My experiment this year: I have an older but very light ThinkPad X61. It's running OpenSUSE. The OS install included Firefox, LibreOffice and GIMP. WiFi works well. I've added Notes and the old Air version of TweetDeck. I can't see why that won't see me through most days, although I may bring the big machine to the labs one day.

Will post if I learn anything useful from the experiment.

David

Two "big picture" questions:

What's the transition path from an email-centric (Lotus Notes rich client mostly) environment to a more collaborative, real time way of working?
I support a small group of business consultants who travel heavily, spend a lot of time on airplanes, and deal with a lot of confidential information. They love Notes local replicas and they love their email. But they also love their iPhones, iPads and Blackberries. They're increasingly creating documents too large to send via email -- or at least too large to want to send by email. And they often send out mass emails to each other asking "Does anyone have any document or case history on topic xyz that I can refer to?"
They have Quickr and Sametime available (although not the latest and greatest of either). They have Notes-based CRM. But their individual email database is their comfort zone.
What will their world look like a year or two from now and how do I help move them there?

What's the future for Quickr on Domino and what's our way forward?
What document sharing and management we have is via Quickr on Domino. Despite assurances from IBM it seems that Quickr for Domino has become an orphan while Connections gets all the attention. Quickr D is a good fit for organizations of under 50 users already using Domino, Notes and Sametime. But not if it has no future. The long delay between the release of Notes 8.5.3 and the release of Connectors to support it, the complete lack of Connectors for Mac, and a general attitude of Quickr D being an afterthought is giving us pause. I was particularly irked when I was working a Notes problem with support. They advised me to take out all the third party add ons and included Quickr Connectors in the list.

A user interface question:
A user wants the ability to color code calendar items individually, not have the color determined by the type of entry. She says Outlook allows this. It's the first time I've had the request but it doesn't seem too unreasonable. Any options or plans?

Some Admin/Techie topics I would like to know more about:

• Network performance monitoring. I got some great tools last year for monitoring individual servers, but how do I figure out what's happening when they talk to each other and to the Notes client?
• What should I know about application development and how do I learn it? I've been supporting Notes/Domino since R3 but I'm still shaky as soon as I open the Designer client.
• Can anyone explain how type-ahead addressing is supposed to work and what changes if Recent Contacts is populated or not populated? This is driving us crazy since Recent Contacts was introduced. It seems like every user's mail behaves a bit differently.
• Any tips for running Notes client on Windows 7 32 bit? Memory management seems to be an issue, at least for me. We can't upgrade everyone to 64 bit Windows or OS X just yet. (I would like to consider Linux but MS Office is a requirement for document exchange with our clients.)
  

David Schaffer

I have been running a Domino server (Windows 2008) with Domino 8.5.3 and Traveler 8.5.2.4 because the installer for Traveler 8.5.3 just would not complete, despite several troubleshooting suggestions from IBM support. It was stable after going to Traveler 8.5.2.4 but still odd that the newer version wouldn't install.

Last week IBM released Traveler 8.5.3.1. I tried that installer and, low and behold, it installed in about 30 seconds as you would expect. Domino did crash when I tried to restart it without rebooting the server, reporting it found memory in use from a previous instance of Domino. But after restarting the server all seems well.

That's my experience. Hope it helps someone.

David

My house and home office is without power due to an unusual snow storm that hit Connecticut and surrounding states on October 29, 2011. We had phone service for a while but that cut out this morning (31Oct). Prospects for recovery any time soon do not look good.

Here's a statement from our electric utility, CL&P:

Recently we asked our service provider for such a simple change: Replace the existing server running Symantec Backup Exec with new hardware, and consolidate all the storage used for backup-to-disk on that new server. The idea was just to do a clean install, migrate over the existing libraries, and change the jobs to point to the new storage. Except it really couldn't be done. The old server was plain Windows 2008, the new was Storage Server. The SCSI card in the old server that connected the tape changer wouldn't go in the new server. There was an upgrade of Backup Exec to be implemented, and corresponding agent upgrades for the servers being backed up. And when all was said and done we needed to completely recreate the backup jobs, schedule, tape rotation, etc.

We're getting close to having it all run smoothly again. And we did eliminate an old flaky server and some performance and backup window issues caused by sharing storage between the backup server and one of the mail servers being backed up.

Not sure there's a moral here other than to test all your assumptions even if the job seems like a no brainer, make sure requirements are properly communicated each time a new person comes onto a project, and assume Murphy's Law will kick in.

David

They need contact management. They need off line capability for when they're on airplanes, in secure buildings, etc. They need platform independence -- at least Mac OS X and MS Windows, iPhone/iPad and Blackberry but Linux and Android wouldn't hurt.

It needs to be a shared system: They need shared address books for mail, collaboration and contact management. They need to be able to check each others' calendars, schedule meetings and reserve rooms and resources (e.g. conference lines). They need to be able to have administrative staff manage their contacts, add entries to their calendars and do mailings on their behalf.

The system needs to be secure without being too hard to use. They need some granularity so they can share certain files with only certain clients. The whole thing needs to be easily and reliably backed up.

They still use the phone a lot. They would like to be able to dial from their address book when on the PC and when on their PDA. They want to be able to take advantage of IP telephony for ease of use and to reduce costs, especially when traveling outside the country. They want to receive voice mail in their inbox.

Simple right?

Please share your thoughts. I don't want a proposal. I want discussion and ideas on how to make a small organization as productive as possible -- preferably at reasonable cost and with a solution that's simple to manage.

[I want to treat this as a wide open search for the best solution, but I'll post their current solutions list in a comment for those that are interested.]

David

While there's a certain inherent satisfaction in keeping email flowing and making sure file shares are accessible it's also nice to have a larger purpose to that effort.

A post on the New York Times Blog by Tina Rosenberg, Making Change Happen, on a Deadline, describes the remarkable results of the Rapid Results Institute in furthering development projects in Africa.

As described in the article, the Institute is an offshoot of a management consulting firm founded by my father, Robert H. Schaffer, over 40 years ago. The Rapid Results approach, known earlier as the Breakthrough Strategy, has been used in many areas of business, including IT, in addition to its use in international development.

I've been supporting this firm's IT, telecom and general administration for the past 23 years. Not a bad use of my time it seems.

David Schaffer

-------- Original Message --------

A user with a MacBook Air (SSD but not the very latest model) had his battery run down while the machine was in sleep. Lotus Notes was open and his local mail replica got corrupted. This lead me to an interesting investigation of sleep options in OS X.

First terminology: Apple uses sleep to mean the same as sleep or suspend in the Windows laptop world. But they use "safe sleep" to mean hibernate. As I understand it sleep holds the current contents of RAM to allow immediate resume, but requires power. Safe sleep writes the current contents of RAM to disk/SSD. Power can then be removed but it takes longer to restart.

My MacBook users are mostly migrating from Lenovo ThinkPads which have very granular power management. This includes the ability to set a delay for sleep and a longer delay for hibernate. This pretty much prevents the battery running down while in sleep mode.

There seems to be no equivalent on the MacBook Air, although I thought I remembered similar granular controls on an older MacBook Pro.

There also seems to be no standard way to manage the "safe sleep" function. I've been told it's always used on the SSD MacBook Air, but our experience doesn't bear that out. There seems to be no native way in the OS to invoke the safe sleep function in OS X 10.6 and later. There is a third-party Dashboard widget to invoke it, but not on a timer.

I've seen very little on this. Based on the mobile users I've worked with I would have thought it to be a hotter topic.

Please share your thoughts and insights.

David

IBM has now posted the hotfix to prevent Traveler 8.5.2.3 from crashing Domino 8.5.2.3

https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24019529

Original post:

If your Domino server runs Traveler you need apply fix pack to them both from distinct downloads. But there's no mention of the Traveler fix pack on the Domino download.

A previously stable server starter crashing after going from Domino 8.5.2FP2 to 8.5.3FP3 without upgrading Traveler, which was at 8.5.2.1. Waiting to see if applying the latest FP for Traveler has resolved the problem.

David