Carl Tyler's Blog

Category Christmas Sudoku

This is my Christmas slant on your regular Sudoko puzzle, rather than using the numbers 123456789 you have to use the letters CHRISTMAS, not sure if having two S's makes it harder or easier?  Click on the image for a larger version you can print out.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 12:34:10 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Drobo Storage

Yesterday my Drobo, DroboShare and two 1tb SATA drivers arrived.  I think I'm like a woman with shoes when it comes to external hard drives, honestly you can never have too many of these things, well you can and I think I'm approaching the too many mark so I was looking for some system to perform more backups across my network, and something that has some data failure features built in.  A few friends had recommended Drobo so I decided to look into it.  Basically with the standard Drobo, you get a SATA drive enclosure that hooks up to your PC/Mac with a USB 2.0 or Firewire 800 cable, and the enclosure automatically offers RAID 5 type capabilities.  What is really nice about the Drobo however, is that your drives don't have to be identical sizes, they don't have to be identical speeds, they just have to be SATA drives and Drobo will do the rest of the configuration etc. like magic.  This is good, as I have numerous SATA drives of different sizes lying around, from various PC upgrades.  But what really makes Drobo very cool is it's hot swap capabilities, change/upgrade drives etc without turning the device off and without having to stop other applications accessing it, that's a pretty nice feature to have.

What follows is my initial impression of Drobo, the out of box experience and other comments, still early days so don't expect too many comments.

Pretty standard brown box


Upon opening the box you see


After removing the top layer box you see  a cloth package inside shipping foam


Upon opening the smaller box


Lifting the flap reveals, some instructions and the contents, setup CD,  auto sensing power adapter (100-240v), USB 2.0 Cable, Firewire 800 cable


Unwrapping the cloth package, reveals the Drobo
Front:


Back, USB port, two Firewire 800 ports, power socket, security key lock socket:


The front panel is held on with some magnets and is easily removed by just pulling gently on it, removing the front panels reveals the area where the hard drives are pushed in, and a drobo read me reminder.


The drobo has various lights that indicate the status of drives and available capacity, For reference there is a descriptor of their various states nicely laid out on the back of the front panel.

One set of lights that isn't shown yet, as I don't have much data on there is the blue lights across the bottom, these represent 10% of disk space in use, so as you use another 10% another blue light goes on.


Plugging in the components is pretty easy, plug one end USB cable into back of Drobo, other end into PC.  Plug in power for Drobo and then insert the Drobo CD into the PC.



Select the option to install Drobo Dashboard.  I was a little dissapointed to see the How to videos take you to a Drobo website, the videos aren't on the CD, which means you need to be connected to the internet to watch them.  The Installer is your standard MSI, nothing fancy.  

Once installed you'll see a message "Ready For Connection"


and you'll be prompted to see if there are updates


Then as this is the first time it's been setup, the Drobo will let you know that your drives need formatting:


Drobo Dashboard will prompt for the format type you want to use


Drobo then prompts for the volume size, to be honest, it isn't really clear what this size is for exatly, and I'm not sure even now. Is it the maximum volume size if I add more drives?


Next we can assign a drive letter to Drobo, Z: was my choice, it had suggested my next available drive letter F:


And then Drobo asks us to confirm the Format


It then formats and restarts the Drobo



The Drobo Dashboard then shows the status of the drive, no idea what the 128.44 Mb of disk already in use is, it was just formatted.


Clicking the Advanced Controls buttons shows me, the current drives in there, their size and their state.


Clicking the Tools Tabs, provides access to some additional options


So that's it Drobo as a USB attached drive is now setup and configured, not much else to it really apart from use the drive.  Except I also purchased DroboShare, so I needed to configure that.

DroboShare is a device that attachs to the Drobo, and allows the Drobo to be used as Network Attached Storage(NAS), DroboShare also allows for 3rd party developers to create applications that run on the device, there are some out there like iTunes server, FTP client/Server, bit Torrent client etc. DroboShare also comes in a brown box


Similar to the main drobo, you open the box and there is a flap with a welcome message


and under the flap you'll find instructions and the DroboShare in a small canvas bag


Removing the DroboShare from the box revealse the power adapter cable, USB cable and network cable.


Cleverly, rather than shipping a separate power supply with the DroboShare, they ship a Y splitter instead, and share the power adapter that comes with the main Drobo.


The USB cable is also short, so you don't have lots of excess cable lying around behind the device


The DroboShare has two USB connectors, a Gigabit network adapter and power socket.  The DroboShare supports the connection of two Drobo devices (which in theory means 32Tb of backup).  


The DroboShare just sits underneath the Drobo


Upon connecting the Drobo and the DroboShare together using the provided USB cable, and connecting the DroboShare to the network, the Drobo Dashboard, recognizes that there is a DroboShare on the network and now enables the Setup button on the Drobo Dashboard Tools tab, which takes you to the Network settings.  Where you can choose to assign a static IP address and a name and password to access the device over a network.


DroboApps is an area I haven't yet had time to play much with yet, the installation is a little weird, in that you download a DroboApp from the Drobo website, then place it into the DroboApps folder on the drobo and then restart the device, restarting the Drobo is a little strange, it doesn't have a power swtich and there isn't a restart option on the Drobo Dashboard, the best I could come up with was to put the device in standby, then pull the cord (apparently there is a DroboApp that has a restart option so I will look into that).  Documentation on DroboApps appears to be pretty poor, for example the Fuppes app which enables the Drobo to be used as a UPnP media player is really really poor.  I think this is an exciting area for the device and I look forward to seeing more apps coming available.

So that's it for now, my movie backups are currently being moved across to the device.  If you're wondering what I use for backing up my PCs I use Acronis, it has saved me numerous times, and with the addition of Drobo I will be moving to a nightly delta backup for many of my machines.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 03:26:05 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (3) |      

Category Lotusphere meetings

Many of us I'm sure, met people in the physical world for the first time at Lotusphere.  Post a response on who you met for the first time at Lotusphere, and why they made an impression on you.

Mine would have to be Bruce Elgort, I was the International Launch manager for Notes R5 and here was this guy handing out bottles of Tabasco sauce.  I remember him clearly as his enthusiasm was almost irritating, he was irritating as here was a guy showing us how slow and cumbersome IBM had become, here was a guy that had managed to bring together a group of people to build tLookout mail experience for Lotus Notes, and the folks internally at IBM were still bickering about what graphics to have on the R5 Welcome page.  Obviously this is a meeting I regretas I'm still in touch with Bruce and he still harasses me on Skype regularly, just kidding, Bruce is a good guy.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 10:12:23 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (5) |      

Category Christmas Story

A friend just sent me this...

When four of Santa's elves got sick, the trainee elves did not produce toys as fast as the regular ones, and Santa began to feel the Pre-Christmas pressure.

Then Mrs Claus told Santa her Mother was coming to visit, which stressed Santa even more.

When he went to harness the reindeer, he found that three of them were about to give birth and two others had jumped the fence and were out, Heaven knows where.

Then when he began to load the sleigh, one of the floorboards cracked, the toy bag fell to the ground and all the toys were scattered.

Frustrated, Santa went in the house for a cup of apple cider and a shot of rum. When he went to the cupboard, he discovered the elves had drank all the cider and hidden the liquor. In his frustration, he accidentally dropped the cider jug, and it broke into hundreds of little glass pieces all over the kitchen floor. He went to get the broom and found the mice had eaten all the straw off the end of the broom.

Just then the doorbell rang, and irritated Santa marched to the door, yanked it open, and there stood a little angel with a great big Christmas tree.

The angel said very cheerfully, 'Merry Christmas, Santa. Isn't this a lovely day? I have a beautiful tree for you. Where would you like me to stick it?'

And so began the tradition of the little angel on top of the Christmas tree.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 04:02:57 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category None

Woolworths (which closed in the US in 1996 I think) is due to shut up shop in England on the 5th of January according to a BBC article, so the question is, where will all wanna be Fagins get their theft training?  Woolworth's pick and mix was the early introduction for many to a life of shop lifting.  Also Woolworths was also the shop that had upside down Daleks hanging from the ceiling (I tried to find a picture on the web, couldn't), when I got older I realised these were actually security cameras.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 09:50:12 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (1) |      

Category Bluemane Charity

Foolishly I said in a blog comment the other day in response to requests that I appear as a blueman at Lotusphere:

I'll do a deal with you, if you guys raise $3000 for charity I'll shave my head again and do Gurupalooza as a Blueman.

Now I really intended this as a quick off the cuff comment and I really should learn to shut my mouth.  First why did I say Gurupalooza and not one of my sessions, well I think doing it in my session would be inappropriate, whereas Gurupalooza is quite casual and laid back so would fit into that ok without snubbing anyone.  Secondly, Chris Miller read the comment (damn him), and has now setup a page where people can donate to a worthy cause MO FEAT.  Not someone to go back on my word, I will indeed do Gurupalooza as a Blueman if you guys raise $3000.  I feel bad that this isn't really a challenge in the way that Yancy Lent's cycle ride was, but if you really do want to see it, then let's make it worthwhile for someone in the process.  Hopefully I'll have some hair grown back by then to shave off, although as I sit here in Panera because of the snow storm and no electric, it does feel like it is growing back pretty quickly.  Oh not having any hair, when you can't take a shower I have decided is a really really good thing.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 07:32:58 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (5) |      

Category Symphony Sametime

IBM has posted a plug-in for Symphony spreadsheets that demonstrates Sametime awareness in your spreadsheet.  You can find it here

The Lotus Symphony sametime integration plug-in is a programmability sample that demonstrates how to use Lotus Symphony programmability functions to extend Lotus Symphony applications.This plugin shows you how to integrate Symphony sample spreadsheet view with Sametime client.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 07:15:40 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Ice Storm

On Thursday evening at 11pm I lost the power at my house due to the ice storm that was taking place outside.  As you know, I did go to this England this weekend to surprised my niece for her 18th birthday party.  I got up at 4am in the dark, with no water, no heat and what sounded like gun shots being fired in the garden, which were in fact tree limbs snapping.   It took me about 1 1/2 hours to drive to Newburyport, a journy that typically takes 35-40 minutes as I had to stop to move tree limbs so that I could continue driving.  Looking at the towns website, the utility company says that 42% of the town population are still withouth power (i'm one of them).  

To be honest I was away most of this, so I'm not yet worried about the power cut, it makes things difficult but I can get by.  With no electricity, at my place it basically means I have nothing, here's why.  My water comes from a well, the well uses Electricity, my heating is oil, but heats water, my water is gas, but needs water, internet connection requires a modem, odem uses electricity, the toilet needs water, you start to get the idea.  I have a 12v inverter so keep running down to the car to charge my cell and laptop.

Fortunately I have a big old fire, so at least one room is warm.

Oh the worst thing about the power cut, I haven't yet seen the Dexter season Finale!

Posted by Carl Tyler At 01:39:27 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (2) |      

Category Blueman Career

Bruce was kind enough to post about the rumour of my career change to become a Blueman.  My brother and I had our audition this weekend, just kidding, this is the actual story.  On wednesday my eldest niece turned 18 (yes it makes me feel old), on Saturday she had a fancy dress party (costume party is translation for Americans), I had told everyone except my brother and his wife that I could not make it.  So my brother and I started planning our costume.  We decided that we would go as Bluemen from the Blueman show (a great show that must be seen by the way).  I got us matching outfits, blue makeup, bald caps, matching shoes, the works.  Unfortunately my head is humongous and there was no way the bald cap would stay on my head.  So I took the decision that I would go whole hog and shave my head, I figured I haven't been bald before and something should grow back before Lotusphere.

So here you go, the video of my brother shaving my head, and photos of the results...


What was I thinking... from Carl Tyler on Vimeo.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 07:46:31 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (15) |      

Category Emoticons

No I don't mean Workplace or some other IBM technology, I mean this article about a Russian getting the trademark right to emoticons:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7778767.stm

What is it with Trademark and Patent organizations, do they have no common sense?

Posted by Carl Tyler At 07:19:05 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (4) |      

Category Foundations Viral Video

The video is out, no idea if this is the first part and there are more to come.  Can someone explain the punch line to me, I don't get it.


Unfortunate that the mention of "replicating" relates to viruses, script should have used some other word like self cloning viruses or something IMHO.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 06:33:45 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (9) |      

Category Blog layout

If you don't read the blog via an RSS reader, you'll probably notice I changed the layout a little bit.  With the likes of PlanetLotus, I felt the blog roll had pretty much become redundant, as most people are getting to other blogs either fomr a central point like that or something like Google Reader.  So to make a little more room for the items I post, I got rid of one of the columns and some of the items in the columns. I kept what I felt were the key items around.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 03:18:16 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Conference Security

This just freaked me out.  I was a conference call early this morning with a large company, it had a dialin code, a web meeting and all that good stuff.  Anyway I was sitting here a few moments ago, and I started hearing voices and ping sounds, I checked, no IM windows were appearing and I didn't have any browser open, so where were the sounds coming from?  It turns out, my phone has been on mute and speakerphone since the end of the earlier call, but I never hung up.  

Turns out the telephone conferencing system never hung me up from the previous call, and now I can hear what I expect is supposed to be a secure conference call.  I know a couple of people on the call so I'll hang up to save them embarrassment.  This is one of those areas that the telephone conferencing system should handle better, but if the people involved had been using a truly integrated telephone and web conferncing system, they would have seen that there was another phone line still connected and they could have hung me up.  This is one of the reasons why web conferencing hooked into telephony is great, and also a reason why conferences call systems should not cycle around meeting IDs too quickly.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 03:02:59 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Microsoft OCS Videos

Even if your company is running Sametime, it's a good idea to know what the competitive products out there are doing.  This can help if someone comes and tells you you need to switch, but also makes it look like you're aware of the overall market place.  Obviously the best way to do this is to actually get your hands on them, but if that's not possible then online demos make a good alternative for educating yourself.  

Whilst I/we like to believe that Sametime is the leader of the pack as it a mature product and had a few years head start in the market, the competitors didn't sit around idly and it some may argue (me) that Workplace IM wasted a good few development years for Sametime advancements, but that is in the past and not a mistake that can be changed, the Unified Communications it's a very competitive space, with many vendors, but the one that most IBM Lotus customers should concern themselves with is Microsoft (be aware that Cisco isn't far behind).  Microsoft has just published some great video tutorials that give a great overview of what Microsoft OCS is capable of today. (They also have lots of fake screenshots, with video quality that is way too high compared to the real world)  

Don't forget IBM also has the Sametime Cool Stuff page with links to videos and whitepapers that can help you in competitive situations.

Much of what you see with Microsoft Telephony integration is possible today though IBM's Telephony partners, and with the arrival in the next few months much will be possible with the Sametime Unified Telephony Offering.  If you're interested in know more about Sametime Unified Telephony be sure to chack out the Understanding IBM® Lotus® Sametime® Unified Telephony whitepaper.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 02:23:39 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Sametime AIX

Who is it that's running Sametime on AIX?  I maybe get asked about it once every 6 month.   I'd have to think that maybe 5% of Sametime customers are running AIX tops, from what I can tell it primarily appears to be companies who have IBM to manage their IT infrastructure.  are you running Sametime on AIX?  Why did you select AIX as your OS?  I'm interested to know why someone would choose AIX over say Linux or Windows.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 05:18:08 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (2) |      

Category VirtualBox Mac

If you have a Mac and you're looking for a free alternative to the popular Parallels and VMWare Fusion, then take a look at VirtualBox from Sun.

See screenshots here http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Screenshots

Posted by Carl Tyler At 12:03:41 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category TivoHD Netflix

If you have a TivoHD and a Netflix account, great news, today the feature for playing your watch instantly Netflix movies went live.  Under the Video on Demand menu option, Netflix is now listed as an option.  After selecting to activate the account with the passcode provided in the TivoHD menu at the www.netflix/activate website, my Netflix watch list appeared on the Tivo.

Video on Demand options


Netflix Instant Queue


Movie information


Starting player, tests network speed, optimizes performance


Movie started




Fast forward, shows a shrunk picture, but allows for fast forward, and tick skip

Posted by Carl Tyler At 11:37:36 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Symphony OpenOffice

IBM wanted the Lotusphere presentations to be in ODP format, and I don't have a problem with that, it's a privilidge to present at Lotusphere and requiring presenters to have their presentations in the format the company wants makes perfect sense to me, in the process they also wanted us to use Lotus Symphony.  I wonder if that part will turn out to be a good idea.

A week or so ago I changed my Facebook status to say that I was in Symphony crash hell.  I got one response from a person that said it must be my problem as they had no issues, but then I got quite a few emails and IMs that told me I was not alone.  I have seen people this week, switch from Symphony Mac to openOffice Mac, and I personally switched from Symphony on Windows to OpenOffice on Windows because of the crashs and general speed of Symphony.  I had hangs when doing simple things like clicking on the File menu, and I even had a few blue screens, never a good thing.

I found on my machine with 2gb Ram, 3ghz Dual Core, NVIDIA 512Mb graphics card and latest drivers that the screen redraws in Symphony Presentations were just painfully slow.  I'd click a text block and I could watch the rectangle area be drawn, it just felt really slow.  Usability issues I had, if I brought in a PPT file, I could change the layout of a page to be the new smartmasters layout, but I would manually have to go into each text block and select all text and mark it as default style.  No easy way I could find to do this across the application.  Some imported slides that had pictures, would have text added above the picture that said "Click here to add agenda".

So how did you get on with Symphony?  For me, I would only feel comfortable recommending Symphony if the users/company were committed to Notes and didn't want to do anything complex in the Symphony editors, weren't worried about 100% file fidelity with Office and have high end machines.  I think Symphony is also a work in progress, so users should also be comfortable seeing rapid UI changes/updates over maintenance releases.  Otherwise if you want an Office suite and don't want to pay Microsoft any money, then I'd recommend OpenOffice over Symphony, and again only if you weren't worried about 100% file fidelity with Office and have time to fix any import issues that arise.  OpenOffice on the Mac seems to work well and has plenty of functions for most users, and from what I hear, Office on the Mac isn't that great at file fidelity either.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 10:42:18 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (9) |      

Category Motivation Video

L. Vaughan Spencer was named the 2004 Business Speaker of the Year for Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire and came 12th in the Northern Hemisphere Motivator of the Year (Under-40 Middleweight Section). He is Business Ambassador for the South East England Tree Fellowship, editor-at-large of Success & Succeediness and is the Kall-Kwik Visiting Professor of Succeedership at the University of the Isle of Wight. He is a member of the Board of Governors of Skybrook Primary School in Stevenage.



More here http://www.thesucceeder.com/

I'm trying to remember what TV series this guy was in, Have I got news for you?

Posted by Carl Tyler At 03:06:01 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (3) |      

Category Fairpoint Metrocast

Living in the middle of nowhere I am fairly limited with my internet connection options.  For the last year or so I have been using Metrocast Business Cable for my internet.  It runs about $100 a month and gives me 7Mb down and 768k up.  But I've had issues, very rarely I can I play a youtube video without it stopping every couple of seconds, and if I use the Netflix instant play I get a message like this, saying it will start playing in about 9 hours, sometimes even as high as 15 hours. The Flickr website was always hideously slow.  I really only noticed the issues hitting servers in the West Coast too.


Obviously this isn't what I expected, so I try out things like the speed test at www.speakeasy.net and I will get mixed results, sometimes I get the 7mb/768k then 10 seconds later I will get 440k/768k testing against the same server.  At first I assumed a bad router my end, so I changed that to two different models, no difference.  I changed my cables, no difference, then for fun I loaded up a VPN client and tried out a connection via a VPN server at a friends office,  the connections that way had no issues, no variable speed results, I always got the expected results.  This to me indicated that my Cable company had an issue, and that the issue happened somewhere between.  When I called the Cable company they decided to give me a lesson in how the internet works, explaining that the problem must be someone else's, so I explained that the VPN connection was fine to be told that didn't prove anything, and the problem isn't there's and that I should live with it.  Sadly for them I didn't like that response and it made me look at alternatives, for me I don't have many alternatives, I can get DSL and that's it, unless I want wireless, which won't really give me the speeds I want.   So today I fitted a telephone jack to my office and the engineer from Fairpoint came along and connected me to their service.

With the DSL, I now get consistent, yet slower results from the test pages, and my Netflix account can start playing in about 9 seconds

The DSL is half the price, and half the speed for download, which leads me to a few questions.

Does anyone have any experience with running two DSL lines into one of the Dual WAN router models?  Good bad experiences? Interested in any feedback with regards to this approach.
Would you take reliability over performance?  I am thinking yes to this answer myself.
How would you go about proving that the problem is or isn't with the cable company?  In my mind I did that with the VPN, but have now done it conclusively with the DSL line.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 02:48:38 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (3) |      

Category Esc Enter

I use two mail clients, Outlook and Notes.  In Notes when I'm done creating an email I hit Esc and then Press Enter and the mail is gone, I never look at the message box that pops up because I've been doing the exact same keystroke sequence for something like 17+ years (probably why I hate Notes 8 and it's shortcut changes so much).  17+ years makes anything a hard habbit to break, sadly I keep doing the same keystroke in Outlook, but in Outlook, Esc, Enter doesn't send the email it saves it to the Drafts folder, so in my head I think I've sent the email but in fact it's sitting in the drafts folder.  

Anybody else have keystrokes they use in one app that carry on to them working in other apps that don't do what they expect?

Posted by Carl Tyler At 11:03:03 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (4) |      

Category WSJ IBM Virtual Desktop

IBM Creates 'Microsoft-Free' Desktop

Sounds like a Citrix style implementation with the code actually running on the server.  It's not eSuite, but it's the model that made sure eSuite wasn't successful i.e. thin terminals acting as display only devices, which was much better for most companies than the download everything and run slowly eSuite approach.  It will be interesting to see if customers for this type of solution will choose to move from paying licensing costs to Microsoft over to IBM, or bypass both of them and move to the free alternatives that much of the IBM offering is based on.  I know this week I have personally seen Mac users bypass Symphony on Mac, for OpenOffice Mac because it was faster, more functional and handled PPT files better.  Certainly interesting times, with a possible sea change if Microsoft isn't successful with Windows 7.

The key compents are:
Notes, Sametime, Symphony - E-mail, Collaboration, UC, Desktop Productivity
Virtual Bridge VERDE - Desktop Virtualization
Ubuntu Linux - Host/Client OS

This article has a little more "how they do it" meat

Not sure if this is the IBM related site...I don't think it is.
Virtual client solution from IBM

Posted by Carl Tyler At 07:14:10 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (1) |      

Category Visualisations playauditorium

If you enjoy looking at Media Player and iTunes visualisations then you'll really like this interesting online game Play Auditorium. Bend the light to fill all the music meters.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 06:07:08 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Irony?

You know the problem, you buy something and it's in that plastic pack that rips your fingers off when you try and open it.  Well today in the store I found the solution, and guess what, it's in a plastic package you struggle to open!

Posted by Carl Tyler At 12:26:48 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category IdeaJam IBM

It sucks when they take your ideas, it sucks when they get credit for someone elses work, but it's part of life.  Here's an example of IBM (but this could be any large company) getting credit for the work of a small company familiar to most in the Lotus Community,  Elguji (they may be small but they come up with big ideas).

Harnessing the Power Of the Crowd

'IBM's' IdeaJam is 24 hours; people propose their ideas for, basically, "What should IBM be doing?" Since IBM is so big that can run the gamut of just about anything. People vote on the winners and IBM selects like 10 ideas and then funds them, sometimes with a lot of money. We've seen a number of these spring up since then.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 08:46:53 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (8) |      

Category Sametime Chat Logging

Following on the heals of Sherpa software last week, Snapps announces version 8 of their SnappShot® 8 for Sametime® 8.  SnappShot is a server-based enterprise solution, providing companies with regulatory compliance and stewardship over their Sametime installations. SnappShot offers a Notes interface for both configuration and use, and captures Sametime emoticons and images that are exchanged.

You can find out more details and a link to a download at Rob Novak's Blog

By the way I looked at the Sherpa Software IM logging for Sametime, and in my opinion it's a no fly for corporates, it's a client install and not server based logging, for compliance reasons, I do not believe that will qualify as there ways around the logging, so not a recommended solution from me.

Posted by Carl Tyler At 08:28:47 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (1) |      

Category Sametime UC Unified Telephony

This white paper, helps to clear up a lot of the questions that people have had about the Sametime Unified Telephony offering.  It's a good article in that it gives a good enough overview for people that want to know the high level concepts, but then goes into more detail about hardware requirements etc.  IBM is definitely starting to tread on the toes of some of their existing telephony partners with this offering and it's going to be interesting to see how IBM manages those relationships going forward.  The approach IBM has taken is pretty much in-line with the one Microsoft took a few years ago, neither partner requires you to replace your existing telephony system, to get some of the promised features you are going to need to invest in some new hardware and potentially such as bridges to allow your older PBXs to support SIP.  Sametime is certainly evolving in it's capabilities and with that comes complexity, Sametime is quickly moving away from a product that your typical Domino Admin can mange to something that is becoming more and more likely to be managed by the telco groups within organisations, and with that change comes turf wars.  Who's going to win control?  For the last few years I've been watching the same thing happen with Microsoft OCS and now we're going to see it happen with Sametime.

The article is well worth a read, especially if you're considering integrating Sametime with your telephony system, or if you're a telephony solutions vendor wondering how you're going to work with Sametime Unified Telephony.

Understanding IBM® Lotus® Sametime® Unified Telephony

Posted by Carl Tyler At 09:42:17 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category None

Blue Spruce is IBM's project for enabling collaboration via AJAX-based mashups, that include audio, video and document collaboration.  It looks like the project is based on XMPP and not Sametime.  

I couldn't find anything on the IBM website about it, but here are a couple of articles:

Exclusive: First Look at Blue Spruce, IBM's Next Generation Browser Platform

eWeek - Cloud Computing Slideshow: A Look at IBM's Blue Spruce Web Browser Platform

Posted by Carl Tyler At 08:56:15 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0) |