Real World Computing

We had the re-badged "Lotus Comes To You" event in Sydney a couple of weeks ago - "collaboration something or rather...." As usual it was an interesting event but I couldn't help getting some strange vibes from both the business partners and from fellow customers on the Lotus brand. I figured that this was as good a time as any to share them. The "Package" One of the greatest things about Lotus Notes/Domino is its swiss-army knife style ability to do just about anything. ROI in the domino world is a great thing. There's fewer servers to buy, less software and amazing integration. Any existing Domino server can be converted to a different type of domino server without the need to reinstall. For example, it's simple to convert a mail server to a document database server and/or a web server. Such a thing would never happen in the Microsoft world. I guess we've all used the swiss army knife analogy at some point. It's a key strength. ...

IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1: The Upgrader's Guide by Tim Speed, Barry Rosen, Joseph Anderson, Dick McCarrick, Bennie Gibson, Brad Schauf and David Byrd Published by PACKT Publishing. This book clocks in at about 336 pages which is nowhere near enough to be a complete administrator's guide to the gigantic field that IBM Lotus Notes and Domino has become. Fortunately, it identifies its market well and restricts itself firmly to its stated objectives. The book aims to introduce Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1 to people who are already familiar with earlier versions of Notes/Domino. It's not a dummies guide and it's not an administrators handbook. It's purely and simply an upgrader's guide. As someone who never actually bothers to read the "what's new" section of the help files which ship with IBM products, and who instead relies solely on the blogging community (and Lotus-Comes-To-You) to highlight the main interest points, this was always going ...

I was only recently lamenting the lack of Notes 8 books in Australia, when I got sent this one to review. It looks interesting and it certainly will fill a gap. I'll bring you a detailed review when I've had a proper read. In the meantime, if you're interested, jump right in and get it - it seems very comprehensive. IBM Notes and Domino 8.5.1 by Barry Rosen , Bennie Gibson , Brad Schauf , David Byrd , Dick McCarrick , Joseph Anderson , Tim Speed Chapter 8: What's new in Notes/Domino 8.5 Development is available for download for free (in PDF format). It's a good place to start. Click here for further information;

With our recent change to everyone's password and the hardening of some of our standards, we've understandably got a bit of internal confusion over passwords. I decided to not only sort out our internal problems but also give our users some great tips for their internet passwords. Here's a presentation I've prepared for our users. I've stripped off branding and names so that you can use it in your own organisations. You have my permission to reuse it as you see fit.

Our Domino Infrastructure upgrades were originally scheduled to take place in early 2009 but when we discovered that Notes 8 closed the "duplicate subform" loophole which, as it turned out was used by one of our mission critical apps, it was put on hold. In fact it was put on hold for so long that 8.5 and then 8.5.1 were released in the meantime. After a careful look at both, some unresolved issues in 8.5.1 led us to a decision to deploy 8.5. The Notes 8.5 Client The rollout of 8.5 client was done quietly, one person at a time. Given that this is such a major change to the client (eclipse), it's hardly surprising that there were issues - some of which are again, still unresolved. We did quite a few experiments in that initial rollout; Networked Data Folders We tried putting the data directory on the user's home drives (network shares). It's an old trick which works to provide better (more complete and seamless) roaming than Notes itself provides. Unfortunately, no...

I'd like to say that I've reached the end of our changes, fixes and upgrades for the year but it's simply not true. Work is increasing drastically as we try to make use of the "quiet business period" to install new systems and have outages. Look out for a bunch of posts early in the new year to describe some of the best and worst of our installations. In the meantime, it's Christmas eve. Instead of doing a completely off-topic post about a holiday which might not appeal to all my readers, I thought I might wrap up the year with my "layman's" (generally ignoring the finances) perception of how the computing giants have performed this year. In the meantime, if you're accepting well-wishes for the season, you have mine. Quick Disclaimer: Everything here is my own personal thoughts - so don't place too much reliance on it - and don't try to sue me. We're all entitled to our thoughts, so get over it. 2009 has been an amazing year in ...

I was asked to help someone with this today and I spent ages searching for the option (because it's not in the obvious place). I didn't get a lot of help online either, so I thought I'd put a post out there to fill in the gap. It's not on the spanner icon (settings) where you'd expect it to be. Procedure From the front screen of your Blackberry Push the green phone button Push the blackberry button Scroll through the menu to find "Options" Choose "General Options" Scroll down to "Show my Number" If it says, Yes, then your caller id displays when you ring people. If no, then it doesn't. Change it to whatever you want by pushing the pearl Push the Blackberry button and choose Save. It should take effect immediately. Bear in mind though that lots of people won't accept calls from unlisted numbers - though if you're having trouble getting people to accept calls from YOU on a listed number, maybe going unlisted is a better opti...