Blog In Progress

First, I hope you've all had a wonderful holiday season and wish you health, success and happiness in the new year.

2009 was a bit "interesting" for me from a business perspective. My major support client had a fairly dramatic drop in their business, so my commitment there was reduced. Besides being a financial hardship it gave me some new challenges in terms of setting limits, managing expectations and anticipating needs. I had basically been available for technical support and hand-holding 24 x 7 (although I do have my Blackberry turn itself off every night at 11 so I can get some sleep) and they were no longer paying for that availability.

A few of my small business customers were also hurt by economic conditions enough to affect their business with me. And it was a tough economy for picking up new clients.

Looking forward to improvement all around in 2010.

On the technology front I did have a lot of time available to explore on-line resources, hang out on social networking sites, and delve into new technologies.

I got three production Domino mail/application servers upgraded to Domino 8.5.1 (two Windows and one Linux). I got DAOS running on a server where it made a big difference. I've got Blackberry Enterprise Server running on Domino 8.5 -- it was on Domino 6.5 not long ago -- and it pretty much just sits there and runs. That's the way I like technology to work. I also added Traveler to one Domino server for a single iPhone user. It was a fairly trivial setup and the user is thrilled but I don't know what the impact would be if we had a bunch of users hitting it.

I spent a fair bit of time evaluating Symphony vs MS Office 2007 as a replacement for MS Office 2003. Much as I like Symphony for myself Office just made more sense for a consulting organization that's constantly exchanging documents still in progress with clients. And Symphony still has some odd shortcomings -- envelope printing is still a work in progress, in fact all printing is still a bit hit or miss, and there are some unfortunate problems with formatting changing as you pass a document back and forth between Office and Symphony. I'm looking forward to the next version but I think it will remain an option only for very large organizations that can make ODF their own standard and for folks that can use it internally and pass finished content along in pdf.

Looking ahead 2010 looks like the year my last NetWare servers will finally be retired. This will likely mean getting up to speed on Active Directory and Windows Server as a file-and-print solution. But if money stays tight we might end up with Open Enterprise Server, or even an appliance-type solution for file sharing and lose managed printing.

In general in 2010 I'm counting on spending some time (and clients' money) replacing hardware that's overdue because of cutbacks in the past 18 months. On the laptop/desktop side that means I'll be getting to know Windows 7.

Postings to this blog over the year have been spotty. As many others have noted the ability to "microblog" and post status updates all over the Internet preempts a lot of posts. I've also started posting a few items on computer security and I've set up a new blog for that, theremustbe.posterous.com.

I hope to be even more interactive on matters technical and personal in the coming year so please feel free to post a response or contact me directly. I'm still looking for business as a consultant and VAR for small business or for network administration (Lotus, Novell, other Linux or Microsoft). I'm continuing to look for interesting things to write about.

About that contact stuff:
Twitter
Facebook
E-mail
LinkedIn

I'm also on Bleed Yellow and Greenhouse (and usually remember to launch Sametime) if you want to reach me that way.