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Showing posts from 2016

Microsoft - Clear Leaders in the Race for Digital Identity

One of the less obvious trends of the last five years has been the race to own people's "digital identities". It started in earnest with Facebook and Gmail and it soon spread to Apple and LinkedIn. More recently, we've seen Microsoft and IBM jumping on the bandwagon and I think that's when I started to realise that there was much more to this than simply "targeted advertising". Quiet Beginnings  At this point, I'm not sure that all of the founding companies in this revolution fully understand what is going on - and indeed, there are many companies out there today who are still using digital identities simply as a means of easily logging people onto their systems, storing user preferences and targeting advertising. Certainly that was the original plan on our own systems. Taking it to the next level  Digital identity is the cornerstone in any form of electronic ledger system. It's one of the key foundations of commerce. People don&

Fixing Word 2016 Crashes when Opening Older Documents with Macros on Windows 7

We have a lot of documents and they go back several decades. Many of them  are still relevant today, even if they're only background to current projects. The problem is that Word doesn't like its own file formats. It won't open documents created with versions of Word earlier than 1997 and it crashes with anything saved as .DOC which contains macros.  There's some solutions to these problems though; Opening Older Documents It's possible to change Word 2016's settings to allow you to open old documents; Click File,  Then Options Then Trust Center Click on the button marked Trust Center Settings Click on File Block settings. UN Tick the document types that you want to be able to open and click Ok Of course, just because you CAN, doesn't mean that you should. Word is less stable with these settings turned on, and it's able to open documents which could be potentially dangerous.  If you're looking at your company's archives t

Embracing Microsoft while keeping Domino

When I first started this blog, my aim was to stay with mainly IBM (Lotus) Notes and Domino, hence the URL of DominoGavin.  Things changed over the years and I've found myself wanting to talk about all manner of technology brands from Symantec to Blackberry, Google, Windows and Linux. (Hence the renaming of the blog to "Real World Computing'.  Many of my most recent posts were on IBM connections. I've also tried to cover a few business IT concepts. Things are changing again and we've reached the point where it makes sense to swap out some of our IBM technology solutions for Microsoft ones. We're not leaving Domino, it's still an important part of our strategy but we are planning to move our mail from Verse to Outlook and our collaboration from Connections to the Microsoft jumble of OneDrive, Yammer, SharePoint and Delve. All of this while rebranding and moving office in a typical “office-politics” hands-tied scenario. It's going to be a fun ri

How to Use Microsoft Outlook with Your IBM Verse (in the cloud) Mail

So, all the newcomers in your company want to use outlook? IBM have put a lot of work into making the Notes client look and feel like outlook and they've given us Verse which is an acquired taste but if you like Google's inbox, it's good.  Unfortunately, there's just just no pleasing some people.  If you don't have Notes and Domino apps, then there's nothing at all holding you back. Nobody without Notes/Domino applications (or perhaps a huge investment in IBM Connections) should be using IBM's mail offerings. On the other hand, if you do have apps for which there's no equivalent in the Microsoft world, here's another option that you might want to try... Give your users Outlook but point it to their Verse Mail. That way, you can concentrate on either migrating your apps to another environment or webifying them to the extent that there's no reason to use the notes client.  In this post, I want to discuss how to access Outlook mail - Not

The Difference Between IBM and Microsoft's Social Systems - An Analogy

We're currently in the process of trying to set up a Microsoft cloud environment. No, we're not giving up on Connections. We're straddling a couple of environments. The Microsoft experience hasn't been overwhelming so far but that's for another post. Right now, I want to talk about some of the fundamental differences between IBM and Microsoft’s attempts to conquer the social business market. ...and what better way to tell it than an allegorical tale? Two houses So let's assume that instead of cloud collaboration platforms, we're talking about “houses”. Both fulfill the same basic functions; being a "house" for your data and a place where the people that live there (and invited guests) can access that data. The real difference is in the way that the two companies have gone about preparing their homes. The Engineer's House One company, let's call them the engineers, have focused on infrastructure. They've added rooms, s

Making IBM Verse Easier to get to...

One of the most frustrating things about the whole IBM Verse experience is the difficulty in getting to the application. If you go through connections, you have to go through normal mail first. This ruins the experience because it isn't “seamless” to the users. The obvious answer is to bookmark the verse site but there's a few other things that we can do to really  smarten the experience up. Making Verse the Default The first thing to do is to make Verse the default mail view. To do this; Go into Connections. On the top Right, click your profile picture In the drop down menu, choose "Mail and Calendar Settings" On the next screen, click Mail (on the left) - Actually, it should already be selected. Tick the box marked - [x] Make IBM Verse my default mail experience . You should see a highlight telling you that your changes were saved.  Setting up a Decent Shortcut/Favourite Link So, you could of course, add a favourite to the bookmark bar or d

Looking at Cloud Licensing - Microsoft, IBM and Google

We live in interesting times and while I haven't changed jobs in years, I now do IT for several companies.  What makes this even more interesting is that some are on the IBM infrastructure, some are on Google and some are on Microsoft...   ...and of course, there's a bit of change from one to the other. I tend to get a lot of licensing-based invoices across my desk nowadays.  Recently, we shifted our IBM licensing to the new IBM Mail Dual Entitlement plan. It's basically a combined Notes and Connections licence. Since I've been doing a lot of Microsoft work for another company, I thought I might do a comparison... especially since numbers are so hard to find on the web. Note that these figures are in Australian dollars and they're probably not entirely "apples to apples" (or entirely perfect -- I've rounded) but they still make for interesting comparisons.  They're not intended to be proper comparisons.... more for interest sake. IBM $1

IBM's Cloud takes the Pain out of Updates

I’ll admit that I'm generally not very kind to IBM on this blog. It's not that they're doing a worse job than their competitors, I'm still very impressed with some of the things they're doing.  It's just that after using Notes/Domino for over 20 years, I hold them, sometimes impossibly, to very high standards…. and, of course, any goofs on their part affect my systems a little too directly. The Quiet Migration to 24x7 One of our biggest frustrations in recent years has been the understated migration of our systems from a business hours model to a 24x7 one. It's not so much that our business became so critical that it needed to go 24 hour but more that changes in mobility and connectivity mean that people now expect to be able to connect to our systems at any time, anywhere. Almost imperceptibly, we quietly moved to a "zero tolerance for downtime" model. IT changed to suit the business needs in this regard but the change itself and the i

What's Wrong with the IBM Connections.Cloud Welcome Message (and what IBM Needs to do to fix it)

One of the interesting things about being in IT is that you're responsible for hundreds of "automated" messages each day but... as an IT person, who was already set up on the system from day one, you never actually get to see them - at least, not until someone complains. One of the things we do at work is provide an area on IBM Connections.Cloud for parties external to our own organisation to collaborate. The collaboration in this space is with some pretty important people.  Recently we had our "communications" staff member express unhappiness about the IBM Connections welcome message which went to the CEO of a large institution. I've been sitting on it for a while wondering how to explain this to IBM but today I read a great article on welcome messages .  I figured that blogging might be the best way to explain the problem. The Message So, without further ado, here is the message (which apart from 5 words) is entirely created by IBM. See if you

Good Resources for Support with IBM Connections and Verse 2: Official Channel Web Sites

A couple of posts ago, I provided a list of LinkedIn Groups which I've found to be good sources of IBM Connections Information.  In this post, I aim to provide some "Official" web sites.  Needless to say, the majority of these will be IBM resources.  Of course, there are lots of great personal blogs out there too but I'll cover them in a different post. The Three Big Questions for "Developing Products & Services" IBM Connections (and specifically Connections.cloud) is a "developing product/service". As such there are always new holes, new fixes and new ideas.  There's always just that little bit of functionality which either doesn't work as expected or doesn't go as far as it could.  That's not to say that IBM Connections is a bad product, simply that like all "developing products/services" (indeed, like all Modern Products & Services) the ground is constantly moving and sometimes you need to stop an

The Importance of Email Retention, Journaling and Recoverability (and why Cloud Solutions Fail)

For most of us, email is simply a means of communicating work.  It's a glorified, bi-directional to-do list with comments. Emails come in, we read, do and delete. Once the work is done, there's usually no need to find the email again.  That's all very true except for when something goes wrong and your company gets taken to court. Suddenly then, all those deleted emails are very, very important.  How Email Discovery could work under Litigation So, assuming that there's a legal case, such as a lawsuit, that involves your company. You could be asked to produce all the emails within a given period (say, six months) which include certain key phrases -- or perhaps all emails from a now-terminated employee. In the event that email cannot be produced, you could be fined or worse, you could lose the ability to defend your company in court.  ...and it doesn't stop there, your company might not even be directly involved in the court case but could be dragged in as

Copy as Table works (in One Direction) for IBM Notes/Verse Interactions

Copy as table used to be one of my favourite IBM Notes features. We have a lot of databases full of documents, news stories etc. We also have an office which is "entirely migrated to connections.cloud" but not entirely using Verse.  Some people just won't let go of the Notes interface - we're working on that problem.  One of our databases contains news stories, the links for which we regularly send out to the rest of the organisation. We quickly discovered that the Verse users couldn't open the links. This is because the doclinks had our Notes Server names (eg: http://internalserver.ournetwork.local) as http, instead of Notes protocol; (Notes://internalserver). This morning I discovered a great update to Verse.  I don't know when exactly IBM did it, but I'm very grateful. To Copy Documents as a Table Go to a Notes database (in the Notes Client) and select a bunch of documents  Use Right Mouse click, Copy as Table,  They're now on the

Good Resources for Support with IBM Connections and Verse 1: Linked In Groups

I was originally hoping to produce a single list of all of my (so far) collected resources. Of course, the problem with that is that I have to review the sites to make sure that they're still relevant -- and provide at least some added value.   I've decided, that in the short term, I'll just point out some useful groups of sites. This is the first of a bunch of posts on the topic. This time, I'm covering LinkedIN.  LinkedIN If you're not a member of LinkedIN, it's well worth signing up (it's free anyway). LinkedIN has matured over the years and while people are usually still "too serious" on the site, It's no longer just a place for jobs.  There's some great technical discussions and articles that come up on there. LinkedIN isn't the best resource for connections but it's one of the easiest ones to engage. IBM Messaging & Collaboration Professionals https://www.linkedin.com/groups/37836 This group has 29,000

Turn off Location Services on your iPhone to Conserve Power

My iPhone has been driving me crazy these last few weeks. The power has been draining so fast that I need to recharge by lunch time if I still want a phone (and not a brick) by the afternoon. I'd been blaming my iPhone for being old but as it turns out, the problem was much simpler than that - It was location settings.  When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. After all, you have to assume that if your phone is going to communicate with the satellites (and other receivers), it's probably going to need a bit of power to get up there. Then of course you factor in the number of apps which are using location services (it's exploded since I last looked in there).... and of course, many of the apps use location services "always". Yep, that's right... even when you're not using the phone. So, how do you turn these things off? First, you need to get to Location Services. The easiest way is via these three icons; Settings Privacy Location

Cloud is great but IBM Verse misses a step in Business Continuity

Today's world is all about cloud.  We have email in the cloud, document storage in the cloud, data, applications and even development in the cloud. Why Cloud is Best From one point of view, cloud is an excellent choice. You no longer need to worry about; Physical servers which can suffer hardware failures. Storage and rack space for servers Local services, such as Air Conditioning and the Water Supply in the computer room. Local environmental factors, such as storms which can directly impact your infrastructure. Local backups, which can take hours and require special software Tape management (or streaming backup services) Server failover -- this is managed by the cloud sites. Hotfixes and patches to operating systems and applications. Most of the cloud systems offer some pretty good restore functionality too. For example; IBM Connections has some great version control tools which allow you to roll back to previous versions of your file.  This means that if a us

How to set IBM Verse as your Default Email Client

We've recently rolled out IBM Verse and we're trying to get our staff members to use it (willingly) rather than mandating the change.  One of the issues that we've come up against is the humble Mailto link.  If you go to any web page that has a mailto link and click it, it goes to Notes. Obviously we want those links to go to Verse. It's a simple fix, here's how to do it. How To Open IBM Verse in Google Chrome (it might be possible to use other browser but I haven't tested them). Click on the Service Handler Icon in the Address Bar (Right hand side) A dialog box will appear asking if you want to allow Verse to open all Email links. Choose Allow. Click Finished. That's all there is to it.  Now you can browse around and find a mailto link like this one and click it.   and here's a picture (click on it if it's too small).

Harnessing the Power of Shadow IT

There seems to have been quite a bit of press lately about “Shadow IT” and it gives the impression that it's a new thing. Perhaps having a formally recognised name is new but shadow IT has been around throughout my (so far 28 year) career in IT and I suspect that it's much older than that. What is Shadow IT? Shadow IT is what happens when someone, not associated with the IT department, starts offering IT services to other parts of the business. Shadow IT can take the form of someone bringing in software from home, downloading software or even writing their own. Sometimes hardware is involved too with work PCs being opened, repaired, upgraded or otherwise "enhanced". In particular, since the emergence of cheap network hardware and the explosive growth of USB, its become very common to find users trying to plug their own hardware into work systems and networks. Sometimes new systems are developed. In one place I worked, a marketing employee rolled out a La

How to Embed Video into your IBM Connections Wiki

Everybody loves video but while IBM Connections allows you to upload images, for some reason it doesn't have a simple "video upload" function. No problems though... just add your own code. Attaching your MP4 File If you're referencing an external public video, for example something on Youtube, then you can simply copy the embed codes from there.  If you want to host your own video (privately) on connections, you'll need to follow these instructions; Open your IBM Connections Wiki and go to attachments.  Upload your MP4 file as an attachment. Once it's uploaded, right mouse click on it and copy the URL to the Clipboard. Figuring out How Big Your Video Is You'll probably have seen your video playing somewhere already, so if you can, screenshot it and put it into a graphics package.  Crop the edges so that just your video is showing and then attempt to do a resize.  The original dimensions shown, should give you an indication of the size.