January, 2009

January 2009 - Wrap up and Thoughts

Well January 2009 is over. Time is flying and the economy is not getting much better is it? It’s getting harder to work harder when you are seeing people loose their jobs. I hate it when the economy goes to the crapper. I don’t like it one bit, and the media, in my opinion, is not helping. They are not reporting anything but news that would make a normal well mannered person want to go jump off a bridge. I am not suggesting you do that but why can’t the media report something other than bad bad bad all the time.

We have a running joke in our house when the news is on, you can almost her them saying, if you watch this news your family could die, and we all just laugh. The truth is the media never wants to report the fuzzy, happy, stories. I think it kills them.  I would like to see one day a week when the media does not make me want to turn the news off with all the bad news and do some good news.

I am also tired of companies keeping on CEOs that make millions and all this while the company is tanking and they get to lay off  5000 people. Hey CEO person, cut you and your EXECS salary down to 100K a year and then start cutting jobs. The way I see it we can either fire one $5 million a year EXEC or 300 people. Hummm. I will keep the 300 people who work hard and really need the money and let the one do nothing exec. figure it out. I get tired of hearing about bonuses too from companies that were telling us they needed a hand out 6 months ago and passed out money to retain executives. You have to be kidding me?

I hope the economy comes back soon and I hope all the people I know who don’t have work find some. How can we solve this economic problem. We can spend a little. I really don’t think it’s as bad as the government says it is either. We were out tonight trying to find a place to eat and every place was packed. The shops were packed and the mall was busy. Nothing but big companies seem to be doing bad who miss managed money and kept on to many high payed execs.

I also can’t wait to be in RENO and here what fancy story IBM has worked up as to why the IBM i and POWER Systems sales numbers are all off. Who will they blame? I am sure no System i’ and iSeries servers are coming off lease in 2009, they all somehow came off last year and none of them are going to be delivered this year?  While IBM lays off people they still fail to know how to sell some of the best hardware in the business. Funny DELL and HP are figuring it out and they are putting Windows onto their server and they still sell? What is the IBM i missing that it can’t seem to fly of the shelves at IBM? Sales staff? NO! Price? Maybe? Commitment from IBM? Maybe? A one sentence tag line? YES? How about CIOs and IT Managers who undrstand it and can order it today and get it next week? YES, we need that.

Why can’t I order an IBM i from IBM today and get it by next Friday? WHY?

You don’t have to answer I know it already and plan to ask it in RENO!

Digital TV Transition Delay Bill Failed to Pass?

Digital TV Transition Delay bill failed again and I think it’s a good thing. Would this not help spur on sales of new TVs and more Digital Products for homes?  I am all for the switch over and think it would help the economy rather than hurt it? Comments?

LINK :: Digital TV Transition Delay Bill Failed to Pass

Lotus Notes to Sharepoint Blog

I have been reading as much as I can about Sharepoint and why it just is no comparison to Lotus Domino Application Development. There is a blog out there that is pointing all this out and I think the person posting is at the end of his or her rope and posted this recently:

“My time is either spent doing a lot more configuration(in Sharepoint) than coding, or I am fighting the platform with code to try to bend it to my will. I like using technology to solve problems, not fighting technology to create basic business process applications.”

This is about all that needs to be said. Sharepoint is not a drop in solution for anything Lotus has to offer. They are just not the same in any way shape or form.

So if you are thinking about moving to Sharepoint from Lotus, or for any reason. Know there are much better solutions out there than Sharepoint I assure you.

LINK :: NOTES MIGRATION BLOG

Moving from Lotus to Exchange is costly and a step backwards

You don’t need to tell me anything about how much a move from Lotus Domino/Note to Microsoft Exchange/Outlook is going to cost these days. It’s going to be expensive. Even with a light investment in Lotus and only  few production DBs, an average company is not prepared for the cost involved. I pointed out in  a previous post that it’s idiotic and stupid to move from the IBM i or any installed technology to a different solution ( LINK ).

No some comments have surfaced on Network World that are interesting and true.

We stopped the move to Exchange

“I work for a 15k+ organization, and we stopped our migration to Exchange, in part because of the costs to migrate, but also because we found out we could save money moving to Domino 8.5. Our application developers are excited about Domino as a development platform again, and that alone will prove to be a huge ROI.”

Read the Article that sparked the comments.

I know of a company in Denver that I worked for at one time that has about 3,000 - 4,000 users who in my words . . .

Lotus did not fail them, they failed Lotus.

What does that mean David?

Let me tell you!

Lotus is not just mail. Lotus is many many things. Of which 20% is mail. The rest is Web Serving, Mail Archiving, Database Server, and Application Server all wrapped up into one. Many companies get Lotus installed and get t working then fail to use all it;s pieces. Sadly if you would have spent the time and money to develop some applications in Lotus Notes and deploy them your company would benefit from them. I even suggested a few years back that IBM give away 80 hours of consulting time to help the new company deploy an application so they could see the value. That 80 hours would have gone a long way in consulting dollars later on.

See if you just focus on the Mail bit you are missing the point. Microsoft is good at making sure you only focus on the mail and oh you want to do something with your applications? We can move those to Sharepoint. Well I am telling you it’s not that easy. Moving applications from Domino to Sharepoint is like expecting a VW Bug to out perform a Ferrari just because it has round rubber things and run on gas.

They are not the same. Lotus does all of these things well, and you can have them all on the same server if your smart bout it. In Microsoft world you can’t have your Exchange Server on the same servers as your Chat Server along with your Sharepoint Server. If you did you would be the oldest man in IT from lack of sleep and general frustration.

There are also the CIOs and IT Managers who read the propaganda Microsoft is sending them that says “Everyone is moving to Exchange” and they think, crap I don’t want to be left out….so they start moving to Microsoft, no matter what the cost, but the biggest question is what about the investment you already have in your current solution? How does the CEO allow that to get thrown out the window? You spent  and continue to spend to keep Lotus Notes, and yet a 4 to 8 times increase in cost is worth it for the benefit of increasing energy consumption, increase cooling needs and increase the number of servers you are going to have to deploy vs. keeping a few Lotus Domino Servers to manage large numbers of users and applications. Plus Lotus is not nearly as expensive as Microsoft’s solution. Plus how much is a .NET Developer license again? Lotus, last I checked, does not charge for the developer license. It’s apart of the client.

If you are thinking of moving off Lotus Domino/Notes to Exchange/Outlook/Sharepoint/Communications, ask yourself….is this the best way for use to spend money right now and would this money not be better spend hiring a Lotus Designer/Developer to increase our productivity and also increase the ROI we could be getting out of Lotus products?

Well this is good news:

LINK :: More firms switching from Microsoft’s Outlook to Lotus

IBM Closes 2008 on a High, i Sales Unclear - IT Jungle

LINK :: IBM Closes 2008 on a High, i Sales Unclear - IT Jungle

Wall Street got a chance to catch its breath a little yesterday after the market closed when IBM announced its financial results for the fourth quarter, a quarter that was impacted by the economic crisis last summer and fall but one in which Big Blue nonetheless was able to pull out of the fire profit-wise by cutting costs. More importantly, perhaps, IBM’s top brass reaffirmed that they were on track, despite the state of the global economy, to meet aggressive profit targets.

In the fourth quarter, which bore the brunt of the economic meltdown and which saw 1.53 million layoffs of full-time workers in the United States, IBM did see a decline in sales. But aggressive cost cutting and margin management allowed the company to actually beat the estimates Wall Street was making about IBM’s possible profits in the quarter. (As if we trust even a tenth of what Wall Street says these days.) IBM’s sales worldwide actually declined by 6.4 percent to just a hair over $27 billion, but despite that decline, IBM held gross margins and actually boosted net income by 12 percent to $4.43 billion. And because IBM buys back buckets of its own shares each quarter “to return value to its shareholders,” er, to financially engineer its earnings per share growth, IBM was still able to show a 17.1 percent increase in EPS to $3.28 in the quarter. While not a miracle, this is nonetheless a fine piece of piloting in some pretty rough waters. No question about that.

COMMON - Please Register Now for RENO

LINK :: To register for COMMON in 2009 in RENO, NV

Save the date for the COMMON’s 2009 Annual Meeting and Exposition in Reno, Nevada, taking place from April 26 - 30, 2009 - the largest gathering of the Power Systems user community. Registration is now open - click here to register!

This is COMMON’s largest educational event of the year. Five full days of in-depth IBM i and AIX education that includes all-day pre-conference workshops, all-day Integrated Seminars, open labs and a wide variety of regular-length sessions.

The Annual Meeting will kickoff on Sunday, April 26th with the Opening Session, followed by four days of leading-edge IBM i and AIX-related education, closing with the fun and exciting Power Down Main Event on Thursday, April 30th. Of course, as is expected from all COMMON conferences, there will be plenty of social and networking events taking place throughout the week.

The COMMON 2009 Annual Meeting and Exposition is the premier educational and networking event that you and your team will not want to miss.

Be sure to schedule time to browse the world’s largest Power Systems Exposition. Make sure to allow plenty of time because it encompasses more than 90 industry exhibitors including IBM. The COMMON Exposition provides a one-stop source of up-to-the minute information and ideas for the IT industry. Discover what’s new in the IBM i and AIX world and give your company ways to reduce costs and improve productivity. Also, since many different technologies are on display, you can compare alternatives and determine what’s right for you.

Trial: IBM Lotus Expeditor V6.2 toolkit

LINK :: IBM Lotus Expeditor v6.2 Toolkit Download

Download IBM® Lotus® Expeditor 6.2 toolkit at no charge to see how easily you can leverage your OSGi™ foundation and Eclipse™ platform skills to develop and extend composite applications to managed clients — used online or offline.

IBM® Lotus® Expeditor software is IBM’s universal desktop client integration framework. It assists developers in integrating a wide variety of client and server applications in composite applications to optimize the information that your employees need to accelerate your business processes. Use it to extend your IBM Lotus or IBM WebSphere® Portal (or other IBM WebSphere or Eclipse™) or other application infrastructures such as Microsoft applications. Lotus Expeditor software supports laptops, desktops, kiosks and mobile device clients.

Lotus Expeditor Integrator software provides a local concentrator and integration hub for transactional messaging for satellite locations of an enterprise such as retail outlets or remote offices. Lotus Expeditor software provides the flexibility of service oriented architecture (SOA) and a standards-based programming model from the OSGi™ alliance and the Eclipse foundation. The client integration software is the follow-on release of IBM WebSphere Everyplace® Deployment and IBM® Workplace™ Client Technology products.

The Lotus Expeditor wiki includes information that will help get started in installing and using the toolkit.

WKOW - Bashes Ubuntu and they end up paying for it

Ubuntu is a decent OS, and by the looks of everything coming out of Redmond (Microsoft) latley it’s starting to look better each day. Maddison, WI local TV station WKOW and it’s local help the people person took up some poor woman assertion that DELL was screwing her out of her college education. While blame is ofter easy to point this was a stretch at best.

The young woman, Abbie Schubert, ordered a DELL Laptop from you guessed it, DELL. I would consider her an uneducater buyer who should have maybe gone into Best Buy and not used and computer to order her computer. You have to go out of your way to find the DELL Ubuntu site and order a DELL with Ubuntu. If she would have gone to the main DELL site and just ordered a laptop no one would know who the hell she is and I would not have a post this week.

So she ordered this DELL Ubuntu Laptop, which t no point said Windows or anything about WIndows when she ordered it. I don’t know how she assumed WIndows would end up on it, unless she is really that stupid, and I don’t want to start calling her stupid, but the question begs to be asked.

Then the reported asserts that the Virizon Software won’t load on Ubuntu…well no duh? It won’t load on a Mac either you dufus. And that it didn’t come with Microsoft Word. The world does not rotate around Microsoft Word. While it’s nice to have Word, you don’t need it. I have not used it on my personal laptop in over 4 years. I have even attended college and turned in “word” documents that were typed on Open Office and no one as the wiser.

Lastly I would like to point out the part of the story that I talk a lot about in my personal and buisness life. Running a computer today is like knowing how to operate the shower, or turn on the TV, or drive and operate your car. You need to be able to use a computer and understand what you are doing. I am not trying to be a super geek or dictate anything, I am just making a point. There is a very large group of young people out there who do undrstand computers and do “get IT” and in the next 10 years they are going to start taking over the work market and the colleges becasue computers are just things in their lives and the OS does not matter and the programs do not matter. They all know what they are doing and they are good. What I have learned bout computers in the past 20+ years they come out of high school with and then move onto college.

The follow up story from WKOW takes into account that a fairly large group of people who get it and stand by Ubuntu made contact with them for the poor light they shed on the poor little OS. I commend the station for being bold enought to do a folllow up peice.
Now if we could only get the IBM i devotees of the world to stand up like that in the work place the next time someone says something dicouraging about he IBM i or even threatens to remove it.

Survey :: Military Living in Japan - I need your help

Hello Reader - If you were in the Military and were stationed in Japan please, please, please take this survey. There is this really nice guy working on his college degree and needs information about you being in the military and being stationed in Japan. You know how hard it was and he wants to know more about that visit. Please please please help him out.

Here is the Link to take the survey:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=yLzMxM4oKJKI_2fYBLxJscZw_3d_3d

Japan, Navy, US Navy, Sasebo, Yokuska, Marines, Army, Air Force

CL - To get record count for all the Physical Files (PF) in a library

CLLE - To get record count for all the PF’s in library
Posted By: Nanda Kishore Perisetla Contact

This bit of CL s very useful and is a good example.