I'm doing a project with the estimable Matt White, and on occasions, he's come up to Unipart for project meetings. We have a visitor booking application (in Notes, of course), which pre-notifies reception, enables a badge to be printed, and gives a contact number for when your visitor arrives. All well and good. Except my typing: I booked Matt's arrivel in this app yesterday yesterday, and must have been in a hurry. Seems I replaced the W of White with one of the other keys near W. Which one? The one directly below, of course. Good thing Matt has a well-functioning sense of humour, as does our receptionist.
Comments (0)Mick Moignard June 30th, 2009 10:00:00 AM
A press release from IBM in the US just passed through my computer:
200+ Microsoft Partners Per Month Flocking to Sell IBM Lotus Foundations
Small Businesses say Foundations is Better, Cheaper, Smarter than SBS
ARMONK, NY -- June 4, 2009 -- Facing decreasing demand for Microsoft products, more than 1,000 Microsoft Business Partners have offered to sell IBM's Lotus Foundations (www.ibm.com/lotus/foundations) "office-in-a-box" appliance for small businesses (SMB) in the five months of 2009.
According to Microsoft business partners, sales of Microsoft's Small Business Server (SBS) software bundle have stagnated due to lack of innovation and partner dissatisfaction with their inability to add solutions and services. Microsoft partners are looking for an alternative that provides their small-medium business (SMB) customers with more collaboration computing power for less money and more reliability in these cash-strapped times.
"Lotus Foundations is a complete, cost-effective solution that easily scales as a business grows. When you add users, you know exactly what it will cost and the functionality you'll get," said Bernie Leung of Mesa Technology. "With Microsoft SBS, you always have to worry about what additional licenses you will have to purchase - the SQL client is just one example."
In addition, some Microsoft partners have expressed disenchantment with Microsoft's new strategy against Linux by offering a skeletal version of Windows Server. Named "Microsoft Foundation Windows Server," it can only be used as a loss leader to up-sell customers a variety of other Microsoft products. Seeing rising customer demand for lower cost, more secure, and open source alternatives, many Microsoft partners are looking to sell Linux-based solutions, not bash them.
There's quite a lot more in the release which I guess can be found in full at IBM.com. How the worm turns!
Mick Moignard June 8th, 2009 06:20:30 AM
We've been having some trouble with an application I'm dealing with. This is a business critical app for the end-users, and one that has a large database - 20+ Gigs in size with upwards of 1.5m documents. For what are mostly Accessibility reasons, many of the views are set to Refresh Display, rather than Display Indicator. What that means is that once or twice a minute, sometimes a little more often, the displayed view flickers as the client refreshes the view.
But recently we've started to see delays - sometimes 20-30 seconds, and more. We've looked at the client-debug messages, and we see pairs of messages, Read_entries and Update_Collection, like the ones shown below. We have two puzzles over this:
Firstly, why does the Update_collection sometimes take so long - in one case, over 5000ms as shown in the sample below? Surely this is just the client updating its display with the Read_entries result - there is a tiny exchange of data with the server, all of 152 bytes. What is that exchange, and what might make the exchange take so long?
Secondly, why so are there sometimes a huge number of these many Read_entries calls - sometimes we see tens or even hundreds of these call pairs going on for one view refresh. Is it that each view row that's updated is passed back in one read_entries call, or what? We've also tried pressing F9 manually, and as far as we can tell, the same exchange of pairs of Read_Entries and Update_collection calls - and we also noticed, that on a second F9 press immediately after a first, there can often be jsut one message pair.
Finally, anyone have any ideas that would help us to debug this further, so that we can try to establish if the issue is a server delay, or a networking issue. Right now, we can't really tell where the delays come from.
Here's the sample of client debug entries:
(15806-85078 [15808]) READ_ENTRIES(REP8025XXXX:XXXXXXXX-NT0000XXXX): 1484 ms. [304+3836=4140]
(15807-85080 [15809]) UPDATE_COLLECTION(REP8025XXXX:XXXXXXXX-NT0000XXXX): 5219 ms. [36+116=152]
(15808-85085 [15810]) READ_ENTRIES(REP8025XXXX:XXXXXXXX-NT0000XXXX): 1578 ms. [304+3836=4140]
(15809-85087 [15811]) UPDATE_COLLECTION(REP8025XXXX:XXXXXXXX-NT0000XXXX): 656 ms. [36+116=152]
(15810-85087 [15812]) READ_ENTRIES(REP8025XXXX:XXXXXXXX-NT0000XXXX): 625 ms. [304+3836=4140]
(15811-85088 [15813]) UPDATE_COLLECTION(REP8025XXXX:XXXXXXXX-NT0000XXXX): 313 ms. [36+116=152]
(15812-85088 [15814]) READ_ENTRIES(REP8025XXXX:XXXXXXXX-NT0000XXXX): 282 ms. [304+3840=4144]
(15813-85088 [15815]) UPDATE_COLLECTION(REP8025XXXX:XXXXXXXX-NT0000XXXX): 421 ms. [36+116=152]
(15814-85089 [15816]) READ_ENTRIES(REP8025XXXX:XXXXXXXX-NT0000XXXX): 329 ms. [304+3836=4140]
(15815-85089 [15817]) UPDATE_COLLECTION(REP8025XXXX:XXXXXXXX-NT0000XXXX): 328 ms. [36+116=152]
(15816-85090 [15818]) READ_ENTRIES(REP8025XXXX:XXXXXXXX-NT0000XXXX): 500 ms. [304+3836=4140]
(15817-85090 [15819]) UPDATE_COLLECTION(REP8025XXXX:XXXXXXXX-NT0000XXXX): 453 ms. [36+116=152]
Mick Moignard March 26th, 2009 10:46:18 AM
I followed a link from Ed Brill to a blog post about Sharepoint. Interesting discussion of how Sharepoint more often than not fails to hit the spot, and why. How the implementation, and more importantly, the expectations of that implementation are what really matters. Being sure that the organisation understands what it thinks it's it's there to do, and how that often fails to translate into reality. And how the costs can just go out of the window. To be fair, quite a number of the criticisms and issues can equally apply to Quickr too, because most of them are not about the technology per se, but how enterprises totally fail to understand what they are trying to achieve and why.
There's a bit of a buzz going on about this blog post too; Mike Gotta has some perspectives, as does Oliver Marks.
One major issue that I see is the one about how you want to hold and disseminate content - and I feel very strongly that the answer to this comes from how the intended audience will want to get at that content. I don't think that they want to have to deal with files, and the applications that work with files, such as Office and Symphony. I think they want to be able to find the content and view the content without having to worry or deal with how that content is stored.
For example, if I want to find something out, my natural reaction is to reach for a browser and type a search into the search bar, and then browse the links returned; each of which, more often than not, opens a page that I can review, read or discard. The target of that search on the web is the most complete set of knowledge that there is. Or I do the same thing in Lotus Notes, but with a much smaller context - a single database or a domain search - but in the same way, I get a list of potential results as links to pages. And Lotus Notes opens those pages when I click the link, just as the browser does.
But if I do a search that involves a file-based medium such as the shared drives available to my Windows file system , or Quickr libraries. I get a list of files. The file system offers no meta-data that expands on the files, and so I have to guess at which files may help me. And then I have to wait while some application loads to show me the content - and that application then has to be guided to find the search results.
And that means that information stored in files is, to be blunt, lost. It's of little consequence or use to anyone who doesn't intimately know that it's there. To my mind, that, ultimately, is the big issue that such implementations fail to address; it's not how you store the stuff that you should pay attention to, but how the audience that you expect - and possibly ones you don't expect - will want and expect to find and use the material.
Mick Moignard March 13th, 2009 03:57:16 AM
Here's a cool wmv showing the world's air traffic - major planes only - over a 24hr hour period one day in January. It's been assembled, apparently from airplane transponders via geosynchnonous satellite tracking. Interesting to watch the traffic as the day progresses, especially the waves of transatlantic traffic - westbound during the day and eastbound at night, and the daytime densities in the populated parts of the world.
Comments (3)Mick Moignard March 10th, 2009 08:57:04 AM
Notes 8.5 contains so many gems that you come across almost by accident. How about the ability to look at someone else's personal contacts?
Do this by, first, opening your own personal contacts (ah, and be connected to a Domino domain, too. This one isn't good Offline).
Look on the right menu pane for Other Contacts, and expand that entry:
Click Open Other Contacts, and you get a standard Notes selection dialog for address book entries. Select a colleague, and wait a few moments, and with some luck, you'll see their contacts. These come from their mail database on the server, courtesy of the fact that iNotes synchronises contacts between your personal contacst and your mail file, which of course, gets them on to the server and potentially available to others. Neat, eh?
Here's how what you, and your co-workers need to do to make this work for you:
- via the Mail Preferences Access and Delegation tab, ensure that you all allow other people to see your contacts; you can do that via the ACL -default- entry, as shown below, or by named people and/or groups:
- In your Contacts database, set up that it synchronises your contacts between your personal address book and your mail: See Contacts Preferences:
- Optionally, you can add other people's names to the Open Other Contacts list, via the Contacts Preferences, down at the bottom.. If you do that, you get this effect in the left menu pane of your Contacts:
Mick Moignard February 18th, 2009 10:18:38 AM
I see that my idea that asks Lotus to release the new Lotuscript editor as an Eclipse upgrade to DDE when it's ready to go, rather than wait for ND851 is now the hottest item at Ideajam. Seems that my prediction back at Lotusphere that the developer community would like to see this has hit the mark. If you've not yet voted on this one, go over there and add your name to the list - be interesting to see if it actually does happen!
Comments (1)Mick Moignard February 16th, 2009 04:46:29 AM
It's taking an absolute age to respond to anything; yesterday I could get logged on, but could not reach the agenda pages. Today, it took several minutes to produce a logon page, and is now stuck opening the homepage. Anyone else managed to get in?
Comments (4)Mick Moignard January 26th, 2009 07:47:14 AM
Pity that DAOS isn't really a client tool though I can well imagine the chaos that could be created if it were. On a whim, I downloaded the DAOS estimator and tried it on my client. Not only did it work, as expected, but heres a couple of snippets from the results:
Summary:
Total DB's analyzed: 475
Total DB's skipped due to errors: 6
Total Size of NSF's Examined: 10.3 GB
Total Attachments found: 13583
Total Duplicate Attachments found: 1622
Total DAOS Eligible Attachments: 13583
Estimated Size of DAOSified NSF's: 6.2 GB
Estimate Size of DAOS dir: 4.2 GB
Total Disk Savings: 287.0 MB
While the actual savings are not huge: 287mb, and I expect that most of that is the 1622 duplicate attachments, it does show that there's 4.2Gb of DAOS-elegible attachments on my laptop, which could be got out of Notes databases, reducing them by 4.2Gb - which surely would help the NSF engine.
And here's the summary of one database:
Database Name Orig NSF New NSF Num DAOS Dup Compr Space DAOS Ob
Size Size Files Files Files Size Savings Size
================================= ======== ======== ====== ====== ============= ======== ========
ZZZZZZZZZZZZ.nsf 47.8 MB 14.1 MB 51 51 5 33.7 MB 0.5 KB 33.2 MB
That's not bad at all; 33.2Mb of attachments pulled out, and which would not get backed up every time the database is backed up. Check out your servers with this tool, and see if the numbers generated help your case for a Domino 8.5 upgrade. Comments (0)
Mick Moignard January 25th, 2009 09:10:49 AM
Speaking with Angus MacIntyre today, Program Director for xPages, he said that the Eclipse environment gave the possibility to deploy functional updates to things outside a major release. Then he mentioned the upcoming LotusScript editor for DDE, that's been shown off here at Lotusphere this week.
So of course I asked him why not release the LS editor for DDE when it is ready as an Eclipse update, rather than wait for 8.5.1. Doing that would show that Lotus could do it, and for sure the developer community would like it. He had the grace to say that he'd note the suggestion and take it away for consideration. I'm just about to post this to Ideajam as well, (if I can stay connected to the Lotusphere wireless for long enough) so why not whiz over there, and vote?
Mick Moignard January 21st, 2009 01:41:37 PM