Ports Thoughts

Over on the Microsoft Windows Team blog they have been discussing the new design of the Logo for Windows 8 and the history of the Windows logos. I always find it fascinating how logo's evolve over time (for example IBM ) and it is especially interesting when the designers explain what they had in mind. Apparently one of the key observations was from a designer from a top agency who observed “ your name is Windows. Why are you a flag? ”. You've got to love designers. If something is stylised they say it should be more literal . If something is literal they say it is too obvious. They get paid either way. I think it is pretty clear that in reality the old Windows logo reflected the rich Aero style interface while the new one reflects the starker more angular Metro interface introduced in Windows Phone 7. However, given that it appears that Windows 8 is going to have both Metro and Aero , perhaps this might have been more appropriate?

There are many IBMers in the IBM Collaboration Solutions team who love to help out our customers, partners and the Lotus community. IBM Collaboration Solutions (or ICS) includes a wide ranging portfolio of products covering Web Experience (Portal), Collaboration, Social Business and Unified Communications. For those of you who, like myself, have a fondness for the Lotus brand it is important to understand that ICS is a superset that still includes Lotus branded products, but ICS goes beyond the traditional Lotus heartland as we integrate more and more IBM technology such as analytics and sentiment tracking into the core stack and augment it with software from our middleware cousins in Tivoli, IM and Websphere. Many of the ICS team keep up with the Lotus Community through tools like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and of course PlanetLotus.org . Sometimes watching, sometimes joining in. We also like to attend conferences and Lotus User Groups as well as participate in Podcasts, Tweetups and...

There are many IBMers in the IBM Collaboration Solutions team who love to help out our customers, partners and the Lotus community. IBM Collaboration Solutions (or ICS) includes a wide ranging portfolio of products covering Web Experience (Portal), Collaboration, Social Business and Unified Communications. For those of you who, like myself, have a fondness for the Lotus brand it is important to understand that ICS is a superset that still includes Lotus branded products, but ICS goes beyond the traditional Lotus heartland as we integrate more and more IBM technology such as analytics and sentiment tracking into the core stack and augment it with software from our middleware cousins in Tivoli, IM and Websphere. Many of the ICS team keep up with the Lotus Community through tools like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and of course PlanetLotus.org . Sometimes watching, sometimes joining in. We also like to attend conferences and Lotus User Groups as well as participate in Podcasts, Tweetups and...

I have two cats called Barney and Boo. This worries me.

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.

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...

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...