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The Radicati Group has published its useless, piss poor one-sided guess who foot the bill for this report latest even, balanced report on Lotus -v- M$ which is essential reading for people that go in and out of meetings where M$ consultants will be quoting from it for the next year. 

Libby gave an excellent summary of the main points.  In addition, blogs have gone wild, but all are secondary to Ed's.  In this posting, he has some excellent comments and in this posting you see some "independants" biting back.  In the next posting though, the "independant" turns out to be.... yep you guessed it - one of the authors!!!  Oh read it, its great!

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Just a quick admin tip!  On a site today, the local Administrator did not know this feature so I thought it might be good to put it up here.

The broadcast command (IMHO) is possibly the most useless Domino command you can use.  Type in the following on the console

Broadcast "server shutting down at 4pm"

and it will appear on the clients of all connected users... Where?  On the status bar, where nobody ever looks!  So, what can you do?

On the console, type in the following

Broadcast "(!)Server shutting down at 4pm"

and the command will no appear as a pop-up dialog box on the screen of all users active with that server.  They have to click on ok for it to go away.  The (!) part of the command forces the pop-up.  Go on... give it a try.

Alternatives - use the windows broadcast or just use a sametime announcement.

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For the first time in a long time, I had to install an Exchange server today for a Domino / COM application. I had forgotten how slow the product is. I am pretty sure, that considering the server spec, I could have setup up three Domino domains in the amount of time it took to configure one Exchange server. Imagine they had to write a version for a different OS, instead of their own….

From the link on Carl’s site , I decided to take the OS test. I don’t know if this is a good or bad thing…

src="http://www.bbspot.com/Images/News_Features/2003/01/os_quiz/amiga.jpg" width="300" height="90"
border="0" alt="You are Amiga OS. Ahead of your time. You keep a lot of balls in the air. If only your parents had given you more opportunities to suceed.">
Which OS are You?

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A recent event with a customer reminded me of 1999 when everyone was on the Y2K checking programme.  At the time a business partner was recommending to check your Domino applications you should bring the server down and change the OS date to a post 2K date (e.g. 2030); bring it back up and test...  You could then sign off your applications.  All well and good, until after resetting the date to 1999 and restarting the server, you realise that your applications are not replicating correctly.  This is because you were not warned to use sample data, or to disconnect your server from the live network and while your server was years ahead of you, it replicated with spokes (or worse, a cluster member!).

Each application on your Domino server retains a replication history (File / Replication / Replication History) where it remembers when it last successfully replicated with another replica on the network.  This is a good thing because it is used as a checkpoint for the next replication.  When your server is replicating, it looks at the history checkpoint for the destination server and will only replicate documents modified after that date.  This makes for excellent, efficient replication.

Except for when your Server thought it was 2030 and replicated with another server.  As it should, each application retains the checkpoint as the date in 2030, and will dutifully not try to replicate any changes or additions from before that date.  So when your date is reset, new documents are ignored until 2030..... A bit of a wait, me thinks...

The solution is relatively simple; go into the application and enter the Replication History dialog box.  From there, choose the "clear" option so the server will check and replicate all documents in the database.  The downside to this is the next replication will take a long time as all documents are checked.

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Two significant announcements in relation to the acceptance of SIP as a communication standard.  Microsoft's "enhanced SIP" statement and now Jabber's SIP gateway statement for IBM (posted by Ed).  I may be jumping off the mark but I am getting an soft tingly feeling about this.

Any regular readers (yes both of you) would know that I had a SIP gateway running here (http://sip.pmooney.net) for anyone to conduct SIP testing off.  No takers at the time (Build it, and they will come....  - nope).  I have already implemented a SIP gateway between my company and one of our major cusomters and the benifit is outstanding.  The corporate presence is a powerful feature as my customer can talk to any member of our company just like talking to a internal sametime buddy.  We are listed in their buddy list, but with our own email address.  Its all encrypted, and we are virtual staff members but retain our identity.

So.. I am willing to give it another go here if anyone is interested.  Would anyone like me to re-set up the SIP gateway?.  If so let me know.  I am also offering to put together an article on SIP and IM.  Again, if there is a significant number of interested parties, I will write it (now its "come, and I will build it).

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Should I mention its in Ireland.. (Dublin based)

If anyone is looking for Domino/LTW/LIM admin position and has good experience, please let me know. 

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Hats off to Carl Tyler and Instant Technologiesfor a neat product. I had to recommend a Sametime logging tool to a customer and downloaded the trial version of IMtegrity available on their site.

The product takes about 15 minutes to install and records all chat that occurs on the server to text files and/or XML. Then, its nice enough to run an agent that copies all chats to a database for review/searching. The configuraiton is easy and the interface and databases are sweet. My only little requests as a "would be nice" is that the notice that the chats are being logged (for AOL users) could be set to appear at the start on intra-sametime chats.

Its no biggie - excellent product!

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I have just spent the last 1/2 hour laughing at this site.  For all those that have ever received the Nigerian bank mails (with the potential of making millions) I would strongly recommend a read of this site.

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It was a matter of time, wasn't it?  Luckily, the virus, reported here and here is harmless.  Symantec, NAI, Trend must all be delighted!  A lovely growing market to sell PPC AV software to!

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