!). I entered the site and was simply stunned by what I found.

The customer was still using Lotus Notes 4.6a as the Domino server, running on and old NT server, servicing 4.6a clients. This is still not unseen in many sites but as I looked at the server and configuration, I began to realise that this box had not been touched in many years.

The server had not been rebooted in 150 days, since a power failure in the server room. The OS was NT4 SP2 and the old DELL poweredge had 1GB free disk space and 256MB RAM. The hardware, software and OS were out of warranty by years. The applications were basic, but functional and quick and were intelligently put together by the local developer (for whom developing notes databases was only a small part of his job).

I was going through the usual discussion, telling the customer that replacement of the hardware and upgrades of the clients and servers (in that order) was really quite necessary at this point, when I decided to just check the address book one last time. This is when I noticed that the servers and clients (and indeed the domain) was still based on a flat architecture. For those that don’t know, Notes id files did not contain hierarchical certificates by default in earlier releases (mainly R2 and R3). and it is very, very rare to come across these environments in this day and age. Upgrading environments from Flat to Hierarchical is well documented and provides many advantages (mainly being able to use Adminp fully) and is strongly recommended by IBM and BP’s. The last time I migrated a Domain from flat to hierarchical was in 1999, and was astonished to find one still 5 years later. Before I continue with this story, if anyone is attempting to migrate from flat to hierarchical structure, please don’t hesitate to mail me for some advice.

Obviously, I told the customer that this had to go, and now there are two projects for them; 1. Migrate to hierarchical structure: 2. Upgrade to ND6.52. Over a cup of coffee I began to ask why no upgrades or recommendations had been made before to them in the past. Quite simply, no external consultant had been in to look at the Domain since it was upgraded from R3 to R4 back in around 96 /97. At that time, the server was upgraded and the developer took the AD1 and AD2 training course. The administrator got basic training in user registration and group creation and that was pretty much that.

So from an initial investment in R3, a little more money was spent in Lotus Notes on a basic upgrade and some APPSDEV training for the staff. That investment was approximately 8 years ago. Not only was it still running, but the most critical application was running on the server and then an additional 10 basic workflow apps were running aswell. Nothing too difficult, but applications that were relied on from day to day. The server churned along, maintaining itself with an infrequent reboot from time to time. On the way home, I began to think about my old WINNT days and what equivalent would have been running in a M$ house. How many times would I have had to upgrade the applications to maintain security or reliability. Odds are, the house would have been MS Mail or early Exchange and running Access 2.0 / 95 for applications (no workflow there). There is not a chance that an M$ environment would have run for that amount of time without upgrades or skilled maintenance. There is also no way in hell that those applications would have existed on the server that was happily running along with Notes

In addition, the customer contacted us in relation to the upgrade, and as they put it jokingly, it was not like they could say that Notes hadn’t paid for itself at this point, and was due an upgrade. Has an M$ consultant ever heard this coming from a customer?

My RSS feed is now sorted. Thanks for the friendly advice from all.

I was invited to join the Workplace beta team last week. After registration, I was sent all the relevant details and access to the latest builds. In order to try to smooth out this install as much as possible, I choose to download LWP beta including all prerequisite software (just to ensure I have all the correct builds). 9GB of Data! The download is estimated at 40 hours. From all the comments on how long this software takes to install and configure, this could be my first slow step to take. Well, only 9 hours left. Better do what Chris Miller recommends and stock up on asprin.

No blogs recently (although I received the highest level of traffic when I was gone.. go figure!) as I am just back from a Stag weekend in Liverpool. An old colleague of mine Wayne Gahan is taking the plunge next month so as tradition would have it, a weekend of booze and debauchery was called for. Just back and very, very tired. Many thanks to all the “Bobs” that turned up and Seamus, who was outstanding. We had a ball. As for Wayne, I am sure all your clients that you code the Domino applications for would love to see your outfit from the night.

Time to catch up on the RSS feeds and mail..

When I started the blog a few months ago, I openly admitted I was an RSS newbie. Being an administrator, RSS was never an issue to me (although that may change with traffic usage by RSS clients increasing as it becomes more popular). I settled with the excellent FeadDemon by Nick Bradbury and really like the product.

Recently, I have been gathering statistics off my blog site to see what the traffic is like on it (is anyone out there etc). This is easy enough with the Domlog.nsf and the improved Domlog.nsf file by Openntf.org is great.

Once again, my RSS ignorance will be apparent here, is there any simple way to measure how many RSS feed requests I am taking per day? Does anybody do this at present using an RSS counter etc?

How would Chandler put it? O MY GOD!

Found this link on Slashdot. CNN posted that Mr Smathers got $52,000.00 for the addresses. Considering the AOL / CNN link, this couldn’t of been nice to publish.

U.S. investigators said on Wednesday they had arrested an America Online employee for stealing the Internet provider’s customer list and selling it to a purveyor of “spam” e-mail.

Jason Smathers of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, has been charged with stealing a list of 92 million AOL customer screen names and selling them to Internet marketer Sean Dunaway of Las Vegas, said David Kelley, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York

In an earlier entry, I was awaiting the arrival of the new IPAQ h6300 to take up as a new phone. Well, whilst waiting I knew I was on borrowed time as my battered and bruised XDA was on its last legs. I threw in the towel on HP today and bought the XDA II. Haven’t really played with it yet but its good. The only thing is I really didn’t want a camera on my phone. Is it only me, or has anyone else got customers whose security policy on sites ban camera phones. I completely agree with this as a policy as a camera phone in the wrong hands in an intrusion on privacy / security breach (IMHO).

So, installed IBM mobile connect client and it doesn’t like Pocket PC 2003. Sametime client for Pocket PC doesn’t like Pocket PC 2003. Think my new phone and I are going to have some run ins in the near future. My jury is out until I get some more time with this sucker.

For those that dont know, this is the list of product goals for ND7 (was
asked today)

Found a link to this excellent
site from Toms
Rant.  Enjoy!