Lotus Bus Nov 3: Lotus Knows the capital of Canada is Ottawa

The Lotus Knows bus tour will continue to Ottawa on November 3, 2009.  My team is looking forward to meeting everyone on the bus!  (Sadly, I won’t be there for this one…but may be in town Nov 9 for the National Websphere Portal User Group session!)

Lotus Knows Bus Flyer – Ottawa

Tuesday, November 3rd
7:30am – 9:50am
York St. & Dalhousie St.
(ByWard Market)

10:00am – 12:00pm
Sparks St. and Bay St.
(Sparks St. Mall)

 

Hop on the Lotus Knows Bus in Toronto November 2!

The Lotus Knows bus is making it’s rounds across America, and will be in Toronto the morning of November 2.  We welcome everyone to join us to find out more about what Lotus knows:  talk to our experts, view a demo and enjoy a refreshment on us!

Lotus Knows Bus Flyer – Toronto – November 2

Monday, November 2nd
7:30am – 12:00pm

Impark parking Lot #260,

270 Church Street, Toronto
(Intersection of Dundas and Church)

OR

Explore lotusknows.com and see how others are getting the most out of Lotus®.

 

Welcome to the Cross Country Lotus User Group!!

Welcome to the Cross Country Lotus User Group

The Cross Country Lotus User Group is an organization consisting of Lotus customers across Canada and the Caribbean. The objective of this group is to provide a place where Lotus professionals, (administrators, developers, users, business partners, and IBM’ers) can meet to:

• share their experiences

• learn new information

• improve technical skills

• take part in the Lotus Collaboration Community

The meetings will be held simultaneously across several cities using Lotus web conferencing technology, but will also be hosted regionally. Therefore, some presentations will be in person in the hosted cities, and at the same time presented via web conference to remote participants. Everyone is encouraged to attend the meeting in a nearby location, so that you can meet and network with other Lotus Collaboration users in your area! There are no membership fees and the meeting is open to anyone interested in Lotus Software.

Date: October 1^st, 2009,

Time: 11:30 to 5:30 Eastern

9:30 to 3:30 Mountain

Locations

Montreal 1250 René Levesque Blvd West, 7th floor, room 777 Local Host: Angela Caruso, acaruso@ca.ibm.com

Ottawa 2220 Walkley Road, e-Learning Room 1 Local Host: Connie Triassi, ctriassi@ca.ibm.com

Markham 3600 Steeles Ave. East, Room D103 Local Host: Anoop Sidhu, anoops@ca.ibm.com

Calgary 227 - 11th Avenue SW Local Host: Don Gillis, dgillis@ca.ibm.com

IBM is very excited to launch the Cross Country Lotus User Group, we have arranged for several speakers from Lotus, business partners and customers to present many interesting topics for our first meeting. For future meetings, we look forward to suggestions from you, the Lotus Collaboration Community, about the topics you want to see on the agenda.

Agenda:

Topic	Description	Speaker	On Site
What’s New in Notes 8.5.1	Mary Beth will provide the inside scoop on the new features and bug fixes that are coming with Notes 8.5.1. She will demo the latest and greatest build (including new policy settings for iNotes). She will explain why some bug fixes/features made it in and why some did not, and how you can affect some of these decisions through your participation in the Lotus Community.	Mary Beth Raven, Ph.D. Lotus Design Lead, IBM Senior Technical Staff Member	Web conference
Overview of Ytria Inc.’s scanEZ solution	Offers Lotus Notes developers and Domino administrators faster ways to access data inside in a Notes database; faster ways to edit data; better ways to search through data; and new ways to solve common Notes database problems.	David Julien Account Manager Ytria Inc. IBM Business Partner	Will present from Montreal
Domino Designer and XPages Overview	8.5 delivered a lot of great new capabilities for Domino Developers and 8.5.1 keeps the innovation coming. Come hear an overview of how Domino Designer and XPages provide developers with a great new set of capabilities for building compelling Web applications. Not only will you hear about great new features that will compel you to upgrade to 8.5.1, we’ll show you.	Peter Janzen IBM Senior Product Manager, Lotus Application Development & Domino Designer Philippe Riand IBM Senior Technical Staff Member, Domino Architect – XPages	Web conference
Overview of Customer Expressions Corp.’s i- Sight solution	Track the status and progress of customer inquiries/ complaints and compliance issues/ investigations, collaborate on cases, and maintain complete case histories with instant access to all related information.	Joseph Gerard VP Sales & Marketing Customer Expressions Corp. IBM Business Partner	Will present from Ottawa
Domino/Notes Upgrade Project	A customer’s perspective on the upgrade experience	Kathy Collins Sears Canada	Will present from Markham
Adapting Domino Applications onto the Blackberry	We will discuss the options, challenges and the best practices associated with designing, building and deploying Domino applications onto the BlackBerry platform.	Laurie Desautels Director Service Delivery Bill McNaughton, Senior Application Architect Kryos Systems IBM Business Partner	Joint presentation from Calgary and Markham
Life of the Notes ID	Technical session on Shared Login & ID Vault	Frederic Dahm, Senior Systems Architect IBM Software Services for Lotus	Will present from Montreal

In addition, IBM is pleased to provide lunch and refreshments in each of the host cities.

To register for this event, use the following link:
https://events.webdialogs.com/register.php?id=3c9a3ae3b2&l=en-US

If clicking the above link does not work, please copy the entire link and paste it into your Web browser. For webinar-specific questions, contact the moderator.  For technical support, contact UnyteSupport@us.ibm.com. at UnyteSupport@us.ibm.com.

Changing the way that I work.

Inspired, in no small part, by Luis Suarez’s “experiment” of getting away from email at work, I’ve come to the conclusion that I need to change the way that I work in order to survive.

Reading Luis’ early blog entries I found myself saying “45 emails a day? I get that many emails over night! I WISH I could get to 45 emails a day.”  I made all kinds of excuses for why I couldn’t do what Luis did (we have different jobs, different organizational cultures, different

BUT…Recently I’ve been paying closer attention to my own frustrations about how much email I receive and my objections and have realized that I’ve done this to myself.  We’re not so different. (apart from my funny accent)

I already overcame my fears of removing the Microsoft Office Suite and relying only on Symphony and those fears proved to be completely unfounded…no reason this shouldn’t be the same.

So, after a year in my new IBM role (and getting more comfortable in my own skin) I’m recommitting myself to taking on the email battle. 

Shameless product plug:  Connections 2.5 is making this WAY easier for me.

For starters:

1)  Newsletters: Gone…if they have a feed, I’ll subscribe in my feedreader. (Which, incidently, I have a widget for on my Connections Homepage)

2) Wikis:  Moved away from “can you give me an update on this” to “can you please update the status here.”  Pretty simple, but even today I probably had 4 requests for the same status and just sent them an IM with the link to the wiki page…that was already updated by my team.

3)  Mass/Group communication:  Moving to blog entries for team updates.  There are still some items that are marked “cascade this to your team” that are formatted specifically for email, but that’s a battle for another day.

4)  Integrated Voice into Sametime:  This has been HUGE for me and a strangely very liberating way to communicate. IM has become the primary method of communication but using ST as my phone has added a whole new dimension.  But this is for another post…suffice it to say, time saved, better communication, better attention on the task at hand.

6)  Microblogging:  Goodness…don’t know how I lived without it.  I’m a huge fan of Twitter and the the addition of Microblogging in Connections 2.5 is very, very, very welcome. 

 

So..that’s just for starters…

 

 

DAOS Estimator

The Lotus Domino Attachment and Object Service (DAOS) was introduced in Domino 8.5 to help minimize redundant file attachments by utilizing a separate repository on the Lotus Domino server for attachments.

You can now download the Lotus Domino Attachment and Object Service Estimator (DAOS Estimator), a tool for planning the roll-out of DAOS on the Domino 8.5 server.

First Meeting of the Canadian and Caribbean WebSphere Portal User Group

I am esctatitic to announce the the launch of an extremely important initiative in Canada and the Caribbean to allow all of us to share our background and experience with Websphere Portal and the Lotus portfolio. 

A tremendous “Thank you” and congratulations to Anoop Sidhu on the Lotus Canada Technical Sales team for his effort and leadership in getting this off the ground. 

Want to register and participate?

https://greenhouse.lotus.com/turbo/open/route/view/start?formName=VD_uqusS8Vrw5MyE1235921543886

__________________________________________________________

The Canadian and Caribbean WebSphere Portal User Group is being launched to provide forum inwhich WebSphere Portal users can share best practices and expertise.

There are many benefits to participating in this WebSphere Portal User Group including: 

• Learn best practices and optimal ways of using the technology
• Get advice, hints, and tips from experts
• See how other organizations are using the technology
• Network with other technical professionals in your area

At the present time we are planning to have at least two meetings a year; one in the spring and one in thefall. Meetings will consist of presentations from the field and from IBM on subjects that the grouprequests. Meeting frequency, schedule, and content will be discussed at the kick-off meeting.

Kick-off Meeting

The first meeting of the group will be held on May 14^{th, 2009. The meeting will be held simultaneouslyin Toronto, Montreal, and Calgary.}

Date: May 14th, 2009

Time: 2:00 PM – 5:30 PM EST

Locations:

• Toronto: Manulife Building, Main Floor – 200 Bloor Street East – South Tower, Jackson Theatre.
• Montreal: Technical Exploration Centre, 1250 Rene Levesque Blvd.
• Calgary: Technical Exploration Centre, 227 – 11thAvenue S.W

Agenda: Start	End	Title	Speaker(s)
2:00 PM	2:15 PM	Welcome	Lauren Wendel Product ManagerWP(IBM) Anoop Sidhu(IBM)

2:15 PM	3:15 PM	Portal Best practices and Lessons Learntfrom Customer Deployments	Skyler Thomas,Senior TechnicalStaff Member (IBM)
3:15 PM	4:15 PM	Best Practices for Creating WebSpherePortal portlets using WebSphere PortletFactory	Jonathan Booth,Senior Architect forWebSphere PortletFactory (IBM) L. Simmonds Senior DevelopmentManager forWebSphere PortletFactory(IBM)
4:15 PM	5:15 PM	Customer Success Story: TD Bank Portal	Alex Wright Senior Architect(TD Bank) Randy Bast Senior Architect(TD Bank)
5:15 PM	5:30 PM	Closing Remarks	Anoop Sidhu

MS Office-less at the office: Week 1

This is going clearly going to be a short segment. 

As I mentioned in my previous post, I completely removed MS Office from my WORK computer.

*shrug*

Not much to report;  No real issus. In fact, I found it a bit more effective having my editors directly in my Notes client as opposed to switching apps.

There has been a slight learning curve figuring out where things are but, surprisingly, I discovered alot of useful things in Symphony that I couldn’t

Created presentations in Symphony Presentations from scratch, and hybrids of content from existing MS PowerPoint, and Symphony Presentations.  A few really minor formatting snags…thats about it.

Not much to say about MS Word v. Symphony Documents.  I opened a bunch of Word documents.  There were words on the page.  The formatting was fine.  I don’t use Document editors so this

Spreadsheets were where my biggest concern lay.  “What about all those crazy voodoo macros?  Can I work with these big honkin’ Excel spreadsheets that I receive?”  Guess the answer was “yes.” 

Haven’t had a real hiccup yet.  Fingers crossed! 

P.S.  I probably just cursed myself by saying that…kind of like yelling “He’s gonna get a Shutout/NoHitter”

MS Office Free

Taking the plunge.  I’m uninstalling MS Office from my work machine.

I’ve been running Open Office on my home machine for over a year and, while there was a very minor initial learning curve, we’ve really had no problems.

My wife’s initial reaction was: “Where’s Excel?  What the hell did you do to the home computer?”   But after about 2 weeks, the dust settled and now I only get the occasional “how do I” question.

So…here is it goes.  So long MS Office!

An additional upside:  More room on my harddrive for music!

le mal du siècle

In 19th Century French literature, the term “le mal du siècle” (the malady of the
century) described a sense of loss, disillusionment, and melancholy.

In the 21^st Century, our mal du siècle might refer to the diseases of not sharing our knowledge nor making a personal contribution to dealing with the issues that we all face.

So, what are these “diseases” or pains that we face in this century?

Chronic Blogotosis

Fear that whatever comes out of your mouth will stink.

Cure: Drink water…chew some gum…get over yourself.

Sharing Deficit Disorder

Too many distractions…too busy to blog…writing takes time and I just don’t have time to do it.

Cure:  You have time to write an email?  You have time to bookmark a site? This isn’t a disease, it’s an excuse.

Blogexia*

A fear and/or total rejection of blogging to the point it causes signifigant harm to the individual.  Symptoms include rapid weight loss, hair loss, and shifty eyes.  Often is accompanied by Chronic Blogotosis.

Cure: *Sigh*…grow a pair already!

Blogstipation*

You really REALLY want to blog but no matter how hard you try, you just can’t.  It’s painful.  People keep telling you that if you don’t blog then you’re going to explode which just exaserbates the symptoms.

Cure: A solid dose of prunes, confidence, and someone to remind you that when you have a good idea that “you should blog about that.”

The ultimate cure for these diseases?

Bloglemia!!!!

You ingest as much as you can and then spew it all back out again in a different and colorful way.

Cure: Untreatable…this is a good disease…deal with it.

*thanks to Bernie Michilak and Gia Lyons for their input

 

 

National Pond Hockey Championships round-up

We had an incredible time last weekend in Huntsville for the National Pond Hockey Championships.

Most of our wives play on a team in the tournament as well so we all pack up the kids and make a huge family weekend out of it. 

Both our Men’s and Women’s teams did exceptionally well this year. “Ragtime” (my wife’s team) made it to the Final game but lost to a very strong team after 8 games.

After only winning 1 game last year, our team (The King Ferdies Tastee Creem Reunion) took the National title in the Masters Rec Division with a rather decisive win over the IShares from San Fransisco!

 

Our prize for winning?  A jacket (actually quite nice) and a case of Molson Canadian each. 

We’re all still buzzing a bit from the win (no pun intended)…The local press is all over this