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Category Version Management
I visited a company in London recently - one of the larger professional services firms - to deliver a training session to their developers. During this visit I was told this most amusing story (well, I thought it was funny).

A developer urgently needed to make a change to a business-critical database. However, when she went looking for the template on the development servers she couldn't find it. Or rather she did find it . . . 4 times. And she had no idea which, if any, was the version last released to production.

So, the developer went into production and took a copy of the database. She identified the problem, made the fix, tested it, made the database into a template and emailed it to the administrators with instructions to refresh the design of the production database.

All well and good . . . however.

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Posted by Simon Peek At 8:20 AM | Location Huntingdon, UK | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category ILUG
Last week I attended ILUG in Dublin. The event was absolutely fantastic -- bigger and better than ever before with more sessions, more speakers and many more attendees. In fact, IMO (forget the 'Humble' bit cause I've been to more than a few shows in my time!) this was the best European event since the last Lotusphere Europe in Berlin. Anyone remember when that was? 2001?? Maximum credit should go to the organizers; people like Paul Mooney, Rob Novak, Warren Elsmore, Bill Buchan…

This year I was invited to deliver a session (twice, in fact) entitled “Build or Bust: Controlling your Designs from Development to Production”. (You can download presentation slides here)

The first session was particularly well attended with over 100 people. And I thought I had prepared carefully….
(1) I had saved a copy of my presentation slides to a memory stick (just in case the laptop blew up);
(2) I had printed copies of the slides for delegates (but I had only printed 30 sets);
(3) I had practiced the session (of course!); and
(4) I arrived in the room in plenty of time for setup.

Unfortunately the projector switched itself off every 5 minutes for 2 or 3 minutes and the microphone switched itself off every 10 minutes for a couple of minutes.

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Posted by Simon Peek At 4:49 PM | Location Huntingdon, UK | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category ILUG Worst Practices
I'm delivering a presentation at ILUG next week and I wanted to remind myself of the time & title of the session. So I go to www.ILUG2008.org . . .only to discover that the site is down.

Texting Paul I discover that he's in the process of upgrading to 8.5. On the live version of the site. That people are using to register for attendance. I presume that this configuration has been comprehensively tested prior to deployment!

Sounds like a Worst Practice to me

As a result of this, I discover that 8.5 has gone to Public Beta today.

Posted by Simon Peek At 11:06 AM | Location Huntingdon, UK | Permalink | Comments (1) |      

Category Tips and Tricks
I was in France recently facilitating a 2-day Teamstudio training/workshop at a large French bank in La Défense, Paris. I had arranged to visit the customer on the day before the event to prepare the training room but, at the last minute, my contact was called to a meeting and I was not able to do the setup. The developers did not have laptops, so the company provided a batch from a pool of machines retained for training purposes. Great. Unfortunately, when we started up the computers we found that although Notes had been installed, Domino Designer hadn't. As this session was about using Teamstudio tools to develop & maintain applications, this was a problem... Worse, the machines were ultra-secure. USB disabled, limited rights etc.

Happily, one of the developers, Pascal, reminded me of a little trick. If you simply create a text file in the Notes executable directory called designer.exe then Designer suddenly becomes available - launch the Notes client and you'll now see the Designer icon in the bookmarks bar. Don't believe me? I didn't the first time I heard of this trick! Try it out for yourselves. Is this a security loophole? Well, technically not; if your ACLs are set correctly you have nothing to worry about. Even so, I can think of some users in some companies who should not be allowed in the same building as a Designer client. So, let's just keep this little trick to ourselves. I won't tell anyone if you won't

I would be interested in hearing of any problems caused by this trick being exploited. And if anyone can remind me of the way to do this for Domino Administrator I would be most grateful.

Posted by Simon Peek At 10:16 AM | Location Huntingdon, UK | Permalink | Comments (5) |      

Category Lotusphere
We want you to come visit us at our booth and speak your mind. About what? Well, there are a few areas we would be interested in hearing your opinions on but, if there's someing else you want to rave about . . . or complain about . . . we would be interested in hearing about that too. Some of the people I've managed to grab so far have been well-known industry commentators such as Rob Axelrod and Rudi Knegt, Ben Langhinrichs says he'll drop by when he has time & Bill Buchan insist he'll come & see us when he's feeling better . . .. However, it's not just the commentator types we want to hear from. We also want to hear from you guys in the trenches. Whether you're a developer who can't wait to get his hands on 8.5, an administrator who can't get enough information from their log files or a manager who is driving an interesting project forward, we want to hear from you.

So, come and see us at stand 428/429, and speak your mind.

Posted by Simon Peek At 2:36 PM | Location Orlando, FL USA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Worst Practices
Overgrown Notes/Domino environments are quite common. We see a number of organizations with abandoned apps and redundant replicas for a multitude of reasons. Not to mention the lack of knowledge around application usage.

I was meeting with a customer recently who had 100,000 users and 50,000 Notes databases (not counting mail files). Wow, that's a lot of databases. Not only is that a lot of databases, but that works out at one database for every two Notes users in the company.

Then the other day I was speaking with another customer who had 8,000 databases (not counting mail files). Not so impressive you may think. However, they only have 4,000 users. For the mathematically challenged, that's two Notes databases for each and every Notes user. Three if you include mail files!

What are these databases being used for? Does anyone know? Who's managing these databases? How quickly are they growing? How often are they being accessed? Who's accessing them?

What's the highest ratio of databases to users that *you've* seen?

Posted by Simon Peek At 11:05 AM | Location Huntingdon, UK | Permalink | Comments (8) |