A customer has asked me to evaluate a few project management tools with the end-goal of them selecting one with my assistance. Some basic conditions:
Over the years I have tried a few with various levels of success. Do any readers have recommendations on products to evaluate?
You can now click on OK to make the startup “loading” picture disappear. Useful while you are waiting the x seconds/minutes/hours/days/weeks for the client to load.
Update: This is looking like an OSX Lion feature, not a Notes 8.5.3 feature. Verified by two different sources using OSX Lion and Notes 8.5.x (not 8.5.3). This leads to two points:
1. What the hell is OSX Lion doing that for? This may not be a bad thing in this particular case, but it looks a bit product intrusive?
2. IBM, I apologise for blaming the 8.5.3 beta. Consider yourself forgiven for IBM Learning Management Server (well, almost).
In between customer meetings in London this week, I will be heading to Oslo to present at the Norwegian Lotus User Group event. It is a new one for me, as I had to sadly cancel my attendance last year. On the Thursday morning I will be presenting the Lotusphere 2011 Adminblast presentation and then a separate session on clustering. Oh yes, and I get to take my first Ryanair flight this year! Joy.
The IBM Champion program recognizes innovative thought leaders in the technical community — and rewards these contributors by amplifying their voice and increasing their sphere of influence. An IBM Champion is a non-IBM developer or IT professional who leads and mentors his or her peers and helps them make best use of IBM solutions and services.
We invite you to watch a video introduction to the program, by Alice Chou, Director of IBM developerWorks, and learn more.
The IBM Champion program
It has been discussed for many years, as an alternative to the Microsoft MVP program. What I would say is that if you are a reader of a blog, or attender of events and want to say a little “thank you” to someone for their work, nominate them. If you know someone in the trade that has done something altruistic or helpful below the radar, nominate them. It won’t change the world, but appreciation is always appreciated.
Just breadcrumbs/quick tip/query to see if I am alone.
I have setup Traveler for a customer site. In this instance I am using DA to the primary directory of users in the company. As with any good Traveler installation, the access Traveler field has been set to a group name (otherwise everyone can use it). I created this group in the secondary directory as it will be easier to manage.
That doesn’t work. Traveler seems to require the access group to be existing in it’s primary directory. If not, no joy.
Yesterday, a grumpy man had a nice delivery.
My other MBP is 2 1/2 years old, and even though it is still plenty fast, I wanted the extra memory and a Solid State Drive to run multiple heavy VMs.
Although very expensive, I don’t guilt over this particular purchase. Like many readers here, my laptop is the tool of my trade. Used for many many hours per day, 365 or so days per year. I want to enjoy using it, and I get plenty of mileage out of it. We constantly push them hard, running many applications or virtual machines. They get scratched, dropped, mistreated more then most and still are totally relied upon. This time, considering the cost and the fact it is my first laptop with a non-removable battery, I went with applecare for the three years. I have no experience of applecare, so here is hoping that if I do need to use it, it is a good move.
Setup was easy to the point of disappointing.
It is now completely configured and setup as per my last backup on my other Macbook Pro. Only hiccups were related to bluetooth devices and re-registering MSOffice license. It is identical to the machine I was using the day before. Just faster. A lot faster.
The SSD makes a serious difference. Cold start (from the beep to login page) is 18 seconds. After you login, it is fully loaded in 3 seconds. Here is a quick video of Lotus Notes loading after a cold start (by far the heaviest product on my machine), followed by firefox and mail.app.
Compare it to my last Mac below:
Just a personal list. Feel free to add your own. Personally, I think these are more important, but that’s just me. Notice I don’t look for admin client goodness. It works enough for us lot.
My excessivly intelligent niece works with Lotus Notes in her employer’s business. As far as I can make out, they use one “box” in the workspace for their business application (for those not in the know, a single application). I asked if it all works ok. Of course the response is no.
“It looks very old fashioned”
Nothing I can do if the application is old fashioned, unless they are willing to re-design it. It’s so easy for users to blame Lotus Notes for bad applications. You cannot blame end users for that perception. A quick demo of some of the applications that Bluewave have completed for other sites made her wonder why hers looks so bad. Next.
“It is very hard to search for anything”
Yep – no full text indexing enabled. Lotus Notes has a pretty crappy search facility if FTI is not enabled on a database. I explained that not only can notes search a database, but also attachments within the database. At this point I discovered my other niece also works with Lotus Notes in her employer. For mail. And.. yep, you guessed it. No FTI on mail file. I show database properties and creating an index. And also searching for a piece of text.
“We didn’t know it could do that”
Yeah. There is the problem. Lotus Notes is 21 years old. Old applications, regimental admins and old thinking are some of it’s biggest challenges.
If you are getting a lot of these errors on a domino server in mail files, odds are that something read the files at the same time the domino server was running. Example:
Welcome to fixup hell.
I have some issues with “the cloud”. As an infrastructure person, a consultant and a customer. Over the next few weeks I will make these issues known in little posts here and there. As a customer, there is a potential impact on your business by “trusting” your service provider. The person that believes that the chosen cloud solution will never fail them is… well.. an idiot.
If your solution is a managed service or hosting company (e.g. Connectria) you can apply measures and SLA’s. From what I have seen, the could is a bit cloudy about those things. What you need is an ombudsman. Or a product to be your ombudsman. Enter GSX.
Orlando, FL – 31 Jan 2011: GSX Solutions, a leading provider of monitoring and administration solutions for IBM collaboration software, Blackberry Enterprise Server and Microsoft Exchange, today announced that GSX Monitor can now monitor of the availability of LotusLive servers.
This is a smart move by GSX. More.
