Blog In Progress

This server was down from Sunday, August 28, 2011 until Friday, September 2 due to widespread power outages in Connecticut caused by Hurricane Irene. We hope everyone else has recovered from the storm.

A reminder, new technical content will not be posted in this blog but at davidschaffer.us

David Schaffer

New updates will now be in a different feed. Please follow http://theremustbe.posterous.com/rss.xml

David Schaffer

One of the early promises of "thin client" computing was that the heavy lifting would take place on the server and the client workstation could be quite modest. But is that still a reality? I've found recently that modern browsers and web sites seem to push more of the processing back onto the workstation. The speed at which the browser itself and individual web sites load and refresh seem pretty much proportional to the speed of the workstation. I've got several older computers that I've kept around for accessing the Internet and other simple tasks. The machines haven't gotten any slower over time but the way they respond when running major browsers certainly has.

Lower hardware requirements are not often cited as a benefit of Cloud Computing these days -- and apparently with good reason.

Are there real technical reasons for what I'm seeing?

Comment at http://theremustbe.posterous.com/is-thin-client-still-thin

I have a user with iNotes, no Notes client, and a Blackberry we've connected to our BES. So how do we synchronize contacts for this user?

Notes users can synchronize the mail file contacts list with their personal names.nsf through Notes replication. For Traveler users that then gives them sync to their devices.

For Blackberry users, we replicate their personal names.nsf up to the BES and that syncs with their device contacts list. If they want their contacts available via iNotes they can also synchronize contacts during replication and have end-to-end sync between Blackberry, Notes and iNotes.

But the iNotes user can't sync their contacts back to a names.nsf.

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It turns out it's very hard to find a system to match our CRM needs, which seemed fairly simple.

The tech environment: About 35 users. Notes/Domino for messaging. Mix of Windows and Mac and of Blackberry and iPhone (Blackberries on BES, iPhones on Traveler).

The business need: The bulk of the users are consultants who both sell and perform work. Relationships with prospects and clients can last years, and we may follow past clients as they move position or even as they switch employer.


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This blog is being put into "archive" mode and new posts will be at ThereMustBe.posterous.com. I hope you will continue to visit.

Issues of blog SPAM and the bandwidth demands of hosting a public blog on a home-based server have overwhelmed me. With the Posterous site I will be able to focus on the content of the blog, not on maintaining it. I intend to blog more often -- we'll see if I can live up to that intention.

David Schaffer

I'm looking at alternate email clients for Domino for two reasons:
1.        Some management and user dissatisfaction with Notes, especially on Mac OSX.
2.        Other clients are better supported by third party integration for CRM

I've tried DAMO with Outlook 2007 on Windows XP. It's nice, although in limited testing I found some odd lags in synchronizing with the server, but you see those with Outlook used against a POP server as well. I wanted to see how this worked but it is pretty much a dead end for us as Windows XP is going away fast -- future purchases will be Windows 7 or, increasingly, Macintosh OSX. And I've seen no indication that IBM is interested in updating DAMO.

So we turn to the dreaded IMAP. I know that there are lots of performance and other issues with IMAP in big production environments, but this installation will probably never have more than 50 mail users total so I think we can chance it.

My first test was with Mac Mail. This comes integrated into OS X much as Outlook Express used to be integrated into Windows.

I was actually quite impressed. Mac Mail itself is a nice application, with an interface very similar to ThunderBird. IMAP, at least for a test account, seems to work well. Inbox and folders synchronize well. Sent messages go into a new Sent folder in the Domino mail file rather than into the standard Sent, but at least they're saved back to Domino.

I was able to also set up LDAP lookup into the Domino Directory so the user would get type ahead when addressing mail very much as they're used to with Notes.

Outgoing mail is a problem. I've had hit or miss success with using Domino as an outgoing server for SMTP clients; more a of a security challenge than a mail routing challenge I think. For testing at least I've simply used one or our ISP's SMTP servers.

The other issue is calendar. I haven't found any way to link the calendar application that comes with OS X to the calendar in the Domino mail file.

I think my next test will be Outlook 2011 on the Mac.

David

(Cross posted to Posterous; comments may work better on that site.)

If anyone posted any real comments here in the last few days, please email me (dschaffer at bloginprogress dot us). I had nearly 900 blocked comments so I purged them all. Hope I didn't miss a gem in the process.

David

I'm in the early stages of two cloud migrations. One is a pilot of Salesforce.com for CRM. The other is a move of ERP (accounting) onto new software in a hosted environment. I'm finding that my expectations, coming from "premises based" systems tightly integrated with each other, need to change. I used "premises based" in quotes because half of our servers were moved to colocation some time ago but that made very little difference in day to day management. These moves are different.

Part of the shock on the ERP is just the change of scale. Our current system, Sage Pro Series, sits on any available file share (currently Novell OES). It's written in Foxpro/Visual Studio and while the data is shared the executables run entirely on the user workstations. The replacement, Sage Accpack, requires four servers -- a SQL server, an application server, a web server and a data store.  On the other hand, the old system won't run on any OS after Windows XP, can only run from the LAN or by remote control of a machine on the LAN, doesn't have great reporting flexibility, and is hard to integrate for related tasks such as time and expense reporting.

Click to read more.

How many microblogging and IM streams can you follow before it becomes your whole day?

I'm on three Sametime communities (work, BleedYellow and Greenhouse). I'm on Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn and 4Square. And now it looks like I will need to monitor "Chatter" on SalesForce.com.

Is it "Get Social - Do Business" or "Get Social - Do Business - Choose one"?

Anyone know of a good consolidated client that will suppress cross postings so I see everything and see it just once?

[Comment spam filtering is being over aggressive. Don't duplicate post; I will approve the rejected comments and they will appear in time.]