Real World Computing

It's just over 12 months since we made our first forays into the Office 365 space and I'm convinced that we made the right call at the right time.  Any earlier and it would have been wrong because SharePoint hadn't gained traction and OWA was undeveloped. Any later and we'd have lost our unique position.as innovators in this space.  It hasn't all been smooth sailing and many of our legacy systems are still on IBM Domino. The approach to migration was rushed and flawed but I'm looking forward to 2018 when the dust settles and we can begin to move forward in a more orderly manner.  All things considered though, I'm proud to have been part of the technological achievements of the year which included a complete revamp of the hardware and software in the office; including the replacement of all desktops with Microsoft Surfaces and Apple MacBooks, the replacement of our meeting room systems with Microsoft's Surface Hub technology, an office move, a rebrandi...

Over the past few months, I've been looking at a whole range of options to do with file storage on the basis that Microsoft's OneDrive simply doesn't do what we need. The whole time of course, I've been unable to shake the feeling that Microsoft should be offering something that already covers this space. After all, file sharing is one of the major "tentpoles" in most Windows networks.  As it turns out, SharePoint is the answer to this - and it works well if it's playing nicely with OneDrive.  My initial investigation of SharePoint was flawed for a number of reasons. Firstly, it appears that I was looking at an "old version".  The "new" version has really only started to come out over the last few months but it's light years ahead of its predecessor. The second reason that SharePoint was overlooked was because I really didn't have a great understanding of how (or why) it works. I was trying to compare it to IBM Domino a...

2017 marks the beginning of a massive shift in technology at work. We’re re-branding,  we’re moving office and we're changing our technology from IBM to Microsoft. It's going to be a wild ride and I hope that you’ll stay with the blog as I delve into the new world and try to figure out what works and what doesn't.  I've been on Notes/Domino since version 3.0 and I haven't used outlook at all, apart from a week in 1995 when I decided that I hated it (plus of course, the regular interactions with outlook die-hards where I've had to fix their computers). My personal favourite mail client is Gmail though I've been forcing myself to use Google’s inbox for the past three years. Of course I've used a lot of other web based mail systems over the years. IBM Connections Last year our company made the leap to IBM Verse and Connections.  It was a disaster. IBM connections is a very powerful and capable product marred by a terrible and inconsistent interfa...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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...

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....

Two of the most critical factors in the success or failure of your intranet are the ease of use and the degree to which it catches the eye.  Unfortunately, there's not a lot of choices you can make with regards to IBM Connections Community design past the front page. Once you hit a forum or a library of files and folders, every single community starts to look the same.  Luckily though, there's a fair bit of flexibility on the  opening page and on the Wiki Pages.  I've already covered how to make your community look more appealing in other posts (See Part 1 and Part 2 ) but I recently created an internal community that I thought might be useful as a design exercise. A Tiled Community Example This is an internal "social" community which uses a style similar to the Microsoft Windows 10 tiles. I chose that look because I thought it would be both "fun" and "familiar" to our users. To build this, I simply made a 4 x 3 table and set it to 1...

The new IBM Connections Desktop Plug-ins are out today ... and there seem to be quite a few changes. I decided to have a play and to document the experience for our users.  The result is another presentation.  As usual, sorry for all the blurring but I have to provide some protection.  :-) This particular tutorial simply shows how to get a file from Microsoft Excel 2013 up to a Connections.Cloud community using the File, Save As menu option. There are other ways but I didn't want to confuse people with them... not yet anyway.  BTW: If the controls on the slides aren't working, you might want to head over to Slideshare . How to upload a file to an IBM Connections.Cloud Community using the Plugins in Microsoft Office 2013 from Gavin Bollard A Word on Updates The last slide in this series tells you where to get the plug-ins. They seem to update very regularly (monthly) and each update brings great new features. Of course, it's a bit much to expe...

IBM Connections provides some amazing dropbox-style facilities. If you're finding that you can't email a file because it's too big, or because it's prevented by mail gateways (something that is very common with EXE files), you might want to give IBM Connections a go.  Note that in order to share a file, you need to have already accepted the person as one of your contacts. This procedure is explained in my previous Slideshare tutorial about How to add Guest Users to IBM Connections ,  This tutorial explains in simple terms, how to share a file with users. Everyone, even guest users, can share files (though guests clearly have lower limits than fully registered users). If you do find yourself running out of room, consider creating a community to share your files in. Communities don't have file limits and aren't counted against a user's personal storage quota. Feel free to use this presentation in your own organisation if it's relevant; How...

One of the strengths of IBM Connections is the ability to add guest users.  Unfortunately, for the moment, the process isn't as straightforward as it should be.  Here's some documentation I created for our internal users which, you may find useful in your own networks. I've blurred anything here that could  be identifiable. How to Add Guests to IBM Connections from Gavin Bollard Coming Soon.....  I also have a presentation on how to share files in connections.  I'll make this available too as soon as I've done the blurring.

The Simplest Email Signatures are often the Best These days, email is arguably the most common form of “first contact” with a potential customer, client or colleague. People spend quite a bit of time refining the content of these communications, pushing them through both public relations and legal departments and checkpoints but very few people bother to check beyond the content, specifically ... their signatures.  The aim of this post is to, Prompt you to do some basic checks.  Give you some ideas on how you can improve your signature Document how to create a Signature in IBM Verse. Ask yourself…  When was the last time you sent a work-email to your Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo account to see how the signature looks and to find out what your signature looks like with any legalese added by your corporate gateway?  When was the last time you checked out how your signature renders from a mobile device.  Have you recently checked all phone, mob...

IBM Connections.Cloud is a very powerful set of software and services but using the default settings will result in a community that isn't very pretty, has low usability and will discourage your users from participating. Luckily a few tweaks, some promises and a bit of work on engagement can make a huge difference. The Overall Plan Obviously you need to plan out what your guests and members will be doing in your community. It’s basic marketing. People don’t visit the site for nothing, they are there because of a basic need. You can’t begin to provide a solution until you've identified those needs. The needs could be as simple as, the need to obtain information or the need to collaborate with others . These aren't mutually exclusive needs but they do suggest vastly different requirements. Providing information is usually done via files and/or wikis while collaboration is more of a forums thing.  Understanding the needs will help you to build a community which satisf...