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IBM

Natalie Gagliordi

Until 2021, Natalie Gagliordi was a senior writer for Red Ventures based in Louisville, Kentucky, covering business technology for ZDNET.

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MIS Asia: The right dosage

MIS Asia: The right dosage

MIS Asia profiles how Singapore's NationalHealthcare Group benefitted from server consolidation projects, such asbringing a mixed Domino+Exchange environment together on Lotus Domino....Next,e-mail platforms were standardised between November 2003 and May 2005 toLotus Domino/Notes. Six thousand to 7,000 users were affected, including2,000 NUH users who had previously been using Microsoft Exchange and hadto be trained to use the new platform. The other institutions were cutover by end-2004. Administrative cost of gateways anddirectories has been cut by 10%. "The total cost of now supportingthe whole cluster is less than what we used to pay for just the 4,000 userson Lotus," says Tham. NHG reaps other benefits too: bettercontrol over network security, a consolidated e-mail directory, and morecost-effective use of server capacity. Link: MISAsia: The right dosage >

February 21, 2006 by in Microsoft

VARBusiness: Big Blue Strikes Back With Next Generation of Notes/Domino

VARBusiness: Big Blue Strikes Back With Next Generation of Notes/Domino

With a few weeks to reflect on Lotusphere,VARs and analysts are giving the Workplace / Notes strategy a thumbs-up..."Extendingserver-managed clients to Hannover next year simplifies deployment issues,but in 2007 it also gives [IBM] a chance to extend Notes more deeply intoa Linux as well as a Mac environment," says Dana Gardner, presidentand principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions in Gilford, N.H. With Hannover, Workplace OS 2.6, Sametime7.5 instant-messaging software and a new Notes 7.x suite designed to workwith SAP's ERP software, IBM is betting it can sway enterprise users itbelieves are ready to move past traditional, more expensive client-serversolutions, such as Vista and Office 12. Link: VARBusiness:Big Blue Strikes Back With Next Generation of Notes/Domino > (Via JackDausman)

February 21, 2006 by in IBM

Unwanted new jeans UI feature

Unwanted new jeans UI feature

Yesterday, for the third time in abouta month, I set off the anti-theft alarm upon entering and leaving a Targetor Walgreens store.  No, I haven't turned to a life of petty crime,so I was puzzled and frustrated by my newfound skill.  Last night,through deductive reasoning, I realized that I had bought a couple of newpairs of jeans at the Gap last month, and they had those nasty sewn-insecurity tags.  Obviously, this is what was setting off the storealarms.This is a very bad idea, especiallywithout some kind of consumer notification.  I've seen the tags occasionallyon coats, even some shirts...but who actually checks out the tags in apair of jeans?  It's not like I need to read the wash instructions! It would have been helpful for the clerks at the store to mentionthat there was such a tag in these jeans.  Apparently the Gap is evenputtingthese tags in the jeans at theirOld Navy stores, presumably because theft of US$20 jeans is rampant inAmerica.Sometimes changing the UI on the installedbase is a serious retraining issue. :)

February 21, 2006 by in Security

Random journey observations

Random journey observations

Just a few notes from the road:My colleague Andras was a gracious hostfor my 24 hours in Budapest, taking me to see a few of the key sites.  Itlooks like a city that I could spend days in, with dozens of museums andhistorical buildings, and a quaint old city/castle.  Then there'sthe Danube...I think a Danube journey from Vienna to Bucharest via Budapestwould be a fantastic summertime activity. Budapest has not gotten the memo --apparently, black is the new black, at least for outerwear.  On severaloccasions Tuesday night, a bus full of commuters rolled by -- and the visualwas a wall of black coats. Paying the equivalent of Eur. 38 forinternet access in a hotel, anywhere in the world, is ridiculous.  Ijust couldn't do it, whether IBM was buying or not.Being awoken by an Apple telemarketerwho, for whatever reason, was calling my cell phone number (would I reallyhave given them that?), to hear a sales pitch for an extended warranty,at US$2 / minute roaming charges, is not a good thing.  (Yes, I hada good reason to have the cell phone on overnight)Was Mike Lazar the only geek who noticedthat I had an exit row economy class seat on my outbound Chicago to LondonAA flight?  And did he know just by reading my location for that blogentry, or did he run over to seatguru.comto check the seat maps? The Kiwis know how to make a sauvignonblanc like nobody else. The queue for security at the Heathrowflight connections centre today was much shorter than yesterday morning'sdebacle.  But there were still many clueless people in line who didn'tunderstand that the 20 signs saying "take your laptop out and putit in a separate bin" meant take your laptop out and put it ina separate bin. I did it for the miles -- with the flightthat I'm on now, I'll pass 2 million cumulative miles in the AmericanAirlines AAdvantage program.  I'll blog this separately in a few days,once the miles post.  This feat comes on the same trip when I've visitedmy 45th country overall, with at least two more new countries scheduledin the next three months.  Cool.

February 21, 2006 by in Laptops

The Guardian: ´We are trying to make it better´

The Guardian: ´We are trying to make it better´

As a follow-up to lastweek's article about Notes end-userperceptions, and thesubsequentdiscussionin theblogosphere,The Guardian's CharlesArthur has published a compendiumof comments...some from mails to him directly, others from blogs.I thought for a minute about dissectingthe negative user comments, but Mr. Arthur has included a balance of positiveand negative.  This is also what we saw in TheAge (Australia) discussion.  Ithink the Guardian's readers are well-served by the follow-up.  Hopefullythere will be more positives in the future as Notes 7 takes hold, "Hannover"goes to beta, and there is joy in the world.  (Note: Today's printedition apparently features a photo of Mike Rhodin at Lotusphere with "Hannover"on screen).Link: TheGuardian: 'We are trying to make it better'>

February 21, 2006 by in Tech Industry

Show n tell Thursdays

Show n tell Thursdays

It's great to see the enthusiasm in theNotes/Domino community for the inaugural "Shown Tell Thursdays"  Adozen postings already talking about successful Notes/Domino applications,or tips from the real world.  Looks like most of what's been postedso far are technical tips, but there's this casestudy on Kieskeurig from Gerco Wolfswinkel:Q:How many unique visitors come to kieskeurig.nl, on an average day?"Usually we get more than 125.000visitors, and together they generate a little under a million pageviews.Most visitors hit the site around lunchtime, and in the evening hours between8 and 11 PM. As for data traffic, our site generates an average of 3,5GB per hour."...Kieskeurig.nl is running on Lotus Notes/Domino.Why?"We started out on Domino becauseI did a lot of Domino work when I was employed at e-office. Domino is agreat platform for a document based approach. The integrated Notes backendand Domino http frontend together create an environment where you can integrateprocesses, and work on a website together, with your whole organization."Greatstuff, everyone.  I'd like to see more stories of successful applications,not just tips and hints, on show-n-tell Thursday.  Let's see whathappens next week.

February 21, 2006 by in Enterprise Software

Two MILLION miles

Two MILLION miles

Well, it's not quite the dubious accomplishmentit sounds like, but that first digit is now a two...As many frequent flyers observe, milestonesin mileage programs are bittersweet.  It's a good thing to receivebonuses and rewards, but on the other hand, it means that we flew enoughto earn those perks.  This particular one, though, has been in mysights for a couple of years now.  While it's not a formal, publishedprogram component, most American Airlines flies who hit the two millionmilestone are rewarded with lifetime AAdvantage "Platinum"status.  That means early boarding, shorter check-in queues, and upgradesfor a long time to come. While it was a good target to hit, I didn't do too many silly things toget there.  My main worry was that AA would "move the goalposts"-- change this benefit to be awarded once hitting 3,000,000 or some otherfactor.  The AAdvantage program is 25 years old this year, so 2-million-milersare not exactly a club that can be counted on one hand.  I've heardof people with more than 20,000,000 miles earned...impressive (and/or insane;)). One great thing about AA's program is that they count all earned miles,not just actual flying (as United and Delta do).  Ergo this numberis a bit deceptive.  I estimate that I've flown somewhere around 750,000"flying miles" on AA/oneworld so far...the rest are bonuses,credit card spending, hotel stay credits, etc.  Add in travel on United,Delta, and their partners, and it's probably a cool million actual.  That'sa lot of time sitting in a flying chair.

February 21, 2006 by in Tech Industry

Show n tell exposes sizeable talent

Show n tell exposes sizeable talent

So I was incredibly impressed with thenumber of people writing about Notes on last Thursday's first "show-n-tell"day.  It's been especially cool to read some of the blogs and webpages, because they are from new voices. Petervon Stöckel wrote about browsing the web with LotusScript. KevinPettitt wrote about form validation. TimTripcony shared a design template catalog. VinceSchuurman talked about creating PDFs from Domino. EstherStrom solved an offline user's need to compact their mailbox's server copy. IanIrving built a better "save and exit" action button.VinceDiMascio published some code tips, though he's explicitly not blogging.I know that there was some talk at Lotusphere about creating an OPML forDomino bloggers.  Not sure that would solve my issue though -- attention,bandwidth, and prioritization.  There are so many great new voices,but they get added to existing bloggers...and many of us already are strugglingwith how to keep up with and read all the blogs out there.Put simply, I'm starting to struggle to figure out which bloggers to readon a regular basis.  The other struggle is how much bandwidth to giveto "new" bloggers.  I applaud all the new voices that havejoined the Notes/Domino-focused blogosphere.  But there's an abandonrate in all parts of the blogging world, and instinct tells me that someof these will go dark in just a few months. How are you managing your blogreading consumption?  I don't mean froma technology perspective -- I have a perfectly useful RSS reader.  Howare you deciding which blogs to read regularly and which ones get droppedfrom your feeds? And, last, who has the authoritativelist?  I know TheSickos.com has a lot of Domino bloggers, and thereare a few other sites, but I don't know how to best find everyone I shouldconsider reading.

February 21, 2006 by in Enterprise Software

Visiting IS456 Knowledge Management Systems

Visiting IS456 Knowledge Management Systems

Last night, I had the pleasure of beinga guest speaker/lecturer at DePaul University.  My colleague HeatherMcClain, who works in IBM's academic initiative area, introduced me toProfessorAlan Burns last month.  Heteaches a class in KnowledgeManagement Systems, and askedme if I could visit the class and discuss knowledge technology from theIBM Lotus perspective.I've never spoken in an academic settingbefore.  This was an incredibly cool experience.  We spent twohours (about 45 minutes longer than I anticipated) looking at the historyof Notes in the marketplace, where things are going in terms of productivity,collaboration, and knowledge, blogs, wikis, and RSS, and some of the moreadvanced research projects going on in this area at IBM.  The studentswere very interactive and asked great questions.  The ability to discusssome of the trends over the years with a bit of hindsight and some funstories was really cool.We talked a lot about the way the natureof work has changed.  As I've mentioned previously here, about 30%of US IBM employees work from home or mobile offices.  Yesterday,for me, that was a combination of two different coffee shops, a Universityclassroom, and my home office.  It also was in time chunks -- withshifts often taking place between "personal" and "business"computing.  The idea of a 9-to-5 workday is completely extinguished-- the work is done when the work needs to get done.  We talked about differences in the wayscompanies employ technology.  How some companies try to legislatethings via policy -- like "no personal use of the web during businesshours" that are relatively impractical (is cnn.com/business personalor business use?).  How sharing knowledge still requires a culturalchange at many companies.  How instant messaging changes cultures. How voicemail is dead for so many of us -- it's just too asynchronous.One of the great tangents that boththe evening classroom discussion, as well as my daytime panelon customer evangelism, is thattransparency is a critical market thought.  It's just simply no longerpossible to make bad products -- because of blogs, ebay feedback, or amazonrankings, google is one click away from exposing bad products or vendorsor whatever.  BenMcConnell was on the customerevangelism panel, and he's written extensively on this thought of transparencyin the market.  It's oneof the incredibly empowering aspects of social software,and it will beincredibly interesting to watch where this goes in the future.Thank you to Professor Burns and hisclass for such a great evening.  Hopefully, this won't be the lasttime I talk to a college IT class...it was really a lot of fun.

February 21, 2006 by in IBM

100 percent uptime

100 percent uptime

Just finished a very good Notes/Dominobriefing with a customer here in the UK.  Their messaging profile:25,000 Notes users2 iSeries servers -- 12 partitions100% uptime -- since deployingiSeries servers two years agoAlot of the discussion revolved around where productivity is going.... ise-mail dead?  We talked about instant messaging, activites, sharedrepositories, and a lot of other collaboration tools.  It was interestinghow consistent the experience of the IBMers here in the UK is with my own-- "voice mail is dead" said the IBMer running the meeting.  That'scertainly true for me -- I get around to listening to business voicemailonce a week, at best.  Sametime is where it is at.Good meeting, and worth checking out this fascinating IBMbuilding in Hursley.

February 13, 2006 by in Data Centers

Tom Duff called it

Tom Duff called it

Several weeks ago, I linkedto Tom Duff's comments regarding Microsoft's non-presencein the Lotusphere 2006 product showcase.  At the time, we had lotsof voices from Redmond tell me that Lotus wasn't doing the right thingfor mutual customers, that the mission was around coexistence and interoperability,not migration.  Two observations have been made in recentdays that seem to expose the trojan horse for what I said it was.  First,Ben Langhinrichs noted that Microsoft seems to have a self-servingdefinition of the word "coexistence". Second, my blogdigger feeds today caught thisentry from Microsoft's James Conrad. He describes his new role at Microsoft, managing a team of evangelists. One mission in particular seems telling:Lotus NotesMigration (Gary Devendorf)That seems to settle that. Itdoes for Tom as well:But can we now officially cut the kumbaya crap about just wanting to helpus Domino developers out?  Your job is evangelizing Notes migration. You work for Microsoft now, not Lotus.  And if you representMicrosoft in any official capacity at an event, you also represent theirposition.   Regardless of what you might want us to believe (or what*you* personally believe) otherwise... Richpicked this up on Yellowisthenewblack.comas well.

February 13, 2006 by in Microsoft