Domino 851 has been spotted

I was helping Chris Toohey with an SSO problem while on the phone with Cisco about my Unity client(expect a post on THAT one).

And we saw this

Check the header!

Lotus Notes Doesn't Work - Help Desk Answers #1

Help desk refrains pop up in my world every now and then. Here's one:

I just got 20+ emails from 10AM and it's 4PM what's wrong with the server?

The answer is nothing of course.

The server was fine and working for every one else (it's always this way, isn't it).

Digging deeper, well, simpler, I went to the server log, looked up usage by user and expanded the date/time. It shows 2 replications, one in the early AM, one in the late PM. No others. Checked other people, replicated all day long.

Problem is customers never want to admit they did something, but facts are facts.
I could look into the log file on their client but it won't tell me if the person switched off replication or changed locations.

So the moral of the story is you may have help desk calls, but they should not be listed as Lotus calls unless truly a Lotus problem. I would bet if you filtered your calls this way you would find you should be training your customers better.

Do you know what you are doing?

I am sure I am not alone in saying at what time or another I "thought" I knew what I was doing. How wrong can one be?

Famous last words from children, right before they fall, skin their knee or knock out a tooth is "I know what I'm Doing".

Evidently some of us never learn from childhood to correct this mantra.

In life there are few who truly know what they are doing. I don't think many of us from a young age said we wanted to be Lotus Developers or Administrators, although I am sure for some of us, "something" technical and computers was on our mind.

So the same could be said about Product Managers. They do know what they are doing, at a given moment, but the future is not so clear. One could argue Microsoft was stuck on this mantra for a while, some say they still are. Maybe IBM also subscribed to this mantra, and still does for some parts, but there are obvious steps forward which no one expected from IBM in the areas of social media/networking and collaboration at an unprecedented level.

Does Google follow this mantra? Well they proclaim "do no evil" although that has been under debate by some. Does Google know what they are doing? Are they changing our world for the better? Is this just a side step in progress for the "next big thing". Whatever that is.

When you are in management, most of your staff looks up to you for encouragement, support and occasionally wisdom. How often do you admit you just don't know something? Or you know what you are doing, only to see it come back to haunt you?

Presidents, Prime Ministers and other governmental leaders expect us to believe them when they say they know what they are doing, personally I doubt it.

As Star trek said "To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before" sums it up usually for many people and they easily get off track. But to lead one must accept that not only does one not know what they are doing always but one must accept that as a reality. To do otherwise leads to failure.

So if your engineers, Business Partner or sales people say they know what they are doing, you may want to engage them in some conversation and make sure you know what they think they are doing.

60% of 1,000 companies not going to Windows 7

6 in 10 companies not going to use Windows 7...in 2010.

Read the full article here from Yahoo!Tech.

EDIT UPDATE:
CNBC had the original posting or so I was told, so here it is. Thanks to Johnny Smith, AKA HeyKoolaid3

Forty-two percent said their biggest reason for avoiding Windows 7 was a "lack of time and resources."

Word to the wise, if 1,000 companies were polled and 60% said no and many claimed money was a problem, where do you think those companies will be next year, if they last that long.

To be fair, some did say the effort to test 100's or thousands of applications was just not practical right now.

On the other hand, IBM continues to provide nearly(no one is perfect) complete backwards compatibility with their products in the Lotus world. So upgrading to the latest version, 8.5 today, 8.5.1 by Q4 or so, is really not a big deal.

As I and others have said many times, upgrading Domino is 15 minutes usually. So what are you waiting for?

Souvenir for Lotus Approach

Richard, Carl and others always comment when I mention approach, so here is something for you.

Based on Billy Joel's Song, Souvenir from the Streetlife Serenade Album.
Listen here.

"Souvenir of Lotus Approach"

A database program, a stored macro,
A database to mind the store,
File away the files of the past
Before your old NOS turns to dust
But that's the price we pay
For every dead program lives somewhere
But slowly fades away
Every dead program lives out there
Then slowly "saves as" away.

Fud Buster Friday #48 - Google Does No evil

The Google informal motto as we all know is Don't Be Evil.

Just what that means is up to debate usually from various places but evidently it has also been dropped as recently as April 1, 2009.

So now the gloves are off and Google is coming out swinging and if you get in the way, too bad for you. As it happens, Google is swinging, directly,(thanks to Duffbert for finding this) for my fences in trying to win over Lotus customers.

Now why would Google do this? Same reason IBM or Microsoft would when they convert someone. Not going to debate if it's a good idea or not, but suffice it to say, IBM is quite possibly either in the way of Google or a stepping stone to help Google get better footing against Microsoft.

Evil? Well, marketing is usually classified as evil or fictional, depends who is asking and which company you refer to of course.

What makes Google seem evil is they read the Microsoft playbook from the 90's and realized they could be Bill Gates nightmare come to life.

IBM of course is not an angel across the board, but the Lotus side has usually tried to stay above board and have open and honest discussions with competitors and customers. It's what I taught the sales engineers I trained and the way I talk to all customers.

In this case, I am a bit in awe of Google and what they have in place that makes a customer's decision almost child like simple. Like Denzel Washington said in Philadelphia "Now explain it to me like I'm a four-year-old." And Google has done that if you dig deeper into their website links on the migration page I referenced.

What if it's all a game to them? What if they fear search is on the way out, what if they do become the next Microsoft or IBM? Will they truly do no evil once they own your OS, phone, mail, applications and calendar?

Or will absolute power corrupt, as it always does?

Lotus Symphony To The Rescue

If you are an Office 2003 or 2000 or XP user and get a file from an Office 2007 with the X extension names and can't use the file, read on.

This morning, as I was about to file my quarterly IRS and state reports, I went to open up my instruction document so I got it all done properly and found one of my files was in a .docx extension.

So naturally the machine I am using couldn't read it. It was then I realized that this machine had not been updated with Lotus Symphony 1.3 which was released last month(the link takes you to the download page).

Download all 200MB, took 10 minutes here in the UK, and then installed it and a few minutes later up came the document perfectly fine.

Now some will argue but it doesn't work 100% with office. You know what? Nothing works 100% with Office, even Office! As was seen when Microsoft realized previous versions couldn't read the new extensions either.

So if you are using an older Office suite, download Symphony today and start using it and soon you will see you don't need that other suite. I have been exclusively using Symphony since January 1, 2009 and started using it more or less since it was available in beta last year.

What is so wrong with an entirely FREE suite of products that look and act the way you want it. In this case it solved my problem and I Imagine many other companies out there, when they get off their Microsoft hamster wheels, will realize that to pay for something when you can get it for free just makes no sense.

Of course, if it's free, how does IBM make any money you might ask, but you have to ask them about it.