Saturday, January 21, 2006

Replication Mode

Lately, i have started using local mail file replica than to use my mail box in the server. They are actually for some good reasons.

One is to avoid the network traffic that i would be generating when i access the server each time for my mails. And the other is, i can do all my work related to my mails fast when am in disconnected mode or say replication mode. I would set a auto-replication every 15-20mts so that only at the time of replication i use my network and rest of the time leave it for others :)

I am thinking this way.. If everyone in the organisation does the same way as mentioned before a lot of network bandwidth can be saved and used for some other useful purposes.

Notes/Domino allows this to happen.. So why not take vantage??

Sunday, January 01, 2006

IBM Lotus Notes Domino Training

Last week went very good indeed as i was taking training classes for polytechnic students in my office.. Yes, they are doing their final year Industry attachment project in our company and i happened to take training for them in Notes/Domino.

They were 5 students from Nanyang Poly and 1 from Temasek poly. It was really interesting for me and was very happy to give some people training in my technology.. A lot of people from Notes community are talking about giving school people training in Notes/Domino (including Nathan Freeman) so that people coming out from school knows a technology other than MS..

I think MS is doing that and that's why every 6/10 wanna be IT professionals will have MCSE certification. If IBM has to change this kind of trend they have to take Notes to all particularly to schools/poly and colleges.

Before the start of the session, students told me that they haven't heard something called Notes/Domino but they do use Outlook at times cos that's what they have in their polytechnic to get their queries answered from their teachers via E-mails.

So i showed them Lotus Notes client and explained them as a PIM tool (includes E-mail, Calendaring/Scheduling, Group Calendars, Collaboration) what it can do in an organization.. They were very happy to see the Discussion DB's and immediately started with posting queries and answers.. I can see the joy in their face..

Most of them have done Java and .Net projects in their curriculum and they haven't seen applications like this before.. I showed them E-mail client first, Calendering and Scheduling, Group Calendars, Resource reservations etc and said all of them are out-of-the-box and this is not all :).. They were so pleased to see this and agreed that it can do a lot for any type of organisation...

Initially, i was showing them only Notes and started with "Story of the Notes" clipping from Julian's blog.. I slowly showed them with the advent of Internet, Lotus came out with their HTTP engine and code named as "DOMINO" and adapted that as the product name for their back end server after that..

I then opened the same discussion DB which they were playing around in Notes to show them in WEB. In Firefox browser the DB opened like charm and everyone in the room were astonished...

I showed them slowly the Domino designer the RAD tool for building Notes/Domino applications..

It was a very short span of time of 3 days in which i showed the capabilites of Notes/Domino and what it can do any organization.. I loved the way the training went and lotsa my training skills showed up during this sessions..

All in all i am very happy that i have shown them that there is this technology called Lotus Notes/Domino which is now a proud member of IBM Workplace..

Good luck to all of the students who came for training..