DominoKeys.com

Several months ago, I set out to find an application that would easily let me share my business card information with others from my iPhone. There are plenty of apps that do this – but I wanted something super easy and didn’t want it to only work with other iPhone users.

I came across beamME a handy little app that does exactly that. Simply setup your business card record and when you start the app, it asks for either a U.S. mobile phone number to send it to, or an email address. Recipients have the ability to view the card on-line and access a vCard file to download to their own address books.

Simple. Fast. Effective!

But what impressed me even more was an email I got out of the blue from someone at the company that develops the application (rmbrME). She sent a short email asking how I liked the product and if I had any suggestions for making it better.

Again… a simple concept: ask your customer if they like it or have suggestions to make it better.

I took a few moments to send a reply email with a few suggestions (I won’t mention them here – since her response to that email suggested they might try to make some of them happen … I’d hate to steal their thunder).

Asking for input like that is such a simple thing and yet it instantly made me an even bigger fan of this product. I’ve told tons of people about the app and now even blogged about it. — So rmbrME is benefiting by building brand loyalty, free viral marketing and acquiring free product direction input. All from a simple little email. Brilliant!

Tags: beamME, iphone, marketing, rmbrME, simple things, viral

I sat through a webinar today and each time the presenter described the ability to “search” within the application, she used the word “google” instead. Examples:

• “You can click on the google bar here to find…”
• “If there’s something specific you want to see, just google…”
• “… and of course, we can just google it…”
• “… the best way to find that would be by doing a google.”

I finally asked the question: “Does Google power your application’s search feature?”

She replied: “No… you can just google things to … you know… find stuff.”

Ah, my mistake.

Since we’re talking about Google, I also noticed this post today about some problems people were having with the install of Notes 8.5 when Google Desktop Search is running. I thought I’d share the link incase you run into those problems.

Tags: google, odd comments, search

One of my favorite announcements from Lotusphere was the news that Lotus would soon support ActiveSync (which could, I suppose, be handy for people with an iPhone – hint, hint; wink, wink).

I decided a few weeks ago, that I better get some hands-on experience with Traveler, the product that will make this happen. (Important note: I opted to be “one of those guys” with TWO cell phones, vs. “downgrade” from my iPhone to something else. I considered that the better of two evils).

So far – I really like it! Traveler integrates well with the phone O/S (in my case, Windows Mobile running on a BlackJack II). The last time I evaluated software like this was what led to our choice of using GOOD as our standard – which is still a great product, however I look to Traveler as both an answer to my iPhone dilemma and a potential way to phase out GOOD and reduce costs.

He’s a run-down of the highlights I’ve seen so far:

• Pro: Visual cues – like an icon that appears to let you know its communicating with the server.
• Pro: Easy to use.
• Pro: Integrates with the phone O/S. (GOOD does not.)
• Pro: Ability to “dismiss” calendar entries while phone is “locked”
• Con: No support for a global address book (this is THE reason we’re not deploying it more wide-spread today)
• Neutral: Setup is easy – but seems like it could be even easier. It’d be great to have the ability, through Domino Administrator, to push a text message to a user’s phone that provides a URL to download, install and configure (at least to the point of entering a password) the software. The install process is quite easy – but is still a bit more work than GOOD’s.

All in all, I’m really this product! If you’re interested in it, I’ve provided a few links below that might be helpful:

• Notes Traveler Wiki
• Installing Notes Traveler
• Product information page

For YEARS I’ve wanted something that allows me to see my work calendar, my home calendar, my wife’s calendar, my kid’s calendar and … well… the schedule of the Denver Broncos, on one screen. With the combination of Notes 8.5 and Apple’s Me.com (formerly MobileMe) service, I can.

First, open Apple’s iCal application and right-click on the calendar(s) you want to subscribe to. Select “Publish” and make note (either copy/paste or use the “email” option) of the locations of your published calendar.

When the calendar is published, you’ll se a “broadcast” icon appear letting you know its available. In the “Publish…” dialog box, you may also want to select some of the options available. For example, I leave the defaults and select “Publish changes automatically” and “Publish To Do items” but do not “Publish alarms” (I don’t need to be alerted to when their appointments will occur, I just need to see them on the schedule).

Back in Lotus Notes, open your calendar and select “Show Calendars” from the navigation on the left. Use the “Add a Calendar…” feature to enter the location of your .ics feed. Give the calendar a name (can’t use hyphens for some reason) and select any custom icons or colors to make it stand out. I use the same color scheme as I’ve got set up in Apple’s iCal to keep the instant corellation of “who’s calendar is what color” straight in my head.

The new calendar will appear automatically on your Lotus Notes calendar. To toggle on/off, just use the appropriate check mark.

Pretty easy stuff and extremely handy!

Tags: Apple / Mac, broncos, calendars, ical, mac, me.com, mobileme, notes

As a Mac guy, I hate to say this: but I’m not minding Windows 7 (beta). Not at all! Infact, I kinda like it!

While popular opinion around the office is that its just a slightly less panic-prone version of Vista, the user interface really is nice. It doesn’t feel clunky and is pretty responsive. I’m running it under Parallels “experimental” mode and, with the exception of a few drivers that aren’t available for things like the iSight camera, it works great. Infact, I’ve been using it almost exclusively as my Windows O/S of choice (second to Mac OSX of course).

The visual cues are probably my favorite. Things really feel like they’re “loading,” or “opening” or “copying” because Microsoft did a nice job moving windows, status bars and icons around to convey that. I’m also growing to be a fan of Windows Explorer which is a bit smarter than I think most people will give it credit for (really, its OK to stop opening everything by starting with your “C” drive).

One might quickly point out that the Mac dock has the same issue – however the Mac dock is pretty good about putting thumbnails in the dock for open documents/programs that are minimized, which turns out to be very handy.

I would have to say that the only thing I really am having a tough time adjusting to (and its kinda a big one) is the Start menu/bar. The way you open the Programs area feels like an unnecessary extra step (and let’s face it, you kinda need that process to be as easy/quick as possible). Also, the icons in the Start bar are just goofy to me. Its not clear what I have open, or in the case of Notes, how many versions/windows of that program (Notes clients, help files, etc. all group together, which makes it easy to forget that you opened them if you minimize them).

All in all, its a good start for this operating system. If I was forced to use a PC vs. a Mac, I think I’d complain far less if it ran Windows 7 (and that’s a HUGE compliment in my world).

I think its safe to say that the biggest obstacle to our upgrade plans for Lotus Notes 8.x has been: training. How much? Of what? Where do we start? Comprehensive or just what’s new? What features are most important to train on? How do we explain ALL of the great new features in a time frame that will keep people’s attentions.

Enter: Multimedia Library for Lotus Notes

This clever little utility is a comprehensive rundown of just about anything your end users might want to know about the new version of Notes. Its broken into Courses (90 minutes – more topics), Lessons (a grouping of related topics) and Topics (individual, short sessions on discrete topics).

With the help of the Lotus contact, I was able to get access to the utility to demo and it looks very nice. Multiple lanugages are available and the price is reasonable if you assumed you would out-source your training (or consider people’s internal time to be financially accounted for already).

Our pilot group has spent some time looking at this as well to determine if people will actually take the time to go out and run through these training sessions. I want to believe that they will, however the reality is that people are busy and forget. We did a similar training program with a Cisco launch and found that VERY few people actually used the on-line demos (which were fantastic! – just not used).

Feedback on the idea is still trickling in as people continue to use the recently deployed Notes 8.5 client, so time will tell just how beneficial this tool is “in the wild.”

One last note, if you’re interested you might want to bookmark the link above. I didn’t and returned to Lotus.com (not remembering what the product was called and knowing it had a name that didn’t exactly convey what it was: a training/education tool) and couldn’t easily find it. I did what I always do in that situation: google Ed’s blog. – Ah, there it is! Found it!

Two weeks ago today I was sitting in the Lotusphere 2009 OGS. I was also in much nicer weather, despite the fact that it was the longest cold streak in Orlando in 20 years. Today, I’m still on a sort of Lotusphere-high and I’m really surprised (and pleased) to see my team is applying a lot of what they learned at the event.

One of the things we were most excited about was DAOS. This utility falls under the category of “stuff I never expected IBM/Lotus to come up with, but am REALLY glad they did.” This is a great example of some brilliant thinking on the part of the Lotus development team because it gets at a core problem within nearly every company: huge amounts of redundant file attachments.

Armed with more how-to knowledge about DAOS, we returned to the office with the goal of implementing this as one of the first action items coming out of Lotusphere. Below are stats from just two of our servers:

• Mail server:
  - 171 db’s analyzed
  - 162GB of NSFs
  - 647,001 attachments
  - 368,877 duplicate attachments
  - Disk savings: 64.1GB
• Application server:
  - 158 db’s analyzed
  - 52.6GB of NSFs
  - 410,219 attachments
  - 148,035 duplicate attachments
  - Disk savings: 12GB

Beyond disk savings on those servers, the value of this extends (almost exponentially) to our backup solution. We store a few days of backups on-disk (so that savings is multiplied) and then write to tape (again, multiplying the savings) and finally to archive tapes. When you consider that the Lotus Notes/Domino upgrade that contains this feature is included in our normal maintenance and that the savings extends throughout our infrastructure … it becomes a tool that’s so much more impressive.

Tags: daos, domino, lotusphere