Category
Lotusphere
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So now its the run up to Lotusphere 2010
and once again I'm pleased to see that RIM are a major sponsor, and that
the Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections Clients we saw at UKLUG
have now been launched. For me this all reflects a continuing partnership
between Lotus and RIM around the mobilisation of Lotus-based business enterprise
apps.
Checking through the agenda and Lotusphere
has some interesting sessions on mobilisation, and here are a couple I
plan to catch:
ID618 'Lotus + BlackBerry = Enterprise
Mobility', an overview of Lotus and RIM's partnership, the new Lotus Clients
and how they are looking to provide a mobilisation infrastructure. This
sessions is presented by Jen Stevenson, Enterprise Technologies Manager
for IBM Technologies at RIM.
BP212 'Delivering IBM Lotus Domino to
Mobile Devices: Top 10 Mobile Browser Dev Tricks - and More!' with Rob
Wunderlich and John
Wargo (who's book on BB development
Jason Hook previously reviewed on this site).
SHOW113 My colleague here at The Turtle
Partnership - Tim Davis - is presenting again on 'Integrating IBM Lotus
Domino Data and Applications on Smartphones, BlackBerry's and Apple iPhones'.
"If you’re an Admin who needs to understand how to work with Lotus
Domino data on a variety of mobile devices or a developer who needs to
know how to code a "one size fits all" design re-usable for multiple
user interfaces, then don't miss this session!"
We have also issued our BlackBerry
Lotusphere sessions app again
- and its also now available on BB
App World too. IBM Lotus have
also produced a Lotusphere
sessions app and you can find
it over at Lotusphere
Online.
It seems to have been a good time for
RIM, their last quarterly profits are way up, they shipped a record 10m
devices in a single quarter and their share of the critical smartphone
sector has increased. Looking ahead its likely that the competition in
the smartphone sector will ramp up even more 2010 - its the big growth
area in an otherwise moribund mobile market. Well at least in the mature
Western markets, I see that China Mobile is now the world's biggest mobile
operator but it only has 37% penetration of the vast Chinese rural market.
The rise and rise of the mobile phone is pretty awe-inspiring.
And finally......
Does your BlackBerry need spiritual
uplift? Well at a special service at St Lawrence Jewry church in London
BlackBerrys
were blessed as 'a daily working
tool', along with laptops and other devices. Its based on an old ceremony
where a village's ploughs would be blessed each year.
Category
RIM
Bookmark :
Following on my last post about the
new Lotus Clients RIM have posted a web page on mobilizing IBM Lotus software
on BlackBerry Smartphones. You can find it here http://www.blackberry.com/go/ibm
There is a whole bunch of pages linked
to the site with more info including details of the new clients:
New
BlackBerry client for IBM Lotus Connections 2.01
"Activities: Users can organize
their work, plan next steps, and invite members of their networks to perform
everyday tasks faster
Blogs: Users can connect with other
employees, customers and partners inside or outside the enterprise
Communities: People who share a common
interest can collaborate by exchanging and sharing information
Profiles: Users can quickly find the
people they need by searching across the organization, using keywords to
identify expertise, current projects and responsibilities
Dogear: Users can save, organize and
share bookmarks and discover bookmarks that have been qualified by others
with similar interests and expertise"
New
BlackBerry Client for IBM Lotus Sametime v2.1
New features include "improved
address book integration, the ability to communicate with Emoticons, presence
management from the BlackBerry smartphone home screen, voice integration
with ‘Click-to-Call’ Sametime Buddy and Sametime Chat 'Convert-to-Call'"
New
BlackBerry client for IBM Lotus Quickr client 1.0
"BlackBerry smartphone users will
soon be able to keep projects moving while mobile through the ability to
download, review and upload documents, photos, audio and videos to IBM
Lotus Quickr team spaces"
And usefully you can also register to
be notified by RIM about the latest on Lotus developments - such as the
Connections 2.01 client release date or more detail on the Quickr client
here.
Category
Lotusphere
Bookmark :
If there is one thing that I took away
from Lotusphere 2009 its the change in the relationship between BlackBerry
and Lotus. Its much closer at all levels - and the best example was that
this year RIM was literally centre stage at the Lotusphere Opening General
Session. Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO of RIM, stood on the stage at Orlando and
pledged support for Lotus software - including Quickr, Symphony and Connections.
As I see it a couple of underlying currents
emerged at Lotusphere 2009.
The need to mobilise business applications
had long been a theme at RIM's own Lotusphere sessions - but now it was
a major Lotus theme at the OGS. As Bob Picciano, General Manager at IBM
Lotus Software, said 'new Lotus collaboration features and developer tools
on the BlackBerry platform will deliver productivity beyond the office
extending IBM software and services so that individuals can access all
of the resources they need to keep their business moving, anytime, anywhere.'
That's very publicly stated proof that Lotus are strongly behind the concept
of apps mobilisation - and a public acknowledgement of RIM as a partner
to deliver it.
Meanwhile RIM has continued to evolve
its strategic view of the BlackBerry as a flexible software platform. This
is reflected in their new dedicated software team, their continuing investment
in product development (interesting to hear that RIM are hiring despite
the current economic climate) and their ongoing work with Lotus. Of course
Lotus and RIM have worked together for some time but now its at a whole
new level, with the BlackBerry software team talking direct with the Lotus
developers.
The fruits of this investment and of
closer ties to Lotus were clear at the show. To take some examples - extending
X-pages to the BB platform, support for Lotus Symphony docs (from BES 5.0
which is due in March), the new enhanced Lotus Connections Client announced
at Lotusphere, a new Quickr Client (due 3rd quarter 2009), new Sametime
for the BB (with better address book integration, ability to send chats
as email, emoticons and presence on the home screen). And there is more
in the pipeline.
So its been good to see RIM and Lotus
getting closer, and showing public commitment to their partnership.
Category
BES
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Interested in hearing more about logging
and monitoring on your BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES)? Well my colleague
Gabriella Davis will be giving an online presentation at the next Lotus
User Group Virtual Meeting.
The BES integrates tightly with your
Lotus Domino environment but its many services actually sit outside Domino
and are not readily accessible to, or understood by, most Domino Admins.
So this presentation will take you through how to monitor each of the BES
services and what they do.
Gabriella will be taking a look at the
extensive logging operations available for the BES server and each of the
services, while delving into some sample logs to help you understand what
your BlackBerry server is doing. She will also take a look at some tools
in the BES Resource Kit that help you analyze your server activity and
identify problems.
This session is ideal for anyone who
is fearful their BlackBerry server 'just runs itself' and wants to achieve
a greater level of control and tracking of BlackBerry activity, such as:
- Discovering the meaning of common Domino
console commands you are seeing.
- Learning how to configure BES logging
and enhanced logging for specific services.
- Generating revealing statistics and
performing insightful log analysis with the BES Resource Kit.
So please join her at 12:00 noon Eastern
(GMT -5) on November 17, 2008. Then after the presentation you can participate
in the online discussion forum that same week which will be moderated by
Gabriella. In the forum you can ask additional questions, provide feedback
on the presentation, or share your knowledge and experience on the topic
with the rest of the Lotus community
The presentation is free to Lotus User
Group Members and LUG membership is free. You do need to pre-register,
so please register today at http://www.LotusUserGroup.org/VUG
Gabriella is Technical Director here
at The Turtle Partnership. Her role is high level administration and consultancy
on Lotus and BlackBerry products supporting customers with over 60 domains,
400 servers and 30,000 plus users. She is an IBM Advanced Administrator
and Developer for v7, certified for v8 and a CLI. She has been a speaker
at Lotusphere and other technical conferences in the US and Europe.
Category
Bold
Bookmark :
Well I must admit to a bit of "Xmas
Morning" excitement when the Bold arrived from O2 in its cool black
box. So what are my first impressions after a few days use?
- The device itself does look smart, its
slightly larger than my old Pearl but not that bulky and I use the same
holster for it.
- I like the clear and sharp screen. I
also like the "white etched out of black" UI design - the clock
is my favourite example.
- The full keyboard was easy to use even
with my "sausage fingers" mainly due to some clever contouring
on the keys. While the trackball is precise and bounces from item to item
very smoothly.
- Setting up my Domino mail was straightforward,
as was getting Sametime up and running. For Sametime we used the 8800 Client
and just a little tweak on the port used.
- The UI has quite a few icons amongst
several folders so I reshuffled them to help usability. I just moved icons
about to make sure that Mail, SMS Messages (its a separate box), Calendar,
Browser, Sametime and Keyboard Lock are always shown first.
- In the office I use WiFi while outside
its shifts to GPRS. No usage problems with either route, and the transition
between them is pretty seamless.
- Battery life has been good - I can leave
it over the weekend between recharges. No different to the Pearl really.
- The browser is much improved over the
Pearl, and the camera is not bad (though we took the attached image with
another Bold - of course that could be the craftsman not the tool!).
- Crucially it now comes with 4 games
preloaded - our old friend BrickBreaker plus WordMole, Texas Hold'em, Sudoko
and Klondike. My rail journeys will fly by.
So what has been the downside of the
Bold? Well I have yet to run into any of the software issues that I have
heard about. My only gripe is that Google Maps won't load, its some sort
of bug that freezes the load after about 10% and according to several BlackBerry
sites other Bold users have had his problem too.
Overall then a good experience with
the Bold so far.
I see that elsewhere a Mr Ed Brill of
IBM Lotus has also commented on his new Bold, you can see that here.
Category
ILUG
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ILUG
went off very well last week, and that is a credit to the team who spent
so much time setting it up - hats off to Paul Mooney, Bill Buchan, Warren
Elsmore, Rob Novak, Julian Woodward, Kitty Elsmore, Matt White, Eileen
Fitzgerald, Tom Duff and all the crew. There were hundreds of attendees
(from 24 countries), the speakers were great, the organisation was brilliant,
but more than that they delivered a relaxed and friendly event that had
the "Lotusphere buzz" that is so hard to generate outside Orlando.
RIM were Platinum (that's the highest
level) ILUG Sponsors again, in other words they really helped make ILUG
happen. They also sent key people to Dublin including Valerie Wang, Jen
Ortiz and Lizzie Hancock, Senior Manager Technical Marketing EMEA. For
me that's pretty hard evidence of RIM's stated commitment to the IBM Lotus
community and they too are due some applause.
Valerie Wang, Product Manager for IBM
technologies at RIM, presented "Taking Lotus Collaboration beyond
the office on your BlackBerry Smartphone". Valerie underlined the
close relationship between RIM and IBM and outlined how they are mobilising
the Lotus range of collaboration tools. As at Lotusphere Valerie emphasised
the value of going beyond messaging to make your enterprise apps mobile
and gave some good pointers to successful development. Valerie also covered
the forthcoming BES 4.1.6 release - including the increased use of Sametime
presence, emoticons and support for Sametime 8.
Jen Ortiz, RIM Global Technical Account
Manager, and Valerie also took part in the "Speedsponsoring"
- The Idea: Each sponsor presents on one cool thing in a five minute timed
demo - then repeats it 16 times as a new audience clusters round! The Result:
A sort of manic double-speed IT streetmarket and a lot of fun. Jen and
Valerie presented a neat little BES tool called "Pusher" that
lets you centrally emplace and manage a browser bookmark icon on all the
BlackBerrys in your organisation.
One last bonus was that Jen also had
the new BlackBerry Bold which looked very cool. Hope to have more about
the Bold soon.
Category
ILUG
Bookmark :
Packing my bags ready to get going to
ILUG
2008 in Dublin, and really looking
forward to what should be another great event. Can I just say kudos to
RIM as they are shiny bright Platinum Sponsors again this year, in other
words they really help make ILUG happen.
OK, looking at the agenda the
BlackBerry highlights to catch are:
Wednesday - "Automating
User and Group Management for Domino, Active Directory and BlackBerry.
Or 'how to save a buttload of work" - Bill Buchan will take you
through how HADSL specialise in the automation, integration and delegation
of all user and group management across Lotus Domino, Active Directory
and BlackBerry. This means that you can delegate all your day-to-day user
management to someone on the helpdesk (or even HR!), confident that only
what YOU allow will be implemented, whilst increasing security.
Thursday - "Taking Lotus
Collaboration beyond the office on your BlackBerry Smartphone"
- Valerie Wang, Product Manager for IBM technologies at RIM will be talking
about how you can use the BlackBerry development platform to mobilise your
enterprise applications as well as how the close collaboration between
IBM Lotus and RIM have led to even more Lotus collaboration and communication
tools such as Sametime and Connections, available for BlackBerry smartphones.
I saw Valerie present at Lotusphere and she was very good.
Friday - "Ask the BES
Adminstrator" - Jen Ortiz of RIM will be back at ILUG again this
year for a highly interactive session which will give you the opportunity
to ask questions, hear about Best Practice and see a BES in action - so
bring along your questions and devices.
And of course some other Notesberry
people will be there too, like Paul Mooney and Tim Davis. Plus a crew from
RIM too.
So hope you can make it, and see you
there if you can.
Category
Lotusphere2008
Bookmark :
Well another Lotusphere is past and
so its time for a well considered review piece full of wise thoughts, sage
words and staggering insights. Sadly my review will have none of those
but here it is anyway.
If there is one thing that has impressed
me its RIM's commitment to Lotus and vice versa. Both companies development
teams are working closely together and the result is a steady stream of
developments and new Client interfaces. Announcements of new contractual
relationships are seldom earth-shattering news. Yet to have an announcement
of a new Lotus/RIM relationship by Mike Rhodin (General Manager of Lotus)
at the Lotusphere keynote in front of 8,000+ attendees shows long-term
commitment on both sides to making it work.
I also think that RIM have outlined
the right vision for the role of the BlackBerry being to mobilise the whole
Lotus family. Effective collaboration is seen to be critical to business
success, so in my view key collaboration tools such as Domino applications,
Sametime, and Connections should be to hand whenever and wherever the need
for them arises. Its worth noting that RIM have said that they want to
steadily develop the potential in the whole family of Lotus products and
not just "cherry pick" temporary opportunities. So for example
they are continuing to develop their existing Notes Mail and Domino apps
functionality alongside developing whole new Clients for Connections and
Quickr.
There were some good announcements of
future developments - and it was good to see RIM prepared to share them
with us. For me the key announcements were around resilience, a key issue
as it seems to me that a BlackBerry service becomes business-critical the
minute its switched on. So we welcome the improved monitoring and eagerly
look forward to ARGON and the server "failover" solution.
I would also like to thank Lizzie Hancock,
RIM Lotus Segment Marketing Manager EMEA, for helping us run a Notesberry
social event at Lotusphere. Just as in the early days of Lotus I think
there is a real need to build up a community around BlackBerry and the
Lotus products to share experiences and skills to get the most from them.
Can I just add that Sametime on the
BlackBerry really came into its own for me at Lotusphere. The ability to
instantly contact each other was invaluable to coordinate our plans, answer
queries from our UK office, and (most importantly of all) meet in the bar.....
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