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Showing posts from 2010

It's Official. Lotus Notes is Cool

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My frolleague Darren Adams has created a web site pointing out the great features and general awesomeness of Lotus Notes. Notes is Cool . Well done sir.

No more passwords for Domino applications

A number of times I have heard customers commenting that they can sign into Windows and access everything that they need to do their job - except for Lotus stuff - where they have to enter their username and password again. This may have been true in the past, but as you can see from this demonstration created by my frolleague Steve Seymour from The Portal Partnership this is no longer the case. A users credentials can be passed from their Windows login to Domino via SPNEGO which will in turn create an LTPA token on the Domino/ Websphere infrastructure that will allow access to all those services without having to authenticate again. So in this video you see a user log into Windows and then access a personalised Domino welcome page, iNotes (web mail), Lotus Quickr (team places), Lotus Sametime (real time collaboration), Lotus Connections (professional social networking) and Websphere Portal ( Enterprise integration ) without having to authenticate . Just to be clear - t...

Not what you want to see on a 6 week old Thinkpad

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I was chuffed to bits to get my new Lenovo W500 Thinkpad a month or so ago. I put Windows 7 64bit on it and with an Intel Duo Core T9400 processor, 8Gb of RAM and 500Gb 7200rpm disk I was looking forward to some awesome performance. And to start of that is exactly what I got. I installed all the newest version of the Lotus stuff, Notes 8.5.2 with embedded Sametime 8.5.1, Symphony 3, Domino 8.5.2, Quickr 8.5 etc. I also added some basics like Firefox and VLC Media Player. After just a couple of days I had the machine pretty much ready to replace my old T61 as my main customer demonstration machine. Except for one thing. Every now and again the machine would seemingly just lock up with the hard disk light on permanently. Sometime it would recover and sometimes it would require a hard reboot. I took to starting Resource Monitor in Disk mode as soon as the machine has booted to see if I could catch the culprit. You might think that my immediate reaction would be to blame Windows 7, but tha...

Wimbledon Widget for Lotus Notes

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As you may know IBM has for many years been providing the technology for the Wimbledon Tennis Championships (as well as many other sporting events). This includes the Wimbledon web site which is awesome and there are now apps for both iPhone and Android to keep track of results. In an effort to help IBMers keep track of what is going on in the Championships while they are using their favorite collaboration application, IBM has deployed a Lotus Notes Widget called Wimbledon Sideline that allows everyone that is using Lotus Notes 8 and above to see what is going on in real time displayed in their sidebar. Very nice. (clicky for bigger). Update: Here is a link to the Widget

Informative Messages in Software

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It is always important to let a user know what is going on during an installation. I particually appreciated this informative message whilst installing my VPN client on Windows 7.

Three Years in Six Minutes

This is a little film of my kid Lucy going from nought to three using 550 pictures of her face. I think it is fair to say that she has quite a strong character which really comes out in this film especially later on. If your interested the excellent music is by The Beta Band and is called Dry the Rain.

Samsung Android phone does not work with Samsung software

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Yesterday I wasted half a day trying to figure out why my brand new Samsung Galaxy Portal (called a Spica in the rest of Europe or the GT-I5700 for the geeks) phone would not connect to the software provided with it called New PC Studio. It turns out that for the software to detect the device as being a phone you need to go (in Android) into Settings / Applications / Development and enable USB Debugging. Hardly intuitive . Even with the software recognising the phone, most of the basic functionality is not supported - I'm talking little things like syncing contacts and uploading or downloading media such as photos. The only thing that is supported is "Update Device". This is actually important since the phone runs Android 1.5 but an upgrade to 2.1 is promised soon. Unfortunately when you check for the update it is more disappointment! If you do want to transfer content then it can be done. Once you have connected the phone via USB you will see a device called...

LCTY: Bridging the Digital Divide - Demonstrating Enterprise Social Tools

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I'm lucky enough to be presenting at Lotusphere Comes to You again this year. This is the abstract of my pitch for London and Edinburgh. Today, employees are divided into digital natives, those who have grown up with the web, mobile devices, always on broadband connectivity and internet social networking and digital immigrants, those who grew up working in a fixed office with more traditional tools like email. Through a series of demonstrations, see how IBM's social and collaborative portfolio seamlessly bridge between these worlds bringing social capabilities to traditional users and bringing robust security, reliability and integration to the social world to produce true enterprise ready professional networking. This empowers organisations to maximize their success by realizing the potential of their people through collaboration, communication and social technologies and mining the collective wisdom of their staff for more accurate and effective decision making. Hope to see y...

Grayed out hard disk password on a Thinkpad

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Every 3 months or so I have what I call password day. This is when all my corporate passwords expire and I need to change them. Despite most of IBM's internal services being authenticate d against our intranet ID and password, I still need to manually change things like OS Passwords (two Windows and one Ubuntu clients), VPN , Boot up and hard disk passwords, Blackberry, Sametime , Activities, FTP and a few others relating to non standard sites and services. Whilst this is quite irritating to have to do, it is a necessary evil and normally quite straight forward. But today I hit a snag I haven't come across before. When I went to change my hard disk password in the BIOS it was grayed out . This was especially annoying because I had changed my power on password successfully . The last thing you want is to have two different passwords on boot up. My initial thought was that it must be something to do with the supervisor password - but it wasn't enabled. Turns out that the p...

Guitar Hero

I was just browsing YouTube when I came upon this film of my friend Damon. He works for Fender and funnily enough he does pretty much the same job as me except he demonstrates and explains guitars while I do the same for social and collaborative software. On the one hand this makes him way cooler than me but then I work more sociable hours and get a better company car. Damon, or Bass Elf as we called him, used to play in my band Sideburner. Obviously we were somewhat under utilising his skillz by forcing him to play the fat strings but Lightning Tom was already lead guitarist so that was the only job left. Here is any example of our ragged magnificence . So if you enjoy guitar, are interested in the Fender Stratocaster (particularly the '79 hardtail) or just like watching short people over compensate then spend 5 minutes in the company of Damon presenting his extraordinary abilities whilst also showing off outrageously. As he should.

Gmail 2010 = Lotus Notes 1995?

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A very interesting article from PC Pro comparing and contrasting the progress of Google Mail with Lotus Notes. Comparing a robust reliable product matured over many years to the new players on the block reminds me of an old anecdote my Dad used to tell; "When I was a kid my father knew nothing. It's amazing what he has learned since then." " Comparing the Notes architecture back then (all of which is still in the product, even now) with what Google is laboriously developing, as if there were no prior art, is pretty illuminating: Notes does smart replication between servers and clients, works offline or in low-bandwidth connections admirably well, secures the inter-machine traffic with robust levels of encryption, doesn’t have to sit on top of protocols used for other things, stamps messages with irrefutable digital identities so you can verify who the sender really is. These are all things which SMTP (on the one hand) and webmail over http (on the other) are struggli...

The Perfect Job Interview

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It is always important to understand your potential employer when considering how to answer interview questions. Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Saving an email directly to the file system from Lotus Notes

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I have pretty much lost count of the number of times MS Outlook users who have been upgraded to Lotus Notes have asked me how to save an email either to their file system or to their desktop. The most commonly stated reason for this is so that all the emails, files and documents related to a project can all be saved in one folder on a shared drive. Most organisations now recognise that collaborating through shared drives creates a whole raft of problems including security, duplication, compliance and the inability to find the "one version of the truth". This capability is pretty much redundant to Lotus users since they have many ways of collaborating including Teamrooms , Quickr Places , Wikis , Blogs and Connections Communities . These tools include access control, search, versioning and all the various features that promote good information management. However, we must remember that users do tend to become a bit set in their ways, so if they do want to copy mail messages t...

8 Bit Fun (Pun)

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Click the picture for the appalling pun. I would apologise - but I think it's very funny :0)

Why better isn't always best

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I guess it is now pretty evident that humans are not the greatest at predicting the future. It is well established that generals tend to prepare to fight the previous war (hence aircraft carriers and fighter jets take on AK47 and IED's ). Looking back at the predictions from the 1930's we see reusable rocket ships and hand held ray guns being on the cards whilst in the 50's folks were predicting we would be eating food pills and flying around in jet packs . In fact we only have to look back 10 years to see some predictions by noted futurologist and author Arthur C. Clark which have mainly been shown to be hopelessly wrong (All coal mines closed, Humans cloned?). So how did they miss real game changers like television, mobile phones, personal computers and of course our old friend the Internet? Perhaps the answer is that, in these 4 examples, they were solutions waiting for people to notice that they needed them. For example the Victorians didn't sit watching a...

So long Doctor

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So the 10 th Doctor has regenerated into his new incarnation Matt Smith . Geeks will appreciate the synchronicity in this appointment since The Doctor often refers to himself as Mr Smith when he is incognito. But from my perspective there is a more significant change - which is that the venerable Dr Who logo which has been used since the series returned in 2005 is being replaced with this one . I can't say I'm convinced but I suppose we will have to see how it suits the new season which starts in the UK this spring. However, it has certainly prompted me to regenerate the poorly plagiarised Ports Thoughts logo into something a little less showy. If you are an old timer like me and you are interested in the history of the Dr Who logo's from very beginning then this is quite cool .