Software

Mar 21, 2013

The Ongoing Notes “Legacy” problem {26}

On an IBM WebcastLast week I was honored to part of a webcast that announced the worldwide launch of IBM Notes 9 Social edition.  I was able to speak about how our company uses custom applications built on XPages and Domino to run our business.  I also spoke as to how Traveler has helped our workforce be more connected, and how we are looking forward to integrating Connections into our Notes investment via Activity Streams and embedded experiences.

As the Director of IT for our company, I’m always trying to work with the best technologies to meet our needs.  Those are not always IBM technologies.  We use vendors like Microsoft, EMC, GoToMeeting, Salesforce.com, Basecamp and Box.com.  I tend to choose the best platform to fit our specific needs, whatever they may be.  I’m not simply an IBM fanboy.

That said, we’ve built the software that runs our business on XPages and Domino because it’s a great platform.  We can’t buy off the shelf software to manage our business, it simply doesn’t exist.  We could buy project management and warehousing programs, but it would be very hard to bend them to work the way we need.  That’s why Domino is such a strong platform.  I have a very small staff of very skilled developers who have built amazing applications that our business relies on to manage every bit of work we do. We have built it to fit our business processes exactly, and we can add in features at a very rapid pace.  We integrate everything including our Microsoft ERP system, and I couldn’t be happier.

So why am I writing a blog post mentioning “legacy” on the day the brand new IBM Notes 9 Social Edition is released?  Well, it’s because the market still sees it as legacy.  There has really been no discernible marketing to the contrary.  I’ll give you three quick examples that have all happened in the last couple of weeks.  All were manageable, but I can’t believe I even have to deal with them.

First, a client of ours had been auditing our warehousing software.  A German IT Auditor questioned (with much disdain) why were were using Lotus Notes instead of a “pro” warehousing system, and stated that the fact that we used Notes was a red flag.  This was from a very large, very well known organization, yet this IT Auditor considered Notes legacy and worthy of disdain.  It was even insinuated that nobody used Notes anymore.

I explained our reasoning for using Notes and Domino much like I did above, and then touted a brand new release of the product as well and over 100 million users worldwide, yet I feel that it fell on deaf ears.

The second one was an executive asking one of my employees what our “exit strategy for Notes” was?  When the exec was talking with people from other companies, and some of our clients, the general consensus was that Notes was dead and people couldn’t believe we were still on it.  So the executive assumed we had to be moving off of it soon.

Part of that is on me, and I need to continue to do a better job of internal marketing, but the reason I HAVE to do so much in the way of internal marketing is because there is little to no external marketing.  You really don’t know that Notes exists unless you deal with IBM on a regular basis.

The last thing that happened was a simple offhanded comment on the This Week In Tech podcast.  I don’t remember the context but the host Leo Laporte stated how he hated Notes and would never use it again.  Granted, this man hadn’t touched the software in over seven years, but he was still attacking it.  I’m sure he has no idea how nice the new client is, or how good the development environment is in XPages.  Yet, he still made that statement that was heard as fact by tens of thousands of listeners.

Those of you that know me, and have read this blog for nearly a decade know that I will take IBM to task when it’s warranted, and I will give credit where credit is due.  Obviously I believe wholeheartedly in Domino as a platform.  I wouldn’t use it otherwise, and I wouldn’t take time out of my busy schedule to record customer testimonials or get interviewed for quotes for press releases.  I am very publicly on record with the fact that Notes and Domino is the platform from which our business is run.

Today is a watershed moment.  IBM Notes and Domino 9 Social Edition has been launched and it’s the best the product has ever been.  It’s truly a great piece of software with so much potential in the right hands.  It would be really nice if the tech universe starting seeing it that way. I would just like the perception of Notes to get better in the marketplace, because right now perception doesn’t match reality, and hopefully IBM can work on changing that.

By Category: IBM Lotus, Software, Technology Tags: , , ,

Oct 5, 2012

Sharepoint is the next generation of Lotus Notes {9}

I got an email from a sales rep at a company called HexaCorp in Somerset, NJ.  In my role I get emails from vendors trying to get my company’s business all the time.  Most of the time I delete them and move on.  Once in awhile I’ll respond and let them know that either we don’t need their services, or we don’t use the software they are shilling.

So this exec, let’s call her Marilyn (because that’s her name) left me a voicemail and sent me a message stating that they were a Sharepoint partner and if we were planning any Sharepoint implementations or upgrades, that they would like to help.  Instead of just deleting it, I responded so she knew she was barking up the wrong tree.

Thanks for reaching out, but we don’t use Sharepoint and have no plans to.  We are an IBM Lotus partner, and will continue down that path, thanks.

So I figured that was that.  Until I got an email just now, this was the first line:

I discussed your email with my CEO and he told me that Sharepoint is the next generation of Lotus Notes.

Yeah… okay then. First, you had to discuss with your CEO?  And THAT is what he came up with? As you can imagine, my next email wasn’t as pleasant.

Remove me from your list.

That comment shows your ignorance of an entire software industry.

Sometimes the lack of knowledge people have about the industry simply astounds me.  There are a lot of things Notes related I can bitch about, but Sharepoint is definitely not the next generation of Lotus Notes.

So Marilyn from HexaCorp in Somerset, NJ, and your willfully ignorant CEO.  You may want to do some homework.

By Category: IBM Lotus, Software Tags: , ,

Dec 1, 2011

R.I.P. Napster {0}

Today the Napster service was absorbed by Rhapsody in the United States.  I’ve been a long time user of Napster, and am really sad to see it go.

For those of you unaware, the original Napster program was basically a way to get free music.  You would connect to others and share MP3′s.  The MP3 format basically made it easy for anyone to rip a CD and make it available to the world.  So you could try any music you liked, but it also lead to rampant piracy.

Now instead of trying to embrace and extend the MP3 concept, record companies sued Napster into oblivion. It took a long time for music companies to come around.  And a lot of it had to do with Steve Jobs and Apple requesting that copy protection be removed from songs.  Once that happened, many services started to emerge.

Napster itself rose from the dead as a pay service for music subscriptions.  It had a better library than others as well as higher quality music files.  It also had the ability to download tracks for offline listening.  So I jumped back in, and got a subscription and have been a happy customer ever since.

But, alas, Napster sold its US assets to Rhapsody, so now as of today, I’m a Rhapsody customer whether I like it or not.  I’ll give it a fair shake as it’s been a couple years, but Napster has historically been a much better service.  We’ll see if Rhapsody has finally caught up.

If not, many other services have emerged.  Spotify, MOG, Rdio, Slacker and others are just waiting to fill my ear hole with tunes.  We’ll see which way I go.

By Category: Entertainment, Music, Software Tags: , , ,

Jul 9, 2011

My latest travel helper: Taxi Magic {2}

Over the last couple of years as my pointy hair has grown, I’ve had to travel more and more for my job. I don’t mind travel, but I try to be ruthlessly efficient in how I go about it. While in Denver a couple of weeks ago I came across an service that will change how I use taxis forever. That service is called Taxi Magic.

I had just spent the night in a hotel in downtown Denver and I needed a taxi to get to our office. I hailed one down and we were on our way. As I was riding, there was an LCD screen in the back that was serving up entertainment and talking about the Taxi Magic service. I saw that it had apps for iOS, Blackberry, Android and Palm, so I figured I might check it out as I would need another taxi later in the day to get me to the airport. At the end of the ride, I was able to swipe my credit card and pay that way very easily. I thanked the driver and went to the office.

Later in the day when I had an opportunity, I downloaded the iOS application. It wanted me to set up some stuff, and it looked like the website would be a little easier to deal with, so I set up my account on the taximagic.com website itself. I was able to give my information, including credit card info to be saved for in-cab payments. Once I got it all set up, I went back to iOS and logged in from within the application. I needed a cab for a specific time, so I scheduled one right from my phone. I was able to choose from several participating taxi companies (I chose Yellow Cab) and then set up my time and told the app where I was getting picked up at and where I was going to.

The application scheduled the appointment, told me the approximate travel time and what the approximate fare would be. An hour before I was to be picked up I got a text message reminding me of the cab. Then as the time approached I received another text when the cabbie was dispatched and how far away he was. He arrived and we were on our way. When we arrived at the airport, I opened the app, put in the total I was going to pay (including tip) and clicked Pay. Within seconds, the driver received a confirmation code on his in-taxi computer and I we were done. It was super easy and worked so much more efficiently than anything I had done prior. In addition, my receipt gets saved to my account as a PDF for expenses later. You get to keep a history of all the rides you’ve taken.

So if you take cabs, I really recommend Taxi Magic. It was an awesome new use of technology and will totally simplify the way you go about your rides.

By Category: Mobile, Software

Dec 10, 2010

SIUED: Delicious Bookmarks {1}

In the latest installment of Shit I Use Every Day, I give you the bookmarking service Delicious. Delicious is simply a website that allows you to save your internet bookmarks to it’s website. The main thing this does for you, is that it makes your bookmarks available from any web browser. It also serves as a backup for your bookmarks. I’m sure you know people, or have been one of those people, that have all of their bookmarks on a computer, and once that computer crashes they lose them all. Delicious prevents that by storing everything in the cloud.

The thing that makes it special for me is though is the Firefox Bookmarks add-on. Firefox is the web browser I use, and this add-on integrates Delicious into the browser itself. I personally ‘tag’ all of my bookmarks according to their function. So, I have tags such as webmail, travel, social, weather, photography etc. With the add-on I can add a toolbar that shows these tags. So now, if I click the tag for Photography, then I get a drop-down of all of the photography bookmarks I have. This add-on syncs with the website, so every time I add a new site, it shows up on the website and the toolbar.

The nice thing about this, is that I can add the toolbar to any web browser and log in. So the home PC, the home Mac, and the work Mac all have the add-on installed into Firefox. The bookmarks are consistent across each browser, and adding a site on any one of them adds the site everywhere. I use my bookmarks every day, so having them available and backed up at all times is pretty wonderful.

Delicious is free, and can integrate with Chrome and more. Check it out.

By Category: Software

Nov 18, 2010

SIUED: 1Password {1}

The second installment in Shit I Use Every Day is a password management program called 1Password. I first installed 1Password as part of a bundle of Mac software I had purchased, and then it quickly became essential in my day-to-day world.

1Password is simply a vault for storing all the passwords you use on various websites. You protect it with your master password, and it remembers all the rest. It can also generate random passwords for you with more security than something you might use yourself. This program makes it really easy to use random passwords on every website you frequent, and you as the user never have to remember any of them. If I come to a webpage that requires a login, I do a quick keyboard shortcut, enter the master password, and 1Password fills in the details for that particular website and it logs me in.

That’s not all, 1Password can store software keys, credit card info, notes and even things about your identity that you fill in on forms all the time. Then you can access any of that information quickly.

Now for those of you who are concerned about security, the encryption is 128-bit AES encryption. Which Agile software says “would take millions of years for a criminal to decrypt your data using a brute force attack.” So it’s VERY secure, and wont be getting hacked any time soon. The other thought is what happens if your computer crashes and you lose all your passwords? Well, they have that covered too via syncing with Dropbox.

If you have Dropbox (my first SIUED post) installed, 1Password can use it to store your data files. That means it’s automatically backed up to your Dropbox account. This also means that your password information can replicate to all of your Mac or Windows machines using Dropbox as well as all of your iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch.) If you install 1Password on any of those devices, and they have Dropbox, then all of your data is automatically available on any of those. Add a password to your iPhone’s version of 1Password, and it syncs to everything else. Edit and change a password on your Mac, and it automatically replicates that change around. So that means your passwords are available on any of those devices at any time. It’s convenience and backup rolled into one.

So save yourself having to remember all of those passwords, and get more secure in the process. Trust me, this is much better than writing your passwords on post-it notes, and worth every penny.

By Category: Software

Nov 12, 2010

Shit I Use Every Day (SIUED) : Dropbox {5}

I often get asked by people what software I utilize a lot, so I thought that I would start writing articles letting people know the software I find useful and use nearly every day. The first installment is Dropbox.

Dropbox is a nifty little utility that does one thing, and one thing perfectly. It synchronizes your files between computers, the web and mobile devices. You install a small piece of software wherever you want access to your files, and anytime you add a new file to your Dropbox folder, it get’s synchronized to all of your other devices.

For example, I have Dropbox installed on the following:

  • my work desktop (Windows XP)
  • my work laptop (Mac OSX)
  • the home family iMac (Mac OSX)
  • the home server/biz machine (Windows 7)
  • my iPad (iOS)
  • my iPhone (iOS)

So, each one of those devices has Dropbox installed and they all talk to the Dropbox website. If I change or add a file on ANY of those devices, the change gets replicated to ALL of the devices. It’s great for making things available everywhere, and even as a cheater backup solution. I also utilize several Dropbox ‘aware’ programs that store their data IN Dropbox, so you can utilize those programs on multiple devices as well. I’ll get into that more in a future installment of SIUED. In addition, you can use the service to share files with others. So load them up in your Dropbox, and then invite others to share that folder.

So if you are interested in Dropbox, you can sign up for the free service here. It’s become indispensable in my day-to-day routine.

By Category: Software

Oct 5, 2010

IBM LotusLive wants to Vondle and Tungle you {0}

Please excuse the sex-ay title, but the 13 year old me had to chuckle at it, and with the all the other “LotusLive” posts you are going to see letting us know about the new feature announcements, I figured I’d have some fun with my post.

Yesterday I had the privilege of joining a blogger conference call in which Sean Poulley, Brendan Crotty and Ed Brill went over some new announcements for LotusLive. First off if you couldn’t tell by my rapier wit with the title, LotusLive announced support for Tungle calendaring integration, as well as integration with Vondle Live. Vondle is an online doc viewer that supports over 70 formats and allows you to annotate them from within the browser. So those two integration points were very nice, all configurable from within the admin side of things, and I think will add a lot to the experience.

For those unaware, LotusLive Notes can be had for $5 a month, and can be accessed via the web client, or a Lotus Notes client itself. It allows for a 25GB mailbox as well. In addition, if you want Traveler mobile email support, that will be an additional $2 a user per month. So for a total of $7 a month, you can have a pretty kick ass email solution you can access via web, mobile device or Notes client. Right now the Traveler support only is for iOS devices, Windows Mobile and Symbian. Blackberry support is supposedly coming soon, and I don’t see any mention of Android support yet. I imagine that once the beta of Android is done on the Domino side, that it will make it’s way into LotusLive.

Lotus also announced a new $10 a month offering called the LotusLive Collaboration Suite that includes the LotusLive Notes above as well as IM, file sharing, social networking and web conferencing. It’s a pretty full offering for only $10 a month.

As for the social networking aspect, Lotus added Communities as a feature within LotusLive Engage and LotusLive Connections. So now you can create community areas to share activities, bookmarks, discussion areas and tags. Which means you’ll see that in the collaboration suite as well. Lastly, LotusLive Notes added 21 additional languages, Engage and Connections added 5 languages and Meetings and iNotes added 7 new languages, while Meetings also added app sharing support for the Mac OS.

So in all, LotusLive continues to grow, expand and integrate. They are being pretty nimble in this space, so I’m excited to see how it is received in the marketplace, and to see how much more they’ll unveil in the months to come. Lotusphere should be very interesting.

By Category: IBM Lotus, Software

Aug 10, 2010

LotusLive Notes is Live… and it's Notes! {1}

Ed Brill announced this morning that LotusLive Notes will be available on August 24th. In addition, Lotus Notes 8.5.2 will eGA the same day. So some really good stuff coming to the table for Lotus in the typically quiet late summer months.

For those that don’t know, LotusLive Notes is a cloud based version of your Lotus Notes email. It includes calendaring, contacts, instant messaging, a 25GB mailbox quota, antispam & antivirus, and is hosted in IBM’s data centers. You can hit it via a web browser, OR you can use the full featured Lotus Notes client. And the kicker? It’s only $5 per user, per month. If you include LotusLive Engage (which has activities, file sharing, online meetings, forms and surveys, shared contacts etc.) then the price jumps to $10 per user, per month.

So that brings it in line with other cloud offerings that you can find today, but gives you the power of the Lotus Notes client. A client that can work offline, in Windows, Mac, SUSE or Red Hat Linux. To me, that’s pretty huge.

Now there are caveats. The LotusLive licensing only doesn’t allow you to hit apps on local app servers, you still need an Enterprise CAL for that. Also, Traveler support is not yet there, and when it does arrive it will cost some additional money per user. At the same time, there still is no BES solution either. RIM and IBM are hard at work on making that happen however.

What IBM sees happening (and as an IT Director of an SMB, I do too) is that if companies do go to the cloud, they will end up using a “hybrid” model of computing. Basically certain tasks or people will be relegated to the cloud while others remain on premises. What IBM is trying to do is tie it all together and make it work seamlessly. I haven’t really seen the hard core details of how they are doing it, but I can’t wait to see how it plays out.

There are going to be two additional offerings that bundle “Enterprise” support which means the ability to run apps will be included (off your local servers.) So it will be like an Enterprise CAL, and it’s only going to cost an additional dollar per user per month. So if you go LotusLive Notes, it becomes $6 per user, per month, and if you add Engage, then $11 per user, per month. Lotus will even work with you during your renewals to renew via this method instead of an Enterprise CAL. All the details aren’t finalized yet, but that’s the plan. And the fact that they spelled out the pricing in today’s blogger call was pretty cool to me.

The first feature upgrade is to take place in early October, and that should include Traveler support, and tools to help you convert users from on-prem to the cloud.

I think this is definitely a place that IBM HAS to be in order to compete with Google and Microsoft, and I think they’ve got a very good offering. Now we just need to see if the market agrees. Let’s hope so!

By Category: IBM Lotus, Software

May 6, 2008

Why Twitter Rules, a Rebuttal {13}

My friend and respected colleague Rob McDonagh just posted a rant on Why Twitter Sucks, and to me it seemed very much like the old codger saying “Get off my lawn” so I figured I would write why I think Twitter rules in a rebuttal to the fair Captain. So read his rant first, and then you can come back here. Ready? Good, lets begin:

  • There are No Unread Marks – Actually I agree with this, I would like it myself. But my guess is that there is a programmer somewhere who can work this out. It can’t be that hard. Also, follow your twitter stream in an RSS reader and you’ve got yourself unread marks.
  • People use twitter to say the Most Inane things – Very true, but many times I actually love these little details. It helps me keep in context the fact that people have a life outside the technology. Seeing that someone watches a certain TV show might make me take a look at that show myself. And more than once, seeing what someone was about to eat gave me a craving for the same thing. I like it. I guess if you don’t like people that post those things, you can always stop following them.
  • Conversations are disjointed – This is true too, but like Rob pointed out, if people used the proper conventions it’s much easier. And there are tools like Quotably that help in this regard.
  • 140 characters? – Yes, 140 characters. Deal. If you can’t then send an email or an IM. I find that having to condense what I’m going to tweet about into 140 characters makes things more concise and easier to handle. It’s a texting world, 140 characters is practically a novel to the kids these days.
  • No concept of stopping and starting a day – Okay, and this is a problem why? See, I think you have to view twitter in a certain perspective. If you consider Twitter to be a bar or a party, you can come and go as you want, and when you are there you are part of conversations, you might go to the bathroom and miss a conversation but that doesn’t mean you grill everyone on what you missed, you contribute to the people you are around at the time. Think of it as hanging out with a group of friends, and it becomes much easier to handle…
  • Twitter auto updating Facebook – Seriously, you are complaing about THIS? Both statuses (along with every other site with a status) is meant for you to post your current status. To me they are one and the same. Friends who are only on Facebook see the same thing as people who are only on Twitter. Everyone is updated equally. The fact that things like ping.fm can update statuses all over the place allows ease of use for the poster and allows users at ANY of the services to get the same information.
  • Responses that don’t make sense to people we don’t follow – I actually kinda LIKE this. You know why? Because on more than one occassion reading the reply lead me to read the original person’s tweet, and then in turn I started to follow them because they were interesting. I ignore the ones that don’t make sense or aren’t interesting to me. You need to be less obsessive compulsive about reading every little thing. Once again, think of it as a party where people are chatting. Think of the “don’t make sense” tweets as times when you walk up to a friend talking to a stranger and hear the tail end of a conversation. Maybe you jump in and meet someone new, or maybe you walk on by.
  • Spam in twitter – You’re getting nitpicky now. Of course, some people that can follow you are spammers, but if you don’t follow them, you don’t get spam IN Twitter. If you are talking about follow requests, you are diving too deep here.
  • People tweet instead of blogging – Yup, and it’s absolutely wonderful. There are many times I have a thought that I want to keep track of, but I don’t really have enough to base a full blog post on, so I tweet it. Sometimes the conversation in Twitter gets big enough to finally warrant a blog post, sometimes not. I find it increasingly harder to find time to fully blog, so being able to micro-blog on occassion is beneficial to me, and probably to many others. In fact, I bet there are some people for whom Twitter is a much better medium for them to share thoughts than a full-on blog.

Another reason I like twitter is because of my two best friends, Mike and Tim. They live several hours away, and I only get to see them a couple times a year (kinda like certain Lotusphere buddies.) Anyway, we can email and chat (and we do) but Twitter feels more like we are hanging out. One of us will say something, and we’ll respond to each other and rip on each other and stuff like that. I like knowing the details of what they guys are doing at work too. It really seems more like we are hanging out and chatting over a beer than anything else. To me, twitter has a more personal feel to it than pretty much any of the other “social” mechanisms out there.

Now take TwitNotes. Having that open in my sidebar simply rules. Much love to Mikkel for doing it for us. While I’m at work I live in the Notes client. Having to flip back and forth to a twitter client or the website gets annoying. Having it pop up in the Notes 8 sidebar is easy, and at a glance I can see the latest information. If I want to jump in, I can. 140 characters here and there is easy to do and not really a drain on productivity.

The other thing about Twitter is that I learn things I never would have by traditional means. Late last year, a tweet I responded to saved me about $500 in an electonics purchase. I know that Rob probably falls in that same boat there, and because of Twitter, he has $500 more in his pocket. To me, that’s enough to keep on using it right there.

So, in essence, I think Twitter rules. And I’ve thought so for awhile, but I couldn’t really explain it well until now. So thanks for that Captain, you’ve inspired me to put into words what I’ve been thinking for awhile! Twitter is like a large party where you are hanging out with friends, and if you treat it that way, it makes a lot more sense, and becomes a lot easier to manage in your head.

So what do you think? Does Twitter suck, or does Twitter rule?

By Category: Software Tags: ,

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