I Heard That Lotus Notes Sucks

Yeah, you heard that right.  Happens from time to time for any Notes advocate. 

I heard it again recently when I met a guy...we'll call him Phil McGillicuddy.  Phil is in his mid-forties and works for an energy company.  He's in middle management and an end user.  Nice guy.

The focus of our conversation turned to technology.  Since he had no idea that I'm a Notes advocate, only a "computer guy," I got to have a conversation from the other side of the coin.  Here's how part of it went:

Phil:  "You use Lotus Notes?  Our geniuses in IT are making us move off of Microsoft Outlook soon."
Steve: "Oh yeah? I've been using it for a few years."
Phil: "You poor bastard.  It sucks!  It really sucks.  We had it back when I worked with XYZ company back in 1999.  You had to press F9 to get your mail.  I hope I'm the last guy they convert.  But I'm not going to go happy.  They may as well bring us back to Outlook Express...everyone has that at home anyway.  AND you can have blue letters instead of black.  Lotus only lets you use black letters."
Steve:  "Really?  Have you seen what Notes is like now?  Did they give you any presentations or demos or training or anything?"
Phil:  "No.  All we got was an email saying we're moving to Notes.  They've been moving people off Outlook since July."

That.

That.  Right.  There...is a problem.

You're always going to have some people unhappy with whatever choices you make, be it in technology or otherwise, but you can minimize negative impact of those changes by simply communicating effectively.

More often than not, a poor attitude towards Lotus Notes is caused by an inadequate implementation and little to no communication/training.  Period. 

Buy-in from corporate decision makers (i.e., executive and management) and influencers are wildly important, but you need the people in the trenches having your back.  Everyone, but at the very least key representatives from across the company-wide email user base, from sales to accounting to the shipping dock, should be given pre-rollout demos and a very high level ROI justification.  Everyone needs to be shown why you made the decision to change the one piece of software they use all day and every day, and exactly how Lotus Notes will offer them much more than just email.  They have to, because forced change breeds resentment.

The more selling you do to the troops up front the less likely you'll have a mutiny later.

In Phil's case, I spent 10 minutes explaining Notes 8.5 highlights, the embedded Sametime client, the workflow and app development opportunities, the calendaring and scheduling.  Even the fact that the F5 key works.  But it's probably too late for this one.  Altering his opinion of Notes, no matter how willfully ignorant it is, faces an uphill battle because his company forced a change with little to no discussion, let alone a proper sell job to the user population.

They had a chance to get his buy-in for an enterprise class collaboration solution and blew it.  Failing to get the buy-in isn't bad. Not even trying is inexcusable.

Copy IFS Directory - QSHELL Can Be Your Friend

I needed to push an entire IFS directory of objects (including sub-directories) into another directory and maintain authority. 

I'm not a Unix guy so I tend to get frustrated with Qshell a bit.  However, I'm getting more impressed the more I use it.  For instance, it was incredibly easy to do what I want with Qshell instead of coding an RPG program to read the directory structure and build each object individually.

Here's the command I used to do a recursive copy and maintain file access info:

cp -r -p /sourcedir /targetdir

Is i Social? i Can!

I need literally 10 seconds of your time to help me bring a good idea into reality.

Please click the link below and then cast your vote for Connections to run natively on IBM i. 

https://greenhouse.lotus.com/blogs/We047f6e69323_42ff_8db6_8bd4fe32a841/entry/native_support_for_ibm_i?lang=en_us

For those who aren't aware of the IBM i operating system, here are some fun facts:

• It has been rated as having higher uptime percentage than Linux, Windows, AIX and even zOS.
• You can run 99 Lotus Domino servers under 1 IBM i partition.  These servers run in what we call subsystems. 
• IBM i has never been damaged by a virus. 
• You can run multiple versions of Domino on one partition.  This means your Quickr and Sametime servers can run on the same machine under different Domino versions.
• Communication between servers on a single IBM i server (Sametime, Quickr, Domino, etc.) is via the system bus, meaning Gigabit speed and using zero network bandwidth or equipment.
• Transactional logging isn't suggested to run on a separate disk array.  No need and no adverse effects.

  Thank you!

Is Your System's Performance The Very Best It Can Be?

Here's a link to an article on IBM i performance I wrote for MC Press:

http://www.mcpressonline.com/system-administration/performance-monitoring-&-tuning/is-your-systems-performance-the-very-best-it-can-be.html

Breathing New Life - An IBM i "Growth Play" & Full Support for Lotus Connections/Sametime on IBM i

There's an amazing opportunity for IBM here.

In preparation for a full Sametime Unified Telephony (SUT) Lite deployment, over the last two weeks I've been installing Sametime 8.5.2 components piece by piece.  I'll admit, it's a bit of a challenge because of the sheer magnitude of the product suite.  You've got a good number of components of the entire solution that run natively on IBM i:

• Domino 8.5.2 server acting as an LDAP server
• Domino 8.5.2 Sametime Community server
• Websphere-based components
• Sametime System Console
• Sametime Proxy Server
• Sametime Meeting Server
• Sametime Gateway Server

Then, you have the other components that you need to run on either Linux, Windows, Solaris or AIX:

• Sametime Media Manager
• Sametime TURN Server
• Sametime Bandwidth Manager
• SIP Edge Proxy Server

These servers entail deploying either additional hardware or carving out Linux/AIX partitions on the IBM i.  That's not a huge problem.  A great feature of Power Systems is the ability to run additional operating systems alongside each other.  But what if you are a long time IBM i customer who has no Linux or AIX expertise?  What if you don't want to extend your business servers to Windows?  In order to partition Linux on my IBM i I will have to IPL (reboot) the IBM i server...not a big in terms of learning curve but it makes installing software more complicated than it has to be.  In order to leverage existing skills, minimize training, cut operating system licensing and maintenance costs...ideally you'd want to run all Sametime components natively on the same IBM i partition.

I've also been investigating IBM Connections since the idea of social business is a hot topic.  Sadly, Connections does not run natively on IBM i.  That means a lot to me.  A lot of IBM i customers, when looking for new software, probably ask this as their first question: "Does it run on IBM i?"

Yesterday I was a guest on This Week in Lotus (episode 63) with hosts Stuart McIntyre and Darren Duke and fellow guests Lisa Duke and Sharon Bellamy.  They were kind enough to accept my suggestion to discuss deploying IBM Collaboration Solutions (i.e., Lotus) on IBM i.  I spent a little time preparing to do most of the talking on the subject but those folks were not only receptive to the idea of running IBM Collaboration Solutions products on IBM i, they were advocating it as a very valid solution.  Darren and Sharon especially seemed very fond of the IBM i.  We spent a fair bit of time talking about IBM Connections having zero native support on IBM i and Sametime only offering support for a portion of the product.

With the recent success of IBM i and Power Systems, I was still very surprised when I read, and strongly urge you to read, Chris Maxcer's recent interview with IBM's Ari Kugler, Director of Business Development and Business Unit Executive for IBM i.  Ari talks about the recent success of the IBM i brand and how he expects "double digit growth for the platform install base this year."  Phrases like "critical to the Power brand," "growth play" and a "new renaissance around an integrated platform" inspire consumer confidence of IBM's commitment to the IBM i.

This quote made my day:  “I really think to a large extent, customers, developers, and even to us, in IBM, we’ve forgotten just how tremendous the platform is and we have kind of reawakened and realized the potential, and we’ve come to the same strategic realization that customers want an integrated platform, that has the ¬performance, security, and some of the new market ¬realizations—these were discovered by IBM, and we have a 20-year lead and a proven platform we can build up on.”

Last month IBM named 50 people in it's Champion Program for Collaboration solutions.  One of the benefits of the program is direct access to IBM employees who are designers and leaders of the products we all use and advocate the use of.

Given the timing of my Sametime installation and Connections investigation, I immediately took advantage of this.


In the past few weeks I've been very fortunate to have some communication with IBM product leaders (Mac Guidera and Marlon Machado via the IBM Champion program) regarding the porting of, respectfully, Connections and Sametime components to IBM i. IBM's opinion is that the customer demand for IBM i support just hasn't been that high. Customers haven't been beating down the doors to run a Connections server on their IBM i. Sametime 8.5.2 customers are willing to use Linux on a partition or a standalone server to handle the audio/video components, while running the base Sametime servers natively.  


But that doesn't mean that customers wouldn't run it on IBM i.  It also doesn't mean IBM won't offer IBM i support.  You've got two wallflowers here folks, and they're both not asking each other to dance.
 
Perhaps the one avenue that needs to be explored by IBM is the ability for customers, whether existing or potential, to deploy their entire messaging, social business and collaboration infrastructure (including audio/video) on the back of one IBM i partition running on Power Systems. 

Think about that.  It's an unbelievably strong statement and it works from both a marketing and customer satisfaction perspective.   The security, stability, multi-versioning capabilities of Domino, the central point of management (install base Domino code for a release once and upgrade each server in minutes), the minimal licensing costs, the minimal energy costs of using one server, etc., etc., etc., make it a darn good case.  Can you run 99 Domino servers under 1 Linux or AIX partition like you can with IBM i?  Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think so.  What kind of OS licensing costs do customers with brigades of Windows-based Lotus servers have to suffer compared to IBM i?  Lotus and IBM i are a fantastic combination and really should be tied to the hip in all aspects.  

Or at the very least, IBM should give us the choice. 

If you’re an IBM i or Lotus customer (or both!) then how can you make a difference? 

If you’re an existing or potential IBM i (or existing System i or iSeries) customer and you want to run all components of IBM Connections, IBM Sametime or Lotus Notes Traveler on your system, then click here.