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13/10: UKLUG was a great success
On Wednesday I drove up to Edinburgh in time for the UKLUG conference. It was a great chance to meet up with friends and catch up on all things Lotus. Timing is everything and the conference was timed with 8.5.1 about to be shipped. There was an air of confidence about recent changes to the products.UKLUG was extremely well organised and my thanks go to Warren and all those who put in tireless hours.
The 8.5.1 version is by all accounts a slicker beast than 8.5.0. Many of the chief complaints with 8.5 were about the time it took to load. Those complaints seem to have gone. The Designer client has finally got its make over and IBM have done the right thing and made it a free download. This is a good move. It may be slightly late but better late than never. Doing the same for the Notes client (without the ability to connect to servers) would be a good thing too. The POP3 and IMAP protocols might need a little attention but it would give students somewhere to try out their applications designed in their Designer download. All we need now is a port to a few games consoles (XBOX360, Playstation3, Wii) and the client will become ubiquitous.
On the way up to Scotland we accepted an offer from someone who wanted to buy our house. So we now need to go shopping ourselves and find a new home. We want to buy a home in the Peak District that gets snowed in each year with some land. Broadband connection and four wheel drive vehicle is obviously mandatory.
After UKLUG we drove up to Insch north of Aberdeen to visit my brother and his family. I spent Saturday chilling out with a chainsaw, an axe and a few beers (afterwards). We spent the whole of Sunday driving back. 10 hours in all owing to traffic on the M6.
24/7: $4.5m Oracle ERP Project dumped for Legacy IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and IBM UniVerse Systems
My background since I qualified as a Chemical Engineer back in the days when a Commodore 64 had plenty of RAM has been bespoke software development for Engineering Contracting Companies - Oil & Gas and more recently Water. Over the years, I have had a hand in the development of most of the modules required to operate these companies apart from the core Financials modules. The emphasis of the systems has always been projects. The company tenders for projects and takes responsibility for building a water treatment works or whatever - not just designing it.Much of the software has been developed in a DBMS called IBM UniVerse - or at least IBM acquired the company that acquired the company that acquired the company that owned Prime Information. It is a DBMS that supports multi-values fields and variable length fields rather like a Lotus Notes database. It is clearly not a relational database although it can operate like one. So it is great for ad hoc SQL type queries unlike Notes which is great if you've got a pre-built view.
In 1996 we introduced Lotus Notes into the mix and introduced additional features to the systems like workflow. Lotus Notes/Domino and UniVerse work very well together partly because of the similarities in their architecture.
The systems could be operated with any Finance Systems that had open interfaces. Between 1992 and 2008 the company used SUN Accounts licenced from a company called Systems Union.
As mentioned here and here, I was on the team that migrated to Oracle eBusiness Suite ERP away from SUN Finance and our in-house developed systems.
Well Oracle EBS suite was not a good fit for this company. It ended up like a millstone around their neck and they have reluctantly taken the decision to go back to the legacy systems I wrote. The $4.5m cost of the migration has been wasted. I hope they learn from the experience but it was an expensive lesson. I hate to say "I told you so" but it's in those blog posts.
So I start next week on the return journey. What we could have achieved enhancing those systems with just 10% of that cost doesn't bear thinking about. It is a crying shame.
I am trying to come up with a project name for the migration back into the "legacy" apps. So far I've come up with Project Karma and Project Phoenix. Any better suggestions?
19/6: Going to Lotusphere 2010?
If you're flying to Orlando in January next year, you may want to check out the Virgin deals at the moment. You need to book by 23rd June though.
20/4: I now have an excuse to try out Traveler
I was out shopping yesterday at Makro and the particular store was closing down so there were a few bargains.I ended up buying a Motorola MPx220 mobile phone since it was going cheap. I know nothing about the phone whatsoever but it seemed like a good excuse to try out Traveler since the phone uses a Windows Mobile OS.
So I will try and install Traveler from Paul and Warren's The World is going Mobile presentation at Lotusphere and see whether the presentation is "developer friendly".
Now if only Traveler worked natively on Foundations, that would be cool. Until then it will have to be installed in a Windows VMware image since Lotus Foundations now provides this functionality with the Lotus Foundations Run add-on.
31/3: Using Lotus Foundations’ Built in VMware Server
In my last post, I mentioned the ability to run VMware images was probably the most important addition to Lotus Foundations with the new 1.1 release.Lotus Foundations Run is the name given to the new add-on software that brings the power of VMware Server 2.0 into the mix allowing Lotus Foundations to host applications on virtual servers.
So now Lotus Foundations can host Windows applications. You can install practically all operating systems and then install applications on top of those operating systems.
Installing Lotus Foundations Run is almost identical to the installation of Lotus Foundations Start. Full details can be found here.
Now what I know about virtualisation takes about 30 seconds of revision. I've recently installed VMware workstation for the first time. I'm no expert.
I decided to try out this new software using a couple of downloads from Jump Box which basically hosts ready made images that you can use straight away. The two I chose were free. All I did was download them, unzip them and copy the image folders onto my Lotus Foundations server. A couple of clicks later and they were deployed - that simple.
I deployed SugarCRM and Ruby on Rails knowing precisely nothing about either of them! Obviously, using an application in Production is going to require a little bit of tuning to decide what resources are required but Lotus Foundations Run is extremely easy to use.
27/3: Foundations ready for growing your business on
Well you've probably already heard that IBM have now released Lotus Foundations Start 1.1 and Lotus Foundations Branch Office 1.1. If not then here's a link to their press release.But what does this mean?
Basically Lotus Foundations Start is the add-on software that you install onto the Lotus Foundations appliance that includes Domino. The 1.1 release introduces version 8.5 of Domino (LFS1.0 was based on Domino 8.01). The Branch Office version allows a Lotus Foundations server to become part of an existing Domino infrastructure which was a much requested feature.
How do you install the new version?
The Lotus Foundations status page automatically notifies you that an update is available for the Lotus Foundations core (i.e. the Linux operating system). Installing these releases is simply a matter of clicking on the displayed link and then rebooting the server. After rebooting the new software will be running. Installing a new version of Lotus Foundations Start requires you to download the package from the IBM site and copying it onto the Foundations server. This is a simple process documented in full here.
Once installed the Lotus Foundations status page should show Lotus Foundations 1.1 running on port 1352 as shown below.
What else is new with the 1.1 release?
Probably the biggest addition with the 1.1 release is the inclusion of VMWare Server 2.0 into the mix allowing you to install different operating systems and applications. For example, you can now install Windows Server onto your Lotus Foundations appliance. This allows you to run applications that only run on Windows. An added benefit of this approach is that you can support your Windows software remotely even after a Windows crash.
Once I've had a chance to play with this new release, I'll tell you what I like and don't like about it. At this point in time, I have no idea whether the inclusion of Domino 8.5 exposes any of the really cool features of that release like DAOS. I'll have to run a few tests.
3/3: Lotus Foundations getting ready for the mainstream
This year I went to Lotusphere for the first time. What made me go this year when I couldn't justify it to myself in previous years?Well one key reason was Lotus Foundations. Lotus Foundations is the IBM branding of their acquisition of Net Integration's NITIX brand over a year ago now. A Lotus Foundations appliance is a clever combination of hardware - including an integrated back-up solution - with software. The software is based on Linux but has been designed for simplicity of operation. It basically suits small businesses and also branch offices or sites where there is no I.T. support. It deals with the complex networking that a small office requires as well as security, e-mail, office software etc.
I bought a Lotus Foundations box and I love it! My company, Inter Weavers, has now become a business partner here in the UK so that we can start to sell these appliances.
The latest version 1.1 of the Lotus Foundations Start software out shortly includes free VMWare server support so that you can install any Windows software (in addition to Linux distributions) in a VMWare partition. So if you needed you could install a Windows Server OS in your VMWare partition. When your Windows server blue screens, you can still access your Lotus Foundations server and you can restart your Windows server remotely!
It also includes better support for branch offices allowing the server to integrate better with other offices in the company. The server is designed to use Lotus Domino for e-mail and the new version uses the latest 8.5 release and allows a Lotus Foundations Server to integrate with an existing Lotus Domino domain.
My clients work in Engineering and they tend to set-up site offices with between 3 and 20 people working in portacabins for two year durations. Lotus Foundations is perfect for them.
I am able to provide Lotus Notes applications for my clients on top of Lotus Foundations. It combines the power of Lotus Notes/Domino with the simplicity needed to support without travel.
Please click on the graphic below to see a video all about Lotus Foundations. It can take a while to load but it is well worth watching. If you're interested in more information, please let me know here or on the Inter Weavers site and I'll get the information you need.
28/2: London Developer Co-op
Last year my company Inter Weavers went into partnership with three other companies and the London Developer Co-op (or LDC for short) was created. LDC has since grown to six partners. My initial reasons for teaming up with other companies was one of resourcing. I was in a position where I was in danger of having too much on my plate but didn't want to turn work away. However, it also gives us the opportunity to bid for larger projects with wider technical scope and we are already having some success in that direction.And here's one of my favourite tracks from the 80s ...
