WildFire! 1.0 Released on OpenNTF

How many social networks are you a part of? Got Sametime and Connections? Maybe you have multiple of each. Got Twitter as well? Facebook? Wordpress? Bebo? Tumblr? etc etc etc. I bet you have work related networks, personal networks, Yellowverse networks even!

Well I am very pleased to announce the release of WildFire 1.0 our free Notes 8.5 sidebar plugin just in time for Lotusphere!

Most of us have many social networks that we try and keep up to date but it is getting harder every day with so many networks. Wildfire! allows you to update mulitple communities in one go! You can add all of your networks in the Wildfire application and select which ones to send an update to. You can group them, sort by type, and even view your twitter lifestream from the one interface.

WildFire is a Lotus Notes 8.5 Sidebar Application to Update Status's across a wide range of Social Networks including Bebo, Lotus Sametime Communities, Lotus Connections, Facebook, GTalk, PingFm, Plurk, Sametime, Tumblr, Twitter, Wordpress and more!



You can also have mulitple of each network type!! WildFire! can be downloaded either from OpenNTF - http://www.openntf.org/Projects/pmt.nsf/ProjectLookup/WildFire or the ISW web site - http://www.isw.com.au/wildfire . ISW has decided to contribute back to the Lotus Community so the source code is available on OpenNTF as well. We are hoping this is the first of a few sidebar plugins that we release during 2010!

Congratulations to Andrew Welch and the guys at ISW for their work on this project. 

To Mac or not to Mac?

So that wonderful time has come, at the end of 3 years, where it is time to get a new laptop. I have stuck with IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads for the last 15 years but here I am considering a change to a Macbook Pro 17 inch. Why am I thinking about changing? To be honest I don't think I have a compelling business reason to do so. Partly it is because I am sick of Vista however I moved to Windows 7 about a month ago and have been pleasantly surprised so that really isn't a reason to move. Partly I see it as an opportunity to present to clients how Notes is supported on the Mac as well. However most of all I think it is probably more just a desire to see what people rave about.

So I am asking those that have done it/tried it should I do it? To Mac or not to Mac? that is the question:)

I have been thru a lot of points in my consideration and nearly came across a few show stoppers. The one that nearly blew the idea all together was my Telstra NextG Wireless card. This wasn't compatible so it was a definite show stopper. However I then received a new NextG 21 USB device and it supports Mac. So we are still on.

What software do I use? Well I have a cross role between business development and technology. In my business development role I use tools like Office (although this might give me the reason to move fully to symphony, MindManager, Notes 8.5.1, our finance system (Not mac compatible so hoping to use VMFusion for this), SnagIT (No mac version unfortunately but rumours of one coming), Camtasia, Adobe CS2, and a range of other bits and pieces. I think in most use cases for business development a Mac should be fine.

In my technology role I use Domino Designer, Lotus Forms Designer, WebSphere Portlet Factory, Rational App Developer, as well as frequently running up VM images with the latest Portal, Connections, etc etc. So these products are probably the most troublesome in that they don't have Mac version. Again I am assuming they would work with VMFusion. Any comments?

So I am interested in hearing your (non-fanboy) opinions. Is Mac worth the switch? Given the above do you think it would work for me?


<edit> The last thing I forgot to mention is that I have Dual external screens. This has taken some research in how I would do this with a Macbook Pro. I understand that you can have one external and the Macbook screen at the same time however I still want to have that Dual 24 Inch external screen experience. The only way I can see to do this is the Matrox DualHeadToGo devices. These don't come cheap and considering I will need one for home and one for the office I would love to hear alternate solutions. </edit>

Take my To Mac or Not To Mac Doodle Poll (Created from the Notes 8.5.1 Doodle Sidebar!)
http://www.doodle.com/ztcmn8fw6ncktn8n 

Real world outcome of Domino Designer becoming Free

I was just working with a client to optimise their IBM software maintenance which is coming up in Dec. Amongst other things they are currently licensed with Lotus Notes Collaboration and Domino Enterprise Servers and also have 4 Domino Designer licenses which were all up for renewal.

I explained to them the recently announced changes with Lotus Notes licensing, in particular that come Feb next year their Lotus Notes Collaboration licenses will convert to Domino Enterprise CALs and that as part of this they get an entitlement for Domino Designer with each license. There instant reaction to this was to ask "So does that mean every one of our users can have Designer?" which off course the answer is yes. They were wrapped with this and said that while they certainly wouldn't give it to every user that it is great that they can enable more people to build apps and don't have to be restricted by their 4 Designer licenses.

This has to be on of the exact outcome IBM is hoping to achieve, encourage organisation to do more with Notes and Domino. Back in the early versions of Notes before Designer came along any user could build basic databases and Notes flourished. Obviously Domino Designer was a great step forward when it was introduced however the cost of the license definitely had a negative impact of preventing that grass roots development occurring from basic users.

So then off course the question is should they renew their existing Domino Designer licenses now? I have suggested probably not. They have current maintenance up until Dec 31 so they are entitled to use Domino Designer 8.5.1 and it is probably unlikely there will be another release between now and Feb when their licenses convert. The only reason they would do it I guess is to have support for Jan but this is not likely to be needed, and also the fact that the Designer licenses will also convert to CAL's which they don't really need. So I guess the short term negative of the change is a small loss in revenue for IBM for clients no longer buying/renewing Designer but this should be insignificant to the positive impact that more people building Notes Apps will have on the usage of Lotus Notes within organisations and hence the ROI they get from the product.

So I say good one IBM, Domino Designer for Free is definitely making a positive impact on our clients usage of Notes & Domino! 

Starting up Lotus Connections automatically

Having installed Lotus Connections using WAS Network Deployment to start the Lotus Connections servers up I do the following:

restart the server (This also starts the Deployment Manager as a Windows Service)
Start the Node Agent  - D:\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\AppSrv01\bin\startNode.bat
Once the Node Agent has started I can start the Connections servers (I have server1, server2, and server3) from the Deployment Manager Integrated Solutions Console.

I want to change this process so that the Node Agent and the Connections server's all start automatically when the server is restarted.

So here's how:  

Setting up the WebSphere Node Manager as a Windows service

First, you need to set up the Node Manager on each physical server to run as a service and restart after a reboot:

   1. Open a Command Window and go to the ..\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\bin directory
   2. Type in the following command (adjusted for your install paths):

    WASService -add "IBM WebSphere Node Agent" -servername nodeagent -profilePath D:\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\AppSrv01 -wasHome D:\IBM\Websphere\Appserver -logFile D:\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\AppSrv01\logs\nodeagent\startNode.log -logRoot D:\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer\profiles\AppSrv01\logs\nodeagent -restart true -startType automatic

Setting up the member servers to automatically restart

Once the Node Manager is running as a service, you need to set the individual WebSphere servers to automatically restart using the following steps:

   1. Log in to the Integrated Solutions Console
   2. Navigate to Servers > Application servers > servername
   3. Expand Java and Process Management and click on Monitoring Policy
   4. Change the Node restart state to RUNNING
   5. Click Apply
   6. Click Save to save the master configuration
   7. Repeat for each server in the cluster

And that should do it. So when you restart your server the nodeagent should firstly start as a service and then it should monitor the servers and start them automatically. 

Connections 2.5 - Step 5 - INSTALL CONNECTIONS!

Right so we should have all the pre-install steps completed. WASND installed, Dmgr running, server1 profile created (unmanaged node, not running), security setup (using LDAP federated repository in this case), DB2 installed, databases created, TDI installed, Profiles database populated.

So now we can install Lotus Connections 2.5

But before we do...one more thing. Sometimes when you install Connections we can get a SOAP time out error. In order to avoid this error we need to increate the time that the server allows for a SOAP request. We need to modify the com.ibm.SOAP.requestTimeout property in the install_root/properties/soap.client.props file. Just open this file in Wordpad, search for "soap.request", and change the value to 300 or 600 (I did 600 just to be sure). Detailed instructions are here.

So now that we are really ready we need to make sure the Deployment Manager is running and the Application Server instance we will use to install Connections (server1) is not running.

Then we run the install.bat file from the extract of file 1 of 12 from the downloads. The Info Center is pretty good for these steps so just follow the prompts as per this document. You can choose to install all the Features onto the one server however I decided to split the features across 3 servers just to spread the load. The Lotus Connections install will automatically create the additional server profiles for you if you decide to do this as well. I guess it would be wise to try and spread the estimated load across all 3 of the servers however it is really dependent on your usage plans as to how you do this.

The install takes a good while but you should be able to just let it run. Once the install is complete it will provide you with a list of the URL's to each feature. You just need to start each of the servers (as long as the nodeagent is running you can start the servers from the Dmgr Integrated Solutions Console) and off you go! Be Social, Explore, Collaborate!

There are some post install tasks (such as testing the database connections, more security, configuring IBM HTTP server etc) that are listed in the Info Center but you should have a Connections system up and running.