Made up my mind

Today, i finally made up my mind to use this blog much more than i have been doing so far. I am willing to cover all that has happened in the past with the present in my posts. But how am i going to differentiate this two? At the moment i am planning to include the month and date(if possible) in the title of the entry.

The reason am doing this is to remember all the good things i have had in the past and hope to continue the same in the future and more. I always think that my memory is so good that i can tell many of the things happened during my childhood, even my mom don't remember.

Ok, so there we go... lets see how it goes.

Effective Team Collaboration in On-Demand Work Place

Attended a half-day seminar on Effective Team Collaboration in On-Demand Workplace conducted by IBM. It was a very good and different from the usual ones. IBM has started doing some great things around Lotus marketing and it is evident in these events. The crowd was pretty decent in number and for the first time i have got DVD's as take away with lots of IBM software evaluation copies.

The presentation was indeed good by Scott Bain - Manager IBM Software Technology Group followed with nice demos from Mark Moore. The presentation was well organised and started with Domino v7 and Sametime integration and explaining the newly introduced Web services in Domino. Got some very interesting points including the free presence awareness, and IM.

This particular feature is available from v6.5 but the sad thing is not many know about this and hence haven't tried in their environments. I don't know of anyone who is using this in Singapore. Initially, i assumed that i require a Lotus Sametime server component to make this work but after taking some time with the speakers after the presentation i found out that its just a matter of turning ON the feature while installing and configuring Domino. Now i am convinced to give it a try in my notebook to begin with.

So then the presentation moved to extending Domino to Portal infrastructures. They covered some of the features of Websphere portal and how it can work with Domino and several other transaction oriented apps. They were explaining how collaboration could extend to portals and will in turn help the customers.

Till that stage, they were explaining about tool based collaboration like E-mails, IM, Discussions, Application databases which we are doing today. In the future there is going to be "Activity based collaboration" which is also called Contextual collaboration.

What it means is this : For a particular goal/activity to be accomplished users are using various tools like Emails, Chats, Word docs to generate artifacts. And the common thread which connects all these is that particular "Activity". The thread which links everything is called an Activity thread which is what Activity centric collaboration all about.

The users might have used various tools, interacted with various users and would have prepared various artifcats like word docs, spread sheets so on so forth. But at one shot, the system will show the users about all the things which has happened on that particular task and what is happening currently.

Sounds exciting!!! Today this technology is available in the form of Lotus Workplace and customers can make use of it straight away. But if users want to stay in the evolutionary path who is currently using Domino v6.5 upwards or Websphere Portal they can wait till "Hannover" time frame and Domino Next which will have Workplace technologies sowed in everywhere.

I look forward to "Hannover". Meanwhile i will start exploring about Workplace :)

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..