Issues have come about with the deployment of the Sametime 8 client.  There is some missing pieces to the provisioning mainfest that will prevent the ability to properly upgrade/update the client in the future.  If you already have 8, you have to get the patch out there.  If you are just staring to deploy Sametime 8 clients, then get this in place first.  This technote goes into full detail on the fix and what is being changed.

Without implementing this fix, administrators will not be able to successfully maintain Sametime Connect clients and keep them up-to-date with the latest maintenance releases.

If the Sametime 8.0 Connect client has not yet been deployed, administrators can simply replace the provisioning manifest (also known as the install manifest) with the updated one included in the download package referred to above. This issue impacts both the stand-alone client installation package as well as the Network Client Install (NCI) package.

Everyone heading out to CES has been posting around this, they are limiting the amount of checked, spare ones you can have.  Carry-on and ones in the original packing seem to be ok.  If they are inside the camera, cellphone or whatever they are ok.  It is just the loose ones. Check the following links to clarify:

• New York Times article
• Geek News Central
• SafeTravel dot gov

They all address the issue.  The weirdest statement is that in the cargo hold the flight staff can not monitor the possibility of a fire until it is too late.  However, in the cabin they can.

Alan and Carl had both posted on Symbaloo.  While I was doing a site review for the other blog, I figured it might well fit into this one as well.  This site actually has a hidden social networking hook, allowing you to create custom pages and send them to others to use as their desktop.  Much like Pageflakes does in theirs where I already created pages for Notes bloggers and the Lotus Support RSS feeds.  (listen to my podcast interview of the Pageflakes founder, a former Notes guy)

Since there are screenshots on the other pages (including webware) I will leave those out but tell you what I think.  The iconic type desktop works well overall.  While some of the icons actually utilize the main center window to show the results of what you click, others open new tabs or browser windows (found in settings).  You actually get the most function by making your own pages and adding content that you want.  There is more than a handful of built in widgets and feeds, from there you can also add your own site or feed. There was 2 Gmail links.  One took you to the actual Gmail login page in a new tab, the other was a functioning widget.  I would suggest they blow the new tab one away and stick with the widget to keep you in their page.  I also found I could not drag the icons between pages, which is something we are used to in Notes for sure.

What I didn't like is how most of their icons they provide of them simply took you to the site.  You cannot enter your credentials and have it log in and bring you some form of miniapp window.  Symbaloo is a visualization of your bookmarks.  But there is no way to take my existing bookmarks and make them a visual page!!  That bites.  I also could not find a way to import an OPML stream to have it populate pages with existing feeds I watch.  RSS streams in the blocks would make this site somewhat useful, but I still prefer Particls, Spokeo and now Streamy.  I found places to manually enter single bookmarks and manually enter a single RSS feed, both labeled beta at this time.

You can create links for audio streams and use widgets for Last.FM.   But the widget area has a lot of room to grow before it is very useful.

I will say this first, I do have my issues with Lotus Connections.  So this is not a Microsoft or Lotus bashing post.  It is a posting directed towards social networking in the enterprise.  Many of you know I run an alter-ego blog at TheSocialNetworker.  I am starting to get more site review requests that I can run through in a timely manner, so I take the ones that look the most interesting and go from there.  So I ran across a slide set found here that was co-presented by Peter de Haas at the end of November 2007.  I see he and Stuart had some comments back and forth when I went looking in his archives.  In the set there was the following slide towards the end:



If you take the second line that says Microsoft 2007 Office System, you could go with either Lotus or Microsoft on this one.  So without reading what Stuart had to say on the topic, I have my own thoughts.  Both of the companies are fighting for what the consumer (public) space already has in abundance.  The question are:

• how to relate it to business usage
• secure the data
• get people to utilize it
• allow outside data to be referenced and pulled in
• give the users the Ohh's and Ahh's they find on the consumer side
• provide presence both for internal and external awareness
• open the system to pull in external feeds in a structured and loose manner (ie: Attensa and user defined feeds)

The approach on the underlying purple, blue and green colored areas above fit into both vendors.  The question is who can make their product grow up the quickest and maybe pay attention to suggestions (cough cough)

I just came across an article on Publish.com discussing IBM Metaverse project.

IBM's Metaverse virtual reality software ... Though still a bit rough around the edges-it won't be mistaken for Second Life-some 2,200 IBM staffers are testing ways to collaborate with colleagues in the Metaverse, according to Mike Ackerbauer, innovation manager for collaboration development at IBM.

Ackerbauer said IBM staffers leverage IBM's internal virtual conferencing application through Web services to have online meetings in 3D.  This approach is a boon for IBM employes, who are spread out all over the world.

The meeting room Ackerbauer showed eWeek was sparsely furnished, but serviceable, with a screen on the wall to simulate the typical conference room.

What interested me was the statement in the article that they are looking for VOIP solutions inside of it, including hooking it to Lotus Sametime.  Forget making profiles in Lotus Connections, get ready to make avatars.

Interestingly Rob Novak issued a nice blog posting on how Quickr will be fitting in to BDD at Lotusphere and then Tim came on the call today mentioning there will be 19 sessions with pre-sessions utilizing Sametime Unyte to get everyone primed for press releases, interactions and validation through a "Making News @ the Sphere on December 19.

But wait, there is more..


The Business Partner cafe is the place to not only get coffee but sit with experts across product areas.  I know we saw something like this last year and by the end of the week it was quite empty.

Lotusphere Comes to You starts in February

Winners in bold.

I posted a couple days ago on the missing feature that we saw at Lotusphere2007, but didn't seem to surface in the Sametime or Blackberry messaging client.  Well I finally got some updates from same avid readers to the blog across timezones (I love the Internet) :

The demo that was shown at Lotusphere used the Ascendant to bridge all the Sametime users into a conference call.

Then another update showed from someone else putting it all together

Today, you are "linking" a Sametime user to an entry in your address book so that you get the added menu items of "Email, Call, SMS, MMS."  RIM will add the Click to Map feature

Looks like a winner when it arrives!

I happened to be poking around Lotus Greenhouse and saw a bookmark from January 2007 (Lotusphere2007) for a press release between Lotus and RIM.  It highlighted the new "Convert to Call" and "Click to Map" that would be possible.

RIM Showcases Unified Communications Breakthrough for Blackberry Users At Lotusphere
RIM is showcasing a new feature called "Click to Map" that will allow users to generate maps on a Blackberry handset within the context of a Lotus Sametime session.  The "Click to Map" feature will launch Blackberry Maps from within the Sametime client software and generate a map that illustrates a colleague's location based on presence information retrieved from Lotus Sametime.

This is a cool feature I would love to see in place.  I know the "Convert to Call" is kind of there, but that seems to not be in place either.  Maybe I missed something in implementation or does this need the Sametime 8 Advanced Server that is not due out till next year some time?  Also, does the map render from the location they type into the client?  I am not sure how that would work either looking at the preferences in the Sametime Connect client for the Blackberry as shown in this screen capture:


I can't seem to find a menu item for mapping the user in the Business Card or main screen.  Anyone?

Numerous sites are reporting the release of Atlas for Lotus Connections.  I will link those below.  My thoughts first.

While this is a step in the right direction for giving users a visual tool to extract and work with data that is contained inside of Lotus Connections, why the heck is this an IBM Software Services Asset that must be purchased as a consulting agreement?  That is ludicrous considering the amount of free social networking sites that offer this type of capability inside of their free products.  Lotus Connections is not a cheap purchase and is an investment in the growing world of social networking in the enterprise, this is a toolset that should be available now and included in how you work with Connections.  Staring at web pages all day with no dashboard or visualization makes the product dry.  I have seen many products that were Lotus assets stop dead in their tracks.  Too many places are trying for a piece of the corporate social network pie.  Lotus has to make strides to be far ahead of the competition to keep a hold on this emerging market.

For example, check out the simple site Spokeo for a dashboard across multiple social networks.  I have a podcast with them coming out in a few days, look for it to describe how to make a dashboard and soon to provide some better management of the data you receive.

From Infoworld:

"Atlas looks at the data within Connections and does some visualizations of the information," said Chris Lamb, senior product manager. "The main point is that it is a way to visualize the social data from a line-of-business perspective and a personal level."

The Atlas suite contains four components dubbed My Net, Find, Reach, and Net.

IBM is selling Atlas through its Software Services for Lotus group. Lamb declined to provide specific pricing information.

Good idea and having multiple parts of the product makes it expansible.  Reach is the dashboard tool to navigate the six-degrees of separation and to find expertise.  Find, well it finds things.  How it differs from search is not clear.  Net somehow builds on the ideas of communities, not sure how yet.

The actual IBM webpage on the topic gives some basic description while pointing you to IBM Software Services (ISS) to make a project out of installing, defining, piloting and then deploying Atlas and Connections.  The Synh.rono.us blog also has the announcement

The Money on CNN page also had another variance on the announcement.

Redmond Developer News reports that, interestingly enough, as Lotus closes down Cambridge, MA offices Microsoft opens one a few doors down with Reed reporting into Ray Ozzie's group at Microsoft.  Reed apparently (according to the article) worked on Freelance and helped launch InterNotes and stayed through the beginning of the IBM acquisition.

He was previously the CTO for Eons, a social networking site for people over 50.  I just happened to talk about this site a while ago.

Sametime normally would create the required Directory Assistance on the fly and keep right on rolling.  A fresh Domino 8 server and Sametime 8 install gave the following today:

error returned from CreateSTDatabases
Error encountered in the local server while setting up LDAP directory support da.nsf

File does not exist
DDNALocalDominoSetup returning with error code = 0103
SetupLocalSvr returning with error code = 3701
SetupSvrMergeWithDomino returning with error code = 3701

function: TermNotesRT

I quickly started the Domino server, created the Directory Assistance and then restart the Sametime setup.  Weirdly it now saw the install as the ability to:

• Install a new instance of Sametime ?!?!?
• Upgrade an instance of Sametime ?!?!?

I took upgrade as fix the install that is there please.  And away it went.  Now let's see how it did.

This article on ZDNet  went by quietly and unnoticed by others that post on Sametime, so I thought I would share..

Jim then connects the dots to envision, as he says, a "possible IBM licensing partnership for incorporation of Skype technology into its various Sametime real time communications offerings where appropriate?"

I can read the tea leaves, and I think Jim is right.  Such a partnership is likely to be attempted.

That is just a small touch of what the entry outlines.  Could such an arrangement be made when WebDialogs was such a strong development partner for Skype and now is under the IBM wings?  The Skype hooks into the public POTS infrastructure for expanded VOIP integration is not a stretch of any imagination if we look at the hints Lotus gives with each introduction of the new product family.  This isn't speaking from someone that is "in the know".  Strictly from what is out there now and what they hint about in slideshows and presentations.

So what do you think of some sort of Skype integration for VOIP instead of relying just on Cisco, Avaya and other partnerships?  The Sametime Gateway already reaches into the public IM providers, the voice and video had to be close behind.

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Ed Brill and I talk for under 13 minutes about his track at Lotusphere2008 and what makes it different than previous years.

I made this posting yesterday to an interesting number of comments and this one might go a bit further.  Sametime 8 gets closer to an actual provisioned installation.  Much better indeed.  I praise Lotus for listening to my rants on provisioning and deployment management.  However, this became a noticeable problem here and after consideration and some talks with those deep in the bowels of Lotus Sametime development we (as in they and I) confirmed my fears upon first testing.

Here is what happens.  Sametime 8 does not see the previous install path (as shown yesterday) since it is not upgrading your Sametime 7.5.x client.  It is installing Sametime 8 and then uninstalling 7.5.x from your system.  It reads your settings and places them into a lookaside database to move them across during provisioning of the new 8.0 client.  What this means to you is that you then cannot install into the same directory you had 7.5.x at first.  If you install 8.0 into that folder and then it goes to uninstall 7.5.x it really removes all the new files also.  Quite the conundrum isn't it?  I know I want mine in the same path all the time.  With this scenario, I cannot hit the site and have it upgrade what I have in place.  So if you have company standards on how the client is installed, you may be looking at uninstalling the old version from everywhere, then running the install for 8 afterwards into that same directory.

Lotus also changed the folder structure and naming of the Sametime Connect files.  This adds a new level of change for the plug-ins.   We will cover more on plug-ins on the next posting.

This image shows on a fresh laptop that only had Sametime 7.5.1 installed a couple weeks ago.  This was the network install attempt and then the locally saved attempt at a Sametime 8 client install on the same laptop.  The first thing to arise was that it did not see my previous installation path.

Messaging and Collaboration Webconference
December 13th, 2007
9:30 to 10:30a.m. US Pacific Time
Moderator: Sara Radicati

So the moderator is basically showing off their new paper coming out about this very market.

This webconference looks at the market for enterprise Messaging and Collaboration. Messaging and Collaboration platforms are designed to be deployed on-premises by organizations and provide a broad range of functionality which includes email, groupware, calendar/scheduling, security, wireless email, and more.

Guest speakers are Microsoft, Microsoft, Novell and Georgia State University.  Hmm, I wonder who sponsored this one?

Sun January 20, 2008	9:00-10:45am EST	Y&B Grand Harbor Salon IV	HND302: IBM Lotus Sametime Gateway - Setup and Administration
Tues January 22, 2008	4:15-5:15pm EST	Dolphin S Hemisphere IV-V	BP105: Installing and Administrating the IBM Lotus Sametime Gateway
Wed January 23 2008	12:30-2:15pm EST	Y&B Grand Harbor Salon IV	HND302: IBM Lotus Sametime Gateway - Setup and Administration

Bob Balaban starts off the Lotusphere2008 track manager interviews with Jumpstart information

Music today is Beat Under Control from Stockholm, Sweden via Magnatune

Thanks Mac for noticing how tired I was and linking the wrong podcast the first time

You can find them all right here , some of them aren't bad

Emergence of a Digital Collaboration Infrastructure -

• One generation thinks of collaboration in the workplace used to be something around documents (ie: emails, presentations).
• The next generation thinks of SMS, instant messaging as the paradigm for collaboration
• The new generation come with MySpace, Facebook and the equivalents.

Product design going forward for Lotus has to take the collaborative energies and bring them together into the workforce.  All the data information, expertise and skills have to be shown in context.  The platform has to be open and enabled for you to plug in innovative infrastructure.  The Lotus infrastructure must be complete and open at the same time to support growth.

Digital Collaboration Infrastructure

• Collaboration Foundation
• Web 2.0
• Beyond Office

Work is now performed not around the technologies, but the activities they are currently involved in.  Software then assist in getting the work completed in context.  Notes 8, Quickr and Sametime enable that to happen.

Domino and Notes 8.0.1 will be released around Lotusphere in January 2008.

• New DWA client
• Lotus Quickr integration into side shelf in Standard client
• Storage reduction through increased compression - up to 35%
• Native 64-bit support
• IBM Lotus Notes Traveler for Windows Mobile support
• Support for Mac in beta

Domino 8.5 will ship towards the end of 2008

• Simplify the Notes Identity management and authentication
• Reduce storage costs
• Improve Quality of Service
• QuickTune
• Modernize Domino application development.  Tools, infrastructures and technique will take advantage of the frameworks developed in 8 and deliver it in 8.5 (hear that Nathan, just passing info, I have no clue about the dev side.  He said he didn't post on the blogs due to the announcements at Lotusphere coming)

Sametime 8 (we know hits the streets and I post plenty on it).  He did mention Entry that comes in the Domino server for free, then why sell it.  Easy..  those that choose 'other' messaging/email solutions, can still choose Sametime.  Sametime Advanced comes in Q1 of 2008.  It is Sametime for communities, adding social software ideas into the Sametime family.  Persistent chats (seen LotusphereLive done in 2007 without Advanced?) and polling.  Unified Telephony is next up for more aggregated presence, call management and softphones.  Lastly was the acquisition of Sametime Unyte for hosted conferencing services.

Quickr comes in Q1 with integration further into Notes and now the Quick Content Integrator.  This allows you to import information from Sharepoint and shared public folders in Exchange.  You can also synchronize and coexist between them.

Lotus Connections 2.0 will get more enhancements around a 'portal' type page allowing you to being in all your social contacts into a single interface and also better integration into the Notes client

This was a great, smooth and simple presentation showing the direction of Lotus and how things are coming together in context of letting the user work first with the technology in the background,.  Instead of learning new ways due to changes in technology.

Here is what I found.  I installed the Sametime 8 server and also placed the network-install package on the server.  For those of you not familiar with it, I suggest you go read how this is done over here.  I then started the download.  I forgot to specify the base URL inside the download properties though and when the install attempted to complete, it came up with errors.  Lots of errors.

I then went back and placed the correct URL in the download properties file and tried again.  I noticed that the install seemed to download incredibly quick.  Halfway through, it then stopped and just sat there for a long time.  I killed the install and tried again.  Same thing.  It then hit me.  The original download was still in my cache for the browser so it was still reading the bad data.  Here is a screenshot:



So I went in and removed that bottom file from the cache to see what the result would be.  As expected a much longer download started again.  You need to know the original part is 29MB and then more is pulled from the server.  The client code itself is still 135MB when it is on the machine.  So I am off to delete the file and redo the install.