dadams.co.uk

Okay, probably a bit late, but better late than never (and ‘never’ was an option). Ed Brill somehow managed twenty or so posts during Lotusphere, and managed to take part in a boat race, and suffered a nasty verbal attack from a blogger who is less important that he’d like to believe he is (more on that later).

Personally I was worn out after live-blogging the Opening General Session - the announcements came so fast there was scarcely time to note all the details and take it all in. However, the following three days provided some opportunities to gather more details. I’ll just quickly mention the Lotusphere grand night out to Universal Islands of Adventure where we achieved the impossible… four major rides in two hours. Imagine doing that during the day in a school holiday. Four major rides in eight hours would be a more realistic expectation. Those rides were the Incredible Hulk (0 to 40 mph in two seconds), Spider-man (that was the best by far), Jurassic Park River Adventure (steep drop, wet jeans), and the thankfully over-quite-quickly Dueling Dragons (the mere memory turns my stomach). And the experience wouldn’t be complete without myself and a colleague threatening to kill another colleague for insisting we went on the second two rides after eating.

Anyway, back to Lotusphere. If I had to pick some highlights it would be the following:

• Russ Holden’s presentation on Domino 8.0.1 and ‘Next’, now known as 8.5. As Chief Architect Russ deserves the plaudits for the continued improvements (database compression, space saving on file attachments, native Active Directory authentication, to name but a few) while maintaining a consistent upgrade-able architecture. Yes, an architecture that has a roadmap and doesn’t require rip and replace migrations for every upgrade. Microsoft Exchange customers take note.
• Quickr 8.1 - fantastic update to an already fantastic product. Anybody who believes SharePoint Services to be the pinnacle of collaboration needs to broaden their horizons very soon.
• Sametime futures - near futures in fact. Some of the guys from Sametime Product Management and development showed some things that will hopefully ship this year… an Ajax web client, local client proxy, on-the-fly translation, an ad-hoc meeting place. All this in addition to Sametime Advanced (expected within a couple of months).
• Connections 2 - awesome. If the new home page and the improvements to Community pages weren’t enough, the next version of Activities will blow you away. Loads of new options to make management of an Activity more flexible, and best of all, customised forms (boy, do we have some great Ajax skills in the development team). I was sitting next to a customer from the UK, and he was bowled over (as was I). Watch out for this mid-year.

I mentioned that Ed Brill suffered a verbal attack from a blogger… Dan Lyons is a writer from Forbes who also masquerades as Fake Steve Jobs. Normally I find the blog amusing, if not a little foul-mouthed, knowing that the author actually works for a serious business publication. For some reason Mr Lyons found it necessary to launch a tirade against Lotusphere and Ed in particular. He called Ed a “marketing f***wit” and referred to other people who work for Lotus as “retards”. So suddenly this went from amusing to insulting. Lyons went on to write:

“What really saddens me, however, is the idea that somewhere out in some forlorn sad corner of the world someone is actually following this live blog and actually cares what Lotus announces and maybe even wishes he could be there in Orlando to experience the rock concert excitement in person. To those people I say this: I will pray for your souls.”

Given that Lotus is in the clear second place position in the messaging and collaboration market, leads the market for real-time collaboration and enterprise portals, has over 46,000 customer companies using Notes / Domino worldwide, and gained market share during 2006 (source: IDC and Gartner Dataquest), I would say that many businesses do care about what Lotus announce. Mr Lyons however demonstrated a complete lack of knowledge about the Lotus portfolio, and as he is a journalist I would suggest he does some research before publishing such as article in the future… even if it is done under a pseudonym distancing himself from his employer.

Furthermore, Ed runs a blog which attracts thousands of hits per day. He doesn’t have to pretend to be someone else to get that attention, because what he writes has value to the people who read his content. Consider that Mr Lyons. You can insult the Lotus brand, and anyone with any sense will see it as ill-informed crap. The Microsoft fan-boys will find it amusing and join in, but that’s to be expected. Now go and get a life, rather than hanging on the coat tails of someone who probably wouldn’t give you twenty seconds of attention.

And by the way, the real Steve Jobs loves Notes 8.5 for the Mac.

(11:05 EST, 16:05 UK) - I’m waiting for the opening general sesison to start… like many of our UKISA colleagues I’m attending the re-run, necessary because the numbers this year mean they couldn’t accomodate everyone in one go. It looks like it’s going to start late as many people are still coming in and trying to find seats. This is supposed to be half the attendees, yet the room looks full.

(11:21 EST, 16:21 UK) - the symphony (ho ho) orchestra have completed an outstanding set and preparations are being made for Mike Rhodin to enter the stage.

(11:23 EST, 16:23 UK) - Mike arrives and cracks the symphony gag. He then says that the first run of the session this morning was a rehearsal, and goes on to explain the theme of ‘Emergence’ (getting the big picture from patterns and using it to your advantage).

(11:27 EST, 16:27 UK) - the guest speaker is Bob Costas, a sports commentator. Well done to everyone who said it was going to be William Shatner.

(11:43 EST, 16:43 UK) - Mike Rhodin has returned to the stage and is discussing modes of collaboration.

(11:55 EST, 16:55 UK) - no announcements yet, but the ground has been set for Lotus Connections, composite applications and mobile working. Oh, an announcement that Lotus and RIM will work more closely on content and applications.

(11:58 EST, 16:58 UK) - .Dr Vishal Sikka, the CTO of SAP comes to the stage. ‘Atlantic’ will allow Lotus Notes to access key SAP applications. Ron Sebastian (of course) provides a demo of a composite application.

(12:03 EST, 17:03 UK) - Alistair Rennie arrives to talk about Notes and Domino. He is joined by Russ Holden and Jeff Eisen for a light-hearted debate. Jeff talks about Notes on the Mac, Ubuntu Linux and Traveler (including iPhone support).

(12:07 EST, 17:07 UK) - Russ counters with improvements on the Domino server (storage and performance), and the new Domino Web Access Lite. Jeff then talks about ‘My Widgets’ which Ron demos along with Quickr integration and new calendar scheduling options.

(12:15 EST, 17:15 UK) - Ron demos Domino Web Access Lite and the iPhone edition.

(12:17 EST, 17:17 UK) - Russ discusses Domino 8.5 - directory freedom, Notes ID vault, and reducing file attachment storage. Also, a new appliance for Domino virus and spam protection. And then, Web 2.0 for the Domino server. Maureen Leland comes on to talk about improvements to building and rendering web applications, and demos improvements to the Domino Designer (which will be an Eclipse application in 8.5).

(12:25 EST, 17:25 UK) - Kevin Cavanaugh arrives to talk about Symphony. He says that it allows businesses to move away from proprietary document formats and strangle-held budgets. He then announces that beta 4 will provide new APIs to extend Symphony’s functionality.

(12:30 EST, 17:30 UK) - Bruce Morse wishes Sametime a happy 10th birthday. Outlook users made up a third of new Sametime customers in 2007. Sametime Advanced and Sametime Unified Telephony are discussed, and Ron provides a demo.

(12:42 EST, 17:42 UK) - it’s Portal time with Larry Bowden. He says that Websphere Portal has been #1 in the market for a decade. Larry talks about portal-based dashboards providing content to Quickr, Sametime and Notes. And another set of demos from Ron - Portal / Connections integration, embedding of rich media, tear-away portlets, integration with Forms, a Forms web-based designer (Total Forms)… crikey, loads there.

(12:53 EST, 17:53 UK) - it’s Jeff Schick to talk about social networking (and probably Connections). He also talks about Quickr - clearly a move to couple the two more closely - and says that version 8.1 will add more value, especially to Lotus Domino customers. Integration with FileNet and Content Manager is discussed. Ron gets a break from the demo and Suzanne Minassian takes over. ‘My Files’ and the media library are demoed.

(13:04 EST, 18:04 UK) - back to Jeff for an announcement of on-the-fly language translation for Connections, And here we go, Connections 2… customisation, attention management, widgets and mash-ups, Atlas for Lotus Connections (visualisation), off-line access / synchronisation, and mobile access. Suzanne demos.

(13:14 EST, 18:14 UK) - Jeff talks mash-ups. “Makes SOA work the desktop”. Jeff announces Lotus Mashups, a graphical browser-based tool for application assembly.based on open standards. Suzanne demos, building an application that starts as an organisation chart but then includes salary and HR data. Funky.

(13:19 EST, 18:19 UK) - back to Mike. Big drum roll followed by a big SMB announcement… Lotus Foundations, a collection of integrated servers for all-encompassing services. Mike then pulled a Domino-configured Nitix server from an envelope. And then ‘Bluehouse’, solutions for small businesses. Another demo from Ron.

That’s it… a lot there, I could hardly keep up.

In a post in November last year I mentioned that in addition to the the ZDNet videos I had recorded a video interview for vnunet.com. I was sent a first edit shortly after, but I only recently remembered to chase up on where it was on the vnunet.com site… so you can now view it here.

This was a much easier format to work with than the ZDNet whiteboards. Compared the utter nightmare I bestowed upon the very patient ZDNet producer (the guy really was a gem), Andrew Charlesworth and I did this in just one take (although we recorded a second to help the editing process). One thing I do realise now is that I couldn’t have a career in broadcasting (always fancied being a chat show host) until I get rid of the errrs and errrms.

Okay, here’s a big helping of double-standards. We’ve discussed the BBC news site’s slightly Microsoft-centric skew on the world of technology, but I don’t mind Apple getting a bit of airtime. I was told that “the BBC don’t do product announcements”, so obviously their coverage of the latest Apple-fest in the court of King Steve is purely about interesting technology… it just so happens that Apple happened to have announced some new products during MacWorld. Imagine that.

Now, I have to admit that I haven’t, as yet, harboured any great desire to own a Mac. Wild Bill will probably hunt me down during the next week and subject me to several hours of reasoning. Or he might just stay in the bar, we’ll see. But I can’t help but admire Apple’s latest offering, the MacBook Air. It’s 0.76 inches thick at it’s thickest point. How do they do that? It weighs three pounds. Crikey. What they don’t tell you is that you need an aluminium case weighing ten pounds to carry it round in to make sure your wafer-thin Mac doesn’t snap in half (that’s not true, but you get the point). What is true is that to get to those vital statistics it doesn’t have a CD drive, but Apple have invented ‘Remote Disc’ (accessing CD drives over Wifi) to compensate.

Two further things occurred to me while watching the guided tour. Firstly, the lid is as flat as an After Eight mint… so how the hell did they fit a webcam in there? Amazing. Second, when John (that’s his name) demonstrates Remote Disc, look at the Windows-based computer he puts the CD in. Could they have picked a lumpier ugly-looking beast? Just look how that contrasts with the MacBook Air’s beauty. That’s Apple for you… nice products, great marketing.

Earlier in January I commented on the fact that the BBC’s news site was giving Bill Gates and his company (the name escapes me for the moment) a lot of air-time, and seemed to revere Gates as the saviour of the universe. So I was very interested when the following headline popped up in NewsFox (an RSS reader extension for Firefox).

‘MP accuses BBC chief of illegally championing Microsoft’ - as featured in the site bookmarked by every good IT professional, The Register.

“At last” I thought, “someone has noticed”. However, the story isn’t about the BBC giving so much airtime to Microsoft (oh yeah, that’s the company name I was trying to remember) or worshipping Bill’s every move (or movement) - it’s about the BBC’s iPlayer service. iPlayer allows you to catch up on programs you might have missed… a bit like Sky Plus but cheaper and more reliable.

Liberal Democrat John Pugh MP accuses the BBC (a public body) of “handing a commercial advantage to that company [Microsoft]“. The problem is that the iPlayer is only fully-supported using Internet Explorer on a Windows operating system. Well yes, that does seem a tad Microsoft-centric, doesn’t it?

Pugh continued “What might be a pragmatic choice for a privately funded company becomes deeply problematic for a public corporation.”

Visit the iPlayer in Mozilla Firefox and you’ll see the message “Sorry, downloading BBC iPlayer programmes is currently only available in Internet Explorer”. You can actually play the content in Firefox, but you can’t download it. A link takes you to a page which explains the issue further:

“ActiveX, an essential component in making the BBC iPlayer Download Manager communicate with the BBC iPlayer website, only functions in Internet Explorer which is why you must use this browser.”

Well, balls to that - no-one is going to tell me which browser to use. The Register article goes on to discuss the fact that Linux and Mac users don’t have the option of begrudgingly opening Internet Explorer. If they’d used Java, then all three communities would be given a chance to use the technology.

But remember, the BBC are impartial.

I won’t be getting much sympathy from my colleagues who aren’t attending… sorry guys. Last night I started working on an annual dilemma… which Lotusphere sessions to attend. I’ve said before that this is the hallmark of a great event, being spoilt for choice. I’ve identified fifty-four (yes, 54) sessions that I want to attend, but the four-day schedule means I can only attend eighteen. Prioritising is tricky when you don’t want to miss anything, but I shouldn’t be complaining (I’m not, this is a nice ‘problem’ to have).

Also of note this year is the fact that the opening general session (featuring Mike Rhodin and his team, a guest speaker - last year it was Neil Armstrong - and a heap of announcements) is having to be repeated to accommodate everyone - a happy symptom of the ever-increasing attendance. Let me just repeat that - ever-increasing attendance.

My frolleague Brendan Tutt and I will be live-blogging again this year (in our IBM-internal Lotusphere blog), and I’ll paste the highlights into this blog too.

Addendum: ooops, I nearly forget to thank Ben Langhinrichs of Geniisoft for once again providing the Lotusphere session application for Notes, a nifty tool which lists the sessions and what else is going on at the same time, and then adds the selected sessions to your Notes calendar. Thanks Ben.

I don’t believe I’m writing this. Less than two weeks after unwrapping my Christmas present it’s knackered. I set it up to record off Sky Plus, and a little later noticed that it wasn’t recording. I took it off the DVR Station and tried to turn it on - nothing. After a few more attempts at holding down the power button the boot-up screen appeared - “Archos - entertainment your way” - and then I saw “Recovery code 102 - system is damaged”. The device felt warmer than usual, an ominous sign.

I was provided with three options for recovering the system - ‘no’, ‘repair’ and ‘format disk’. Ah, clearly ‘repair’ was the best option. Unfortunately this just seemed to turn the device off, back on again and land me at the same screen. I tried it again… and again, and again. I pressed the reset thingy. I tried ‘repair’ again. I left it switched off to cool down. I tried again.

I then started searching the Archos forum and found (ominously) that several other people had suffered this problem but (ominously, there’s that word again) it seemed no-one had a solution. Someone suggested connecting to the computer via USB and doing a checkdisk, but unfortunately Windows wouldn’t even recognise it as a connected device (hardly suprising, during normal operation it asks you if you’d like to enable USB).

So, the last resort before I face the reality of sending it back or starting the battle to get a replacement - ‘format disk’. Obviously this was a last resort as it would render many hours worth of transferring content to the device pointless. But I took the plunge and pressed it… and… nothing. I just came back to the same three options.

As I’m typing I’m holding on to play.com’s customer service line - all of their agents are currently busy (but my call will be answered shortly… mind you, they said that 25 minutes ago).

What really annoys me is that I’ve invested in stuff to go with the Archos… a case, a screen protector, additional software, the DVR Station. I was going to take it to Lotusphere with me, and that’s now looking unlikely.

Number 1 - recorded from Sky Plus. I mentioned in an earlier post that most things concerned with Sky Plus are usually doomed to failure. Everyone in the house (even the hamster) is actually forbidden to physically touch the Sky Plus box on the grounds that “it’s working, don’t touch it”. So the thought of moving it to plug some extra cables in filled me with dread. However, after carefully plugging in said cables and attaching to the Archos’ DVR Station, recording was very easy. The quality of the results is excellent and - how cool is this? - the Archos is able to edit the results (chop off over-runs, remove the adverts, that sort of thing).

Number 2 - set up UPnP. Of course, you all know that UPnP stands for ‘Universal Plug and Play’. Not wanting to break the sacred covenant of IT people I didn’t read the manual, but it didn’t take long to add a UPnP service to the ThinkPad, share a folder, and then stream video and browse photos from that folder wirelessly to the Archos. I probably won’t use it that much, but it’s cool and important to get these things working. Mind you, having the DVR Station means that it is possible to stream movies or photos from the ‘Pad to the Archos and then to the television.

Number 3 - work in progress… content captured from Sky Plus converted into a format that will then work on the wife’s iPod touch. This project is extremely important for a) chick-flick ‘The Holiday’ and b) Take That live on New Year’s Eve. However, it’s not working… yet.

This is something I’ve never done before… posted an entry and then changed it completely later the same day. The following is a re-thought entry about the same topic, but a bit more balanced.

I like to peruse the technology news page of the BBC’s news site as I find it one of the best ways to find out what Microsoft are up to and how it’s being positioned to the public. I do subscribe to a couple of Microsoft-centric newsfeeds, but the BBC’s news site is one of the most read on the planet, so it’s important to see what’s going on there.

We’ve had several heated conversations in the office about the fact that Microsoft seem to get a lot of coverage on BBC News… too much, way too much in my opinion. Around the time of the launch of Windows Vista it seemed that BBC News was like Microsoft’s own PR agency and news service rolled into one. To be fair, some other companies get a lot of focus… Apple for example, and I’ll admit to double-standards and say that I don’t have a problem with Apple getting a lot of airtime. IBM get very little coverage in comparison to Microsoft, and the Lotus brand get next to nothing (do a search on Microsoft and IBM and compare the results).

I took this conversation further on a couple of occasions. Shortly before the launch of Sametime 7.5 there were security restrictions and all kinds of problems at the airports in the UK, and I considered how relevant real-time collaboration was. Surely the market leader in real-time collaboration bringing out a new version and tackling some of the issues of business travel was news-worthy. Well, apparently not, yet at that time Internet Explorer 7 was getting a lot of coverage.

The drivers behind what the BBC decide to cover have been explained to me - basically what the BBC think their readership would be interested in and what has a broad appeal. Microsoft and Apple are news-worthy. I was told that “the BBC don’t do product announcements” but I blatantly disagreed with this. Have a read of this article and see if you think it’s tantamount to a product announcement. And to be fair, Apple get the same treatment. Think about that idea of what the BBC’s readership would be interested in… are they given the opportunity to be interested in other options when other software vendors aren’t granted an equal shout? Lotus Symphony, a free alternative to Microsoft Office, should be of interest to consumers and businesses - not just because it’s free but also because of the importance of the Open Document Format. However, there has been no coverage of Symphony.

The one that really had me ranting (I know, hard to believe) was a few years ago when the Beeb ran a story about Microsoft outlining the future of e-mail. They mentioned that Microsoft would introduce e-mail which couldn’t be forwarded or copied to another recipient. At the time of that article that capability had been in Lotus Notes for a few years already, yet Microsoft were getting the credit for a future vision. Microsoft the great visionaries? No, just a case of Microsoft getting the airtime.

So, with this in mind (and here’s the point of all this), they’re offering you the opportunity to post questions for Bill Gates, “one of the most important men in technology over the last three decades”. The man who invented oxygen, food, television and, of course, the internet.

The BBC deliberates your line of questioning… “Perhaps you have always wanted to know what the inspiration was behind Windows. Maybe you want to know what it is like being one of the world’s richest men. Or maybe you are more interested in the philanthropic career he has planned after he steps down.”

I know the answer to what was the inspiration behind Windows… it was the Apple Mac operating system. And as interesting as all those other questions sound, I’d just like to know about the roadmap for Microsoft Exchange (as it’s clearly too big a secret to share with the world). And actually I asked that one (can’t see it being selected), and just for fun I also asked “how many Zunes have you sold and when will you admit that Apple are just completely kicking your backside in that market?”.

The BBC have a charter which includes impartiality, so surely this means that Sam Palmisano will be next week’s guest question-answerer, followed by, oooh, perhaps Larry Ellison the week after. Maybe Steve Jobs (well, that wouldn’t surprise me). But probably not.

So, here we are, the first post of 2008. After a strenuous first day back at work I arrived home to find two letters for me. Not unusual, I get post but usually it’s either a) bills or b) junk mail. Sometimes birthday cards, but typically only in January.

Since we moved in October 2006 we certainly get less casual delivered-on-foot junk mail. Where we used to live there was a high concentration of houses meaning that all manner of junk mail-delivery offenders could offload a huge volume of their wares in a short time… and hence we used to get a lot, sometimes up to ten pizza delivery leaflets a week. The day when I opened the door, screwed up a leaflet from an estate agent and threw it back at his head now seems distant.

The road we now live in is a bit of a hike for on-foot junk mail-delivery, nowhere near as many houses and wouldn’t be attempted after dark (not because of me jumping out of a bush at them - although that’s a thought - it’s just a very dark road). Hence we rarely get any leaflets through the door, which I count as a huge bonus. However…

The amount of junk mail delivered in addressed envelopes seems to be on the increase. Now, what are we constantly warned against (apart from eating too much saturated fat, binge drinking and driving while shaving or eating a bowl of cereal)? Answer: identity fraud. Who warns us against identity fraud? Answer: financial institutions, banks and credit card providers. Who sends the most junk mail which carries the risk of exposing our name and address details to potential fraudsters? Answer: financial institutions, banks and credit card providers.

Here’s my tip… when you receive junk mail from anyone and it includes a reply-paid envelope, send it back to them. It costs them money to process your incoming envelope. You can send their crap back to them and include a note saying “take me off your mailing list” or just send them back something else you don’t want. After all, they sent you some rubbish, so just return the favour.