Collaboration Matters!

My father-in-law is very engaged in the political discussions around the UK's loss of sovereignty to the EU. This is his post for today:

"The European Union has achieved the great dream of the Great war generation,"

President Sarkozy said today at Verdun

No, no, no. Their blood was not shed for this.

The great War generation was fighting for freedom from tyranny. The European Union eats into that hard fought for freedom, tiny bit by tiny bit on a daily basis, with the support of our politicians.

From Roger Scruton's "The Nation-State and Democracy":

The result of Jean Monnet's plan is there for all to see: an unaccountable bureaucracy presiding over a continent that has been cast adrift from its traditional aspirations and historical ties. Europeans have been disenfranchised by the European machine, which has at the same time resolutely refused to address the real problems of Europe's future. Of course, these problems (demographic decline, adverse immigration, the imminent collapse of the welfare state) might have arisen without the project of Union: but one thing is certain, which is that the project has weakened the authority of European governments and put no rival authority in their place. The unaccountable nature of the European institutions, their ability to spend money on themselves and to clutter the continent with their fantasy projects, their endless production of absurd and malicious regulations -- all these things have deprived the EU of legitimacy in the eyes of the European people. But the Union remains, immune to any action that its "citizens" can take, cushioned from all popular resentment by the national governments that shield it from the people. If proof were needed for the proposition that the nation-state is the friend of democracy, and transnational government the foe, then the European Union is it.

My Grandfather gave his life at Ypres, in the trenches, for my freedom from the aspirations of a tyranny that wanted to remove British Sovereignty. Our politicians have allowed that to happen without a fight. Shame on you all on this day.

Well said Greg.

Ed nearly announced this today, but here is the real thing:

IBM Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging delivers services for quicker deployment

At a Glance
E-mail is indispensable to today's business. And while its benefits are numerous, so are the challenges that it presents. With IBM Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging you can have a team of experts and cutting-edge infrastructure dedicated to improving the performance of your messaging environment while reducing the costs of your in-house solution.

Notes Hosted Messaging offering is designed to:

   * Enhance the security, integrity and availability of the messaging system
   * Keep costs lower by using automated processes and an integrated platform
   * Support a faster implementation with an established infrastructure and a team of subject matter experts

There is a minimum 1,000 authorized user purchase requirement per company for the initial purchase.

This offering requires a customer signed IBM Passport Advantage "Attachment for Fixed Term Use". That document references an offering-specific "Terms of Use" document which outlines the terms of this offering. This worldwide offering is currently available only under English language contractual terms.

Additional language versions of the offering-specific "Terms of Use" document will be made available very soon. The following Web site will be updated as language versions of the "Terms of Use" document become available

Overview

IBM Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging features standardized services that are designed to deliver faster deployment and more competitive pricing. A team of experts, state-of-the-art infrastructure, and established processes and controls help create a highly available, security-rich environment for your messaging systems. Optional support is available for migration. Daily maintenance tasks, such as data backup and guarding against viruses and spam are included. Dealing with hygiene threats can take its toll on your IT department. With the Notes Hosted Messaging solution, industry-leading spam and virus protection help stop hygiene threats before they impact end users.

The solution includes:

   * Servers
   * Storage
   * Monitoring
   * Networks
   * Security
   * 24 x 7 support

Features

   * Fully managed, scalable enterprise e-mail application platform hosted at an IBM data center
   * 1 GB mailbox
   * Comprehensive service-level agreements for e-mail application and infrastructure (99.5% and 99.9% availability)
   * Support for the regulatory requirements of the government and various industries
   * Anti-spam and antivirus protection to support data privacy and security
   * Backup and restore

Benefits

   * Lower, more predictable costs
   * Dedicated environment for enhanced data privacy, security, and scalability
   * Faster implementations and time to value
   * Improved efficiency as IT staff is freed to focus on business-related tasks

Its always great when a topic that you have been thinking about for a while suddenly gets distilled by someone else in the blogosphere.  This happened just this morning with regard to the question of how I manage my time engaging with others on Twitter, blogs and forums - in fact, in all types of social networking.

Angela Maiers writes (in a link that a friend shared on Twitter):

As a critical reader and writer, Twitter or otherwise, you must be purposeful in how you engage. You get what you put in, and I am not talking about the number of "Tweets" - I am talking about engagement in the conversations.

My Twitter Engagement Formula is my guideline for entering the Twittersphere with purpose and intention. It's what I call my 70-20-10.

    Share Resources (70) - Successful learning in the 21st Century is not what you know, but what you can share, so 70 % of my Twittertime is spent sharing others voices, opinions, and tools.

    Collaborations (20) - 20% of my Tweets are directly responding, connecting, collaboration, and co-creating with like-minded Twitter colleagues. From these important tweets, lifelong professional and personal relationships have been forged.

    Chit-Chat (10) 10% of my Twittertalk is "chit-chat-how's-your-hat" stuff. It is in these "trivial" details shared about working out, favorite movies, politics, and life in general that I connect with others as a human being. These simple chit chats are what have allowed me to know that I am never alone, and there is support whenever, wherever, and however I need it!

Your Twitter Engagement Formula will, of course, be different, but I encourage you to create one. Engage with purpose and intention, and Twitter success will follow!

I like this idea of setting an ideal split of sharing/collaboration/chat and then measuring one's output against that, and actually I think that 70/20/10 is a good starting point.  I'd say my stats are probably more like 40/40/20 at the moment, so I have some work to do.

I can also see this being very relevant to Lotus Connections deployments, particularly when advising new users that have been involved in social networking applications previously.

What would your ideal engagement formula be? And how are you doing against that right now?

As you can see, I sit on the fence on this one!

I love RSS feeds - they rock.  Whether it's for aggregation, or for mobile or disconnected access, RSS feeds are a great way to get the latest info.  This might be blog posts, podcasts, forum entries, bookmarks, comments, tweets or whatever.  Then when you add in synchronisation between computer and mobile device (e.g. the NetNewsWire/FeedDemon/NewsGatorGo combo) you really do have access to all the info you need wherever you are.

So to those who provide RSS feeds on your blogs or your applications, I salute you.  Thank you for letting me consume your comment in the way that I want it.  This to me is one of the core features of Web2.0 - publish once, then let the user consume it in the way that works best for us. Awesome.

So....  Why on earth would you then want to hamstring this by only letting us have a portion of the content?  It is crazy, dumb, and ridiculous.  If you need to monetise your site by getting hits direct to the site then find a way to add extra value for visitors, don't cut down what you supply in your feed.  If you write an application that serves feeds (ahem, Lotus Domino Blog, ahem) then make full feeds the default, not partial feeds.

And the reason for the post??   If you happen to run a set of 20 or so forums covering your collaboration products, and you want to offer the users RSS feeds of "All forum posts RSS" and "All main topics RSS" (need any clues?), then what on earth is the point of only giving a partial feed of those said entries!?!?  

Please please someone in developerWorks, sort this out!

Do you run a Domino web application server in your organisation?  Or do you host any Domino-based blogs?

If the answer to either of these questions is 'yes', this setting might be of real value to you, particularly if you are suffering poor performance from your Domino HTTP stack.

Go to the server document for your web server, then Internet Protocols/Domino Web Engine.  Check the setting of the "Run web agents and web services concurrently?" parameter.



This should be enabled.  It is disabled by default.

I recently had this setting cause me huge performance issues on my Domino Blog server (which hosts 10+ fairly active blogs), with us seeing fast performance when the Domino server was started, then performance rapidly tailing off after 20 minutes or so. Changing this setting has cured the issue completely.  

Huge thanks to Steve Castledine for his "beyond the call of duty" help on this.  Also, it would make sense from my point of view for this setting to be enabled by default rather than disabled.  It appears that others have had the same idea, so if you agree, go vote for this idea:

I love the Lotus forums - you know, the product support forums for each of the products, Quickr, Connections, Notes/Domino, Sametime etc.  The community support on them is excellent, better than most other vendor support forums I've come across.  A lot of folks outside and inside IBM give up many many hours to answer queries and to follow up on issues posted on there.

However (you knew that was coming didn't you), I am becoming concerned that there is a trend toward less and less involvement from those in the development teams.  There are (thankfully) a number of very active product evangelists and tech-sales folks (e.g. Luis Benitez for Connections, Michael Urspringer for Quickr) who keep the forums ticking over, but I cannot recall the last time I saw a response from a product developer who really had the insight on how the product was written.  This often leaves folks guessing at answers or reasons why something might be written in a certain way, and also gives the impression that feedback does not often make it back to those that can influence the products themselves.    

That of course is just my perception, and maybe I'm completely wrong on this?  I hope I am really.  But I'd be interested in your viewpoint, and also whether the forums are still as valuable to you as they used to be?

As you have probably spotted, I use Domino Blog for my blogs.  When composing a post, I add any links using Create/Hotspot/Link Hotspot.  Now I am not 100% sure that this the recommended approach, but it does the job nicely, and saves hand-coding them.

However, when sorting out some RSS feed validation issues this morning I noticed that the links added are not enclosed in double quotes, e.g.:


It is my belief that hrefs should always be enclosed, and the W3C page relating to this tag seems to suggest this too - if only by example rather than by specification.

So what do you think folks? Is this down to a misuse of Create/Hotspot/Link Hotspot on my behalf, should Notes be adding the quotes whatever, or is their use discretionary as far as the standard goes?  I'd be interested in your feedback.

Win a new iPod Touch!



The Domino Blog Import contest

I have a need for a Notes/Domino tool, a very simple tool...  

I want to be able to take one or more existing RSS blog feeds (say from a Nucleus, Blogger or Wordpress blog) and a Domino Blog database and to "automagically" import all the entries and comments from the RSS feed(s) into the Domino Blog DB.  

The tool needs to maintain the content, formatting (as much as possible), links, images, author and timestamps of all the posts and comments.  This would typically be a one-off task for each Domino Blog DB, but the tool should cope with being run multiple times against the same DB if necessary.

The tool should be run from a Notes client or Domino web application, and should support import into databases based on the 8.0.2 version of the Domino Blog template.  Additional credit will be given to any entries that also support import into Blogsphere databases!

Entries should be sent via email/FTP. Contact me via BleedYellow Sametime, Skype or Twitter.  

The winning entry will be the best tool supplied in the subjective opinion of myself and a couple of fellow judges, and will be picked at 12pm 30 October 2008.  The iPod Touch 8GB (or a voucher to the same value) will be ordered from your local Apple online store ASAP after this date.  The result will be announced via this blog.

All rights to the application (beyond a personal licence for me to use the tool for my immediate requirements) will remain with the developer.  If the tool were to be made available on OpenNTF then that would be awesome, but that is a decision for the developer themselves.

Make sense?  Any questions, please let me know!

Announced today:

IBM Lotus Sametime Unyte Meeting 8.2 strengthens global collaboration among businesses and enhances the customer Web event and meeting experience

Within the next few months, IBM Lotus Sametime Unyte Meeting will include these exciting features:

    * Support of PDF and ODF document formats in addition to Microsoft formats
    * A waiting room for attendees who join a conference prior to the host
    * Performance acceleration for international customers so all attendees, regardless of location, can count on consistent, fast response rates
    * Multiple language support (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese) so individuals can host and join conferences in their preferred language
    * One-click start of a Web conference from Lotus Sametime messaging service via shelf
    * Firefox 3.0 support

Good to see the support for ODF and Firefox3 in there, and I am sure that many users will see benefits from the language support and one-click start of Unyte conferences.

I do wish they had support for application sharing from Mac and Linux in the list though...

The organisers of the Web2.0 Expo event coming up soon in Berlin have just announced that they are making a lounge available for community events:

Community Lounge

Web 2.0 Expo Europe is the gathering place for the European community and beyond to come together and discuss what’s happening, and what’s about to happen, on the Web and in our community. In that spirit, we offer you our Community Lounge – a place to hang out, network and hold meetings.

Offerings:

  * Wireless available in the room
  * Conference style seating for up to 30 people
  * Cafe style workspace seating
  * Power for up to 15 laptops (first come, first serve)

I think this is a great idea for both this conference and for others we attend (hint, hint!)...