Lotusphere Comes To You ‘10 (UK)
Fri, Mar 5th 2010 3:24a Darren Adams It’s that time of year again – registration for the UK-based Lotusphere Comes To You events is now open. There are three events this year – London (13th April), Edinburgh (15th April) and Warrington (13th May), the latter being run by our excellent Business Partner Polymorph. One great attraction this year is the fact that I won’t be speaking (for the first time in many years) so you won’t have to listen to me… instead you will have the pleasure of hearing fro [read] Keywords: collaboration
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R.I.P. Internet Explorer 6
Mon, Mar 1st 2010 1:23p Darren Adams My frolleague Richard ‘Dickie’ Voaden (who I bumped into in Sweden last week) forwarded a link today, reminding me that the Grim Reaper of software will soon be coming to collect Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and take it to the underworld (and it’ll have Netscape Navigator to keep it company). My reply to Dickie was something along the lines of “good, and they can do us all a favour and bury Internet Explorer 7 and 8, and plans for any future versions, at the same time& [read] Keywords: applications
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Lotus Notes integrating with Tungle
Wed, Feb 17th 2010 10:24a Darren Adams Imagine wanting to arrange a meeting with someone and being able to see whether they’re free or not… how great would that be? Well, most modern e-mail solutions (such as Notes / Domino and that one that Microsoft sell) offer such a thing – it’s called ‘free time search’. Unfortunately, many people are either too lazy to use free time search, or maybe just don’t know how – I say this because most of the meeting invites I get are for times that IR [read] Keywords: domino
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Annual moan about The Brit Awards, 2010 edition
Sun, Feb 14th 2010 7:24a Darren Adams The awards ceremony takes place this coming Tuesday – I don’t care who wins and who loses because the whole thing is a nonsense. Let’s start with best album of 2009 – Dizzee Rascal is nominated. Is that his real name? “Congratulations Mr Rascal, it’s a boy” – “great, I’ll call him Dizzee… a brother for my eldest son Dirty”. Anyway, who else? Florence & the Machine, Kasabian, Lily Allen and Paolo Nutini. Young Mr Nutini, [read] Keywords: facebook
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A week with Symphony 3 (the beta)
Fri, Feb 12th 2010 3:24p Darren Adams I’m a little behind Ed Brill, but I’ve been busy ticking off the journeys listed on TripIt. Last week at EdgeGuide’s post-Lotusphere event in Stockholm (over one hundred delegates, well done guys) I spoke about Symphony 3, and within ten minutes of coming off the stage (to rapturous applause of course) I discovered that the beta of Symphony 3 was already available. Twenty minutes later it was downloaded and installed, and since then I’ve installed the Mac version.
What ca [read] Keywords: ibm
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So, it’s basically a big iPod touch
Thu, Jan 28th 2010 3:31p Darren Adams Yesterday I blogged about the fact that the whole world had convinced itself that Apple were going to announcement a tablet device. And unless you live in a cave or are appearing in a reality television show where you get locked in a house for forty days, you’ll probably now know that Apple did just that.
In a rather puny attempt to set myself up as an observer of future technology trends, I speculated that early adopters would probably wish they’d waited for the next iteration. Clea [read] Keywords: apple
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File Navigator for Lotus Notes
Wed, Jan 27th 2010 11:06a Darren Adams Here’s a very handy Notes side-bar plug-in which has been knocking around since the middle of 2009 but has really come into it’s own with the latest release. The File Navigator plug-in does what it’s name suggests… it allows you to access your file system from the Notes side-bar, perform a set of actions on the files and folders, and drag and drop files to and from Notes documents and e-mails (not that I’m condoning sending file attachments in e-mails of course R [read] Keywords: lotus
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The difference between men and women
Wed, Jan 27th 2010 11:06a Darren Adams On Christmas Eve I announced via Twitter the sad passing of Mrs A’s laptop. I was on the phone and from behind me I could hear the unmistakable sound of a hard disk in the throes of death. By the time the conference call had finished, the Windows desktop had disappeared and had been replaced by a black screen with the words ‘disk error’ (or something to that effect). Attempts to bring the old beast back to life failed. And it was an old beast – a single core processor of [read] Keywords: desktop
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The perfect Christmas gift?
Wed, Jan 27th 2010 11:06a Darren Adams There’s good spam and there’s bad spam… bad spam offers me a dangerous array of dubious prescription drugs and the chance to receive money from some extremely generous Nigerian bankers. Good spam is harmless but unwanted… and sometimes it’s received because at some point in the past I purchased something or maybe even submitted my own e-mail address. I’m talking about the offer of an array of Christmas gifts from a company which offers acres of land situated o [read] Keywords: facebook
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BlackBerry Storm 2
Wed, Jan 27th 2010 11:06a Darren Adams Back in October 2008 I blogged about the BlackBerry Storm, RIM’s first touch-screen device. At the time I was totally seduced by the idea of having a full-screen BlackBerry… until I tried it. The usability of the original Storm was deservedly much-maligned, and indeed I spent ten unsuccessful minutes trying to enter my name into the contact list, eventually resulting in the word ‘Dappem’. No, I’m not joking. The design of the device was lovely, the big screen was br [read] Keywords: applications
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Lotusphere on the move
Wed, Jan 27th 2010 11:06a Darren Adams Going to Lotusphere? Do you use Lotus Notes? Do you have an iPhone or a BlackBerry. If you answered ‘yes’ to the first question and ‘yes’ to any of the others, then you’ll be interested in some resources offered by Geniisoft and The Turtle Partnership.
Firstly, Ben Langhinrichs has once again provided the Lotusphere agenda and session planning database. This is a Notes application which you can store locally, and then inspect the sessions and add them to your person [read] Keywords: lotus
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Ice age
Wed, Jan 27th 2010 11:06a Darren Adams Here at Adams Tower we love Christmas, and every year I have to persuade Mrs A to hold back on playing the Christmas music until a reasonable date. 1st November is too early, even though the Harrods Christmas department opens in August. As we get to late November, and the sound of Bing Crosby’s crooning and whistling wafts out from the iPod speakers, I consider how ridiculous the lyrics of White Christmas are… for traditionally Christmas in the South East of England is a rather grey [read] Keywords: atlantic
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IT Jungle coverage of Sametime 8.5
Wed, Jan 27th 2010 11:06a Darren Adams I’ve already blogged about IBM Lotus Sametime 8.5 but IT Jungle have posted a good overview of all that’s new in this recently-released version. And actually, reading through the article, you realise just how much new stuff has been packed into this release.
If you want to take a look at Sametime 8.5 you can find some videos on YouTube, narrated by John Del Pizzo and presented in fabulous high definition. [read] Keywords: ibm
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Review of the decade
Wed, Jan 27th 2010 11:06a Darren Adams Don’t worry, this won’t take long. I’ve seen a lot of links for ‘10 things’ today, either for the year or the decade, and I really can’t be bothered to do my own. Anyway, most people will be out boozing tonight and nursing a hangover tomorrow, so there’s no point, no-one will be reading this.
I started the decade (i.e. January 2000) in my first management role, heading up a team within the larger Lotus Technical Sales team… the Technology Advocates [read] Keywords: lotus
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A new addition to the family
Wed, Jan 27th 2010 11:06a Darren Adams It was actually quite scary how quickly this happened – a few weeks ago Mrs A finally agreed with Lolli that we would get a new dog, but plan it to coincide with the start of school holidays. The pair of them then started looking at where they would get the right dog from… the ‘right dog’ being a Yorkipoo, a Yorkshire Terrier / Poodle cross. This cross-breed has the advantage of being hand-bag sized and not dropping hair. While I was at Lotusphere they located a litter wi [read] Keywords: lotusphere
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Apple hype over-drive
Wed, Jan 27th 2010 11:06a Darren Adams It must be nice to work for Apple, knowing that the slightest rumour of Steve Jobs breaking wind will generate a billion news articles. Apple have trained the industry well, and now we’re all waiting for their announcement events knowing that that something desirable will be unleashed upon a waiting world. You may not need it, but you’ll want it… which reminds me of one of the best ever news spoofs to hit the Internet, the MacBook Wheel video on The Onion. I guess we’re m [read] Keywords: apple
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Reasons to live in Swindon
Wed, Dec 16th 2009 2:00p Darren Adams Ah, Swindon, that jewel of middle England. Home-town of the great British band XTC, the Great Western Railway and, errr, hmmm… a cheap designer outlet centre.
Swindon doesn’t need to be put on the map, because there it is, next to the M4. But today Swindon has attracted attention because a new technological marvel… being able to access the Internet without a network cable. Actually I’m being facetious because many of us can do that already (you probably are reading this w [read] Keywords: designer
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Exchange 2010 – the tables are turned
Mon, Dec 14th 2009 10:56a Darren Adams Like most people of the Lotus persuasion, I remember the days when advocates of Microsoft Exchange were very fond of stating that Domino was very wasteful of disk space because of it’s architecture – everyone has their own mail box and each e-mail (and it’s attachments) would be stored separately per mail box. So if I e-mailed 20 mb of file attachments to 10 users I’d be creating 200 mb of allotted disk space on the server(s). I’d also deserve to have my knee-caps b [read] Keywords: domino
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Thunderbird 3
Fri, Dec 11th 2009 3:57p Darren Adams If you came here expecting to read something about that single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft that Alan Tracy used to pilot up to Thunderbird 5, you’ve come to the wrong place. I’m talking about the new version of Mozilla’s e-mail client.
I use Thunderbird as my personal e-mail client attached to my dadams.co.uk mail account, and therefore the function I use most of all is ‘Delete’ as I clean up the stuff that isn’t spam but I really can’t be bothered to read [read] Keywords: lotus
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Sametime Advanced in the frozen North
Fri, Dec 11th 2009 7:57a Darren Adams Here we are in the most exciting (or should I say “busiest”?) part of our 4th quarter, and the IBM Lotus team in Sweden have found a great use for some of the capabilities of IBM Lotus Sametime Advanced.
They’ve created a broadcast community and a chat room so that they can broadcast announcements of software transactions being booked and provide some further details.
Obviously I’m not going to share the full details of the conversations going on, but here’s a scree [read] Keywords: ibm
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LotusLive attracts 18 million paying subscribers
Fri, Dec 11th 2009 4:56a Darren Adams This hit the Twittersphere yesterday and was also blogged about by Stuart McIntyre on his LotusLive blog… the combined services of LotusLive have now attracted 18 million paying subscribers. Since we started the year with zero paying subscribers that’s pretty good growth. The story is then picked up by ZDNet who theorise that the annual revenue from those subscribers could be $648 million, thus justifying IBM’s acquisitions and development efforts… and indeed the overall [read] Keywords: ibm
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The Turner Prize 2009
Tue, Dec 8th 2009 4:55p Darren Adams I must say, I found the Turner Prize very disappointing this year. In previous years it’s been all-to-easy to poke fun at the preposterous and pretentious rubbish that these so-called artists pride themselves on… people dressed as bears, flashing lights, planks of wood on the floor, mannequins on toilets and old sheds. But this year it seems that there are a few pieces I would describe as art and actually demonstrate some artistic talent. Okay, I say this as someone who is a bit of a [read] Keywords: ibm
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They could learn something
Fri, Nov 27th 2009 7:59a Darren Adams I have just one thought about this kerfuffle over British hacker Gary McKinnon finding his way into some (supposedly) ultra-secure US Government systems… don’t put the guy in jail. Instead the US Government should fly him over the pond first class and grill him on how he did it. That way they can learn about how to make the systems more secure. And then they should give him a job working in the UFO lab that we saw in Independence Day.
Of course, regular watchers of 1980s movies will [read] Keywords: facebook
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Lotusphere 2010 agenda now on-line
Wed, Nov 25th 2009 12:59p Darren Adams Before I start talking about Lotusphere 2010 I just wanted to mention that today is the 18th anniversary of me joining what was, at the time, Lotus Development Corporation. I know what you’re thinking, I must have gone straight from junior school. I turned down an offer to join Borland and made the long journey from Shepperton to the far end of Staines, and took up a role in Customer Support. Later that week, when they found a spare computer for me, I installed Notes version 2.0a.
But that [read] Keywords: ibm
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We’re English and we love a drop of rain
Mon, Nov 23rd 2009 4:57p Darren Adams Have you ever wondered about how much rain runs off your roof, into the gutter and down the pipe? Your answer is probably “no”. I don’t spend my days considering it either. But heavy downpours used to worry me – the guttering at the front of our house didn’t seem to be able to cope well with torrential rain and the result was that a small area near our front door used to fill up. The soil there is so clay-like that you could probably grab a bucket-full, put it strai [read] Keywords: lotus
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Facebook and Twitter on the Xbox
Tue, Nov 17th 2009 4:55p Darren Adams A few days ago I read that there was an update coming to the Xbox 360. This isn’t unusual, sometimes it seems like every time I turn the bloody thing on it ties itself up for an hour while it downloads something… but it is a Microsoft product, so this shouldn’t come as a big surprise. But this particular update, rather than fixing a problem I didn’t know existed, promised some new goodies… Facebook and Twitter. Me being me, I started to ponder this. Okay, so here [read] Keywords: application
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A leisurely journey across Denmark
Fri, Nov 6th 2009 7:02p Darren Adams Ah, Denmark. They have holes in some their coins, you know. Think how much metal that must save.
Anyway, on with the story. Back in September I was invited to speak at DanNotes, the Danish Notes User Group event – not about Notes, but about Lotus Connections. Of course I accepted, and wasn’t put off in the least when I discovered that the event was taking place in a town called Korsør (pronounced ‘Korsur’ because of that ‘ø’ character) which is half-way acro [read] Keywords: composite
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Upgraded to Karmic Koala
Fri, Oct 30th 2009 8:03p Darren Adams Fact #1 – I never read manuals or instructions. So I merrily downloaded the Ubuntu 9.10 installation ISO, created a CD and then set about upgrading my 9.04 installation. And then I got to the options… install as a separate partition or erase the current installation and install the new version? Neither thanks, I want to upgrade. It was then I checked the Ubuntu site and realised that the upgrade option was a separate download.
But actually there was an easier option… just go to [read] Keywords: administration
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Firefox market share re-visited
Thu, Oct 29th 2009 5:03p Darren Adams Back in January I blogged about the rise of Firefox coupled with the fall of Internet Explorer. At the time Firefox had risen to a very precise 21.34% while Internet Explorer continued to lead the ‘market’ with 68.15% (but was on the way down).
Ten months later the two haven’t waved at each other as they passed in opposite vertical directions, but the gap has closed a bit. According to The Register, Firefox now claims 23.75% while Internet Explorer has lost more ground and sits [read] Keywords: apple
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Karmic Koala arrives this week
Tue, Oct 27th 2009 3:02p Darren Adams Karmic Koala? No, I haven’t been smoking something grown in a hippy’s window box. Like many, I’m a) fed up with hearing about Windows 7 and b) looking forward to the release of Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (otherwise known as Karmic Koala) later this week. It seems that Microsoft’s unofficial PR machine in the UK (BBC News) has taken ten minutes off from fawning over the new Windows version to recognise that technology companies other than Microsoft, Google and Apple do actually exi [read] Keywords: lotus
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Indiana Jones and the Zimmer Frame of Shame
Sat, Oct 17th 2009 11:59a Darren Adams Warning: this contains spoilers, so don’t read it if you haven’t seen the movie in question.
I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather this week, so Mrs A gave me a day off from working down her usual long list of Saturday must-dos. After getting my hair cut and cleaning out the hamster house I decided to take time out to watch ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’ which I recorded some time ago – a movie which I promised myself I’d watch [read] Keywords: facebook
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The joys of airport security
Wed, Oct 14th 2009 4:55p Darren Adams Let me start by saying that I’m not knocking the requirement for airport security. In fact, thank heavens that they’re now very thorough even if they have started letting suitcases resembling small wheelie-bins be taken on as hand luggage – as I said years ago, if you need wheels to move the bloody thing is it ‘hand luggage’? What annoys me about airport security is the lack of consistency. At some airports you don’t have to take your laptop out of your bag &# [read] Keywords: facebook
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I hate you for e-mailing me
Fri, Oct 2nd 2009 1:56p Darren Adams I was perusing PlanetLotus today and an interesting blog post from Vaughan Rivett caught my eye – what’s the worst email in-box that you have ever seen? Vaughan tells the tale of a user with a mail box weighing in at 11 gigabytes. This is what’s known in the trade as either a) hoarding or b) bad management. Mail boxes of that size could never be tolerated at IBM, before like so many companies we impose a mail quota – your mail box gets to a certain size, some things stop work [read] Keywords: collaboration
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Welcome to October
Thu, Oct 1st 2009 4:56a Darren Adams So, here we are… Summer has officially ended, the first X-Factor live show is just over a week away, and Christmas merchandise is quickly taking over the local garden centres. There are two other important things I noted this morning, both on GMTV.
Firstly, the weather forecast from Kirsty McCabe. Earlier this week she speculated that we would have a mild Winter with no chance of a white Christmas – a pretty safe bet, given the last one was thirty-nine years ago. This morning she sai [read] Keywords: facebook
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Receiving web content in a composite application
Fri, Sep 25th 2009 7:56p Darren Adams September continues to be composite application month here at dadams.co.uk, and to round off this exciting set of posts I’m going to show you how to easily grab content from a web page and publish it into a Notes form. It’s also possible, and just as easy, to publish into a Symphony spreadsheet, but we’ve done that one to death already.
First thing to do is create a blank composite application. Then go into Domino Designer and add a simple form containing three fields – F [read] Keywords: composite
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Lotus Connections 2.5 press coverage
Thu, Sep 24th 2009 8:56a Darren Adams In a week where Lotus general manager Bob Picciano hit out at Microsoft for spreading “ridiculous and fabricated” information (go Bob), here in the UK we’ve seen some press coverage of Lotus Connections 2.5 in Computer Business Review and Computerworld UK.
No surprise to see Jeff Schick quoted, as he heads up the social collaboration business unit. But in Computerworld UK there’s Mr Picciano again…
We have been using it internally at IBM … especially at the en [read] Keywords: collaboration
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Joint IBM Lotus / Canonical event in London
Tue, Sep 15th 2009 12:57p Darren Adams Check your diaries folks – on 16th October 2009 IBM Lotus and Canonical (the providers of the popular Ubuntu Linux platform) will join forces to deliver an event designed to help businesses understand and realise the benefits of open source collaborative solutions.
Adam Jollans, IBM’s Linux and Open Source Strategy Manager, will kick off with a session about open source solutions revolutionising the IT market. Then we have someone called Darren Adams (who is apparently very good) tal [read] Keywords: collaboration
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More composite application and Symphony goodness
Mon, Sep 14th 2009 6:56p Darren Adams In an attempt to completely alienate everyone who just comes to dadams.co.uk for humour and pedantry, here is the third part of our look at Notes 8.x composite applications. Our previous look at integrating Symphony spreadsheets with a composite application was a simple example publishing individual field values. Today we’ll get a little more complex. Just a bit. Please note that this example is hopelessly ripped off from this article from the Composite Application wiki – I make no a [read] Keywords: composite
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Unfair
Tue, Sep 1st 2009 1:56p Darren Adams The wife says I’m not always impartial on these matters, but sometimes I really do believe the collective world of football (note, the game played by kicking the ball with the feet, not throwing it with the hands while dressed in layers of body armour) have it in for Arsenal. Take Saturday’s game against the South East’s favourite team, Manchester United – ManUre committed 21 fouls but had just 3 players booked. Arsenal committed 15 fouls but had 6 players booked. ManUre [read] Keywords:
A simple UC² story
Fri, Aug 28th 2009 12:53p Darren Adams This afternoon I was putting together some material for the Sametime Unified Telephony events that are taking place over the next two weeks. One of the slides covers how we used to work many years ago (i.e. you went to the office, really no other option) versus how we can work now given the improved and more accessible means of communication (the Internet playing a fairly big part) and the increased capabilities of technology solutions. To go with this slide, I needed an example of what this act [read] Keywords: sametime
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Naughty sweeties
Wed, Aug 26th 2009 3:56p Darren Adams Travelling from Heathrow to Copenhagen on the world’s favourite airline allowed me to pick up a copy of the Daily Mail, a newspaper well-known for it’s traditional values. I guess it depends which historical figures you judge to be traditional… Adolf Hitler maybe? Anyway, there was an amazing picture of a 25 foot great white shark on page 3, and while coming into land I had to turn off the Archos and my eye caught a reader’s letter. This wasn’t the usual old guff fr [read] Keywords: exchange
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Wednesday night in Lyngby
Wed, Aug 26th 2009 2:55p Darren Adams I’ve noticed something strange. Opposite my hotel there’s a cinema surrounded by several cafes and restaurants, and last night the area was a hive of activity… loads of people in the cinema queue and waiting to be seated at the various eating establishments. Tonight, it’s like a ghost town.
Possible explanations… Tuesday is two-for-one night at the cinema… FC Copenhagen are playing a Champions’ League qualifier and the good people of the Copenhagen subur [read] Keywords:
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Denmark
Tue, Aug 25th 2009 4:56p Darren Adams Good evening everyone. I am in Denmark, which is enormously exciting as I’ve never been to Denmark before. I’ve been telling everyone I was going to Copenhagen, which was true in a way – I landed at Copenhagen airport, passed through Copenhagen on the train, but eventually got off at Lyngby (which I think is pronounced Lungbu). So you’ve probably guessed I’m not on holiday – Lyngby is the location of IBM’s main office in Denmark. Some observations:
Out [read] Keywords: ibm
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Butler Group talks Lotus Connections
Tue, Aug 25th 2009 7:01a Darren Adams Butler Group have published an in-depth report on IBM Lotus Connections. One important thing to note is that the report was based on Connections 2.0.1 so some of the comments are not up-to-date – for example, the lack of a wiki capability is cited as a weakness. With Connections 2.5 (shipping end of this week) that weakness is removed, and I’ll stand by my previous post and again say that the new version puts us even further ahead of the competition.
The report says good things about [read] Keywords: collaboration
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Movie studio visit
Mon, Aug 24th 2009 2:55p Darren Adams This is going to be a rubbish blog post, because on the way into the studio I had to sign a confidentiality agreement. I’d already left the camera at home having been told it would be confiscated, but I had planned a little report about a visit to the set of a major movie which is currently being filmed. However, part of the agreement was not to divulge any details via Twitter, Facebook or blogging. I wouldn’t want to incur the wrath of a film company but I also wouldn’t want t [read] Keywords: blogging
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Collaborating with the outside world
Wed, Aug 19th 2009 1:53p Darren Adams In September, the Lotus team in Sweden will be holding their Gold Club event – a meeting (with dinner thrown in) for their most valued customers. Our Swedish country manager Kristoffer invited me (in my new capacity) to come over and talk to the assembled audience about how Lotus solutions were helping customers to reduce costs and improve efficiency. “No problem” I said – Sweden is a nice place to visit and there’s nothing I like more than hearing my own voice talk [read] Keywords: connections
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Sametime Unified Telephony events in London and Edinburgh
Wed, Aug 19th 2009 7:54a Darren Adams IBM Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony (let’s say SUT to avoid the mouthful) is garnering a huge amount of interest from our customers and analysts. To provide an opportunity to hear more about the solution and how it can benefit your organisation, we’ve laid on two events during September – in Edinburgh on the 3rd and at IBM South Bank (London) on the 8th.
To register for the SUT events, please click here. I hope to see you there. [read] Keywords: collaboration
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Fun with Exchange upgrades
Fri, Aug 14th 2009 3:56p Darren Adams This article on ZDNet makes an interesting read on the pros and cons of Exchange 2010.
Bear in mind that upgrades to an e-mail infrastructure are never trivial – they require planning, execution, resources and funds, and sometimes carry a small amount of risk when moving from a mature stable version to a newer version. Although I show a slide with successive versions of Domino and the word ‘upgrade’ plastered all over it, I recognise it’s often a major undertaking for com [read] Keywords: collaboration
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The end of the line for Microsoft Word?
Thu, Aug 13th 2009 4:55a Darren Adams The Internet is a wonderful place to spend some time, but it has it’s bad points. Firstly there’s the criminal element – hackers, virus writers, spy and malware, and people making kind offers to deposit Nigerian fortunes in your bank account. And then there’s the problem of whether the truth is out there, and how do you work out what’s true and what’s not… for example, is Lady GaGa really a hermaphrodite as was speculated this week? My guess is ‘no [read] Keywords: macbook
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More foxes
Sat, Aug 8th 2009 12:54p Darren Adams I don’t want to turn this into the fox blog, but I wanted to share this with you. I think it’s wonderful to see foxes in the garden – Mrs A is not so sure – and it’s even better to see three youngsters as I did this morning. I’m sure they’re siblings from the same litter, and no doubt one of them was the solo visitor who appeared a couple of days ago (probably scouting for a good place to have a snooze).
The lower patio gets the sun in the morning, so I [read] Keywords:
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A visitor in the garden
Thu, Aug 6th 2009 5:52p Darren Adams Since we moved to Adams Tower here in the wilds of Camberley three years ago, foxes have been a familiar sight (especially since our dear old spaniel Molly passed away). This year I’ve seen a pair together only once, but have seen more individual visitors at the front of the house… which isn’t surprising since that’s where I sometimes leave food out for them. I’ve twice seen a badger although they scuttle away very quickly as soon as the security light comes on. Fox [read] Keywords: security
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LinkedIn widget for IBM Lotus Notes 8
Wed, Jul 15th 2009 5:57p Darren Adams Widget or plug-in? Whatever… it’s difficult to beat Ed Brill in the race to blog something related to Notes, all you can really do is wait until he goes on holiday (sorry, vacation) and hope that he doesn’t have his Macbook with him and access to a WiFi connection. Today’s announcements were centred around two newly-available widgets (plug-ins?) for Notes 8, supporting LinkedIn and TripIt. I’ve never used TripIt so I’m not going to comment on that one (not unt [read] Keywords: ibm
lotus
lotusnotes
notes
enterprise
integration
linkedin
macbook
widget
widgets
wifi
2
Daddy brags
Sun, Jul 12th 2009 3:57p Darren Adams My daughter Lauren (Lolli as she is known to her friends and on Twitter) is a girl of many talents – she gets amazing school reports, she plays the flute better than anyone should be able to after just 10 months, and no-one is better at driving the wrong way round a Project Gotham Racing 4 circuit to smash head-first into the other drivers. But her real passion is gymnastics.
She came to the sport fairly late and joined a gymnastics club with the aim of getting into the school team – [read] Keywords: twitter
4
See you at Collaboration University
Thu, Jul 9th 2009 4:00a Darren Adams Collaboration University – the education event for customers and Business Partners on the subjects of IBM Lotus Connections, Quickr and Sametime – takes place on the 21st, 22nd and 23rd of September 2009 at IBM South Bank (London). This year there’s an added incentive to attend. As well as hearing from collaboration experts such as Rob Novak and his team from Snapps, Carl Tyler, Chris Miller, Gabriella Davis and Warren Elsmore (to name but a few), this year’s keynote spea [read] Keywords: collaboration
connections
ibm
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quickr
sametime
4
Crunch and repair
Mon, Jul 6th 2009 2:56p Darren Adams If you’re one of my Twitter disciples, you may know that my car was repaired today… under a tent on my drive-way.
A month and a day ago, the 5 series had an altercation with a brick gate pillar and came off worst. I blame the lady who had placed her unnecessarily large ‘Urban Sherman’ too far forward in the queue for drop-off at school, which meant that I had to squeeze through the entrance gates… and sensing I was too close to her, I compensated by moving a tad too [read] Keywords: mobile
twitter
5
Firefox 3.5 is available
Tue, Jun 30th 2009 6:59p Darren Adams Over here at dadams.co.uk headquarters we’re big fans of Mozilla Firefox – everyone from the tea-boy, to the feature writers, right up to the editor-in-chief uses the much-loved web browser. And so there was a huge swell of anticipation today as the release of Firefox 3.5 drew ever nearer. As soon as it became available the whole team downloaded it and what follows are the first impressions. Well, I say first impressions, I’ve actually been using the beta for a couple of months [read] Keywords: application
applications
firefox
server
4
LotusLive Connections
Tue, Jun 30th 2009 4:57a Darren Adams Earlier this week, the LotusLive home page received a face-lift, making it easier for visitors to understand the services of the LotusLive family. The new compare services page breaks down the services into components so that you can see what you get with each of them.
Later today, you’ll be able to sign up for a 30-day trial of the newest offering, LotusLive Connections. This service was announced at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference (the setting for Microsoft’s drubbing at the [read] Keywords: collaboration
connections
forms
ibm
lotus
enterprise
google
microsoft
9
Phasing out Windows
Fri, Jun 26th 2009 7:56p Darren Adams Two months after taking one step to phase out Windows (the acquisition of an iMac), I taken another step. Today… or yesterday depending on where you are… okay, on Friday… I converted my work laptop to Ubuntu Linux. While working at IBM’s Warwick office with an older laptop (too busy to ignore work completely), my frolleagues Ray Davies and Stuart Crump assisted in converting me and several other people to the popular Linux distribution.
The base installation was extremely [read] Keywords: ibm
lotus
notes
sametime
symphony
application
laptop
linux
mobile
networking
office
vmware
wireless
ubuntu
4
Ping pedantry
Mon, Jun 22nd 2009 7:55a Darren Adams What you see above is the result of entering ping /? at a DOS / Windows command prompt. From the available parameters you’ll see that there’s actually no way to ping someone via IBM Lotus Sametime or ‘ping a note over’ to someone.
Please see here for more details, and please stop using the term ‘ping’ incorrectly. [read] Keywords: ibm
lotus
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IBM Lotus Symphony 1.3 is unleashed
Fri, Jun 19th 2009 3:57a Darren Adams Yes folks, not just released… it’s unleashed (according to the press release). The question is a simple one – which organisation in today’s economic climate would ignore “the chance to save hundreds of dollars on each of their Microsoft Office licenses by providing support for Microsoft Office 2007 with the newest version of Lotus Symphony, IBM’s free of charge productivity software suite”? Maybe not today, maybe not next week or next month… maybe [read] Keywords: ibm
lotus
notes
symphony
microsoft
office
widget
5
New music from Incubus
Mon, Jun 15th 2009 5:53p Darren Adams To be honest I’m not a big fan of ‘greatest hits’ albums. In this day and age when you can download whatever set of tracks you like, and therefore effectively make up your own compilation, the idea of greatest hits is rather redundant. If you’ve already bought the albums of the band in question then a greatest hits album is almost completely redundant, apart from the one or two tracks that they add. And so I had mixed feelings when I heard that my favourite band of the la [read] Keywords:
6
Sametime Unified Telephony - I love it
Mon, Jun 8th 2009 1:50p Darren Adams I was a little behind in installing Sametime Unified Telephony (SUT) - the technical guys did it within 30 seconds of getting access to the server but it too me a couple of weeks to get round to it. But I’m glad I did.
The key word here is ‘unified’. It’s very rare to ask a customer what they have in terms of telephony and get an answer that includes just one vendor. The answer is usually “a bit of everything”. Different locations, different business units, so [read] Keywords: notes
sametime
application
mobile
office
server
wireless
3
New job
Thu, Jun 4th 2009 7:48p Darren Adams Did you think I’d abandoned dadams.co.uk? May 2009 was the first zero-entry month since April 2007. It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to write about - I did. Loads. IBM Lotus Connections 2.5 had been deployed internally (in April I think) but there’s so much in it to write about that I knew it was going to be a long job… so I didn’t get round to it (but I will). And then I became a Sametime Unified Telephony user, and at some point I’ll tell you abou [read] Keywords: collaboration
connections
ibm
lotus
sametime
mobile
3
LCTY ‘09 part 1 - Manchester
Tue, Apr 28th 2009 7:51p Darren Adams It’s late, I’ll keep it brief. A great day - over 260 attendees and the presentation delivered by Andy Ports Porter and me was well-attended. No doubt about the two highlights of the day - the first being the glowing customer testimonials delivered by the Salvation Army (Mark Calleran) and Moore Stephens (Michael Bruce).
And then our guest speaker Barry Cryer… I expected him to be great entertainment, but he exceeded expectations. For the entire half an hour he weaved stories a [read] Keywords: lotus
5
Who are you poken?
Sat, Apr 25th 2009 5:51p Darren Adams I had a very interesting meeting on Thursday. Along with some colleagues, I went to see Mr Mark Calleran of the Salvation Army (who incidentally is speaking at Lotusphere Comes To You) to talk about a particular Lotus solution. But enough of that work-related stuff, because as the meeting drew near it’s conclusion Mark (who is avid consumer of interesting technology) got onto the subjects of Pokens. He’d mentioned this before, I think during lunch at Lotusphere in Orlando, and I did [read] Keywords: lotus
lotusphere
facebook
linkedin
linking
networking
twitter
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LCTY, courtesy of Lotus Activities
Fri, Apr 24th 2009 4:51p Darren Adams Along with the speaker videos added earlier this week, the web marketing team have posted another treat to the UK Lotusphere Comes To You page. To put this latest addition into context, you need to know that this year’s events have been managed using the Activities module of IBM Lotus Connections.
Managing an event is a good example of an activity - it has an end date and an end goal, and will also require and produce a wide variety of ‘information artefacts’ - presentations, b [read] Keywords: collaboration
connections
ibm
lotus
lotusphere
notes
sametime
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My personal invite to LCTY
Tue, Apr 21st 2009 11:55a Darren Adams As alluded to in an earlier post, a couple of weeks ago we recorded some videos at Lotus Park describing our Lotusphere Comes To You sessions. The videos are now on YouTube and will be posted onto the UK Lotusphere Comes To You page by the end of tomorrow.
Maybe I should have shaved the night before…
I’m also pleased to announce that Andy ‘Ports’ Porter and I finished preparing our content today (well, 90% done, just a few odd bits to do - just the 96 slides to finish off [read] Keywords: collaboration
ibm
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23 hours as a Mac user
Mon, Apr 20th 2009 1:55p Darren Adams After a couple of weeks of hesitation I took the plunge and I’m now the proud and happy owner of a 24-inch Apple iMac. Lotus Notes 8.5, Symphony and Firefox are loaded - there’s still plenty to install and copy over but here’s the first impressions:
The setup was incredibly easy. Power, mouse, keyboard… a few questions. The most difficult thing was finding the home WiFi WEP key, and it wasn’t Apple’s fault that I can’t remember 10 characters. Child̵ [read] Keywords: lotus
notes
symphony
apple
application
firefox
mac
wifi
workspace
5
Errrrr, ummm
Thu, Apr 16th 2009 7:54p Darren Adams I never really noticed this until I watched a video of myself presenting at last year’s Lotusphere Comes To You… I do say “errrr” quite a lot when I do presentations, usually to start a sentence or bridge the gap between two passages of speech. It seems to have become habitual. Maybe I don’t do it all the time, I don’t know, I’ve never really thought about it even though I know I do it. A rather detailed analysis of the cause and the remedy suggests that [read] Keywords: domino
lotusphere
notes
community
3
Register for Lotusphere Comes To Scotland
Thu, Apr 16th 2009 1:54p Darren Adams Just a quick one to say that the Lotusphere Comes To You event in Edinburgh (28th May 2009 at the Caledonian Hotel, Princes Street) is now open for registration. Thanks to Davinia who also posted a comment to that effect. See you there.
Very soon, there’ll be some videos added to the LCTY page - watch out for those. But while I was looking at the page I saw a link to some videos from last year - I’m featured - but I had no idea (until now) that these had been recorded and posted. I r [read] Keywords: collaboration
ibm
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6
Intec’s iMigrate migrates Exchange users at Findus
Thu, Apr 16th 2009 4:50a Darren Adams Tim Malone and his colleagues from IBM Premier Business Partner Intec have published information about their iMigrate solution which assists in Exchange to Domino migrations, and it also refers to the Exchange to Domino migration at Foodvest (better known by the brand names of Findus, Young’s and The Seafood Company). Over 1,000 users from the Findus organisation were moved onto the consolidated Domino environment.
Intec also won an IBM award for their work, details of which can be found [read] Keywords: domino
ibm
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exchange
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Collaboration 4 you on YouTube
Thu, Apr 9th 2009 2:49p Darren Adams This week we launched a collaboration-focused channel on YouTube. It shows a series of short vignettes of our clients and Business Partners talking about how IBM Lotus collaboration solutions have enabled them to work smarter together.
Flying the flag for the UK are Andrew Frayling from Cardiff University and John Gallagher from City University. Customers such as Colgate-Palmolive are featured, and there’s also videos from our good friends Rob Novak of Snapps and Carl Tyler of Epilio.
Ch [read] Keywords: collaboration
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Lotusphere Comes To Scotland
Thu, Apr 2nd 2009 5:50p Darren Adams Our dynamic and lovely Marketing duo, Sue and Chrissie, have given me permission to go public on the announcement of Lotusphere Comes To You in Edinburgh. The event will be held on Thursday 28th May at the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh. The plan is to have the same agenda as the London and Manchester events. More details will be available soon… in the meantime my fellow Scotsmen (well, I am a bit*), mark it in your diary and I’ll see you there.
* Quarter or half, depending on which v [read] Keywords: lotus
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3
Happy 10th birthday, Notes R5
Tue, Mar 31st 2009 6:50p Darren Adams This week, I think, marks the 10th birthday of Lotus Notes R5. I say “think” because I can’t remember the exact date, but I know that it shipped very late in Q1 of 1999.
I remember Lotus Notes R5 very well for a number of reasons. The first is that I spent two weeks working in Cambridge, Massachusetts (across the Charles River from what is officially Boston) in October 1998 (crumbs, last century). Myself and a team of a few other Lotus colleagues, including Jean Nelson and Crai [read] Keywords: domino
ibm
lotus
lotusnotes
lotusphere
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notes client
R5
linux
outlook
xml
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Save disk space with IBM Lotus Symphony
Thu, Mar 26th 2009 7:54a Darren Adams Over the past couple of days I’ve been working on a sales campaign and have a big chunk of customer and product data - 17,324 records to be precise. To make sense of it all, I pasted it into a Lotus Symphony spreadsheet and then used a couple of Data Pilot tables - like Excel’s Pivot Tables but in my beta of Notes 8.5.1 they’re better than Pivot Tables thanks to some new features.
The resulting Open Document spreadsheet file was 1.6 mb - “crikey” I thought, “t [read] Keywords: document
ibm
lotus
notes
symphony
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LCTY ‘09 guest speakers
Wed, Mar 25th 2009 1:54p Darren Adams The guest speakers for the Manchester and London events have been confirmed, but I’m not saying who they are. For the third year running I suggested Harry Hill and have always been told he’d be too expensive. This year (presumably to humour me and to shut me up) our lovely events manager Chrissie actually did go and find out how much Harry Hill would cost. And she was right, he is too expensive. I have offered to bridge the gap in the funds should I win the lottery tonight.
But inste [read] Keywords: lotus
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Fulham 2, ManYoo 0
Sat, Mar 21st 2009 3:56p Darren Adams On a day where the Spuds almost eliminated their relegation concerns with a win over Chelski, a day when Arsenal took another step towards cementing 4th place (best we can hope for) with a win over the increasingly doomed-looking Newcastle, there was a shock win for Fulham. And no-one was more shocked than the ManUre fans, some of whom had travelled nearly 20 miles to watch the spectacle.
So okay, ManYoo are still top and are 10 points ahead of Arsenal, so I have no right to gloat. But this isn& [read] Keywords:
BlackBerry 8900 test drive
Mon, Mar 16th 2009 7:54p Darren Adams The nice people at RIM have loaned me a 8900 (also known as the Javelin, but also as the new Curve) to take a look, and here’s a quick overview. Is it the replacement of the 8300 series (the original Curve) or is it the baby brother of the 9000 (the Bold)? The answer… yes. Even though you can still buy the original Curve which remains a damn fine device.
Given the the 8900 is effectively the new Curve, it seems right to compare it to the 8300. The screen is the same size but at a res [read] Keywords: blackberry
rim
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Social sites eclipse e-mail use
Sun, Mar 15th 2009 7:53p Darren Adams A couple of interesting articles on the Beeb’s news site caught my eye this week, both of which had the same basic premise… that social networking sites are overtaking e-mail as a communication tool. A couple of years there was an interesting statistic (can’t remember the source, can’t be bothered to find it) that said that the volume of instant messages has already overtaken e-mails, so it’s interesting to see that yet another medium is pushing e-mail out of the wa [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
lotus
lotusphere
notes
eclipse
facebook
instant messaging
interface
linkedin
networking
twitter
7
Instant messaging etiquette
Fri, Mar 13th 2009 5:52p Darren Adams Over here in IBM-land we’re big users of instant messaging. The Sametime solution has a daily average concurrent connection statistic that is bigger than most companies and even some small nations… 170,000 people logged on.
Yesterday my frolleague Mark Holmes and I had a telephone conversation… imagine that. Yes, we do use the phone sometimes and actually many Sametime conversations consist of “hi, can I call you?”. This one started off with “can you talk?R [read] Keywords: collaboration
ibm
notes
sametime
blogger
enterprise
instant message
instant messaging
mobile
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Doing cool things with Notes 8.5
Tue, Mar 3rd 2009 7:55p Darren Adams I’m actually now using a beta of IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.1, but that’s not important. I thought I’d update you on a couple of cool things I’ve done with some of the new (and existing) capabilities.
Firstly, Notes 8.5 has the ability to ’show-through’ calendars from other sources onto your own personal calendar. This could be another user’s calendar, a calendar from a Teamroom, a calendar from a custom Notes application, a Google calendar, an iCalendar feed, [read] Keywords: composite
designer
ibm
lotus
lotusnotes
notes
application
google
interface
java
properties
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UKLUG 2009
Tue, Feb 24th 2009 7:57p Darren Adams UKLUG supremo Warren Elsmore has announced that the UK Lotus User Group will be holding a two-day event in Edinburgh on the 8th and 9th of October 2009 at the Radisson SAS hotel. That’s handy, it’s my preferred hotel in Edinburgh. The choice of location for this year’s event has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Warren lives in Edinburgh. Nor does it have anything to do with Wild Bill’s encyclopedic knowledge of every watering hole in a ten mile radius (he’ [read] Keywords: lotus
community
2
Alice West discovered
Mon, Feb 23rd 2009 5:55p Darren Adams For the full background on this subject please see here.
A couple of months ago I acquired a CD with the Parish records for St Nicholas (Chiswick) from 1855 to 1901. It revealed the details of my main suspect for my Alice West, living a stone’s throw from my great-grandfather Henry Clinch… this was not the right Alice West. My great-grandmother was Alice Maud West, and this one turned out to be Alice Jane West. Disappointing maybe, but by this point I had two options, and this remove [read] Keywords: development
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Lotusphere Comes To You ‘09 (UK)
Thu, Feb 19th 2009 5:56p Darren Adams Let’s just ignore the man from Plymouth who two years ago said it was a four hour journey so Lotusphere didn’t exactly come to him (which I actually thought was quite amusing but not useful feedback for planning future events). LCTY ‘09 (the UK version) is now open for registration. As in previous years you have a choice - Manchester (the Radisson SAS hotel at Manchester Airport, 28th April) and London (Hilton on Park Lane, 30th April). Well, actually you have three choices (se [read] Keywords: collaboration
connections
ibm
lotus
lotusphere
notes
application
applications
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The Brit Awards 2009
Wed, Feb 18th 2009 5:52p Darren Adams I have just one thing to say before the ceremony starts. Any scenario in which a band as awful as Scouting For Girls are nominated for an award is a bad sign for the British music industry. Unless the nomination was for worst band of the year. I can’t remember the last time I heard a band that made me so badly want to tear my own ears off. [read] Keywords:
Two weeks on Twitter
Mon, Feb 9th 2009 5:51p Darren Adams I’m a late-comer to Twitter. It sounded like a distraction and quite frankly sounded a bit silly (seeing people in Facebook who were “twittering”). While at Lotusphere I sat and had lunch with some guys from a very important Lotus customer, and Mark the CIO asked why I wasn’t on Twitter. One of my reasons, jokingly, was that I couldn’t bear the thought of signing up and having the embarrassment of no-one following me… so round the table I received a number of [read] Keywords: lotus
lotusphere
blackberry
facebook
twitter
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IBM Lotus Notes 8 video interview
Tue, Jan 27th 2009 5:52p Darren Adams Just before Christmas I recorded a video interview with Graham Lewis from IBM Software Marketing. The subject is Notes 8, how we’ve improved the user interface and usability, the strategy for integrating collaboration solutions and the business value of the capabilities. Have a look, enjoy the demo snippets and gaze in wonder at my shorter-than-usual haircut.
Shooting a video at IBM South Bank is not without it’s challenges. We chose a day that coincided with a customer event in the [read] Keywords: collaboration
ibm
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lotusnotes
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Job cuts at Microsoft
Thu, Jan 22nd 2009 5:53p Darren Adams A number of people have forwarded various links to me today on the subject of announced job cuts at Microsoft… many accompanied by comments to the effect of “enjoy”, “good news” and “this will make you smile”.
Actually it doesn’t make me smile and to be honest I don’t think it’s good news. Winning against Microsoft, taking out Exchange and replacing with Domino, hearing that a company is looking at throwing out Office in favour of Symph [read] Keywords: domino
ibm
lotusphere
symphony
exchange
exchange
microsoft
office
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I’m a Bold user again
Wed, Jan 21st 2009 10:56p Darren Adams Back in November last year I was disappointed when I had a BlackBerry Bold for a week but then had to return it to my friends at RIM (it was a loan device for a joint customer event). Since then I moved to a Curve, but have looked on enviously at the Bold devices in other peoples’ hands.
I’m please to say that yesterday I managed to obtain a new Bold, and I’ll say thanks again to my provider. The device switch-over was quick and easy, so now I’m receiving e-mail and calen [read] Keywords: connections
sametime
blackberry
mobile
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