Ok, this is going to sound dumb.  I
chose iNotes ultralite instead of iNotes lite when accessing webmail a
few minutes ago.  And do you know what, it was great!  Even faster
the iNotes lite, this gave me exactly what I needed, access to read email.
 Blisteringly fast over a crappy link.  I know this is totally
not using a product for its intended purpose, but thought I would share
the event.  Give it a go!

Update:  Ed pointed out
this is in ND85 beta only at the moment.

Last year Gabriella
Davis and I got talking about
the limitations of the Hands on sessions.  Having presented one in
the past (on integration of portal with domino), it was frustrating for
the instructors and the delegates that we could only offer limited seats,
as the logistics of having laptops for hundreds of people, and managed
VMs were a veritable nightmare.

We discussed this with one of the organisers
of Lotusphere (Kristin Keene) and suggested an alternative session type,
where there are no laptops at all but the session topics, speakers, and
format are aimed as classroom-type session.  Nine months later and
the "new kid on the block" is born, the SNT track.  The
track manager for this is Christian Holsing.  And today we can make
public that Gab and I have been asked to assist in session selection.  Very
quickly, Gab and I are starting to get a new found respect for the work
done from the inside, with regards to track selection.  There have
been lots (I’m not sure if I can release the numbers yet) of submissions,
and we have a lot of work to do in choosing the ones that will work the
best.   I come from a technical teaching background and Gab, well,
em knows everything so we should be able to help out.

So, what type of session are we looking
for?

The SNT track is different to the other
tracks.  For example, the infrastructure track, you can demo/discuss
something new and funky, same goes for the dev track.  In the strategy
sessions, you can bore people to death and in the BP track you (read: Bill
and I) can rant and rave and impart
real world knowledge.

The SNT track is very simple.  Consider
it a classroom.  You, as a speaker are to teach a topic from start
to finish, very very well.  Your documentation should be good enough
that people can do it themselves, step by step, when you are gone.  It
doesn’t have to be something new.  It just has to be something that
people may find difficult, and you believe that you can teach fully, and
impart full knowledge.

This makes it a very challenging session.
 I can imagine that the slide deck on a session like this would be
at least 100 slides (in a session I submitted, the first slide is "turn
on computer"), so the work required by a speaker in advance of sphere
is going to be intense.

Over the next few weeks, Gab and I will
say what we can about the track, and if you have questions about it, feel
free to contact us or comment here.  Of course, one thing we are NOT
going to do is discuss selection of sessions, so don’t bother trying (Kristin
has outlined what will happen to us if we do, and it aint pleasant).

Nice..

Just a reminder to anyone that wants to
submit a session to present at Lotusphere.  The submission window
closes at 12PM EST this Friday, 26th September.  So, over in DST/GMT
world, you have to the end of the business day on Friday.  Click here
to submit.

When wrapping up UKLUG, before heading
for my flight, Carl Tyler and I got talking about Lotus Notes in the SMB
space.  We share the common idea of what we think an SMB is (1-999
users).  Discussing what Lotus Notes is used for there, we realised
that almost all BP’s would qualify as SMB sites.  So, looking at Bluewave/BE
Systems, here is what we use Lotus Notes/Domino for in production (keeping
dev servers and hosted servers out of the equation).

So… what do YOU use Domino for in your business, and what does it require
to run?

Update:  I suppose this
is a fanboy post, but the services above, all serviced from two
machines, is one of the main reasons I am a fan of the product.  Its
hard to argue with ROI at this level.

At UKLUG, I mentioned this setting and
that Ed had already blogged it.  A few people asked me to link to
this tip cause they want to implement it now.  In the twitterverse,
it would be a "retweet", but what the hell.

As per Ed’s
post, images pasted into Lotus
Notes client will be converted to jpg or gif, rather then bitmap, saving
buckets of space.  It is a preference in 8.5 but pushing out the following
notes.ini to all clients (654 and onwards) will enable this feature:

OptimizeImagePasteSize=1

Chris Miller and Ulrich Krause also
posted on this in the past.

Tomorrow I will be moderating and presenting
with The
View,  GSX
and HSBC on "The business
impact of monitoring global messaging servers".   It is a FREE
session and has three presentations and a Q&A at the end.  So
far, there are well over 100 companies registered to attend this online
event, and from looking at the slides of the other presenters, I’m looking
forward to it aswell!.

It is on at noon EST (5pm for UK) tomorrow.
 Click here
to register.

If you are not aware of these ground-breaking
experiments, em.. where have you been?  Click here
to see what is happening right
now while they start their full acceleration tests.

Thanks Bill and Chris

The new apple store in Belfast

Originally uploaded by pmooneynet

This is gonna be expensive

Update: Yep… purchase of an Apple TV complete. Although there is massive hype over here (1000 customers entered the shop in 24 minutes), I am curious as to intentions of flogging Macbooks and Pros just before a hardware refresh. I do believe in “buyer beware” but flogging all this new kit in the first store in Ireland, only to have it replaced in the market seems unfair to me. Apple staff told me that they would replace the outdated kit after the refresh to anyone that complained, but still, to me that sounds like inconvenience