B’musings

April 25, 2011

Solution for Quickr/FileNet/XenApp Integration, Earthquakes, and Stuff

Filed under: IBM,Lotus — Mike Burford @ 12:08 pm
Tags: , , ,

It’s been a couple of months and a somewhat disruptive earthquake since I posted about the problem we had run into with Quickr not being supported in a Citrix/Xenapp environment.

The customer’s offices were in the building next to the collapsed CTV building (as shown on TV), so they are now spread around three offices across the city.  We lost our office as well so things have been a bit more challenging than normal, but we’re all up and running and the project is progressing through design phase.  A definite advance on the status I last reported.

I’ve had a lot of support from IBM’s Lotus team in Australia and they put me in touch with one of the FileNet technical sales guys who came up with a workaround for the Quickr/XenApp issue: IBM Content Collector for Email.  Notes 8.5.3 is going to support XenApp 6 so the users will have the Notes Standard client running under XenApp, Quickr will be running on WebSphere Portal Server, and IBM Content Collector (ICC) will “archive” the required content from the mail files on the Domino server into FileNet.  FileNet Services for Quickr will provide the integration between Quickr and FileNet so in theory we will have access via Quickr to content in FileNet that has been collected both from Quickr entries and email content harvested by ICC.  Users can initiate a search of archived content from within Notes, but it will launch a web interface to display the results from FileNet.  Add Sametime, Traveler, and telephony integration to the mix and it’s a challenging project!

We’re putting together the proof of concept and demo environment this week,  I’m building the two servers for Domino and Quickr on WebSphere Portal Server as I write this.  It’s going to be an interesting week!

As for other news, my mother-in-law lost her house during the Feb earthquake and is now living with us, and my wife and I are now full-time carers of our two and a half year old granddaughter and subsequently feeling a lot older than we should be!  Though I have experienced my first Wiggles concert as a result and that was something not to be forgotten!

And no, the house-load of women is not the reason I’m in my office building servers on a public holiday.  :)

February 11, 2011

Notes 8.5.x + XenApp 6 + Quickr + FileNet = no sale?

Filed under: IBM,Lotus — Mike Burford @ 3:48 pm

Last Friday was an exciting day, an opportunity turned into a potential sale when a customer emailed to say that they have decided to replace their Exchange and online document management environment for a Lotus software solution that includes Notes/Domino 8.5, Traveler, Sametime, and Quickr.  At the meeting on Tuesday to look at the scoping/design approach they stated that the planned environment is for everything to run on Win Svr 2008 R2, with the clients in XenApp 6, and Quickr connecting to FileNet with all key data (including emails) to be stored in FileNet.  I can’t be certain, but I think I may have gone pale round about then.  I know that Notes isn’t supported in XenApp 6 yet (let alone 2008 R2), but from what I’ve read it seems that it will be in 8.5.3.  What I knew nothing about at the time was the Quickr/FileNet requirements and how that was going to work in their proposed environment.

Unless anyone out there can advise otherwise, indications are that it isn’t going to be happening any time soon.  Quickr and FileNet play well together of course, but not in a Citrix environment if you’re relying on being able to use connectors.  On warning the customer about this the response was in that case FileNet would need to be able to search the Notes emails without Quickr ….. yes, I know, not going to happen.

As the FileNet integration is critical to the migration, and as they have already approached the FileNet provider regarding Sharepoint integration, it’s looking as though we may have lost a big win in just under a week and they’ll stick with Outlook/Exchange and implement a Microsoft environment instead.  And just to rub the salt in, the infrastructure is going to be fully hosted by IBM – which was another first for us, and we were the ones who brought IBM in on the opportunity.

I haven’t given up yet, emails have been flying back and forth to IBM and I’ve posted in the Quickr forum and now here in case someone can come up with an answer, but I think I’m clutching at straws.

Anyone?

January 29, 2010

Bold 9700, Garmin GPS, DAOS scare, and Blink!

Filed under: BlackBerry,Lotus,Reading,Technology — Mike Burford @ 7:53 pm
Tags: , , ,

Okay, so whilst I’m on a roll (and the baby’s asleep and nobody’s telling me to come in from the office):

Bold 9700: Recently upgraded from my Curve 8310 and am loving the 9700.  It’s taking a bit of getting used to the new keypad but the screen is very impressive, WiFi is great, I reckon the trackpad is an improvement over the ball, and overall I think it’s a great device.

Another new device is the Garmin GPS my father got me.  It’s a nuvi 1390 and although I don’t have a great need for the navigation assistance around Christchurch on a day to day basis, with the recent law change on the use of phones in vehicles the bluetooth connection and phone functionality works really well.  I’ve only used a TomTom GPS when in Australia so I’m not an expert on GPS units, but the ease of use, software integration, and look and feel of the Garmin will have me recommending it to anyone who’s interested.

I’ve been going through a bit of a nightmare with DAOS at a client site over the past week.  Over Christmas the mail server started generating a whole bunch of “nsf directory manager pool is full” errors, but we couldn’t reboot the server as the customer has a change freeze over the holiday period so we had to wait until that ended.  So when that lifted the weekend before last I connected in and rebooted the server and after it came back up again initiated the upgrade of the ODS of the mail archive databases.  The archives are on a separate server to Domino so when the server was upgraded late last year we left the archive databases to last whilst we fine tuned everything else.  What I didn’t realise at the time was that the archive databases all had the DAOS setting enabled and the ODS upgrade kicked off DAOS in the background, but this became rapidly obvious when I got a frantic call to say that the server was losing 100Mb/minute of available disk space.  The archives are on a separate server, the DAOS files aren’t!  The organisation’s primary mail server dropped to 6Gb of available disk space and daily email consumption is just over 1Gb of disk space!

Easy fix I thought, stop the compact process, restart it with the “daos -off” option and when all the attachments are back in the archive databases, prune DAOS to just the other side of the backup.  Not so easy, every time the prune tried to run it would stop because the DAOS catalog wasn’t synchronized, even if we had just “successfully” completed a three and a half hour resync and daosmgr reported that the catalog state was synchronized!  IBM support helped and running a log analysis on “DAOS object count” identified a bunch of mail databases to run fixup against, but three and a half hours later the prune task fell over after only running for a minute so we’ve got a corrupted DAOS catalog.  The only fix for that is to shut down Domino, rename/remove the catalog and cfg databases, restart Domino and run another resync.  That’s tomorrow (Sat) night taken care of, if I pick up any more tips I’ll post them in here.

And just to finish off in case this is the last post I make for another 6 months, I really recommend “Blink”, another great book by Malcolm Gladwell:

It’s a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, “Blink” is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good.

He describes this ability as “thin-slicing”  and as per Wikipedia:

Gladwell gives a wide range of examples of thin-slicing in contexts such as gambling, speed dating, tennis, military war games, the movies, malpractice suits, popular music, and predicting divorce.

There’s plenty of info about it on gladwell dot com and Wikipedia so I won’t repeat it here, but I found it to be a fascinating book, easy to read, and some of the examples he gives are really eye-opening.

Time to head inside and see if I’m still entitled to dinner.

I don’t know how regular bloggers do it!

Filed under: General — Mike Burford @ 4:26 pm

I thought if I started off a blog whilst things were relatively quiet then I would be in the habit of keeping it up to date so it wouldn’t be too much of an effort when things got busy.  I was wrong.  I never seem to be able to find the time, or if I have got some time spare I try to use it to catch up on email, reading/learning, documentation, overdue stuff, or feeling guilty for not doing enough exercise!  Yet here are all these people online who not only manage to produce informative blogs, but keep up with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc etc.  I have an account with all of the above but Twitter is too much of a distraction, Facebook just eats time – I mainly use it now to find out what my sons are up to as they both live overseas and hardly ever write, but they keep Facebook up to date! – and my LinkedIn group notifications pile up with all the other email that isn’t urgent.

Then there’s my 18 month old granddaughter and as the only man in her life I try to make a point of spending quality time with her each day – for some reason my daughter and wife think the same should apply for them as well!  What’s with that?  :o)

A friend put me on to Google Reader the other day so I’m looking forward to seeing if that helps me to keep on top of my reading, now all I have to do is work out how to keep on top of all the electronic paperwork.

Anyway, for those of you who are obviously much more organised than I am and keep churning out quality, informative stuff, I take my hat off to you.

July 2, 2009

State Services Commission tells (NZ) Govt agencies to dump Microsoft

Filed under: IBM,Lotus — Mike Burford @ 12:46 pm

Now here’s an opportunity for IBM!

National Business Review Article

June 14, 2009

Migrated from Domino to Exchange for an iPhone

Filed under: Technology — Mike Burford @ 5:51 pm
Tags: , ,

Well, that was a first for me.  A small company – 8 users with Domino and BES on SBS 2003 – had one guy who bought an iPhone and didn’t want the Web access to his mail so the company ditched Domino for Exchange!  One of the other guys from our company did the migration with Exchange and Domino side-by-side on the same server (it went very smoothly, I was quite impressed) and I was called in to migrate BES from Domino to Exchange for the other company members.

They were only using Domino for mail, but all the same, how do you justify a business case for this based on a single user’s desire to use an iPhone?  And you know the real kicker?  The iPhone user is the only one in the office with a Mac, so he’s running a Windows emulator for Outlook!!!

June 3, 2009

It sure has been a while!

Filed under: BlackBerry,Lotus,Reading — Mike Burford @ 1:12 pm
Tags: , ,

It’s a bit like the confessional thing: “Forgive me for it has been a long time since my last blog …”  I’ve been on a non-Notes/Domino project doing some business analysis work for a client looking at implementing an ERP system.  I’ve spent the last few months interviewing staff and documenting the current and proposed process models for various departments using Tibco Business Studio – quite a cool program.  The thing is, I spend most of the day doing that then have to spend the evenings and weekends catching up on my “normal” work so with that, a sick 10-month old granddaughter at home, and taking on the treasurer position for a church start-up, things have been really full on.  And probably why I’m now sick at home myself.

But it’s been an interesting few months, I’ve set up Sametime and Quickr demos and rolled out a Quickr implementation as a result; I’ve done my first BlackBerry BPS implementation in a Windows 2008 environment (on Exchange 2007); I’ve completed – well, me and the customer’s project team – a year long Notes/Domino 8 roll-out project; and this weekend I upgraded a server with 1,300 mail files to Domino 8.5 and implemented DAOS (Domino Attachment and Object Service) which resulted in 163 Gb of disk space saving – a reduction of 43.5% of disk usage – and there’s still 12 Gb of mail files that couldn’t be compacted so we’re probably looking at a 44-45% saving.

I’ve also read “Now, Discover your Strengths” and completed the online “StrengthsFinder” questionnaire and found it interesting reviewing the various jobs I’ve done, positions I’ve held, projects I’ve worked on etc, in light of what are (apparently) my top five strengths.  I look forward to seeing whether focusing on those strengths in future work/projects makes a noticeable difference to the outcome and my enjoyment of the work.

So that’s me for now, time to go and lie down again.

February 26, 2009

Twitter for research?

Filed under: Social Networking — Mike Burford @ 3:36 pm

I’d read a few comments in the past about searching Twitter but didn’t think much about it until reading Anthony Pisani’s comment on Eric Mack’s “Twitter as a tool for Personal Knowledge Management” post.  Eric raises some good points as I hadn’t thought of using Twitter for research before, and Andy makes a really good comment in response.  But Twitter Search is helpful for identifying the people who Twitter about something I’m interested in, then checking out their blogs/websites for anything they may have posted about the topic.  Okay, so maybe I’m way out of date and everybody knows this already.  :)

February 9, 2009

Michael Sampson comments on “How to manage your business in a recession”

Filed under: Collaboration,Technology — Mike Burford @ 5:19 pm

Just because Michael used to be my boss doesn’t mean that I’m at all biased towards his writings, much. :)  Michael puts out some good stuff and I usually don’t need to link to it because a whole bunch of other people already have, but in this case it’s well worth repeating.  He has taken two (so far) of the ten principles Geoff Colvin listed in his Fortune magazine article “How to manage your business in a recession” and analysed them based on collaboration strategies.  Well worth reading both Geoff’s article and Michael’s analyses:

#1: Reset priorities to face the new reality

#2: Keep investing in the core

February 5, 2009

Brilliant! The Lotus Connections installation step-through I’ve been looking for!

Filed under: Lotus,Social Networking — Mike Burford @ 6:14 pm

My attempt at installing a demo/practice Lotus Connections environment has been a fairly haphazard affair as I try to find the time to work on it in between work and family commitments.  I invariably end up spending whatever time I can cobble together struggling through infocentres and numerous websites trying to work out how to get Websphere, DB2, TDI etc installed, patched, configured, and playing nicely together so that Connections will work when I finally get around to installing it.  I’m a Notes Admin with very limited to almost non-existent experience with Websphere et al, so it’s been a really challenging process trying to get my head around everything that needed to be done.  In fact, a couple of times I got pretty close to giving up and going back to the pilot installation.

So you can imagine my relief – bordering on sheer excitement – when today I found what I’ve been wishing was ‘out there’: a clear, easy to follow set of instructions stepping through the whole process, courtesy of Mitch Cohen and Chris Whisonant and their Lotusphere presentation “Getting Your Feet Wet with Lotus Connections”.

Mitch has made the presentation available on his website and you can grab it from here.  Whilst you’re there, check out his Resource Pages for Connections and Quickr.

Next Page »

Theme: Rubric. Blog at WordPress.com.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.