Mick Moignard's Blog

No, I'm not leaving the Yellowsphere.  But I am leaving Unipart, my employer of 28 years, as they've decided that Lotus Notes consulting isn't core business and are closing that business unit.

I'm setting up on my own - to do Lotus Notes and Domino business rather much as I have been up to now.  Starting off working with some loyal customers whose business I appreciate and treasure.  I'm hoping to be able to find the time also to go find new customers, learn some new skills, and hopefully have some fun doing so.  I'm a reasonably positive sort of person, so none of this is getting me down - to be honest, I'd rather seen it coming anyway. At least, I figured that the thing itself would happen, but not exactly when.  

So now I have even more reason to spend as much of Lotusphere 2012 as possible in the bar, er, I mean networking.   See you all there.

It's been quite a wait for a Sametime client for iPhone/iPad/iPod devices, and the two come along almost at once. And one of them is rather more useful than the other.

IBM's is at least free, but requires first that you have Sametime 8.5.2 IFR1 installed and also that you have a Sametime Proxy server installed as well.  While you can get the app right now in the Apple AppStore, you won't be able to use it for a while.

However, Conundrum have had their QuipIM product in the app store for a few weeks now.  It's not free (£2.99), but it works with earlier versions of Sametime, and it does just work.  I had to set it to use Port 80 rather that 1533 to get to my corporate site, but it could see im.bleedyellow.com directly via port 80.  And it does just appear to work.    It can also log in to two separate Sametimes at once. I can't see whether IBM's can do that, but then again, as it can't connect to either site I tried, I don;t actually know whether it can do two simultaneous Sametimes or not.  

I've suspect that IBM 's version has all sorts of features and functions that QuipIM doesn't, but when you're faced with a choice of a product that works now and one that doesn't, which will you go for?  

I was asked at the Slim gauge Circle meeting last Sunday if I could make a version of the Tsunami slides that isn't 51 pages.  There's a handouts version of the slides as a PDF on the downloads page.

Mick

Slides from my two clinics at the NMRA BR Convention in Bournemouth are now posted on the downloads page. I hope you find these useful, and for those hardy souls who came to the Sunday one on Tsunamis, where my laptop was playing up, I don't think you - and I -  actually missed much, now that I've looked again at the slides.  

Do let me know iif there's anything that needs expanding, and if anyone would like me to come and do these clinics at their club, let me know.

Installed iOS5 on my iPod Touch last night and this morning.  

Like many people, I got the stuff downloaded last night, but suffered the 3200 error with Apple's servers being busy and could not complete the install.  So I did the actual install this morning, where it worked first time, though only the standard apps worked once it "completed" the setup.  Took a complete power-off of the iPod and a restart of Windows and iTunes before iTunes would see the  iPod again and put everything back on it.  

And Traveler continues its reputation: it just works.  Mail is fine.  I've not seen any mail issues with any of it in playing with it sporadically during the day,.   There's a few changes you'll see quite quickly - such as Mark as Unread on an inbox item is now just Flag - and you have the choice to Flag it or Mark it Unread.  Mark Unread syncs back to Notes as it did before, but the new Flag doesn't.   I'm also not entirely keen on how conversations display in the inbox if there's more than one unread item in the conversation, or when an unread item isn't the most recent in the list, but I guess that's an Apple gripe rather than a Traveler one.  What I'd really like to see is All Documents synced to the device: which the iPod does seem to be able to do with Gmail - showing All Mail.  

Contacts seems to work just fine.  Not seen any issues here.

However, there is a calendar issue which is quite serious: it seems to be totally lost on repeating meetings that were set up in Notes.   One example: I have one that I set up yesterday, that repeats 4 dates, 2nd and 4th Tuesday of the month for 4 meetings.   Notes has it as 25/10, 8 and 22/11 and 13/12.  The iPod has 25/10, and if you open that entry, it says it's repeating weekly. However, it also only appears on the correct dates.  Another example is one that was set up for 17 June repeated every 3 months, which on the iPod appears from 17 June onwards repeating every two weeks: and actually appears on the iPod calendar on those dates.   Moral: check back with your Notes calendar via iNotes or the client!

IOS5 has a new reminders app.  Not wanting to undermine the efforts of the guys behind NotesF1 - which doesn't yet work on iOS5 -  but it would be nice to see this reminders app connected to the Notes to-do list.  

Some other Notes-related things I've tried also work: SnappFiles, and the IBM Connections app both work OK, too.

No, this is nothing about the riots over here in the UK.  It's about making statements and opinions, and finding that other people may disagree with you.

DominoPower magazine is running a my review of Eric Mack's eProductivity Essentials, which is one of his family of Getting Things Done toolsets.   This new version is a free but limited capability version.  You install it and it is supposed to work as the full version for 21 days, and then, if you don't purchase a license key, backs down to the limited-function version.   The key issue here is that the limited version supports only 25 open actions. The app comes preloaded with a bunch of content that acts as a rather neat tutorial, which you work through, learning the product and creating actions along the way.  All well and dandy, except that at the end of the 21 days, if you've not completed - or deleted - those  sample actions, you'll run out of slots to create more actions.  

The copy I installed didn't do that, and I wrote  that it didn't.  I didn't see it as a major issue, noted what I did to get out of it (deleted actions and generally cleaned up), and moved on.  However it seems that this part of the review has riled Eric a little, and we've had an exchange of emails.   Seems that the issue is that because I've previously installed a version of eProductivity, some expiration date or other timebomb is stored somewhere on my computer.  This new installation found that, and as a result has gotten itself a bit bent out of shape.  It , in that it considered that the free period had already expired.   But the Mind Coach, which also is supposed to expire after 21 days, was still working.  And it still is.  Maybe something has got more bent than it should have done.  

I've looked at the license details.  Find these on the Action Bar at eProductivity/Installation Tools/Manage License Information.  It says:



It's at feature level Professional.  I don't recall getting and adding a license key or activation key to upgrade it.  I also note that it says that it will expire on 31/08/2011.  I installed it on the 05/05/11 - at least, that's the database creation date,and that's way beyond any 21 day limitation.  I've just added a load of actions, and the 25-action limit that I saw is now gone.  

So what's going on here then?  

Now, don't take this all too much to heart.  I'm not going to tell you now what my conclusions were, you'll have to read DominoPower again next week.  But, regardless of what's being going on here, and I'll happily accept that these functionality entitlement issues may well be down to interactions with previous installations, this is a good product set.  If you think you need some personal organisation help, look at this stuff.  If you've ever looked at it before, you might want to ask eProductivity how to completely remove any previous installation, so that a new one behaves as you and they think it should.  

Microsoft are to pay $8.5bn for Skype, apparently to use it to perk up their online and mobile strategy, according to a BBC report.  How this deal will play with the Nokia/Windows Mobile deal is yet to be seen.  

Skype doesn't make a lot of money.  Only two years ago, it was valued at a bit over $2bn, so what is it that Microsoft have seen in Skype that nobody else has, that can  generate that sort of premium?  The BBC post suggests that there's a lot of potential, to deliver a variety of new services to new audiences beyond teleconferencing such as remote education and training, patient care, and so on.  They also note that Microsoft will have an uphill task both with explaining to shareholders what they are doing, as well as actually making future product and service value by integration of Skype.  eBay failed to make much of Skype while it owned it, so what can Microsoft do with it?

Following Stephen Elop's downbeat assessment yesterday of Nokia's situation, they've now decided to go in with Microsoft to make gear based on Windows Mobile 7,and shed a large number of jobs round the world.  

The BBC report says that Nokia will sideline Symbian and go with Mobile 7 across the range.  You can see some logic in that argument; supporting two operating systems - three if you include Nokia's not yet shipped MeeGo - would cost more, but I can't imagine the changeover will be cheap - unless of course Microsoft are going to fund it, which I suspect that they will, at least in part.

Nokia may still be big in Europe, but they aren't the force they used to be.  These days when I visit business customers here in the UK, or talk to friends, I don't see Nokias as much as I used to, certainly at the smartphone end of the scale - I see Apples, Blackberries and Androids, mostly.  Our Lotus Traveler has 5 Nokias listed, against 159 Apples - but does have 33 WM5/6 devices,  and 6 Androids.    When I spoke with Kevin Cavanaugh at Lotusphere, I asked him why he'd not mentioned WM7 as a device that Lotus would concentrate on, and he said "because I've never seen one'.  And figures I've seen suggest that WM in all its versions has way under 10% of the market, possibly under 5% - though our Traveler suggest otherwise.

So, is this a last-ditch attempt by Microsoft to get someone big in the market to do WM7 - and they targeted Nokia,  as being one of the weaker players, and run by an ex-Microsoft man, to boot?    Is this decision suicide on Nokia's part, desperation on Microsoft's or some combination of both? What will the outcome be?

My speculation is that it won't result in serious sales, and that it will be the beginning of the end of Nokia as a serious player in the mobile phone market.  I'd also suggest that it will wound Microsoft, too.  Failure with Windows Mobile so far in what hasn't been very big-name gear in the market is one thing, but taking down Nokia would be quite another, should that be the end result.  

A few months back when Ray Ozzie announced he was to leave Microsoft, I said "Look at the FTSE 100 or Dow Jones indexes of 30 years ago.  How many of the top companies then are top companies now?  How many of those companies of 30 years ago still exist? How many of them failed because their market walked away, and they failed to react.   Will the indexes of 2020, 2030 still contain Microsoft as a player? ".  Will this new announcement make that more or less likely?

Just completed my writeup for Dominopower and submitted it for the editor's blue pencil. Should see it appear over the next few weeks.   Please keep an eye open...

I squirted it thru IBM's Word Cloud to see how the emphasis went: see for yourself:

Or rather, judging by last night's crowd in the Dolphin lobby bar, it already has.