Episode 55, recorded on Thursday 9th June 2011, discussing the new IBM Sametime 8.5.2, Domino Express licensing, Quickr connectors and more…

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Gab DavisGabriella 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.
Adam BrownAdam Brown (blog | twitter | company ) is a Director at ISW, a focused IBM Premier Partner in Australia that operates across the full IBM Software Portfolio including Lotus, WebSphere, Rational, Tivoli, IM, and Business Analytics (Cognos). Adam is the Technical Director for the company and is responsible for helping our clients understand where IBM solutions can help them meet their business objectives. Specifically Adam is personally focused around Connections/Portal/Forms/Notes/Domino/TDI/TIM/TAM/Cognos.

Topics

Sametime 8.5.2

  • Shipped last week, a whole week early
  • What’s new?
    • Audio and video through the firewall
    • Audio and video in a browser too
    • Mute your mic in a meeting! (switches camera to the person speaking)
    • Control how much bandwidth is taken up by audio and video
  • How is the upgrade from 8.5.0 or 8.5.1?
    • Can upgrade from 8.5.1 but Gab’s advice would be to build a new environment
    • In 8.5.1 you needed a deployment manager for each server, now have just one for all servers.
  • What issues does it solve?
    • NAT traversal
    • Multiple deployment managers
  • What’s the experience been like so far?
    • Gab has done 4.5 upgrades so far, have worked really well
  • How many boxes are needed now?
    • Can get all servers on one 4way-4GB box now (for pilot purposes)
  • Has Sametime Advanced been updated?
    • Yes, same four features as previously
    • Can connect a Sametime persistant chatroom to a Connections community
    • Now runs on WAS 7
    • Expecting Advanced to be more popular now
  • How about Sametime Gateway?
    • Now runs on WAS 7 and connects to the System Console
    • Dropped the Lotus name, now IBM Sametime

The state of ‘Lotus’ in Australia

  • Some high profile customers migrating from IBM in Aus lately.  Is there still plenty of demand for Lotus development in the geography?

Ed says there’s been issues with the change to the Express licensing

  • Is the PVU/CAL model still relevant?
  • Is it fair that partners and customers try to ‘exploit’the licensing to minimise costs?
  • Could IBM make it easier to transition from one license model to another?

iWildfire has launched

Quickr Connectors for Windows x64 and Office 2010 support!

Announcing ‘Social Connections

  • The first IBM Connections user group
  • Based in the UK initially, but would love to do events in Europe and even further afield, perhaps tacked on to national LUGs
  • Thanks to The Salvation Army for providing the location and to all those that have helped so far.

Tips

Darren:
Completely off topic (and non-controversial) an excellent non-technical book, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser. Saw him interviewed on the Daily Show a while back. Has some interesting plays on why cities are “greener”
Adam:

Xmarks. If you work across multiple computers/devices/vm’s etc then Xmarks is awesome way of synching your browser bookmarks. Very neat.
Stuart:

Pixelmator – Photoshop lite for the Mac. Great app, layers work well, much more intuitive than PhotoShop, and much much cheaper! 17.99GBP in the App Store.