When I heard about this at Lotusphere I instantly got excited. For a good rundown of what this is, read this guy’s blog entry (why retype something someone else did brilliantly, right?).
In short, ID vault synchronizes IDs and ensures that users who have multiple ID files out in the wild have the information (certificates, passwords, etc.) in the ID file synchronized. It also includes a number of tools that are designed to provide better administration of ID related activities (password resets and such).
For some reason, in my excitement I *thought* that it would also solve a problem we have where people use PCs in conference rooms and don’t have access to their ID. Sure, we’ve provided instructions about how to move it to a network share, but not everyone “gets” that. We could also store the ID on the network, but that doesn’t fix the issue for laptop users. I *thought* ID vault had something available that would help address that but apparently not.
If anyone knows of a clever way around that problem, I’d love to hear about it.
Kevin Notes Administration domino, id, notes
This is a topic I find myself debating quite a bit lately. I “get” the benefits of virtualizing it, I really do. But the normal behavior/benefit of Domino skews things a bit.
Our Domino environments replicate databases everywhere. Its also really easy to start up a new Domino server on another box in the event of a disaster (an ID file, names.nsf, notes.ini and a bit of elbow grease and BOOM you’ve got a box that thinks its been a Domino server for some time). Those two features alone have always weighed heavily in my continued committment of the Domino platform because it removes a lot of headaches associated with disaster recovery and business contniuity planning.
Still, virtualization is a good idea. But how? What do I need to be thinking about? How do I get started?
And then this article (”Benefits of virtualizating Lotus Domino“) arrives in my inbox. This is probably one of the most helpful rundowns of the virtualization concept that is specific to Domino that I’ve seen. So I’m sharing.
Kevin Notes Administration domino, virtualization, vm
One of my favorite features of Notes/Domino is how easy it is to set your servers to accept email messages from variations on your actual email address. For example, if Joe Smith’s email address is jsmith@company.com, Notes/Domino can actually be set (using the “More variations” option in the server document – I believe that’s what does it anyway) to accept and route messages sent to joesmith@company.com, joes@company.com, joe.smith@company.com, etc.
That’s one of the most handy things ever! It makes it very easy to get an email to someone at a company when you’re not exactly sure of their email address. Its also helpful for us, because we have employees that work at the corporate office and/or one of our divisions, so we exploit this option to also accept emails from addresses like jsmith@company-subsidiary.com or jsmith@parentcompany.com.
The result is that its very easy to associate email addresses based on whatever naming convention or URL makes the most sense, and IT doesn’t have to manage it on a case-by-case basis. We can just let employees pick whatever makes sense and run with it (the exception to that is our Spam filtering service does require a match, but we auto-load those with common email address alternatives when creating the account for the first time, thus side-stepping the problem in 90% of the cases).
I was reminded of how powerful this is the other day when I was trying to contact someone I recently met but lost a business card for. I guessed and guessed and guessed at their email address before I finally found a winner. The whole time I kept thinking: well THESE people aren’t using Notes… but should!
Kevin Notes Administration
I did my first internal demo of Quickr today at the office. I pulled a group of people that regularly work with customer projects AND are visionaries to show them this tool. I started the demo saying that our I.T. group feels like we’re sitting on a product that can do a lot of good in the company and solve some problems – however, we don’t have a clear idea of how/where/when to integrate this product into the business.
A half-hour into the meeting, they understood exactly what I meant.
Quickr gives us the ability to set up places where we can collaborate around projects. Its easy to understand attaching files (although check-in/check-out is going to be a training point, since lots of people haven’t done that before). Its easy to understand a group/project calendar. The ability to drag-n-drop onto Windows Explorer or the Notes 8.0.1 sidebar (which prompted me to revisit the “we’re not upgrading yet because… blah blah… performance is poor… blah blah blah”) is all very cool and handy stuff! And the task list is much easier to deal with than anything we have today. But here’s what we all felt were issues to consider further:
- It looks really flexible – which is good, and yet creates a training problem if you’re applying it to a process you want to be consistent. Action item: look further into “Custom” places.
- Quickr entry/personal is a PERFECT way to build viral adoption. However, the lack of folders will kill it before it starts. Too many people have FINALLY found a way to structure their file system using a folder organization that makes sense. Not having that means Quickr entry will be seen as a down-grade.
- It would have been really nice to have some strong interoperation with Notes accessible to developers. We want… something… that would give us an easy way to integrate the hundreds of Notes apps we’ve built over time right into Quickr places.
- The navigation appears easy, but gets more complicated the longer you look. – I’m not sure if its terminology or what, but we kept expecting documents to be in one area, but found them in another.
- Custom forms, pages, etc. look really powerful but appear to be hidden within the system (and I had to hunt them down each time I wanted to create or edit one).
Of all the products I’ve dealt with lately, this continues to be the one that has the most promise. But cracking it into the organization continues to be really tough. We have a good set of action items out of this meeting to research further, and a list of projects that might fit into this initially. I’m anxious to see where it goes in the next few weeks!
Kevin IT Management, Notes Administration
If there’s one single product I’m most excited about from Lotus, its Quickr. Our company, like many others, can always benefit from better tools that help us collaborate with one another, and Quickr looks to be a strong tool to do just that.
However, our Quickr launch efforts have been slow-going to say the least. Previous versions had plenty of bugs that frustrated end-users (read: “gave them an easy excuse to give up”). The latest version has a MUCH improved UI. Yet, I just can’t seem to get past some of the goofy bits about the product that just shouldn’t seem to be there. For example:
- You can’t add users to a room when you use a Domino Directory only. You have to use LDAP. Yes, a Lotus product won’t use the Lotus address book to add new users to a room unless its via LDAP. — Now, that’s an easy fix and let’s face it, if you’re not using LDAP you probably should start. Still, its just goofy.
- The personal edition is there, but not. You can issue a console command to create personal spaces (or mass load them via an XML file) but there’s no UI piece to do so. Again, not a big deal, but goofy.
- The UI has been improved quite a great deal … but there’s still left-overs. You’ll run into a few areas where old (as in “from quickplace”) buttons still exist. Again, not a big deal, but its goofy considering how much the UI has been improved overall.
For the record, all of this has been confirmed through Lotus support.
None of this is going to prevent me from pushing Quickr as a possible tool in the organization. However, when you don’t dive into a product very far and start to run into odd things like this, its often not a good sign of things to come. — I’m just going to assume that the list above is the complete list of goofy things and move on. 
Kevin Notes Administration
The Minnesota Lotus Notes user group met recently to discuss a migration from Domino to Exchange by RSM McGladrey. You can see the presentation for yourself here.
A couple of thoughts on this. First, the “problems” they identified for moving away from Domino included:
- Aging Lotus Notes solution did not meet the needs of a mobile workforce
- Need more flexible and web-based interfaces
- Anyplace, anytime access to email
- Integration with Microsoft apps
- 85% of workers are mobile most of them
The solution to these problems seems to be pretty easy to me: “upgrade to Notes 6.5 or higher.”
While we all know that Domino CAN do all of the things in the “problems” list above, that’s not the point I want to make. I think this is a GREAT example of why Lotus/IBM needs to do more marketing about Lotus Notes/Domino. Its clear through comments like this (from big companies, even) that there are basic features in Notes that people don’t know about.
Now, IBM is doing a good job of allowing this story to continue to be told because there are some good things for current and potential Notes customers to read about. However, I challenge that a stronger, focused marketing campaign that communicates the value of Lotus Notes in the enterprise would do even more good.
Think about it: if a company like RSM McGladrey, an existing Notes shop, can come to the conclusion to rip out Domino and replace it with Exchange based on the bullet points above … then doesn’t suggest that Lotus/IBM isn’t adequately communicating the value, features and power of their tools with each version release!?
Marketing. It works. – I’ve said before that the “R5 – I am” commercials were the closest thing I’ve seen to a strong marketing campaign. It was a good start, I wish they would have kept going.
Maybe in Notes 8?
Kevin Misc. Info, Notes Administration, Notes Development
To do this, the process seems to be something like:
- Get Notes
- Get a digital camera
- Get a Mac (not needed, but never a bad idea)
- Take everyone’s picture (keep a list of the name of the person and the number of the photo, you’ll ned that later)
Optional: Pay a real photographer to do this … the pictures will look MUCH better.
- Upload the pictures to your computer and label them
- Import into Notes
Here’s the problem. I had no clue how to do #6. I mean … where does Sametime (for example) look for these pictures? Each time we’ve done this in the past, we’ve had a seperate database that we created, web-enabled and agentized to sync to our Domino Directory to the database to keep all the employee information correct. But, do I really need to figure out how to integrate all that into Sametime?
No. A quick notes.net search turned up this document which tells you exactly how to do it (in your main Domino Directory). Now … let’s just do a little File\Database\Delete on that other one I worked so hard on a few years ago…
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khansen Notes Administration
I intend to use it for:
- Users who don’t have a laptop, but travel or work from home/remotely
- Users who use multiple computers (aka: everyone in our plants, part-time users, temporary staff, etc.)
- Everyone not in our office (that way we can configure Notes from here, send them a USB stick and not have to worry about all the messy desktop configuration stuff like local address books or what to do when they get a new computer)
This is probably the single biggest advancement in Lotus Notes for my company in many years. But you do need to know a few things before you do the install. Here’s the most comprehensive link I’ve found about those details:
Link: Chris Whisonant: Lotus Notes 7.0.2 – NOMAD Review
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khansen Notes Administration
I stumbled across this new feature in Notes 7.0.2 the other day. Its a pretty small change but a nice reminder for end-users who might not realize they are about to open a potentially dangerous attachment.
(Note the “Attachment Actions” dialog section.)
Kevin Notes Administration
If
you’re like me, you find yourself wondering how in the world some
people “deal” with the rediculous amount of documents that exist in
their in-box!
I like to keep my in-box nice-n-clean. I think everyone else should
too, but I don’t have a good reason why. Until now! And the
justification I was looking for came in the form of everyone’s favorite
term: performance improvement!
I came across this article from IBM: Best practices for large Lotus Notes mail files (IBM.com, 10.11.2005) which is really written to give Administrators some idea of how to better control the cost of hardware that results from ever-growing mail files demanding more disk and processor resources.
There was one part of this (very long) article that screamed out to me. Check out Fig. 5 (below) which shows the response time end users experience based on the number of documents in their in-box. The results of the report stated:
“Keeping the Inbox at 1000 or fewer documents resulted in dramatically faster response times to end users…”
And there we have it! Proof that users should keep their in-box clean. “Who has 1000+ in-boxes,” you say? You’d be surprised!
Kevin Notes Administration
