LAUG 1st Meeting

So i have attended the 1st Lotus Asia User Group Meeting in Singapore. I initially thought this group was there for quite sometime and i missed many of their meetings. Luckily, i didn't miss any as this is the first one. Seems that there used to be a Notes user group in Singapore long time before but it remained silent for whatever reasons.

Today, the group is rejuvenated again by conducting their first meeting @ Springleaf tower. Happened to meet couple of IBMers too and shared my opinions - i was a bit emotional when arguing IBM has to do more than what it is doing when taking the technology to the management. It was certainly not to just hit IBMers, infact we as developers also have to play a key role when we build/showcase applications to customers.

But my point to IBM is, if customers are not choosing Lotus Notes/Domino as their platform how do i develop apps using that as platform. Of course, I have to do my bit to go,push,argue with my customer base that - look these are the list of things this platform (Notes/Domino) can offer , now you show me a platform which can do all this in one single box. Mine stops there. I can do that and am doing it. But i think its very hard for me to have access to their senior management and convince them.

Right, i am asking IBM to play that role cos i know only IBM can do that. They can talk to corporate/government agencies about the role Lotus can play inside their organisations.
I know that day is not so far and will come soon, and i am sure IBM will do that.

Meanwhile, i hope that i can participate regularly in the LAUG monthly meetings and hopefully i can contribute something back to the community. Thank you very much Stephan for making this happen and thanks to all attendees.

After all, i love this IBM Lotus Notes/Domino platform. I earn my living through this and i badly want to contribute something to it.

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??

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..

Change in the blog title and content

Lots of early morning thoughts made me wake up again from the bed which leads to a title change for my blog. Yes, i am renaming my blog to "The Power of IBM Lotus Notes/Domino".

This decision is made keeping few things in mind. Earlier i thought of writing of whatever i feel but mostly on Lotus Notes and my own personal feelings, thoughts etc and hence named as Mirror Image.

Now i have decided to get a step ahead by keeping myself positive and focus more on positive side of me rather than just this is not good, that is not good. May be i am finding a bit hard to explain it but i do hope i would do better in the times to come.

So from now, i would write on Notes/Domino of whatever i know, i understood, i experience, i read for the benefit of myself and largely to my customers, friends, colleagues et all.

I hope i am going to enjoy of whatever i have chosen to and i sincerely hope other too will feel the same.

After a long time

I am writing this after a long time. Its about 1:15 AM here and i was not able to sleep.. i thought i would read some thing good about my platform before going to bed again.

I wanted to read the article in the developer works web site on How to manage mail boxes in Notes/Domino but till now i haven't opened that at all.. I have been browsing for the last 1.5hrs. That is the drawback when i sit in front of my Laptop.

I will see something and start reading forgetting about the one originally i had in mind. I somehow feel like reading many Lotus geeks writings on whatever they write about Lotus technologies. There is whole lot of people whom i watch. In particular Ed, Nathan, Stan, Alan, Rocky, Tom, Ben Rose, Ben Poole, Jake, Julian, Jon, Joe, Mike, Bob to name a few.

I have been working in this technology for the last 7 years but i still feel that somewhere am lacking. I don't know whether that feeling is only a mind set or something else. One possible reason could be here in Singapore not much applications are built around Notes/Domino. So what am doing now is to maintain the old age apps built in 90's.

Its interesting at times and challenging too because of the production related issues. As the application data grows, because of the way the application was developed it would have all kind of issues.

Poorly architectured, poorly written code Domino apps are running in my customer places.. Not to say i would do a 100% good job but am sure that i would have taken lot more points in to account before i do something.

I should say not many people would know Notes/Domino to that extent. Even an experienced Notes programmer knows just to write an some Lotus Script code to solve the problem. Absolutely no thoughts what is the impact when its rolled out to say 1000 users at a time.

The customers are also not willing to share clearly how many users are going to use this application. They would say some small number or in many cases the vendors are not even asking for actual no. of users who use the application.

Vendors think that they might lose the deal if they quote high and they quote less.

And i should say when it comes to Domino, people take everything for granted here. They just deploy the applicaiton in the server and that's all, they assume the app would run for ever and in many cases there would not be a Domino administrator. Even if they claim they are, they are at best their network administrators or mail administrators and not real Domino admins.

When it comes to Domino, there is this next thing - they want everything at a very little cost cause somewhere they would have heard this jargon RAD.

So all in all it frustrates me what to do on all this.. I wouldn't have constructed things nicely here but i hope that i'll improve in the days to come..