So I received an inbound chat to Sametime from an AOL person through the gateway.  This person was not on my list previously in Sametime as a buddy.  So while in the chat I clicked the Add icon and they were successfully listed in the right group.

However (isn't there always one of these with me), they showed with the custom icon for the community and not with the little AOL running man.  So I removed the username entirely from my buddylist, and then manually added a new contact from the buddylist window.  I choose external contact and add the AOL name and the AOL running man shows up just fine.

Bizarre and makes sense in a weird way, it is broke.

I had read Ed's posting on too much information and feeds and had just personally deleted my local RSS database (News Miner) a few weeks ago to start from scratch.  I found that weeding it out would be tougher than starting over.

Then before I could act, people had tossed out the Digg idea for Domino where people vote and have one site of aggregated content.  A great idea, but the stuff has to get there somehow.  Sounds like a ping utility inside the blog to get it posted with the right stuff.  Or someone reading has to nominate it.  I think it is a great idea to simplify and find what is going on in the Domino blog world.

Imagine all the RSS with the native feed reader ability inside of the Notes 8 client?  A central source would make life easier than trying to subscribe to so many links.  Most of our users have not fully discovered RSS.  As admins and such, we have played around with it a lot.  But now picture your average user and their skillset and demand for streaming radio, pictures, videos, shopping and add in the constant feed of RSS on just about every site from eBay to their favorite cooking website for new recipes.  This could get overwhelming.

Do not look at these postings as whining or complaining, just things the users need to be aware of in usage in advance so they do not question you later.

I never looked until today, which I should have.  While running the Sametime Mobile client for Blackberry, you can see all your AOL and gTalk contacts just great.  However, when they see you through the gateway, they do not get the mobile icon like other Sametime users see.  This might be a limitation of the gateway itself, but users will notice, trust me.

So what you get is the standard online and status ability, just not client type indications.

Thanks to Bruce for taking the time to drag and drop or whatever it is this thing does to make widgets.

If you add a user from the Sametime Gateway with an alias name, such as IdoNotes@gmail dot com, but give it a friendly name such as Chris on GTalk, you can then never again see the email address you add.  I tried looking at Edit Nickname from the menu, but that only let's you change what you set, not see the address you added.  I saw nothing under the menu items either.  Yes, you could look at local XML, but for a user that will not fly.

So chalk this one to a 'feature request' I guess.

I received a Sametime to Sametime ping via the AOL Clearinghouse today from Adam G.  Not sure if this is live public stuff yet so I blurred the host so no one went crazy, but yes it did happen from their test servers.

Here are the categories and winners

Best Messaging and Collaborative Solution

• Intravision (denmark) - winner
• cypoint systems innovation AB (sweden)
• Gaia Informaitca (brazil)

Bext Contextual Collaboration Solution

• Adrenalin eSystem Limited (India)
• Brookstone Technoloiiges pty limited (Australia)
• relavis Corporation (US) - winner

 
Best Portal Solution

• Flowring Technology Corp (Taiwan)
• Kryos Systems (Canada) - winner
• Gemini Systems (USA)

Best Industry Solution

• Bat-groupware GmbH (Austria) - winner
• Engram Gmbh (Germany)
• Siemens Communications (USA)

Best Midmarket Solution

• GEDYS Intraware Gmbh (Germany)
• DLI.tools Inc (Canda)
• VDoc Software (France) - winner

Best Tool and Utility Solution

• Idokiorro Mobile, Inc (Canada)
• Instant Technologies (USA) - winner
• Smartdot Technolgoiies Co, LTD (China)

Best IBM Lotus Sametime Collaboration Extension

• Radvision, Inc (USA)
• iscood AG (Switzerland)
• Imixs Software Solutions Gmbh (Germany) - winner

Best IBM Workplace Forms Solution

• ITM Associates Inc (USA)
• Spheronic (Austrialia) - winner
• Enterprise Information Management, inc (USA)

Best People-centric SOA Solution

• PSC Group, LLC (USA) - winner
• Ascentant Technology (USA)
• Peace System Integration (Taiwan)

Distinguished Achievement Awards NA

• TamGroup (USA)
• Ascendant Technology (USA) - winner
• E2 Consulting (USA)

Sametime 7.5 should grab your local or server buddylist for AOL, Google Talk and Yahoo and import those into the buddy list via script, even keeping groups if there is XML ability like the below image does.  What a way to move people to the Sametime Gateway!!



This is the new update for AOL Triton install.  I saw that AIM Pro does something similar, but this is too easy for users.  (Why can't this grab your local Notes address book I wonder too? A simple look-up for online name fields and email names?)  Just one more fight to have some public system instead of Sametime for smaller sites.

To follow up on this mornings posting, I was interested to see that AIM 6 now allows 1000 buddies in the list, plus a tabbed interface (like Trillian), offline messages (like Yahoo) and local chat logging (like Trillian again and now Sametime).

I have an interesting bug or something bizarro that bothers me if it isn't to post in a few minutes after some testing on the Sametime Gateway however.

You can now receive it in HTML or straight text, it is all up to your profile on the LotusUserGroup site.  So head on over and get your recent copy right here

This month I had a nice array of things I wrote (I like to think) from Hannover to Sametime hardware sizing.

Pretty straight forward... they assign it to you automatically.  You don't get a choice here. The below is Trillian and I added an attachment for the AOL Triton look and feel of people through the gateway.

Ok, this has me laughing and I had to share.   I still use some of the mood stamps in mail messages, they actually draw attention since so many users are 'new'.  But Microsoft has now taken them on in patent under the name emotiflags

An emotiflag is made up of a graphical icon and a text tag, and may also include a textual representation of the graphical icon. A collection of emotiflags is maintained by an email application and made available to users. Users can modify existing emotiflags and create custom emotiflags. Users can also add an emotiflag to an email message they are composing so that when the email message is sent, the emotiflag is sent with the email message

So this old product piece once again becomes a patent for someone else.  There is supposed to be images attached but they would not load for some reason.

In the patent I liked this little section from the 'background" assumptions:

Many existing email applications enable users to apply color-coded flags to received email messages. These flags are frequently used to represent a status of the email messages (e.g., red for follow up; orange for reply; yellow for to do; and so on). Some email applications also enable users to mark a message as important (e.g., with a "!") or unimportant (e.g., with a ".dwnarw.") before the message is sent, so that when a user receives the message, the importance of the message is clearly indicated

While performing an upgrade of version and hardware swap from dedicated to VMWare, I had one sticky issue for a client. We performed the whole upgrade remotely, no reason to be sitting there for this one.

Here is the issue.  After loading 7.0.2 in the new VMWare, we shut down the old 6.5.3 server and began the simple mailfile and few database copies.  We brought the server up under the old name and started seeing countless lines of the different tasks with the same error message

"cache entry not found"

No maintenance or convert task would fix it.  Convert, Fixup, compact, index all failed with the same error.  Yes, all of them.

Now I searched Knowledgebase and online to limited success.  The Sched task, RnRMgr and HTTP were all reporting this same error.  Well with numerous tweaks to the Google search, I finally found some insight. The customer had moved to a single copy template (SCT) for the DWA 6 infrastructure.  When the databases were moved over, the SCT templates in use were not.  I simply moved those over and the server came right up with the error removed.  Convert then ran successfully to move them to DWA7 and then compact to reclaim much of the unused diskspace.

Issue solved and into the books for another oddity of undocumented weirdness.

I have a public group from our corporate directory.  Not a large one, maybe 40 people.  I can talk to most everyone just fine while using Sametime Mobile on the Blackberry 8703e.  However, there is one person I go to talk to and it throws the following screenshot error.  I wonder if it has to do with chat history

So today ends the 3-day seminar.  I crammed in a podcast, announcing the Lotusphere2007 t-shirts with the Taking Notes guys and even digging deep in the conversations around the Sametime Gateway.

As for here, the normal array.  Only a couple hands running older versions of Sametime, from 3.1 and below.  No one really had a full implementation of 7.5 outside of a couple small shops.  One site even used the integrated calendaring feature to invite the Sametime server for all of their meetings.  I do not see that often at all.

The demand for scalable and clustered architectures was the largest I had seen so far.  There were some larger enterprises represented that were asking about architecture design and deploying everything from clusters to MUX's with load balancers.  It was nice to see that Sametime 7.5 is becoming a commodity and looked upon as a business tool.  The session on plug-ins showed some of the capabilities, and now that I have tested and actually ran the auto updates from the server side, it made the push in that direction stronger for myself.  I took great interest in the new redpaper Carl mentioned and can't wait for it to hit full redbook.  It has a couple cool plug-in ideas.  It will offer some sample code download too.

Deployment was a concern, mainly over the amount of features.  I posed a question to Adam G offline asking about the ability to reduce memory load by removing feature sets from the client.  This was asked more than once by attendees here and other cities.  Basically the thinking is that if I am not using it or deploying it, why do I have to show it and can I save from that in memory.

Dinner the second night (the first night I missed a connection due to mechanical issues on the plane) was at Bella Trattoria.  Excellent food, thanks to Andy P for choosing.  Otherwise I got to see nothing outside of the hotel and a walk to a local sports grille.

Listen Up !

Find me, Bruce or Julian for one of our super cool t-shirts for Lotusphere 2007. But you have to be a subscriber or new subscriber to our podcasts to get your hands on one of these!

Front of Shirt

Back of shirt

I anticipated the book going more in depth in certain areas, but the overview it provided for each section was a great starter. I do agree with another reviewer that stated it was missing references to certain website links or direction to where to gather more information. This was a downside, mainly in dealing with large technical references such as this book. An index or glossary, noting the pages used and full definitions would have gone a long way.

I did like some of the directions on testing and building of products, scripts or other methods to verify your own environment however. I do realize you can only fit so much detail, but some definition areas needed more explanation that a simple paragraph. I would have looked to eliminate those and expand on others to give the feeling of deeper information.

Now saying all that, I appreciated the adding of the 8th layer that is not mentioned anywhere else. The reading was fairly straightforward and simple for the intermediate level technical administrator. Some of the references are not for the basic entry level, as it jumps right into topics that assume basic knowledge of networks, protocols and even mail and messaging.

I shared this with some staff in the office for reading of particular areas and will be keeping it on the bookshelf (which means it is a keeper)

Chris Miller interviews Adam Gartenberg, Lotus Offering Manager for Real-time Collaboration. We cover why the recent blog comments/postings exist and confusion over the Sametime Gateway in numerous areas:

• Why was the gateway not made to natively run on Domino?
• Why the choice of DB2 over Cloudscape?
• When will the Sametime server install be simplified and streamlined?
• Is IBM pursuing an appliance model approach for the gateway?
• The older Sametime 3.1 AOL integration versus now
• What can be done to lighten the memory load in the Sametime 7.5 client?
• Plus a bunch of others I tossed in and talked about myself with him

I apologize for some of the audio overlap, I did not know that was occurring until I was done recording.

"AOL Operations has verified that connectria is misconfigured. However we do not see other misconfigurations right now. Would be good if you could let us know other domains that are not ok."

After checking today, it seems I have the nice little yellow ball of awareness next to my name and the MS Office icon is gone.  They are uploading the Sametime blue chat thingy we all know so well.

I have already filled some slots before it went public in this announcement, but I plan on taking advantage of technology and doing an onslaught of podcasts from Lotusphere.  Here is the advertising announcement that went out in email

 <---- launch the pdf from here

Please forward all responses to IdoNotes at netscape.net

Note: Filled are two of the opening session slots and a few random others throughout the week already

We are looking for test developers for the following exams:
 
 
* 190-756 Using Web Services in IBM Lotus Domino 7 Applications
* 190-738 Developing Applications with IBM Lotus Sametime 7.5
* 070-262 TS: Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 - Implementing, Managing, and Troubleshooting
* 000-252 WebSphere Application Server V6.0 Network Deployment, Basic Administration
* 190-824 Building Portlets with IBM Websphere Portlet Factory 6
* 190-822 Creating Application Components with IBM Workplace 6 Forms
* 190-826 Creating Application Components with IBM Workplace Designer 6
* 000-255 Developing with IBM Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software V6.0
* 000-825 IBM WebSphere Portal V6.0, Deployment and Administration
* 000-829 IBM WebSphere Portal V6.0, Application Development
 
 
 
If you are interested, or know anyone who may be interested, please have them contact us ....   if you happened to work on the real exam for any of these, we unfortunately, can not use you as a resource.
 
We can either pay on a per-question basis or a fixed price.
 
Thank you,
 
 
Jason Collier
support@certfx.com

Here is the screenshot from Trillian.  Ouch, hahaha.  That is not my windows icon nor what I use for Trillian icon as most of you know.  So did it grab it form my OS?  Either way that is funny to me

AOL is now connected fully and NULL errors seem to have vanished with much tweaking and un quietly announced patches.  Google Talk went live today and seems to work fine, it prompted me for the authorization to add awareness and to my buddylist, I am still waiting on the green light however.

I am getting lot of IM's and a few emails over setting this up and I hope to have a nice document shortly to answer those burning questions for all of you

You can catch up over here

First, from ZDNet Asia comes this little quip:

According to Peter O'Kelly, research director at analyst company Burton Group, the cocktail of Microsoft's Exchange 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007 will present "unprecedented competition" to IBM in messaging and collaboration software. He was speaking to ZDNet Asia on the sidelines of a press briefing, held Wednesday--a day before Microsoft launches Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Exchange 2007 for business customers on Nov. 30.

O'Kelly said: "Microsoft has never had the combination of very strong enterprise messaging and collaboration software before. So, I think Microsoft is going to be a new competitive threat to IBM."

He noted that Microsoft has historically been strong in enterprise messaging, but not in collaboration. "[Exchange] hasn't really approached what you could do with Lotus Notes, which is a combination of enterprise messaging and document-oriented workflow."

I am not sure how he derives this from announcements only and no testing, but I am curious to see how it falls into place.  Now the licensing for Unified Communications, which covers antispam, antivirus and other items makes sense when Microsoft has been out buying such companies.  So rolling it into one package does make a nice offering.  However, most companies are already embedded into appliances and other installed applications for filtering and service.  But, when those comes up for maintenance or renewal, some will jump ship to a reduced, single cost point that offers all if it works right.

The conference
  Another excellent conference produced by WISPubs and The View.  An excellent array of speakers on hand turned out some sessions, I myself made time to see on breaks.  I am always amazed at the knowledge that everyone carries and in very certain and specific areas.  All in attendance came prepared with tons of questions and very focused direction.  I handled a session on Sametime 7.5 which I drew much from the Real-Time Collaboration Seminar we are in the middle of touring right now (see link on left of blog).  As most has seen the interface, the growth in the ability around plug-ins and the abilities of the Sametime Gateway generated most of the questions.  The majority had already installed Sametime and were in the process of upgrade planning.  Those that had upgraded were smaller enterprise sizes, the largest was 500 persons.  We covered some of the security considerations around plug-in deployment and control over users.  Mail routing was a hot topic, both SMTP based and NRPC based.  As I mentioned in the other postings, there was some unique environments with multiple domains, firewalls, multi-company consolidations and dilemmas and just plain problems.  It seems most were inherited from previous administrators.

But let us make one thing clear.. very few discussions about companies wanting to switch to other solutions and more that were bringing Exchange over or making sure coexistence worked.  I am pleased to see growth in the Europe market and the Notes 8 showings reinvigorated many.  I was glad to see Ed and Mary Beth come over for the conference.  I actually didn't know Mary Beth had another session on Notes 8 the next day. I paid attention to the rumblings from the attendees to hear it was well received again.  Moving forward in Lotus Notes is no longer about Domino, but about total architecture solutions including Portal and the Eclipse framework.

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