DominoKeys.com

One of the other sites I work on quite a bit is Netcot.com (which, for those of you looking for a great weekly podcast about Disney parks, I’d suggest checking out now — or in the iTunes podcast area under “Kids & Family” – its been a featured podcast for a bazillion months now).

Anyway… I’ve wanted to do a video that blends Lotus and Disney… eh… worlds, into one segment for a couple of years now – and I’ve had no shortage of people to help me. I did, however, have a shortage of time to edit it … until now.

The video below is a look at what its like to attend a conference at Walt Disney World and it heavily features the Lotusphere event. The video is targeted at listeners of the Netcot Podcast (read: fans of Disney parks) but I thought people reading this blog might enjoy it as well.

Tags: disney, fun, lotusphere

I posted something about having problems with Quickr Personal Places not showing up after the 8.2 upgrade. The team at my office was able to dig up a fix, which I’ve left as a comment on the original post.

Tags: lotus, notes, quickr

THE NUMBER ONE question I’m hearing from people these days is “NOW can I use the iPhone with Notes?!?!”

The question comes on the heels of the WWDC event earlier this month and they are all wanting whatever-the-product-is that I’ve told them to “wait” for (Traveler, but they don’t care what the product is – they just want to use the iPhone in a Notes world). As a shurg my shoulders and begrudgingly say “no… not yet” I get a lot of disappointed and looks.

“But… but Apple announced a new phone! AND a new operating system! And… and they even talked about enterprise support… AND I SAW this…”

“… and ASSUMED that Lotus wouldn’t allow MICROSOFT to be mentioned without Lotus ALSO working with the product?!?!”

Now… in fairness, there are a lot of technologies at play here that are hidden within end-user comments about “Microsoft” and “Exchange” when they really are talking about stuff that’s a bit more complicated. At the same time, it doesn’t matter. Perception is reality and they have the perception that Apple and Microsoft are working well together while Lotus and Apple aren’t.

Damage control: I consistently remind people that IBM is a large company and that I’m sure they have no shortage of people working on the product. I remind them that its in beta testing at Greenhouse and that there’s a new release of Domino around the corner which, hopefully, will have support for the iPhone in it.

Still. It would have been nice to see “Lotus Notes/Domino” as the third bullet point to the slide above.

We just updated to the latest version of Quickr and WOW is it an improvement. It is noticably faster and its clear that a lot of it has been cleaned up. There’s also a bit more Ajax goodness floating throughout it. Longstoryshort: a strong upgrade for the product.

I’d still LOVE to have the ability to have folders in my personal Quickr place and Mac support. Oh, Mac support… that would be GRAND!

Which brings me to this question: anyone else having problems adding their personal place via Quickr connectors? It looks like you can only add team places, not personal places (which were previously an option to add).

Anyone else found this? Just me? Work arounds?

Meanwhile… this is promising: Pandabear @ Snapps. Its beta so there’s still plenty that I’m sure they’re working on. I’d like to see something different for uploading files (dragging files onto a Panda is fun, but not as business-like as I need it to be) and more functionality added throughout. But its a great concept… especially for those of us who work in a world of multiple OS’s.

Tags: adobe air, lotus, panda, quickr

I’ve been unusually quiet around here lately. Its not for a lack of things to discuss; rather its because I wasn’t sure how to even go about explaining them with any value. Then I realized this is a blog – valuable comments are purely optional on blogs.

First off, we’ve begun the formal launch of Lotus Notes 8.5 in the organization. Its going quite well. We’re using the automatic upgrade, some policies and a home-grown training course (which I’ll post once we’re done with it) in mandatory sessions that last about an hour and a half. User response has been positive. Favorite features include the ability to show other calendars ontop of your own (yet no one is using it with calendars other than internal users) and Sametime IM. I think the later is more of a result of bringing it to the front sidebar than anything else. However, the “preview” of some of the planned Cisco-Sametime integration helped too… people really seem to be excited about that.

Next, Quickr. We came “this close” (put your finger and thumb together spaced about 1cm apart) to jumping ship to SharePoint based largely on user interface. That’s a huge factor. For whatever reason, SharePoint seems instantly more intuitive to our users than Quickr does, despite the fact that we use so little Microsoft-anything its almost unbelievable.

I think some key users toughed it out long enough to make it seem (at the moment) like Quickr will stick around. However it made me seriously think about developing (and then selling, or at least posting for download) a Quickr template that looks like a mirror image of SharePoint. (hint hint – to any enterprising Quickr fan out there looking to make a buck on the side)

Lastly, Sametime. This one is still a product that is suddenly on the fence for us. Don’t get me wrong, its a great tool, looks fantastic and is easy to use. However it has two big “flaws.” It requires some Java stuff to download before the first use (which I’m told changes in 8.5) which is hit-or-miss with how well it works (or how likely the end user is to screw it up by not waiting or paying attention to warning messages).

The second big flaw is in how it renders the screen. Its essentially square blocks which get refreshed based on changes. We see more and more lag with this as we have Sametime meetings around 3D CAD designs, engineering simulations or even screens that require some modest “scrolling” during the meeting. Sametime has a tough time keeping up despite some big internet connections between all parties involved and a dedicated server that’s plenty big.

We’ve looked into Fuze as of late which is a promising tool (and has an iPhone app – bonus!). There is a fair amount of pressure to make a change in our committment to Sametime based largely on these performance issues – however I’m keeping the faith and waiting out the storm for some first hand experience with the 8.5 release. Hopefully that’ll just fix all of my problems.

Oh yeah, and then there’s the iPhone stuff. Still waiting. Patiently. Its coming – I know. And when it does, I anticipate some floodgates opening in the form of people wanting it and then wanting our applications to work closely with it.

Tags: iphone, notes, quickr, sametime, sharepoint

Hi. I’m a Mac.

And yet, when it comes to a few select game titles (two in particular) that are graphics intensive, the Mac (using Windows within a virtual machine) doesn’t quite cut it. Years of fighting that made me realize one simple thing: I could just spend some money on a true PC and have that problem go away completely. So I did.

Its been a long time since I bought a PC for my home. I went to Dell’s website, found the best deal I could. I was impressed at how easy it is to configure the PC (and how easy it is to slowly add a lot of $ to the total! — “for $40 you can have… GREAT, thanks… now for $60 you can have…”).

While I expected that they’d try to sell me some USB memory sticks, a monitor and printer, I didn’t expect to see either of these:

…or these…

I imagine there are people out there financing their new computer and a $9 DVD over the course of a few years. Not my idea of smart money, but hey, whatever.

The process was quite easy although I was surprised how long it would take to arrive. I didn’t get anything fancy and was told it would take nearly a month “or later.” It’ll be interesting to see exactly how long it takes to arrive.

Tags: pc, shopping, website

Since… well, marriage… I’ve become someone who wants to be well organized. Not at all times, but certainly most of the time. Especially when things seem to get out of hand.

For example, our server room is often a drop zone for old computers, monitors and random other crap that once could carry an electrical current. All of this stuff has the intent of being reviewed and disposed of properly but we’re all busy and that means that sometimes it piles up. Several months ago I set up a day where we call cleaned through the room, which made a world of difference and has given us an area that we’ve been able to keep clean ever since.

One of the cornerstones of this process was my insistance on labeling things. Just about everything, really. Servers should have something that IDs them (perhaps not the name or IP address – since you might have a security issue with that, even in a locked room). Shelves for common supplies, etc. I even insisted on getting a decent label maker to ensure things looked nice.

Yes, that led to the label maker getting… a label. Hilarious. — But its not as bad as the picture (below) I got from my brother. At his office, they did the same type of thing and someone went to great lengths to label this item:

Well… now we know that cable isn’t connected, don’t we?

Tags: organization

If I were in charge of Ford, I think I’d be a bit mad. The company is doing fairly well (all things considered) and yet the government is actively bailing out GM and Chrysler in various ways. I think I’d be all “umm… would you guys mind NOT helping out my competition?!”

It was that thought (and the fact that its car shopping season for me again) that led me to the Ford website. Not because I’m really interested in anything in their line, just because I hadn’t taken a moment to notice what has changed in various vehicles (and American Idol was on in the background – and at this point, I’m thinking that maybe the Ford Focus is trying to be one of the final contestants based on how much that thing is shown throughout each episode). It was at that time that I noticed an interesting header on their web page:

Tags: beta, websites

Yeah, weird idea, right?

I got an email this morning from Kisco Information Sysgtems (that’s how they spelled “systems” in the email) who has a product that runs on your System i / iSeries / AS/400 (whatever you’d like to call it) which allows your system to have twitter-like functionality.

They admit its an odd combination but go on to give you a few examples of how you could use it. Things like system, message or file monitoring, personal tweets back to Twitter or as an internal marketing tool. Not a bad idea. I think I’d still prefer the Domino version but I can see how this might be handy.

Prices range from $295 to $495 based on how many partitions it’ll run on. The Domino counterpart is free via OpenNTF.org.

Also if you’d like to follow all my random tweets you can do so here. Keyword: random.

Tags: domino, iseries, twitter

Like you, I get a lot of emails, phone calls and voicemails I didn’t ask for. I’m surprised at just how many lists my name must appear on that people are willing to buy. And the hit rate for emails/calls I’m actually interested in is extremely low. I’d guess less than 1%.

Knowing that cold calling isn’t something anyone likes, I at least try to answer the phone as much as possible to give people 30 seconds of my time … however I recognize that I don’t get paid to answer my phone either, so I do my best to manage that properly. The problem is that I’ve seen an increase in the following tactics from cold calls:

• “Hi, I want to know what it takes to get on your approved vendor list…” (I don’t even know you or what you are doing, so why are we starting there?)
• “… we help IT managers reduce costs and set strategic objectives that are inline with the business and managed to tight budgets.”  (So… you help IT managers do their job for them?)
• “I was wondering if you have any old equipment we could buy back.” (That one is such a good intro and always leads to you having to pay them.)
• “What are your challenges for this year.”  (Avoiding phone calls like this? Is that a valid answer?)
• (Paraphrasing) “We do everything.”

I find that if I ask people to give me the highlights of their company in an email it works out well. I can then view the information on my own schedule, check out their website and decide if I need to follow-up with them. Occassionally, people clearly don’t like that idea and I’ll tell them to explain what they do and why I should be interested in 30 seconds (the typical elevator speach). Most people can’t do it (and are presumably still talking if I hang up).

However, I think I’ve cracked WHY people are calling/emailing me so often: they think I’m someone I’m not. This morning, I followed a link in an email I didn’t ask for to get more information. It was a unique URL that clearly went to the database they purchased with my info in it. The system brought in all of my information into a web page with fields completed that I just had to double-check. I discovered that I work for the government, in another country and have a title that defies description:

Tags: emails, telemarking