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Posts by John Roling:

REVIEW: Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1 Upgraders Guide

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I’m probably the last person to get around to reviewing the Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1 Upgrader’s Guide from Packt Publishing. I’ve been busy, and the PDF nature of the review copy personally made it hard for me to get to until I got my iPad. Having an eReader was far nicer than having to whip out the laptop each time I wanted to delve in. Anyway, for those still wanting a review, here you go.

To refresh your memory, from this book you’re supposed to learn:

  • Explore the new features in Domino Designer 8.5.1 that help build business and collaboration applications quickly
  • Get to grips with features including security, mail, calendar, and contacts
  • Get solutions to issues that you may encounter during the upgrading process
  • Quickly examine coexistence issues involved in running Notes/Domino in a mixed environment and solve them efficiently
  • Discover add-on products such as Lotus QuickPlace/Quickr and Lotus Sametime for a typical Notes/Domino infrastructure
  • Review iNotes updates and explore its new features in full mode
  • Integrate Lotus Domino 8.5.1 with IBM servers and tools
  • Save disk space by managing attachments on a per server basis using Domino Attachment and Object Service (DAOS)
  • Integrate Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) with Lotus Notes 8.5.1
  • Roll out your new deployment with ease by using enhancements, dynamic settings, and the Database redirect policies of Notes/Domino 8.5.1

To me, the book is a little uneven overall. I really like that someone has written a book for Notes and Domino, and I think there really is a lot of good info in here. But I think they really should have thought of this as a book someone on ND6.6 or 7 would be reading on whether or not to upgrade and really focus on ALL of the new functionality from 8.0 on. Maybe have a chapter each on what was new in Notes 8, Notes 8.5 and Notes 8.5.1. Makes it a little easier to breakdown. And, I’m really bummed that they didn’t focus on Widgets and LiveText in the book. For me, I run tons of widgets. The File Navigator from OpenNTF.org, Gist, TripIt, Tungle, and Linked-In. I use live-text all the time. To me, this is a huge omission. They really only mention it in policy and what user ID’s you are using.

They still also call Symphony the Productivity Tools, so you can tell that’s a little outdated. Some good info on it, but I would have liked to see the Symphony brand mentioned in there, if for nothing else than to keep the momentum going around that name. Also, Chapter 4 is Lotus Domino 8.5 Features, and Chapter 10 is Domino 8.5 Enhancements. I’m not sure why they split that into two chapters, and why even if they did, they didn’t put them next to each other. Just seemed weird to me.

That said, in Chapter 10, they did a great job on what I think is one of the defining features of these latest releases, and that’s DAOS, the Domino Attachment and Object Storage feature. They go into pretty good detail, and DAOS is pretty much a feature that justifies the cost of an upgrade completely on it’s own. They also do a really great job on going over the issues of coexistence between old releases and the ND8.X codestream. They even go so far as to teach you how to run both Notes clients on a workstation at one time. It could always be done, but it’s unsupported, so I thought it was really cool that the book taught people how to do it. It’s pretty useful information.

They do also have a chapter (Chapter 8) on What’s new in Notes/Domino Development. What I find curious is that the biggest feature is arguably XPages, and they don’t really give it a lot of in-depth coverage. I imagine you could write a whole book with XPages as the focus, so that could be the reason it is kind of glossed over. But still, the two biggest things with these releases are DAOS and Xpages and they do great on one aspect, and not so great on the other.

If you want to check it out for yourself, Packt offers Chapter 8 – What’s New in Notes/Domino 8.5 Development for free so you can download it and see for yourself.

Overall, the book is pretty good and if you ARE an organization looking to upgrade from 6.5 or 7, this will be a good thing to read through to see reasons why you would want to upgrade, and what the potential gotchas are. It’s good to see books like this on Notes and Domino in the marketplace again, and hopefully Packt can clean up a couple of the omissions in future iterations of the book.

LotusLive Updates

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Today Lotus continued to embrace the blogger community with a briefing to tell us about tomorrow’s official announcements surrounding LotusLive. Sean Poulley, Brendan Crotty and Ed Brill hosted the webinar, demos and Q&A session. Here’s the scoop:

Tomorrow, IBM Lotus will be announcing three new capabilities for LotusLive.

  • Integration with Business Services
  • Essential Bundle for small and medium-size business
  • New markets for Lotus Live

The Integration with business services is pretty cool. They’ve lined up four initial partners: Salesforce.com, Skype, Silanis (eSignatures) and UPS.

The Salesforce.com integration will allow you to have a LotusLive tab within your Salesforce dashboard that can connect you to LotusLive Files, Meetings and more. The integration is really nice and fairly seamless. You can tie files and meetings to particular clients and do all the stuff you normally do with data in Salesforce. You need Enterprise licenses at Salesforce.com in order for LotusLive integration to work.

Skype integration is what you would expect, allowing you to click drop downs to make Skype calls directly from many areas within LotusLive. Silanis is a very robust eSignature platform, and UPS will allow you to track packages and print out mailing labels and such. Enabling this functionality is as easy as clicking a checkbox in the LotusLive administration area. They mention that this is only the beginning too.

Next, the new Essential Bundle for small and medium size business includes Web Mail, storing and sharing files, management of projects, IM, and social networking. It’s a fairly robust bundle and will come in at $7 per user/per month. You can find more info at www.LotusLive.com/bundle. Minimum purchase is 1 license only. Also, by next quarter they hope to make it as easy to sign up as going to the site and punching in your credit card information, something we dinged them for not already having. In addition, one other thing that existing users will enjoy is that storage of Files will go from 1GB to 5GB and iNotes storage ups to 25GB.

The last thing they mentioned is that they are opening new markets for LotusLive with 15 new languages. General Availability will include Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish with more to come.

Now the blogger cloud, being who we are beat up Lotus a little bit about LotusLive lacking a couple things. First, partners want to write and sell applications that can work on the LotusLive platform. This includes the need for a real LotusLive app store of sorts. Well, they’ve stated that an SDK will become available in the second half of year and that an app store is indeed in the works. So pretty good news all around.

It’s nice to see Lotus continuing to embrace the bloggers and our community. It’s not earth-shattering, but it’s very much appreciated by us who live our Lotus lives every day.

The iPad changes the game.

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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.

LCTY Survey. Really?

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LCTY Survey, originally uploaded by Greyhawk68.

Okay, you make arguably the best collaboration and RAD software in the world, and every developer that has ever worked with your software has created a survey app at some point.

Yet, you EMAIL a plain survey form for me to what? Print out and fax you? Send via carrier pigeon?

If you don’t want to seem like an old stodgy legacy platform, maybe you shouldn’t do stuff like this.

At least use surveymonkey for FSM’s sake.

Cotton Horizon (Week 10)

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Cotton Horizon (Week 10), originally uploaded by Greyhawk68.

This week I wanted to see what I could capture with my iPhone. I tried quite a few pictures, but didn’t really like any of them. Until I got out of work one day and saw these clouds.

I took a couple different pictures (even the one simply called Cotton that precedes this picture) but for some reason I really liked the silhouette down below. After uploading, I edited a bit with Picnik, and here’s the result. It’s nothing spectacular, but I really like it for some unknown reason.

Hope you do too.

Repeat after me: DRM is bad for the customer

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DRM, or digital rights management is the fancy term that movie and record companies use to mean copy protection. Basically they use some sort of technical lock-in technique so you can only play your media on a particular device, or it prevents you from making back up copies.

I don’t know about you, but for music, I want to play it a lot of places. iPhones and iPods, Sonos, streaming to Xbox or PS3, on my Mac, on Windows, etc. etc. My solution? Anything I buy is in MP3 format from Amazon or ripped to MP3 from a music CD. That way, I can play it everywhere.

Now when it comes to movies and DVD’s, I’ve never been a really big ‘ripper.’ I am an audiophile when it comes to movies. I want my 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound for my movie. Ripping a movie and streaming it across the network usually loses the surround sound and reduces it to stereo. That really limits my enjoyment. Add to that the fact that ripping a movie is questionably legal.

Nowadays, both of my daughters have iPod touches. As such, when we go on long trips, they can bring a movie or two along with them. The movie company’s compromise has been what is called ‘digital copy.’ So you can buy a Blu-Ray or DVD with a Digital Copy included. The DVD/Blu-Ray set with digital copy generally costs more, but you get a portable version of the movie that you can take with you. Every movie I’ve gotten with a digital copy up to this point works as follows:

  • You get an extra disc
  • You pop that disc in your Mac or Windows machine
  • iTunes pops up
  • You have to enter a DRM code that came with the movie
  • The movie downloads off the disc and into iTunes

So first of all, you have this movie that can only be played in the iTunes ecosystem. iPods, iPhones, iPads and AppleTV. It’s annoying, but that’s largely what we have in our house, so for the girls to take their movies with them, it’s a compromise.

Well yesterday we bought the movie ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.’ It was really funny movie and it comes highly recommended. BUT. It was a DVD/Blu-Ray/Digital Copy combo. We paid extra for the digital copy. Well yesterday I realize that the digital copy is only for Playstation 3 and the Playstation Portable. The big text on the front simply said Digital Copy, so I assumed it was the same digital copy as I always could get (a la iTunes.) Looking at the back of the box, I later found the tiny print saying it was for the PS3 and PSP, but the giant bold lettering on the front didn’t tell me that.

So needless to say, I paid extra for a digital copy that I’ll never use. I’m savvy to this stuff, and I still bought the wrong thing. How many other people is this happening to? It’s not good for the consumer in any case. If they are going to include a digital copy, it should be something open standards that can be played pretty much anywhere.

Yesterday, the movie companies turned me into a ‘ripper’ of movies. I’ll have no qualms ripping my own copy for portable enjoyment from now on. I’m not going to pirate anything, I’m simply never paying EXTRA to get LESS. I’ll take the DVD and make my own copy, and watch it anywhere.

Somewhere Volker nods approvingly

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