divToday IBM made a a href=http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/lotuslive-notes-open-for-businessseries of announcements/a that have a major impact on the future of the Lotus Notes client. br /font color=#d3d3d3./fontbr /The first was the announcement that Lotus Notes 8.5.2 will be available from August 24. As a member of the Lotus Notes Managed beta program I have been using 8.5.2 pretty much exclusively for the past four months. It is just that good! There has been extensive coverage of the many new features being added with 8.5.2 I probably dont need to cover them here. What does it mean to have yet another Notes client upgrade to plan? Well, if you and your organization have not already migrated to 8.5.1 it should be your objective to help make that happen sooner rather than later. Bypassing 8.5.1 and going straight to 8.5.2 seems to make the most sense to me. The incremental value of migrating from 8.5.1 to 8.5.2 is going to vary from organization to organization. 8.5.2 has a lot of great features, performance improvements, and many bugs from 8.5.1 (and before) that have been addressed./divdivfont color=#d3d3d3./fontbr /Todays second announcement is of much more strategic importance to the future of the Notes client. IBM today announced that on August 24 our little baby is growing up and moving to the cloud. On that date LotusLive Notes will become available to the general public. Made available as part of LotusLive 1.3, companies interested in migrating all or part of their collaboration and social networking infrastructure to the cloud using the SaaS model, will now have the ability to utilize the power of the Lotus Notes client as an interface to that offering. br //divdiv font color=#d3d3d3./font/divdivWith earlier releases of LotusLive, IBM had already negated most of the market advantages that Google might have tried to gain with its Google Apps offering. LotusLive iNotes already offers cloud based mail, contacts, and calendaring with 25GB storage, IMAP and POP support, spam and virus protection all for the very attractive price of $3 per month per user, with a minimum purchase of a single user license. With todays announcement it is now possible for companies to move these same in-house services to the cloud but still retain the advantages of using the Lotus Notes client for an equally impressive $5 per month per user (25 user minimum). Sorry, no steak knives, but it also includes the instant messaging capabilities provided by the integrated SameTime client. IBM also announced that LotusLive Notes would provide full
integration with existing LotusLive features. A new bundle of LotusLive
Notes and LotusLive Engage for $10 per month per user (again, 25 user
minimum) will extend the LotusLive Notes capabilities with Web conferencing, Files, Activities, Forms, and Charts./divdivfont color=#d3d3d3./fontbr /What wasnt formally announced today, but included as part of a blogger briefing was some insights into some of the announcements likely to be made between now and LotusSphere that will further fill out the LotusLive Notes offering. These include:-br /olliA future bundling of LotusLive Notes which will add an enterprise CAL for Lotus Notes to the existing bundles for an extra $1 per month per user. This will allow users with an existing Enterprise CAL to migrate to LotusLive and still retain the ability to access on-premise Notes applications for a very attractive price./liliLotusLive Notes capabilities for mobile devices will be enhanced first with the offering of Lotus Notes Traveler (for an additional charge)./liliLook for a joint announcement later in the year by IBM and RIM on the availability of BES as part of LotusLive./liliAlso look for announcements in the next few months for additional languages to be supported, and enhancements to busy time and shared calendar management./liliIBM has already started to talk about Project Concord and we should expect likely announcements of a technology preview becoming available./liliIt has a href=http://lotusliveblog.com/blog/lotuslive.nsf/dx/lotuslive-plugin-now-available-for-lotus-symphony-3-betaalready been announced/a that the latest beta for Symphony 3.0 includes LotusLive plug-ins. I would expect this product should become available during this same timeframe./liliA hybrid model for LotusLive is also likely to become available soon. This will allow organizations the flexibility to deploy parts of their organization onto the cloud while still retaining some parts on-premise. This is consistent with the overall Lotus offering of providing choice to organizations something I think gives Lotus a significant advantage over its competitors offerings of quot;one size fit allquot; or quot;its my way or the highwayquot;. And the migration to LotusLive will be as easy as existing Lotus Notes replication/routing.br //li/olPerhaps the one major hole in this initial Notes client offering for SaaS is Notes/Domino applications? IBMs answer to this was that it was not looking to provide these types of services as part of its core LotusLive offering. Rather it was looking towards a number of its key Business Partners to provide these services. This was not news for me, as over the past few weeks since joining GROUP, I have been learning that a href=http://www.gbs.com/GROUP/a is one of those partners working very closely with IBM to make this happen via its a href=http://www.grouplive.com/GROUP Live/a offering. And while I cant say much just yet about what Nathan, Tim, Colin, Keith, and I are working on, I (think I) can say you can also be looking towards GROUP to make some pretty exciting announcements in this space between now and LotusSphere. What I have been learning these past few weeks is that GROUP believe that quot;the impossiblequot; just take a little longer... and for them a little longer means a few months!/divdiv /divdivSo todays announcement of the Lotus Notes client joining the LotusLive family is just the first of many important steps that will be taken this year and beyond. Having nurtured its development over the past 20 years the Notes client is getting ready to leave it on-premise home and set up a new home in the clouds. And that is just the start of a much larger journey that may see it reach even further when we begin to see the vision outlined in Project Vulcan appear in future announcements at LotusSphere and beyond. Man, I am really starting to like the way Lotus Notes has grown up and matured as a potential future quarterback of a championship winning collaboration team. How about you?br //div
Becoming Agile: Meetings
Sun, Feb 12th 2012 5:27p Peter Presnell One of the interesting aspects of moving from a development role to QA is that I have become much more involved in managing process rather than just managing projects. Part of this is the nature of QA and part of it is the result of going from having to just manage my own work to having to coordinate a team of 25 people. Process now becomes just as important as technology to get the most out of each day. In today’s world I am asked to respond to changing needs at an ever increasing pac [read] Keywords: lotus
lotusphere
notes
development
359
Lotusphere 2012: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Sun, Feb 5th 2012 4:15p Peter Presnell Lotusphere is over for another year. 2012 was my third Lotusphere. This year was a crazy crazy week just as it had been in each of the two previous years. I had the chance to renew many treasured friendships as well as meet many people for the first time. My employer, GBS, has offices all around the world, so Lotusphere also provides a chance for me to meet face to face with a great many of the people with whom I work every day. I see signs that the event is changing. Many legends of the past n [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
lotus
lotusphere
symphony
blogging
community
laptop
mobile
office
social software
twitter
wifi
266
Getting The Most From Lotusphere
Tue, Jan 10th 2012 7:39p Peter Presnell This year will be my third Lotusphere and first IBM Connect. Compared with a great many people attending I am still a newbie. I certainly was not as well prepared as I would have like for my first (or second) Lotusphere and so I would like share a few tips of some of the many things I have learnt in my preparation for this year.
The community itself exists all year round. Lotusphere is the only time in which many of us are together in the same place at the same time. When I try to prioriti [read] Keywords: administration
connections
ibm
lotusphere
notes
community
google
ideajam
mobile
network
222
RAT -- Part 2: Smoke Testing
Sun, Jan 8th 2012 9:02p Peter Presnell In Part 1 of this series, I provided a general summary of some of the key concepts of Rapid Application Testing. Today I would like to take a closer look at one of the more important aspects of RAT.... Smoke tests.
When developing a set of test cases to test an application the most important are smoke tests. Smoke tests can mean different things to different people. For me, smoke tests are the tests you choose to run each and every time you have a new version of the software to be tested. Beca [read] Keywords: domino
lotusphere
application
applications
bleedyellow
bleedyellow.com
133
My Lotusphere Predictions
Thu, Jan 5th 2012 6:15p Peter Presnell Lotusphere is now less than ten days away. The extended weather forecast for Disney World now covers the start of the big event. As the most of us in the yellowverse know, Lotusphere marks the true start of each year. 2011 the year of Get Social Do Business is drawing to an end giving way to 2012 the year of Business Made Social. Thousands of the yellow faithful are now starting to pack in preparation for the annual pilgrimage to the holy shrines of Kimonos, BALD, the Beach Party, Nerd Girl e [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
lotus
lotusphere
notes
notes client
application
applications
microsoft
mobile
outlook
social software
77
RAT -- Part I: Rapid Application Testing
Tue, Nov 29th 2011 8:25p Peter Presnell Welcome to the first in a new multi-part series in which I explore a range of ideas related to a style of testing I have developed for my own use at GBS I call Rapid Application Testing.
Rapid Application Development
For many years I have worked as a Lotus Notes Developer creating and maintaining a large number of Lotus Notes applications. In almost all of these projects I used a development methodology known as Rapid Application Development (RAD). RAD is not a measure of how long it takes [read] Keywords: lotus
notes
application
applications
bug
database
development
My AUSLUG 2011 Presentations
Mon, Sep 5th 2011 5:56p Peter Presnell I had the pleasure of presenting two sessions to an awesome audience at the inaugural AUSLUG conference recently held in Sydney. I have posted the slides for these presentations on slidehsare.
The first of these session IBM XPages: The Next Step In Your Life as A Notes Developer was a joint presentation I did with colleague Paul Calhoun in which we compared and contrasted some of the differences between application development with Notes Classic and XPages. This presentation is an updated ve [read] Keywords: ibm
notes
xpages application
applications
development
