Episode 14, recorded Friday 20th August 2010, discussing 8.5.2, ‘What is Lotus Notes’, Collaboration University and more.
Hosts
Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter) and Darren Duke (blog | twitter)
Guests
Marie Scott (blog | twitter) is Director of Email Services at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. She has been working with Lotus Notes since 1996. Her primary interest is Domino administration in large, complex environments. She has worked on large migration projects and recently completed a project to transition university students to cloud computing. Marie has spoken at Lotusphere and IAMLUG on topics including Domino administration and Tivoli Directory Integrator. She is currently co-authoring a Sametime user’s guide with Tom aka “duffbert” Duff.
Gabriella Davis (blog | twitter | email | company) is Technical Director of The Turtle Partnership, an IBM Lotus Advanced Busines Partner. Originally a ccMail Administrator, Gabriella has been working with Lotus Collaboration software since 1993 and today works extensively with the WAS-based Lotus products including Connections. Sametime and Quickr. In addition, she and her company act as primary Domino Administrator for customers worldwide covering more than 400 servers, 30,000 users, and 60 domains. When she can, she lives in London in a house stocked with 5000+ books, 14 ip addresses and 1 neglected television.
Rob Novak (blog | twitter | email | company) is President of SNAPPS, an Advanced IBM Partner for 14 years providing products, services, hosting, and business process consulting in the collaboration, enterprise content management, mobilization and business intelligence markets. We’re known for doing Quickr work like customization, support, and templates, although that’s really about 1/4 of what we do – lately we’ve been doing Notes client sidebar apps, working with iPhones and iPads, XPages, the works. Everyone on staff is a 15-20 year Lotus nut. We just did announce our first paid product in seven years (since we tend to give everything else away), some modules for Quickr that really enhance the user experience. Rob has 3.99 business degrees, has spoken at most of the industry conferences and user groups on both technical and business topics, and last but not least we – meaning SNAPPS with the amazing co-producers the Turtles in London – produce Collaboration University.
Neil Burston – ( twitter | email | company) is a long term Collaborationist who has worked with Lotus products since being involved in deploying Lotus Notes 3.0 in 1993. He has subsequently been through the full gamut of Lotus products (remember HotMedia Connect anyone?) from 1.0 versions of QuickPlace and Sametime through Portal and Workplace, to the latest Cloud Offerings. A long time advocate of supporting the Community and User groups, Neil was heavily involved in organizing the many excellent Connectr events, bringing people together to share their experiences of utilizing Social Software, in particular Lotus Connections, to help deliver value to their organizations. Now working outside the “Yellowverse”at Helveta, an award winning Supply Chain solution provider, most famous for helping indigenous people barcode hardwood trees in tropical rainforests and then use handheld computers to map and track tree movements. During his time at Helveta Neil has worked on a number of projects in countries as disparate as Honduras, Peru and the Democratic Republic of Congo where his ability to speak several languages has been a major asset.
This podcast is 80MB and runs for 83 minutes at 128kps. Enjoy!
* Please note that all views expressed are the participants’ own and do not necessarily represent those of their employer(s).
Show Notes
8.5.2 and LotusLive wrap-up from last week
- What are the key new features?
- Will you or your customers be upgrading soon?
What is Lotus Notes?
- Asked by Mary-Beth Raven
- Is it possible to define?
- What did we think of the definitions folks came up with?
- Why did MBR ask the question?
Using Tivoli Directory Integrator to provide ‘directory independence’between Domino and AD
- What’s involved?
- What is TDI?
- How much does it cost?
- Is this really a substitute for the Directory Independence planned for Domino?
- What other TDI resources are there? there are some useful starter videos
Notes & Domino 8.5.1 Fix Pack 4 now available
Events
Submitting abstracts for Lotusphere – what’s the secret?
- Gab and Paul’s posts
- What are the tracks that our audience should consider submitting for?
- Advice from the team – what works/doesn’t etc.
- Also worth listening to Chris Miller’s IDoNotes podcast with Paul and Gab on this topic.
Tips
Darren: Something I’d stumbled upon, using “Windows + Tab”in Windows 7. I’d seen this in screen shots before, but had never seen it in real life. I’d assumed MS had pulled it out.
Marie: For admins — don’t forget that you can use the Copy/Paste feature to manage ACLs that need to be exactly the same. On the files tab in the Admin client, right click on the source db, select Access Control, Copy to select the source ACL, then right click on the recipient db, select Access Control and select Paste. You can actually change the ACLs on multiple databases at one time this way. Second tip is for those admins who may need to follow up on a network problem and need a tool to backcheck what the network nerds in your shop are telling you. Check out Wireshark. It’s free and will sniff all sorts of protocols. There is also online training available.
Gab: Windows 2008 R2 ISN’T SUPPORTED for Sametime 8.5.1 according to technote released this week Make sure if you are installing ST8.5 you have plenty of free disk on hand. The zipped installers are over 10GB and unzipped and then installed you need at least 20GB free and that’s not a 20GB partition that’s 20GB AFTER the OS has installed.. Windows 2008 can eat up over 15GB by itself.
Rob: Quickr server upgrades are intense operations from a disk I/O standpoint – even fixpacks. Large Quickr servers may have hundreds of places with thousands of rooms, each its own nsf and each place with a multi-database full text index. Indexing is mad on a Quickr server in general. SO, you can save hours and even days during an upgrade by using the simple notes.ini setting UPDATE_NO_FULLTEXT=1. It can be sent with the console using set config, takes effect immediately, and prevents all full text indexing from occurring on the server during the other intense operations that happen during the upgrade. Just set it back to 0 when you’re done and you can literally save 50% of the upgrade time, even on fixpacks. Oh, and I suppose it works on mail servers too…but they don’t tend to have so many multi-db FTIs going crazy all the time.
Neil: Not so much tips, more some homespun advice!
1. Value the Lotus Community – it is a great community even if there is an element of “circling the wagons”at times. There is a huge array of talent and very extensive portfolio that you can get help to explore from your fellow Community members, especially your friendly Business Partners.
2. Lotus is not just Notes Domino platforms – you need to explore the WebSphere based product – it can look daunting at first but there is a great deal of useful information to help get you started – witness the Lotus Information Development Center material
3. When these worlds come together there are some interesting things that happen – such as the LotusLive family. BPM BluePrint on the LotusLive platform is of particular interest and worth exploring more..
Stuart: JustNudge Delicious import widget for Lotus Connections (free, free, free!) Joint project between Collaboration Matters and JustNudge, working on a series of Connections widgets, including this one, profile progress (as per LinkedIn), multiple reporting lines and more.
