New Blog Design & Domain

Welcome to CollaborationBluePrint.com.au my new blog design and place to talk about what I am doing and thinking! I had been using the older brownblog for the last few years and I decided it needed a facelift. I also wanted to refocus my blogging to what I am really doing which is helping our clients to better collaborate.

I have this idea of a collaboration blueprint. A map or detailed design if you like of what business and people need to enable collaboration. In fact not just collaboration for the sake of it but collaboration that has a positive impact on what we do. Collaboration that improves our work and helps us achieve our objectives. This blueprint isn't about specific industries but rather about the different facets and tools needed by people to work with other people online, offline, in the office, remote, mobile, next to each other, or on the other side of the world. Hence the new domain collaborationblueprint.com.au.

So as these ideas come together I am going to present them here. I am still going to continue to use the blog as a way of documenting or recording some of the more technical work I am doing. I have found this to be a neat way or recording techniques I use so that I can use them again in the future. Hopefully this also has the effect of helping a few other people that are facing similar challenges. And off course I will still have the occasional personal topic or just a comment on something I find interesting.

CRN LotusLive Article

Just found this (http://www.crn.com.au/News/167834,lotuslive-free-for-partners.aspx) article on CRN with a nice mention for ISW.

ISW is creating a service offering around migrating users to LotusLive from competitive offerings. I think one of the biggest challenges for LotusLive is how do we get there and that is what ISW's offering will solve. We are also offering hosting services for Notes/Domino applications to go hand in hand with LotusLive Notes.

Pretty good article but I have to say it is funny how journalists catch onto a couple of points. ISW is an Australian based business partner with offices in NSW, VIC, and Tas (not just a Tasmanian based). I also said that LotusLive fits with both SMB and large enterprises that want to offer services to users (eg factory floor workers) that they otherwise havn't been able to. I guess they need to focus on a couple of key points.

Regardless great to get a mention.

Taking Notes Podcast Episode 113 - All about WildFire!

Check out the latest Taking Notes Podcast. Bruce and Julian interviewed myself, Mat Newman, and lead developer Andrew Welch.

http://planetlotus.org/64cea4

Keep a close eye on OpenNTF as well for release 1.3 coming later today.

I will try and put out a new video this weekend as well. 

Pre-Populating Lotus Connections Tags - A manual test run!

I am working with a client implementing Lotus Connections 2.5 and they want to look at ways of pre-populating some tags for the user profiles. After digging around the database structure you can see there is a table called PEOPLE_TAG. This is the table that stores all of the tags.



The columns are PROF_TAG_ID (This is simply a UUID randomly generated), PROF_SOURCE_KEY (This is the user that created the tag), PROF_TARGET_ID (This is the user that the tag is assigned to), and lastly the PROF_TAG (which is the actual tag itself).

So as a test I used the DB2 Control Centre to create a new row in this table. For the PROF_TAG_ID i used http://www.famkruithof.net/uuid/uuidgen which will generate a random UUID for you (Version 4 is needed for Connections). I then looked up a user in the EMPLOYEE table that will be the source (our Admin user) and used another user for the target. You simply copy their PROF_ID and add it to the appropriate column for the new tag record. And then just enter your tag in lowercase in the PROF_TAG column.

And that is it! Go to your connections, open the target user in Profiles, and they will have the tag.

The next step will be to automatically populate this table using TDI! 

Lotus Connection x 4

Every now and then I like to set myself and ISW a short term target around specific offerings. In November last year I set a personal target of ISW working with 4 clients to review and decide to implement Connections before Xmas. Well we nearly got there with 3 out of 4 sales completed before xmas. Pretty good but not the 4 out of 4 I was aiming for.

Well I have just found out that we just received the order for the 4th order on Friday so I am wrapped.

The customers come from a range of different industries and each have approached Connections from a different angle:
 - First is a large truck company that has a significant investment in Notes/Domino and Portal already. They want to use Connections initially internally to enhance the sharing of Profile/Expertise knowledge as well as the ability to create shared bookmarks. We will be integrating Connections fully with their Portal environment.
- Second is a small business of about 30 users however they are also the largest international racehorse transport company. They operate in offices in the UK, USA, Australia, and New Zealand and use Notes & Domino to co-ordinate the business processes required to move horses from country to country. They are very successful and Notes is a big part of how they do it but that is another story. They are going to implement Sametime and Connections to increase the awareness and collaboration between their sites. They are one team and they want to share their knowledge and make themselves "closer".
- Third is quite interesting. They are part of the Catholic Education Office in Australia and they wanted to provide an online White Pages Directory of up to 70,000 school teachers/staff etc. They have gone with a Connections Extranet server and initially will just implement Profiles however as this grows to the other features I think it is quite exciting.
- Lastly, the 4th is the Australian division of a multinational printer and copier company. They rolled out 20 users a couple of months ago and have found is has spread well. They have now increased their user count by another 50 and plan to let it spread thru out the entire business over time.

So Connections is a very hot product for ISW and IBM. I will be spending plenty of time at the various Connections sessions at Lotusphere to pick up some tips that might help. I wonder what target I should set for other new customers for the next few months!