Leadership By Numbers

Category Open Source
Big media missed the Microsoft-Yahoo plot twist, hidden as a few frames of subliminal messages in a Disney animation. Why should you care? Because Forrester Research did not misread the events: see Charlene Li's "What's next for Microsoft and Yahoo!"for the best analysis I've found of why Steve Ballmer balked.

Of course, just having Microsoft walk away doesn't mean that the opportunity has completely vanished, but it doesn't look good for a MicroHoo union. This courtship between Microsoft and Yahoo never matched the tempest and drama of, say, Oracle and Peoplesoft. The game of acquisition played out, just as predicted by analysts and pundits. "Protacted," "enevitable," and "proxy fight" were the primary media descriptors.

Microsoft desired Yahoo's advertising base and the Yahoo mail accounts. It made financial sense and Yahoo's stock rose, allowing Yahoo to counter with a higher price. And, just when the deadlines, and the heated rhetoric was still thick in the air, Ballmer panned the deal.I think the perfect metaphor for the spoiled attempt is a captcha. After all, Yahoo was among the very first to use a captcha in an attempt to ferret out the real people from automated systems. A captcha, in review, is one of those goofy puzzle boxes of malformed letters and images that a person must decipher in order to process a web site request. "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart."

What's it mean that Microsoft decided against a proxy-fight ? It means that Microsoft (1) didn't really want Yahoo for just the advertising base and e-mail accounts. Winning a proxy-fight would not have diminished their value. However, (2) the intellectual property and culture of Yahoo, with its portfolio of open source (e.g., Zimbra, YUI) would have been difficult to aggregate without Yahoo's willingness to integrate with Microsoft.

To my eye, the captcha that blocked Microsoft's access to Yahoo would have spelled out "open source," which Microsoft has yet to accommodate.

Posted by Jack Dausman At 5:27 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category

Stephan Wissel has asked for comments on his forthcoming commentary on what it takes to be a Domino Developer. Because Stephan is a development wizard, I will be reading his every word.

But, I'm also going to make a plea, in hopes that with the new 8.5 Eclipse Domino Designer we can extend the relevance of the Lotus platform.

The corporate IT world is facing the integration of external, hosted social systems. I don't think enterprise computing will vanish (ala Nicholas Carr) because of these trends, anymore than outsourcing wiped clean entire departments. I can agree, though, that the deck is going to be shuffled and it's going to be important to hold some open-source cards in your hand.

SDTimes reports on a study by Evans Data, which identifies that "second generation" corporate programmers are doing more than .NET and J2EE.

Close to 40% of developers creating collaborative programs are writing such Web 2.0 applications for a corporate enterprise, said John Andrews, president and chief executive of Evans Data, at a developer relations conference hosted by the research firm Monday.

These developers are also widely embracing open-source platforms, Andrews noted, as 70% of developers surveyed use scripting languages such as Perl, PHP, Python or Ruby.

I have my fingers crossed that it'll be possible in 8.5 to build out some very unique solutions: Rich Internet Applications.

Posted by Jack Dausman At 3:44 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (3)

Category
Want to peer into tomorrows IT data center? Don't bother winnowing through Digg.com for the exotic and the new. Read the buyers short list kept by resellers and consultants. CRN has published their 2008 Channel Champions, which will become the 2009 review guide of products and services that consulting resellers will be promoting for their clients. There are some surprises.

• Collaboration Software has Microsoft on top, with the free version of Sharepoint being the tipping point to enable partners and clients to develop practices for Sharepoint. The surprise here, is that IBM/Lotus is only a point behind Microsoft (the score is 72.8 to 71.6). Not quite the spread many predicted, and I expect to see IBM/Lotus close the gap.

The #1 slot for "Partner Sales Expectations" is going for . . . Collaboration Software. Go figure. This category was given short shrift just a few years ago (after all, everyone already has e-mail, right?). Now, everyone sees money in the Collaboration framework.

• Midrange Servers go to IBM, by a wide margin. Those AIX skills aren't losing any value.
• MySQL did terribly. Sun is going to have to work hard to overcome significant obstacles.
• Data and Information Management went to IBM. The big draw being the interoperability of DB2 to mix-and-match with different platforms.

Interestingly, there isn't a lot of overt mentions for Linux. Naturally, many of the HP, IBM servers can be expected to host a Linux distribution, and many products run on Linux, but where are the Linux providers? Right on top.

Cisco is leading a Linux charge with an Integrated Services Router (ISR) module: "The AXP consists of open, Linux-based Cisco ISR hardware modules for application development and hosting to support a tighter integration of the network and applications." Hm. Just how many of these Cisco units are in circulation? 4 million. Now, that's a lot of Linux boxes that need Linux developers.

I can't fight the urge to add a follow-up comment about far-reaching trends. The CRN collection is definitely about immediate needs, so it's probably not a good long-term career guide.Here's my top three IT technologies that every professional should be watching (and, absorbing):

• Cloud computing
• Open Source
• Systems Integration

Seems like a "duh" compilations, doesn't it? These are very broad categories. What's strange to me, is that most of the enterprise IT professionals with whom I interact agree these are important points--but no one is doing anything in their career management to move closer to these three.

Posted by Jack Dausman At 11:36 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category
Yesterday, Slashdot.Org had a feature article on IBM's Inexpensive Notes/Domino Push Against MS. And, almost no one in the Lotus Blogsphere seems to have noticed. I've already written on this topic, and posted it in a more popular tech site, so I've said my peace.

The Slashdot article brought out the flame wars (of course), but there was some reasoned commentary which demonstrates that Lotus Notes 8 is perceived as "new and improved."

Oddly, on the eve of a massive SQL Server security debacle, I'd expect there to have been more discussions about security and encryption.

Posted by Jack Dausman At 8:24 PM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (3)

Category Administration IBM/Lotus Domino

Last night was the DCNUG.org April meeting with a turnout of around 20 people at The National Geographic Society. I presented a short piece on monitoring Domino servers, and I might expand it (e.g., how to get create a historical health-statistic chart). I've placed the PDF on line at YuDu.com. It's a short, quick overview intended for support admins and part-time admins.

The big draw was from IBM's own Maurice Cogdell with his presentation of Quickr. He had the latest presentation material and was even able to demo Quickr in use. There was a lot of interest in the Quickr "lite" release, which has been titled "Express," "Personal" or "Entry." It looks like IBM is doing the same clever (and effective) marketing for Quickr that they used with Sametime: anyone with a Lotus Notes client can have limited use of Quickr at no additional cost.

If you are seriously considering Quickr, then I highly recommend the outstanding training (and evaluation) on-line, self-paced Quickr course from IBM. It's free, and you get to play with a real Quickr server.

We also took a look at the RedHat OpenClient which comes with a Notes Client. It's distributed as a Live-CD (even runs on my Dell D630), so it's a perfect "proof-of-concept."

Kevin Pettitt (LotusGuru.com) touched on two presentations: his SuperNTF open-source powerhouse application, and an overview of Chris Blatnick's outstanding material for building the UI of a Notes application (InterfaceMatters.com). Kevin promises to have an updated release of SuperNTF within the next two weeks.

The next meeting will be in June, and it looks as though we will have Sean Burgess (phigsaidwhat.com) and an IBM presentation on Lotus Forms. More details will be announced, as we get closer to the date.



Technorati Tags: IBM/Lotus Domino

Posted by Jack Dausman At 11:00 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category IBM/Lotus Domino Linux

This last week, I had a short conversation with an IT project manager, who didn't understand the "open source thing." This is a person who I know to be thoughtful and mentally sharp. I think, sometimes, it's too easy for me to be in my own bubble: checking my Bloglines, PlanetLotus, Slashdot, Groklaw, etc. Open Source is a phenomenon that still hasn't hit mainstream, even in IT. Maybe not nascent, it's in its adolescence with the typical growth spurt right before full maturity.

SAP Research has published an informative analysis on the "Total Growth of Open Source."

Our work shows that the additions to open source projects, the total project size (measured in source lines of code), the number of new open source projects, and the total number of open source projects are growing at an exponential rate. The total amount of source code and the total number of projects double about every 14 months.

Typically, Open Source is brought into a company through the back-door, to quickly solve problems on the cheap. I think there may be an association of cheapness, and even frugality towards Open Source. I remember that's how many Windows servers were brought in as part of the client/server revolution--they were less expensive and simpler to setup. Now days, I know shops that have gone from Windows to the commercial Open Source offerings of RedHat and are starting to use Fedora or CentOS as free alternatives to RedHat. But, it's not just about the money.

How about spending $59 million for a CentOS system? That's the cost for the University of Texas super-computer, Ranger, which draws 2.4 megawatts to run, and requires 1 megawatt to cool it. It just seems weird that Open Source Linux is now powering super-computers, as well as the $350.00 Asus EEE PC (#4 on Amazon's Bestseller list for computer gear) Open Source has exposed all the wiring (well, the source code), making it very flexible for multiple applications.

Which brings me to why I prefer Open Source solutions, and why, specifically, I favor Linux for Domino. Uptime.

The Yankee Group has released their independent 2008 Server OS Reliability Survey. AIX and Linux rock.

The top Linux distributions Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and NovellSuSE Linux notched the biggest reliability improvements in the latest2007-2008 survey. Each decreased per server per annum downtime by anaverage of 75%. The biggest and most unwelcome surprise in the surveywas that Windows Server 2003 downtime increased by 25% to nearly 9hours of per server, per year downtime compared to the results itachieved in Yankee Group's 2006 Global Server Reliability Survey.Windows Server 2003's decreased reliability is attributable to a seriesof security alerts Microsoft issued in the summer and fall time framewhich caused network administrators to take their Windows Server 2003machines offline for significantly longer periods of time to applyremedial patches.

Even Ubuntu was mentioned as "highly reliable, with 1.1 hour of per server, per annum downtime." Usually Ubuntu is mentioned as popular for the desktop, it's nice to see that it's picking up momentum for back-end services. However, it is the Linux distro that I use most often. It'll be certified for Lotus Notes 8.5, and if you are concerned that you'll never get your Uncle Joe, or the CFO onto Ubuntu, Canonical is offering training. For $100, it "provides simulations, practical exercises and information to make daily tasks easy."

Hm. "Practical" and making "daily tasks" easier are good enough reasons for me to keep working with Open Source.



Technorati Tags: IBM/Lotus Domino, Ubuntu

Posted by Jack Dausman At 12:03 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (2)

Category IBM/Lotus Domino ND8 Linux

A few bloggers have pointed out the new RedHat/IBM initiative for supporting IBM/Lotus Domino on RedHat. It's cool, but I don't think the word has been spread, that RedHat is also providing an ISO for your evaluation. The ISO is for a Linux Live-CD with IBM/Lotus Notes 8.

http://rhx.s3.amazonaws.com/iso/Red_Hat_IBM_Lotus_Notes_8.iso

Very cool.

I went ahead, downloaded it and burned it to DVD. Amazingly, it fired up on my Dell Latitude D630 without a complaint. Even something as mainstream as Ubuntu has required that I use the Dell supported version of Ubuntu.

All you need is a user.id, and you can run your Notes from a Live-CD.

Important notes:

• The RedHat configuration does not support reading a NTFS file. So, you'll need to load your user.id onto a flash drive or something else before starting up the Live-CD. As a matter of fact. You don't need a hard drive, at all.
  
• A Live-CD means that the OS is reading from a CD, which is not as fast as a hard drive. So, be patient. However, once RedHat is up and running, and you have Lotus Notes working--it blazes, because so much has been loaded into RAM.
• It's a limited time evaluation, and explains the limitations with a comprehensive, 13 page pdf.
  

How's it work ? I'm impressed. I'll be making some copies and handing them out at work and bringing them to the next DC Notes User Group.




Technorati Tags: IBM/Lotus Domino, Linux

Posted by Jack Dausman At 5:35 AM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category

For many years, I've been providing financial and technical support to an HIV+/AIDS orphanage in Nairobi, Kenya: Nyumbani. Over the last year, I've been nudging different IBM contacts for support to Nyumbani. I'd like to set up a grant for Domino/Notes licenses, and am welcoming any assistance in creating a draft proposal.

Lotus Grant Guidelines

Here's a sketch, in three sections, that summarize the needs and a proposed solution:

• Specific Technical Request
• Technical Analysis and Business Need
• Nyumbani Programs

---

Specific Technical Request

• Two (2) Domino server licenses (the physical servers will be hosted on-site at Nyumbani, the other in the US. I am not requesting hardware.)

• 100 Client licenses

The server OS will be Linux, and the clients will be a mix of Linux and Windows.

Technical Analysis and Business Need

• The primary facility has a satellite connection from Nairobi, for Internet access.

• Their Internet service has high signal latency, frequent disconnects, power outages, and they are charged by packet count.

• They do have one, full-time, technical support person wearing many hats, inlcuding system administrator (I've been supplying training materials and have been able to provide an LPI.org authorized course).

• Security is paramount, they deal with medical records and HIV+/AIDS treatment.

• Their e-mail is a patchwork of yahoo, gmail, and nyumbani.org accounts. In order to send a document or e-mail from one office to another down the hall, the route has to go by satellite, to Europe or North America, back through the satellite and into the second user.

• There is a need to support a blog presence (currently, there is FriendsOfNyumbani.org which has been supported by a DC Business Partner).

• Medical record keeping: they have been using a spreadsheet

• Technical education for the older children (job skill placement). I built a Nyumbani Computer Learning Center, which has been quite successful, and very popular.

Nyumbani Programs: Nyumbani provides support for a greater number of HIV+/AIDS children, than the total number of AIDS children in the entire US. They have a registered, (501(c)(3) tax-exempt, US Board, as well as boards in the UK and Italy. They are supported by US AID and have many corporate accounts, such as Lockheed-Martin.

• Nyumbani Childrens' Residence

• An orphanage for 100 children and teenagers

Leo Toto

• Outreach program in the slums of Nairobi, providing medical care for several thousand children.

Kitui Village

• 1,000 acre facility for families decimated by AIDS, who have left behind the surviving children and elderly unable to financially cope.

Technorati Tags: Nyumbani, IBM/Lotus Domino

Posted by Jack Dausman At 12:28 AM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category IBM/Lotus Domino
For some time, there has been a persistent time shift on some of our Domino servers: specifically, the Linux and Unix systems. I've always been a bit suspicious of the NTP configuration, or the internal NTP server. But, because it's a slow shift, it hasn't really been an issue. Of course, the Unix admins have been a little suspicious of me (or, at least, of Domino) !!

IBM has a Technote on this issue of "time creep" for Domino on the Unix/Linux platform, which settles the dispute. It's the fault of Domino, and not the host OS.

The weird part is how to "adjust" the Domino clock. Using the Lotus Administrator client, select "File/Mobile/Edit Current Time & Phone," and choose "OK." I'm sure I haven't touched that setting during this century.

Guess I owe a cup of coffee to the Unix admins.




Technorati Tags: IBM/Lotus Domino

Posted by Jack Dausman At 3:25 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category Diversion
Unbelievable NCAA championship. I'm a Jayhawk. My wife is a Jayhawk, my siblings went to KU and both of my parents went to KU. My grandparents even knew Jim Naismith. That was a great, great game.

Posted by Jack Dausman At 11:54 AM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category

Fontana gave a fair, and informative overview of Microsoft's Sharepoint, and other than Gia Lyons, not many bloggers picked it up.

"I have not seen anything like this since the early days of [Lotus] Notes," says Mike Gotta, an analyst with the Burton Group. In those days, corporate users were enamored with a shiny new technology that seemed to have infinite uses. "The talk [around SharePoint] is getting strategic now, and people are talking about it as a middleware decision," Gotta says. . . .

SharePoint, however, isn't without issues that users should consider, including the fact that it does not scale well given the way it stores data in SQL Server, a concern Microsoft is working to answer in the next version likely to ship in 2009.

Or that its social-networking tools are considered rudimentary, that SharePoint's portal capabilities still don't measure up to enterprise-class platforms, and that the server takes customizations to make it truly sing.

"I think there is going to be some buyer's remorse," Gotta says.

Fontana goes on to mention that IBM is not standing still, and points to Quickr. But, I don't even want to compare the trends.google.com findings between Quickr and Sharepoint. Oh, wait. I can't. Lotus Quickr doesn't even rate enough search volume to be graphed.

Still work to be done.



Technorati Tags: Lotus Quickr, Microsoft Sharepoint

Posted by Jack Dausman At 5:14 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category

IBM has a technote on Domino and Sametime performance issues traced to Windows Server 2003 Scalable Networking Pack. It looks as though the SP3 for Win2003 introduces significant network latency:

It has been determined that these features, which are enabled bydefault with Service Pack 2 of Windows Server 2003, can have a negativeimpact on software performance, particularly for those softwarepackages with a high transactional volume.

Technorati Tags: IBM/Lotus Domino

Posted by Jack Dausman At 4:42 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (2)

Category
IBM's Alphaworks has a Visual Performance Analyzer (Technote # 1296808) that runs on the Eclipse RCP and is useful for analyzing Domino on AIX.

I don't understand why I haven't heard of it before, and I don't know anyone using.

But, after a quick scan of the PDF, I want it.







Technorati Tags: AIX, Visual Performance Analyzer, IBM/Lotus Domino

Posted by Jack Dausman At 4:32 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category
[ED: 4/7/08, added material from CRN]

Slate has an interesting op-ed on giving Cloud Computing a reality check. The cloud fails.

My own company is currently evaluating a replacement of our messaging system with Google Apps. I'm not part of the committee examining the costs or merits, but I do support the effort. It's not that I think less of Notes, or that Google is magic. On the contrary, I think the Domino/Notes 8 platform is the most compelling solution. But, I think studies of this kind can be incredibly useful in encouraging and focusing the direction of our messaging/collaboration platform.

In Paul Boutin's article he notes:

In theory, Web-based apps also known as "software as a service" or, less precisely, "cloud computing" are the future of computers. That ignores the huge progress in personal computers that sit on your desktop, in your lap, or in your pocket. Multi-core processors, touch screens, motion sensors all major computing advances, none of which are happening in the cloud.

Right now, there is one advantage of the cloud: storage. It's cheaper and less hassle to manage. Google Apps allows 25 G of mail per account, which answers a very real need. Of course, I don't agree that unlimited mail storage helps anyone to organize themselves, but e-mail management is very personal. Users are reluctant to alter their behavior if they can postpone the inevitable for another year. Who can blame them?

Microsoft, of course, has a number of these SAAS initiatives. CRN has reviewed their Skydrive, which provides free on-line storage. So how well does a free SAAS storage facility from Microsoft perform? Here's a quote from CRN's Not Safe For Work:

After extensive review, not only does the CRN Test Center not recommend SkyDrive, but it would also be advisable for VARs to suggest their clients block its access through content filters.

Ouch.

I'm hoping that there will be enough testers that experience Paul's dilemma and CRN's conclusion, so that an accord can be reached for balancing larger data stores for e-mail (by expanding our archive server, and working with quotas). And, in the mean time, I'm going to continue to keep an eye on the cloud. I'm sure there is a silver lining, somewhere.


Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing

Posted by Jack Dausman At 11:56 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category Management

This week I received the first printing of "Virtualization: Powering the New IT Generation." A magazine devoted to all things, and only things about, yes, virtualization. 57 glossy pages of articles and advertisements for just one technology trend.

The exuberance for new technologies is always to be expected, and I'm sure that I fall for more initiatives than I suspect. But, jaded or not, I just don't see how this publication could survive as anything more than a quarterly (it's bi-monthly).

After all, there is already a digital-print "magazine on virtualization by Sys-Con. Just what is Doug Barney, a veteran IT journalist and editor, expecting from Virtualization? Because, I just don't see the topic as especially magnetic for readership. Now, granted, virtualization is interesting and useful, and it's still nascent, but I think of it as more of a cost-reduction technique than the introduction of ITs next wave. I have used several VMWare products, XEN, and Microsoft's VM offering. They are truly useful, and I know there is going to be a slugfest in the industry for dominance over virtualization technology (I'm especially attuned to JeOS).

But, I'm also confident this is going to be a slow race, even slower than needs to be tracked by paper mill publishing and distribution.

Posted by Jack Dausman At 10:07 AM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (0)