State Services Commission tells (NZ) Govt agencies to dump Microsoft

Now here’s an opportunity for IBM!

National Business Review Article

Migrated from Domino to Exchange for an iPhone

Well, that was a first for me.  A small company – 8 users with Domino and BES on SBS 2003 – had one guy who bought an iPhone and didn’t want the Web access to his mail so the company ditched Domino for Exchange!  One of the other guys from our company did the migration with Exchange and Domino side-by-side on the same server (it went very smoothly, I was quite impressed) and I was called in to migrate BES from Domino to Exchange for the other company members.

They were only using Domino for mail, but all the same, how do you justify a business case for this based on a single user’s desire to use an iPhone?  And you know the real kicker?  The iPhone user is the only one in the office with a Mac, so he’s running a Windows emulator for Outlook!!!

It sure has been a while!

It’s a bit like the confessional thing: “Forgive me for it has been a long time since my last blog …”  I’ve been on a non-Notes/Domino project doing some business analysis work for a client looking at implementing an ERP system.  I’ve spent the last few months interviewing staff and documenting the current and proposed process models for various departments using Tibco Business Studio – quite a cool program.  The thing is, I spend most of the day doing that then have to spend the evenings and weekends catching up on my “normal” work so with that, a sick 10-month old granddaughter at home, and taking on the treasurer position for a church start-up, things have been really full on.  And probably why I’m now sick at home myself.

But it’s been an interesting few months, I’ve set up Sametime and Quickr demos and rolled out a Quickr implementation as a result; I’ve done my first BlackBerry BPS implementation in a Windows 2008 environment (on Exchange 2007); I’ve completed – well, me and the customer’s project team – a year long Notes/Domino 8 roll-out project; and this weekend I upgraded a server with 1,300 mail files to Domino 8.5 and implemented DAOS (Domino Attachment and Object Service) which resulted in 163 Gb of disk space saving – a reduction of 43.5% of disk usage – and there’s still 12 Gb of mail files that couldn’t be compacted so we’re probably looking at a 44-45% saving.

I’ve also read “Now, Discover your Strengths” and completed the online “StrengthsFinder” questionnaire and found it interesting reviewing the various jobs I’ve done, positions I’ve held, projects I’ve worked on etc, in light of what are (apparently) my top five strengths.  I look forward to seeing whether focusing on those strengths in future work/projects makes a noticeable difference to the outcome and my enjoyment of the work.

So that’s me for now, time to go and lie down again.

Twitter for research?

I’d read a few comments in the past about searching Twitter but didn’t think much about it until reading Anthony Pisani’s comment on Eric Mack’s “Twitter as a tool for Personal Knowledge Management” post.  Eric raises some good points as I hadn’t thought of using Twitter for research before, and Andy makes a really good comment in response.  But Twitter Search is helpful for identifying the people who Twitter about something I’m interested in, then checking out their blogs/websites for anything they may have posted about the topic.  Okay, so maybe I’m way out of date and everybody knows this already. 

Michael Sampson comments on “How to manage your business in a recession”

Just because Michael used to be my boss doesn’t mean that I’m at all biased towards his writings, much.  Michael puts out some good stuff and I usually don’t need to link to it because a whole bunch of other people already have, but in this case it’s well worth repeating.  He has taken two (so far) of the ten principles Geoff Colvin listed in his Fortune magazine article “How to manage your business in a recession” and analysed them based on collaboration strategies.  Well worth reading both Geoff’s article and Michael’s analyses:

#1: Reset priorities to face the new reality

#2: Keep investing in the core

Brilliant! The Lotus Connections installation step-through I’ve been looking for!

My attempt at installing a demo/practice Lotus Connections environment has been a fairly haphazard affair as I try to find the time to work on it in between work and family commitments.  I invariably end up spending whatever time I can cobble together struggling through infocentres and numerous websites trying to work out how to get Websphere, DB2, TDI etc installed, patched, configured, and playing nicely together so that Connections will work when I finally get around to installing it.  I’m a Notes Admin with very limited to almost non-existent experience with Websphere et al, so it’s been a really challenging process trying to get my head around everything that needed to be done.  In fact, a couple of times I got pretty close to giving up and going back to the pilot installation.

So you can imagine my relief – bordering on sheer excitement – when today I found what I’ve been wishing was ‘out there’: a clear, easy to follow set of instructions stepping through the whole process, courtesy of Mitch Cohen and Chris Whisonant and their Lotusphere presentation “Getting Your Feet Wet with Lotus Connections”.

Mitch has made the presentation available on his website and you can grab it from here.  Whilst you’re there, check out his Resource Pages for Connections and Quickr.

IBM Software Support Toolbar for IE and Firefox

Thanks to an interesting post by Lotus Evangelist I have just installed the IBM Software Support Toolbar in Firefox and it provides links to the majority of IBM software support sites I use.  It contains menus for Information Management (a.k.a. DB2), Lotus, Rational, Tivoli, and Websphere.  It installs easily, looks good, and works well.  A very usefull wee tool.

DAOS Estimator Results for Domino 8.5

IBM have made a very handy utility available for estimating the disk space savings for an existing Domino server if it were to be upgraded to 8.5 and Domino Attachment and Object Service (DAOS) enabled. 

I ran into a few problems to start with as the initial version of the tool would hang during the process, but version 1.1 is now available  and works well (albeit with a small numerical display issue in the final table – anything over 1 million loses the end digit(s)).  

Here are the results I got after running the Estimator against a mail file directory on an 8.0.2 server with 1,384 mail files:

Total DB’s analyzed:  1,384

Total DB’s skipped due to errors:  0

Total Size of NSF’s Examined:  335.9 GB

Total Attachments found:  1,027,758

Total Duplicate Attachments found:  664,369

Total DAOS Eligible Attachments:  1,027,758

Estimated Size of DAOSified NSF’s:  101.8 GB

Estimate Size of DAOS dir:  102.0 GB

Total Disk Savings:  145.9 GB

 

That’s a 43.4% saving in disk space!

The Wisdom of Crowds – James Surowiecki

I’ve been a bit slow with my reading lately, but managed to catch up on this book over Christmas.  There are lots of reviews of it on the Internet so I won’t go into detail here, but there’s some great stuff in this book for anyone who is interested in group dynamics. One of the key points that stood out for me was:

“The idea of the wisdom of the crowds is not that a group will always give you the right answer but that on average it will consistently come up with a better answer than any individual will provide.”

He discusses the importance of diversity in group decision making so that outcomes aren’t limited by subject experts; how strong leaders can negatively impact the decision making by encouraging the group to lean towards the leader’s perspective; and how too much information reduces the accuracy of the decision making process.

I remember the argument when Wikipedia started out that the contribution of everyday people to an online encyclopedia instead of leaving it up to the knowledgeable experts would result in the “dumbing down” of both Wikipedia and those who referred to it.  Surowiecki gives various examples of why this isn’t usually the case:

“A survey on the question of overconfidence by economist Terrance Odean found that physicians, nurses, lawyers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and investment bankers all believed that they knew more than they did.  Similarly, a recent study of foreign-exchange traders found that 70 percent of the time, the traders overestimated the accuracy of their exchange-rate predictions.  In other words, it wasn’t just that they were wrong; they also didn’t have any idea how wrong they were.  And that seems to be the rule among experts.  The only forecasters whose judgments are routinely well calibrated are expert bridge players and weathermen.  It rains on 30 percent of the days when weathermen have predicted a 30 percent change of rain.”

He presents some very good examples from business and industry and it was an enjoyable book to read.  I highly recommend it.

Good checklist for Quickr 8.1 install on Windows

I made the most of some downtime over Christmas to build a demo Quickr 8.1 server.  I always refer to the infocenter, but came across a great checklist/walkthrough for the installation here, set up by Michael Urspringer.  I found it really helpful for a quick review and check of the installation and configuration process and even picked up on a couple of things I’d missed.  It’s an excellent Wiki and I highly recommend it.