In the continuing promo of the very good cause the Children’s Cancer Association, here is the 3rd low resolution part of the “It’s a small Lotus world” drawn by Army of Trolls, the item revealed this time is “ye olde Codestore” one of the original domino bloggers (especially in the UK), and a continuing stalwart of great domino code give away’s for many years (personally if Jake would come to one of the lugs I for one would stand him a few well earned pints)

Remember a posh full sized version of the art is one of the prizes at the UK Night at Lotusphere (on the Monday night), with all funds raised going to Children’s Cancer Association (you can buy tickets off Bruce, Gayle, Matt white, Julian Woodward or myself at lotusphere, or donate direct below)

This is my third lotusphere and the first one where im paying for every last bit myself, no freebe ticket for both babeing this year, im also there as part of LDC, so I am going to squeese every drops worth of value from the trip, but just like the rest of the comunity stuff we do, you have to put in the effort yourself to get value out, to this end i compiled a list of tasks to do before, before during and after lotusphere, anyone going to join me?

10 things to learn/do before you go there.

1) Ensure you have a LotusLive account and have had a good look around.

2) Ensure you have the latest version of Notes installed, and have played with its new features.

3) Subscribe to the podcasts, and keep up-to-date. (DONE)

4) Make a list of questions you want answered, get your pet peeves in a row, so you can voice them to Lotus in person.

5) Sign up to a cloud service and TRULY understand what “cloud” is rather than just the hype. (DONE)

6a) If you’re an admin, have the latest version of Domino installed on the most up-to-date OS it supports.

6d) If you’re a developer, ensure that you have the latest version of Eclipse installed and set up correctly. (DONE)

7) Learn about the competitors: get accounts with at least two direct Notes competitors (salesforce.com, Google apps, a free Sharepoint account) and explore their features.

8) Learn about the symbiotic Notes products, play with at least two of these (Sametime, Quickr, Connections, etc.). Can these be of value to you, do you need to find out more from a guru when you have them to hand?

9) Tell your clients and ask your boss whether there’s anything THEY want to know. Get them involved: what do your clients / boss want in the next 12 months?

10) Get your business card printed.

Old Comments

Mitch Cohen(10/12/2010 02:03:09 GMT)

Some good ideas….. See you in Orlando

Mark Myers(10/12/2010 09:21:56 GMT)

cool, yup see you there!

RANT WARNING

Political spin particularly in corporations who should know better is something that always gets on my nerves, currently one of my clients is moving to an outsource model for everything , this has come with a new CIO and is expected as every director wants to stamp his mark on the enterprise, this time there are some bits that are new to me, the particular one that gets my goat is:

“High operational risk due to dependency on few individuals” errr that was because these were specialists that dealt with the products day in, day out for years and knew not only the products but the underlying business and can identify and fix issues in minutes, even seconds, as a business side colleague pointed out, if this was in brain surgery rather than high finance, the suggestion that there are too few proper brain surgeons and they cost a too much, so we should give the work to ordinary doctors, would cause an outcry,

It only works in a corporations because the people issuing them don’t actually understand what their business REALLY does, yes its bad for redundancy purposes and horrible for the day to day running cost to have specialists, but the reason it looks like an easy target is because there have been no problems so everyone thinks the work is simple to do,

This problem was exemplified by an issue in which a instance of Jboss on Redhat became ill during a end of day run and would not restart with the normal scripts we had written, the cause was not a code based one, it is a dedicated box that does nothing else, and we were in a time sensitive situation, the new support personnel (who have been in the role for 8+ months now), were completely at a loss as this scenario was not on their sheet of “how to do stuff”, a suggestion of “Restart the bloody box”, was treated with blank stares and a question of “which script is that”,

It took over an hour to even get them to mail the hardware administrators to get them to do a restart of the physical box (something they could have done them selves in 2 mins with a “sudo Reboot”) , all in all nearly 2 hours of run time was lost making the business very unhappy, this is not intelligent support!!, this is not an improvement!!!, I would say that we now have even higher operational risk than before as we have NO individuals that we can depend on .

To conclude, the support and growth of any business is a balancing act, if you only have 3-4 line people then day to day its very expensive (often unjustifiably so), but you most likely wont ever have a major disaster, if you only have 1-2 line people, then day to day it will be cheap as chips, but when a change is needed to fight off your competitors or deal with a major disaster you will face a sea of blank expressions all saying “that is not on my script sheet”

I will be going to ILUG in November and so will my wife, along with @HughsterRooster wife, @mattwhite girlfriend, and many other better half’s

why is this?, are they keeping an eye on us?…Nope!

Is it because ILUG is in a memorable historical location that has tons to do and try?, is it because of the advantages room rates?, or the fact its basically a holiday location?…nope Nope NOPE!!

Its because the best people in the lotus world will be there and its not a “conference” in the old fashioned sense, yes there are amazing speakers, tons to learn, corporate sponsors, stuff to take back to your client/employer, the chance of free beer and me trying to force grain alcohol down your throat while ranting at you but its not TOO geeky and very defiantly not too corporate. humans are welcome.

And that’s the point, its not a thing to get a “pass” to, its a thing to treat your family to while getting tons out of for your self, my main client wont pay for it, and I don’t care, on the flight back I will sit back, brain and belly full with a clear conscience.

ILUG, its not going to be a guilty pleasure, its going to be pure pleasure.

The following quote was in a clients internal quarterly director’s update on the subject of Client Wins:

“Winning this lead confirms **** as a major player in the US airline market. The aviation team cited the new Claims Online tracking system, as well as ” … “as some of the key reasons for this win.”

I and Mark Barton wrote the system and its really nice to make a difference to a companies bottom line, this will be the third big difference I helped make during my time at my current main client, it feels good, after all even contractors have pride in their work 🙂 .