Technology

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: , , ,

Bucket List: Visiting the TWiT Podcast

Mar 9, 2013

Bucket List: Visiting the TWiT Podcast {2}

I’ve been a huge fan of Leo Laporte since his days at MSNBC’s “The Site” and TechTV.  Many years ago he started the TWiT Podcast Network.  TWiT started as This Week in Tech and expanded to tons of different programming options.  It’s all free and much of the tech news and punditry I get on a weekly basis comes from listening to those podcasts on my way into work.

Since I’ve been such a fan, I really wanted to visit the studios where the TWiT podcasts are recorded.  So, during a business trip this last November, I made it a point to drive to Petaluma, California to see everything in person.  It was a great experience, and I got to meet Leo, and panelists Baratunde Thurston and Nick Bilton.  They couldn’t have been more gracious.  It was a great thing to check off the bucket list.

Anyway, for those of you interested, here is my photo album of the experience!

By Category: Entertainment, Photography, Technology Tags: , , , , ,

We live in the future

Nov 20, 2012

We live in the future {0}

A couple of weeks ago I flew to the US west coast for a business trip.  Mid-flight I tweeted the following:

I’m at 38,000 feet, playing Words with Friends, listening to NFL Sunday Countdown and drinking a screwdriver. THE FUTURE, I AM IN YOU!

I had my iPad in hand and was connected to the WiFi in the plane.  I was streaming a football game in the background, checking Twitter and Facebook and playing Words with Friends.  It really struck me how insanely cool that is.

As a kid, I would have never envisioned the internet, tablet computing, online real-time multi-player gaming or streaming audio.  Much less while mid-flight.  Oh and that tablet device houses thousands of songs, dozens of books, comic books, magazines, and several feature films, all in the palm of my hand.

I landed later in San Francisco, then drove to Petaluma, California to watch one of my favorite podcasts record live, This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte.  Think how unusual podcasting is? When I grew up we had a couple local radio stations and you had to listen to what was on, and only what was locally available.  Now anyone can record a show (in high definition nonetheless)  and make it available for download to people the world over.  Folks like Leo can make careers in podcasting and have fans anywhere.

Then driving back to San Francisco, I drove through a mountain tunnel, and then over the Golden Gate Bridge.  What amazing feats of engineering.  Humans continually amaze me, and it’s insane how far technology has come in my lifetime.  I can only imagine how things will be 10, 20, and 30 years from now…

The future, I am in you, and you feel awesome.

By Category: Personal Life, Technology

Jul 23, 2012

My Brief Lusty Fling with the Galaxy S3 {7}

Recently my long time love, the iPhone, had been seeming a little distant.  We had fallen in a rut, the two of us.  We did the same things, never switched it up, and life became kind of boring. Maybe it’s a mid-phone release cycle-crisis, but I was yearning for something more, that spark, that sexiness that was lacking.  That’s when I saw her.

The Samsung Galaxy S III.

She was beautiful.  Thin, gorgeous face, lightweight, and curves and buttons in all the right places.  I’d never been in a relationship with an Android before.  Sure, I had a couple dates in the past, but never really committed.  So I thought that this time I would give it a shot.  I would go full on Android and see if the grass truly was greener.

At first, everything was new and exciting.  Connecting to my Google services was a snap, and installing Lotus Traveler worked like a charm.  Then as the courtship continued, we started to visit all of the same old haunts.  Foursquare, Dropbox, Foodspotting, Facebook, Twitter, Rhapsody, Yelp, TripIt!, and even 1Password welcomed us.  Everything was comfortable and familiar again.  A new coat of make-up perhaps, but everything worked as expected.  Getting them from the Google Play store was pretty decent as well.  Seemed easy to shop and find what I was looking for, and clicking them brought them right down to the phone nicely.

The S3 wasn’t afraid to mix things up either.  ”You don’t like the default launcher?  Let me try on something more comfortable.  I have an entire wardrobe I could switch into.”  And for role-playing, let’s just say she wasn’t afraid to be Chrome or Firefox or Dolphin if I really wanted her to be. Flexibility, oh yes.  She had some kinky new things she wanted to try too, like tapping other phones and swapping data.  And while hot, unfortunately it was hard to find many others in the crowd that swung that way. When we did, it was really exciting the first time we tried, but after that we would get disappointed when everyone didn’t want to play. It’s still kind of an underground community, but I think more people will become uninhibited as time goes on.

But some aspects of her personality really got to annoy me after awhile.  She kept notifying me of things over and over again, and I couldn’t easily convince her to only tell me about the things I wanted to hear.  She wasn’t a very good listener either as time and again she would screw up or ignore easy to understand requests. She also seemed to wear out more quickly than iPhone did.  I could spend marathon sessions with iPhone no problem, but Galaxy S3 got tired and always wanted to go to bed early. Even when she would stay up, I could never please her with only one hand.  She always required that I used both my hands on her tall frame.

Dealing with her schizophrenia Dissociative identity disorder about email was a nightmare too. It was a little too much with having to switch between mail, and a GMail client and a Traveler email client.  I mean, pick a mood and stick with it will ya? She even sported three different messaging clients by default. I just never knew what I was going to get. Lastly, she was inconsistent. Sometimes I would push her buttons, and how she responded today might be different than how she responds tomorrow. It sometimes became a guessing game trying to figure out how she felt.  It became tiring after awhile.

So as of today, I’ve broken up with Galaxy S3.  Sure, she’s sexy, and we had some incredible nights of passion, but quite frankly, iPhone really gets me better.  iPhone really knows how I like to work it, and will be there for me when I need her.  There’s a lot to be said about someone you can rely on, and iPhone has never let me down.  Despite our rut, I still love her, and probably always will.

All of that said, the Galaxy S3 might be your personal dream girl though, so feel free to date her, I won’t be mad.

Galaxy SIII Pros

  • Great Camera
  • Big Screen is gorgeous and easy to read
  • Light and Thin
  • Flexible Software Choices
  • Connects great to Google Services
  • Near-field communication features
  • Expandable storage

Galaxy SIII Cons

  • Big Screen is too hard to work one-handed
  • Multiple clients for email and messaging
  • Lack of consistency in apps (menus and such)
  • Battery Life isn’t quite as good as my iPhone
  • Plastic outer shell feels a little cheap
  • Lack of notification granularity
  • Default storage (without additional card) tops out at 16 GB
  • Back button was sometimes inconsistent
  • S-Voice was no where near as accurate as Siri

 

By Category: Technology Tags: , , ,

Jan 12, 2012

CES 2012 {0}

Amex CES #ces12For those of you that don’t know, I work in the trade show industry.  I’m the Director of IT for a premier exhibit marketer.  We do everything related to exhibit marketing.  Design, Build, Warehouse, Ship, Install, Tear Down etc.

Since I’m on the back-end IT side of things, I normally don’t go to the show floor to see how things happen leading up to an event.  This year I decided to change that, and go see what takes place before an event.  I figured I might as well go big and hit the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas.

In a word, overwhelming.

This show is absolutely huge.  On the CES website they state that there are 35 American football fields worth of exhibit floor.  I walked all of that.  Every day.  For three days straight.

I walked it on Monday, before the show was open to the public.  I had my exhibitor badge and got to wander and check everything out.  This was about 20 hours before the show went live, and it’s amazing how much work still has to be done in that last period of time.  I honestly was floored by how much teams for every exhibit do in that last day.  They had been setting up for a week already, and still had tons of fit and finish work to do.

One Tuesday I got there about an hour before the doors open, and I was able to once again walk around before the floodgates opened.  There was still polishing and vacuuming and tons of other things going on everywhere.  Teams really do make the most of their time.  :-)

I spent the day walking the floor again, taking pictures, and checking out various products.  I just wanted to take in the enormity of things, so I spent most of my time walking and checking out differing booth designs and how different categories of products related to each other.  It tends to become sensory overload really quickly.  There must have been 40 premium headphones vendors and just as many iPhone case manufacturers.  Those were just two of the many categories of products.  But even though we in the tech industry enjoy CES, this is really a show focused on the average consumer.  People buying TV’s, cell phones, tablets, stereo equipment, accessories, car stereos etc.  Sure, many manufactures showed off ultra-book designs to compete with the likes of Apple’s MacBook Air, but that wasn’t the big focus.

So I enjoyed it, but since it was my first time, I ran around and looked at everything fairly superficially.  I think in future years I would probably plan out what I wanted to look at first and map out where I wanted to go.  It would make for a less harried experience. That said, I really have a new admiration for the people that put these events and booths together.  The work put in is simply mind-boggling.

In all, CES is an awesome behemoth of a show and worth a trip to other gadget addicts out there such as myself.  It’s absolutely overwhelming in every sense of the word, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing :-)

If you want to check out my photos of some of the various booth designs.  You can find them here.

By Category: Entertainment, Technology, Work Life Tags: , ,

Oct 28, 2011

iPhone vs. streetsweeper {4}

Earlier this week an employee at my office couldn’t find his iPhone.  So we pulled it up on Find My iPhone and saw that it was at our office.  So we started looking around for it, and then a curious thing happened.  It started moving down the street.

We figured that someone picked it up and made off with it, so a couple of folks jumped in a car and started after the blip on the GPS screen.  When they finally caught up with it, they found a Chicago City street sweeper vehicle.

The iPhone had fallen out of a pocket, was swept up by the street sweeper and then dragged for blocks.  The entire time it was still giving out its signal for Find My iPhone despite the fact that the handset itself was fairly destroyed.

So Find My iPhone is a pretty cool feature, and can stand a beating to the phone itself.  Good to know.

By Category: Technology Tags:

Oct 7, 2011

The Good, The Sad and the Meh {0}

This has been a rather interesting week for me from a technology perspective.

First, at the day gig, we are launching a new piece of software that effectively runs our entire business.  It’s a big change, so myself and Declan have been traveling and helping answer questions during training.  It’s the largest software launch that our company has probably ever done, and it’s all written in XPages.  Yes, XPages.

Declan has put together an incredible application and I’m very excited for it to go live.  It requires Lotus Domino 8.5.3 for some of the functionality, and lo and behold, that was released by IBM on Tuesday.

We’ve been testing 8.5.3 for quite some time, and actually wrote this application in all of the betas.  So we’re confident that 8.5.3 is going to work well, and very happy that it finally shipped. :-)   That was the good…

On that same day another company in Cupertino, California announced a product of much speculation.  The general consensus on the iPhone 4S was “meh” but it’s still a pretty damn cool phone.  I’ve already gotten floods of requests for the new device (especially since it is now on Sprint) so that’s going to take off quite a bit I think.

Lastly was the sad news of the death of Steve Jobs.  I know there have been tons of eulogies out on the web, so I don’t have too much to add other than it does make me sad to see such an innovative person leave us so young.  56 IS young folks.  And cancer… well just fuck cancer.

Anyway, think of how profoundly Steve Jobs changed everything about computing.  From creating the first truly “personal” computer to revolutionizing the phone and tablet market.  There was no smart phone market five years ago.  No portable music market ten years ago.  No real tablet market two years ago.  No app stores.  Sure these things existed in small pockets, but no one ever really got them to work, and to take off, and be as wildly successful as Apple made them.

Jobs got the music industry to sell unprotected DRM-free music.  Got movie and TV studios to rent movies digitally.  Got periodicals to create digital versions.  Hell, they even got Adobe to create tons of support for HTML 5.

Let’s not forget his time running Pixar, the most successful digital movie creator in the world.

Steve Jobs was a one of a kind individual.  And one that I admired, and try to emulate on certain levels.  It was a sad day for technology, and a sad day for me personally.

I wore a black turtleneck and jeans today.  My little way of paying homage to someone I admired.  RIP Steve, you’ve made a huge impact on me, and how I compute on a daily basis.  Thank You.

 

By Category: IBM Lotus, Technology

Sep 14, 2011

Kickstart My Heart {2}

Recently, I’ve supported a couple of projects on Kickstarter.com and I realized that it’s possible that many of you don’t even know what Kickstarter is.

Kickstarter is what is called “crowd-funding.”  Simply put, inventors or artists or anyone with a dream can try to raise money for their dream via Kickstarter.com.  They place the project online, and let people know how much money they are trying to raise.  People can then donate to the project and help to make the project a reality. If enough money isn’t raised, then you aren’t charged a dime and project doesn’t get made.

I’ve helped two projects recently.  One is for my favorite lounge music cover artist, Richard Cheese and Lounge Against The Machine.  Richard covers contemporary songs in a lounge style, and he’s quite funny as well.  I’ve purchased all of his albums and even seen him in concert.

Well it takes money to make an album, and they weren’t sure they were going to be able to continue making music.  So they decided to try to raise money on Kickstarter to pay for the recording of the new album.  If you donated a small amount of cash to the cause, you would get the album, a little more and you would have it autographed all the way up to paying to get your name said in a track on the album.  So you weren’t just donating, you were getting something back too.  Needless to say, they raised enough money to make the album and I now have an autographed copy featuring awesome new lounge covers like Tik Tok, Like A G6, Boom Boom Pow and even Rebecca Black’s Friday.  :-)

The other project I donated to will probably get it’s own blog post because it’s a pretty cool new piece of tech, so I’ll hold off until then.  That said, I wanted to clue everyone in on how cool Kickstarter is.  Go check out the site, and you may be able to help some really cool ideas come to fruition.

By Category: Entertainment, Technology

May 24, 2011

SSL Hell {3}

If you’re a long time reader of this blog, you are very aware that I hate the way SSL is implemented on Domino. I mean c’mon, even the logo in the management database still has the old R5 Domino logo.

Anyway, at the day gig, we have a wildcard SSL certificate to handle multiple subdomains within our main domain. That means that each domain in the *.acme.com range uses the same SSL certificate. So X.acme.com and Y.acme.com both use the same cert. Domino handles this a little weirdly itself as you require a specific IP address for each SSL subdomain, but that’s not what I ran into this week.

What happened is that we need to use that same SSL wildcard on an IIS server. So, we simply downloaded it from our registrar and tried to install it within IIS. Problem is, it didn’t work. Searching for Google info on SSL on Domino is a little sparse, so my server admin contacted the registrar to see what they thought. They said we needed to export the certificate from Domino and then import it into IIS. For some reason, you couldn’t just install it on IIS once it was already installed previously on Domino.

So, I go to the SSL database on Domino and opened our keyring for our wildcard certificate. I looked around and couldn’t find an Export function anywhere. It doesn’t exist. In addition, Domino saves your info in a keyring file with a .KYR extension which cannot be read outside of Domino. So now I was at a loss. So once again I started googling info on this and came across this post. Kevin was exporting for use in Apache, but had come across the same problem that I just had.

He found a utility from IBM called iKeyman. This utility allows you to open a Domino .KYR file, and then export it to a PKCS12 (.P12) file. Once you do that, you can use another utility called OpenSSL to convert into whatever other formats you may need. For me, IIS was happy with just the .P12 file so we were able to use that and didn’t need to bother with OpenSSL.

So now, SSL is working on IIS and Domino. A huge thanks to Kevin for his blog post. I wanted to post as well to give a little more Google juice to SSL issues you may run into with Domino, SSL and wildcards.

By Category: IBM Lotus, Technology

Apr 5, 2010

The iPad changes the game. {6}

On Saturday, Apple released it’s new device, the iPad. I didn’t pre-order one, but I thought I would stop by our local Best Buy to see if I could snag one. If the line was too long I would just go home. Well, as I arrived at the building a mere 15 minutes before opening, I was ninth in line. I saw footage on TV later in the day that showed hundreds of people in lines at various locations around the states and Chicago in particular. I guess I just got lucky.

Anyway, since luck was on my side, I figured I should pick one up. As you know, I’m a gadget freak, and an Apple fan in particular, and my job as an IT Manager requires me to keep up on the latest trends (at least that’s how I justify it to myself and my wife.) So, it was a pretty easy decision on my part.

Anyway, I want to tell you, this device lives up to the hype. The screen is absolutely gorgeous, applications are lightning fast, and navigating it couldn’t be easier or more intuitive. Now I know I have naysayers in my readership that simply think of this as a big iPod touch. To a point you’re right, but I really think this is a niche product that bridges the gap between your phone and computer perfectly. Let me explain a bit.

First, you can think of this as a better Kindle. I’ve always had a technolust for the Kindle myself, but I don’t read enough to really make one worth my while. Also, I never really liked the fact that it wasn’t in color. Well, the iPad is basically a better color version of the Kindle. Some might prefer the e-ink of the Kindle to the iPad display, but from my experience with it, I can read for hours without any discernible eye strain, and it’s very readable. In addition to the iBooks app you can get from Apple, you CAN also download the Kindle application from Amazon and read books from the Amazon store. To me it’s the best of both worlds. If Barnes and Noble ports an e-reader to the iPad, you can get all three. So out of the box, it’s a better book reader.

Next, it handles Photos really well. They are easy to view with the multitouch interface, but you do have to import them from iTunes. More on this in a bit, but just understand, once you DO get the pictures on the device, it’s gorgeous in pretty much every aspect. Now once you get those pictures on there, you can click a button on your lock screen to kick off a photo slideshow. Now you have a digital picture frame. So the iPad can replace that as well. Set up the charging dock on a shelf with other photo frames and there you go.

Next you have the email client, calendar and contacts applications. They all work rather well as you would expect from Apple, they’ve just made them look a little nicer for the iPad display. I synched them all up via Mobile.Me and was ready to roll. The iPod “Music” piece was as you would expect as well. The Movies piece was the same as on iPhone, but looks a WHOLE lot better.

Next is the web browser Safari. Safari does everything great, except for Adobe Flash. This is a direct snub on Apple’s part, and one that annoys me greatly. That said, any site that I go to on a regular basis worked fine, just the Flash aspects were blank when I ran into any.

So you get an eReader, a digital picture frame, Movies, Music, Email, Calendar, Contacts and Web Browsing. For a LOT of people, they don’t really need anything else.

Take my parents for example. I helped them buy a MacBook near the end of last year. They had never used a computer before and it’s fairly overwhelming to them. This device really would have been all they needed, as the things I mentioned are all that they ever really do. My family has a desktop computer in the living room. My kids, wife and I all use it. My wife has an old Windows laptop too. She uses it to surf the web and do email, but as it’s probably 5 years old, the thing is a tank. She never really wants to take it along when she’s on the road. The iPad changes that. She’ll get one (when the ones with built in 3G) come out, and all of the portable stuff she wants to do can be done on the iPad. She’s not replacing a laptop with a laptop, she’s replacing it with the iPad.

Then there’s my mother-in-law. She has a MacBook and loves it. But when she travels on a plane, or is somewhere with the grandkids in a hotel she wants to be able to take along some movies, music and games that they can all utilize. The iPad does that for her much easier than her MacBook. And she can still do pretty much everything SHE does on a normal machine, only in a much smaller footprint.

Then there’s me. I have several machines for work and home, but I love the iPad. I can use it on the couch, or out on the deck with a cigar, or pull it out easily on a plane. To me it’s the perfect size device to use in those situations. It doesn’t replace another device like it does for my wife, but it supplements it in a way that’s easy to take around, and wonderful to use.

So that’s just the base functionality. If you take all of the applications being built, you can see how this one device will change how certain things are done. For example, seeing interactive newspapers and magazines, in full color with embedded video and interactive weather maps is amazing. And if you check out the Marvel comic book app, it’s absolutely stunning. I can see how people’s entire collections of comic books going forward could be digital. In a future post, I’ll debate whether or not that’s a good thing. But there are so many applications, that it boggles the mind what this can do going forward.

The only real issue I have with the device, is the same one I have with the whole Apple eco-system. They trap you into using their programs, or buy stuff that only they approve. It works so well that we as users experience Stockholm syndrome and fall in love with our captors. Things like not supporting Flash, blocking applications from the app store (Google Voice, adult apps,) having to use iTunes to sync devices, or the DRM they tie to many files you download should not be applauded. This device is no different in that regard. In fact you HAVE to sync it to iTunes when you get it to even use it out of the box. It’s annoying to say the least. The thing is, it all just works, and works great, so most people really won’t care, or if you are like me, you’ll at least put up with it.

All I can say is, this device does everything it needs to do to be successful. Over 300,000 sold on launch day can attest to that. You can scoff if you want to, but I dare you to play with one for 15 minutes and not be impressed. I thought going in that I would like it, but I’m surprised as to how cool it really is to me, and it WILL change the way media is published. Trust me on that.

By Category: Mobile, Technology

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