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Category Data Management
Changes to an application design can cause many data integrity issues. For example, changes that resulted in a field being renamed can cause data to disappear, at least from a user’s perspective, and are virtually impossible to find unless you know they are missing. Similarly, orphaned documents are just as difficult to deal with. If you have a large database, it may be impractical to check each document manually, prior to deployment. As a result, these issues don’t even present themselves until they are in the production environment.

Data maintenance should be a primary concern when designing strategies. Make sure that application managers are involved in deployment plans and possibly even design plans. There should be functionality built into the application that can monitor data integrity issues. Relatively simple scheduled agents can be developed that can periodically check documents, or update older documents to conform to new designs.

Feedback for any potential usability issue causing data to be input incorrectly should be provided immediately. An easy way to prevent issues is to make it extremely clear what data is required for each field, and in what format it should be. Make sure your design requirements entail the use of input validation and input translation formulas. Not letting data errors be input in the first place is critical.

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 8:14 AM | Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Data Management Risk
Considering the investment you have made in your Lotus Notes/Domino infrastructure, it is critical to promote data integrity to help maximize the return on your investment. In general, you can address threats to data integrity by implementing both preventive and detective initiatives.

Data Integrity Threat	Detection or Prevention
Perform Regular Data Backups	Prevention
Control Access to Data via Security Mechanisms	Prevention
Monitor Access to Data via Security Mechanisms	Detection
Design User Interfaces that Prevent the Input of Invalid Data	Prevention
Design Document Maintenance into the Application	Prevention
Monitor Updates to Documents and Record Change Histories	Detection
Use Error Detection and Correction Software when Transmitting Data	Detection
Scan Applications Regularly for Common Issues such as Broken URL Links	Detection

Within the Lotus Notes/Domino environment, general threats can occur as well as Notes-specific problems such as save/replication errors, poor replication strategies, broken links to documents or Lookup Views, or users simply in the wrong application.

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 3:29 AM | Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Risk IT Governance
It’s a fact. Every company faces risk. Whether you are concerned about regulation compliance, security, technology, privacy, fraud or other facets of risk, you are likely focused on risk mitigation and detection. This is absolutely critical to the long term success of your business. So I’m glad you are paying attention to it.

Risk management is usually thought of in terms of cost, particularly time and money. How much time and money has to be spent in order to manage risk at an acceptable level? It sounds simple, but I know this can be very difficult to do in practice. But it has to be done.

Regardless of the type of business you have, a certain amount of risk mitigation must take place. You must protect customer information. You must file appropriate financial statements. You must maintain fair hiring practices. Managing these risks well is not going to ensure your company is wildly successful. Although managing them poorly might ensure your company will fail.

There is another side to risk management that is frequently ignored when creating risk management policies. Having a risk/reward view of risk management will help you see the opportunities that effective risk management can provide.

For example, you can’t do much about hurricanes, blizzards or floods. But you can put a disaster recovery plan in place that allows you to recover much more quickly than your competitors. What if you could recover in hours or a day when your competitors were taking a week or more to get back to business?

Now that’s getting the most out of managing risk.

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 1:51 AM | Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Hobbies Personal

I can see from the article below that Michael Wenn is having some great triathlon success with an early win. Congratulations Michael!

http://www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk/sport/Triathlon-Wenn-wins-novice-event.5350712.jp

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 11:15 AM | Location Beverly, MA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Data Management
Once an application has been deployed, the data that it stores must be properly managed. This includes the usage of the data as well as the data’s integrity. The application data must be managed in an ongoing fashion to ensure it is relevant, accurate and secure.

Your company’s data, especially as it pertains to customers, is your most valuable asset. The costs of unreliable data are derived from a number of events. Some of those events include; incorrect conclusions drawn from data analysis exercises, increased costs through a trial and error method to sift through data for accuracy, and providing customers with incomplete or incorrect information based on faulty data. In addition, unreliable data will encourage your customers, vendors, management and anyone else who has a stake in your enterprise to question your credibility. It only takes a small amount of faulty data to put the entire data set in question. If only 10% of your data is faulty but you don’t know which 10%, you can’t trust any of it.

In the IBM Lotus Notes/Domino environment, data integrity issues such as save/replication conflicts, disconnected links and hidden or lost fields are common. Searching for these errors is labor-intensive and typically occurs only when a problem is reported, if at all. As a result, the integrity of the applications and data is questionable and can put your organization at risk. In order to minimize these risks, policies that ensure the integrity of your data must be implemented.

Since many of the problems related to error detection and monitoring are difficult to do on a large scale, it is important to find ways that will help you do the work. Finding data integrity issues that already exist and being alerted when new errors occur is the best way to ensure you get the most from Notes/Domino. This will also avoid allowing you to get burned by failing an audit.

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 7:10 PM | Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (2) |      

Category Hobbies Personal

Sorry, Michael, I keep my fitness regimen to distances under 4 miles - something I can do in a half hour.  Because that's all you have to do right?  Just enough fitness?  And to prove it, I ran a 5K race this weekend (3.1 miles).   And here are my tips for doing 'well' in a race.  Pick a 'first annual' race that no one has heard of - there won't be as many entrants.  Pray for bad weather (cold and rainy was what I got) so the sunshine runners won't show up.  And wait until a milestone birthday so you will be in a different age bracket.

But I have to tell you, those old people don't have to go to kids soccer games, so all they do is train.  So this was my first race in almost three years.   Because you have to stay healthy and avoid injuries (and hope your gym doesn't go bankrupt) in order to train.  So I found this race because it was near me.  The short version is I finished in 24 minutes, 52 seconds!   My wife was going to document my finish, and I said I wanted to break 25 minutes - I guess I was too fast and beat her to the end, so no pictures.   I came in 3rd in my age bracket, and 24th overall.   Never mind that there were 6 people in my age bracket and 90 runners total.  

So, Michael can have his triathlons - I'll stick to the short ones!  Happy trails!

Posted by John Kingsley At 9:28 PM | Location Beverly, MA | Permalink | Comments (2) |      

Category Application Development
One of the topics that comes up frequently in conversations these days is web-enabling applications. I used to talk about adding a little bit of Dojo to your code to get a very appealing web interface. And then I saw XPages, which really addresses the notion of: 'what are you trying to accomplish by web enabling your application? XPages allows the developer to completely rethink how a user interacts with the data. Can you imagine trying to order something from Amazon if a Notes developer just web enabled that database?

Based on the articles, blog posts, and videos going around, it seems that XPages have been very quickly adopted by the development community. I know you are supposed to use the tool that is appropriate for the problem, but those frameworks were (see - I'm even talking about them in the past tense) hard to use. The Notes team has given us a tool in XPages that is a lot easier to adopt. So, is anyone still debating Dojo versus Ext.ND anymore?

Posted by John Kingsley At 2:45 PM | Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (3) |      

Category Teamstudio Products

For my inaugural post on Voices, I’d like to explain the background to the Find-A-Bug campaign we are now launching at Teamstudio. Like many companies these days, we use tools like Google alerts and TweetBeep to keep an ear out for anything people are saying about us. Most of what we come across is good and we always love to hear that. Sometimes we find someone who is having a problem that we can help with and we pass the details on to our tech support team. But last year I heard something that scared me. Paraphrasing, the tweet was along the lines of “Time to head home for the day - Analyzer has crashed again”. What hit me about that is not the fact that Analyzer crashed, nor even that Analyzer crashed ‘again’. The really scary part was the acceptance that, yeah, crashing is just what Analyzer does. It doesn’t even merit a call to tech support.

So, if you have a few minutes, I’ll explain why Analyzer crashes and what we’re doing about it. The code at the heart of Analyzer dates back around 12 years, to 1997. We were relatively new to Notes and, at version 4.0, Notes was a much simpler animal than it is today. The format that Notes uses to store its data internally is complex and relies on careful processing to read it correctly. The big mistake I made was to assume that the format described in the documentation was the only thing that we would ever find in a Notes application and
designed the code accordingly.

Looking back, that decision seems laughably naive. Over the years, we’ve seen databases where a data structure simply terminates half way through with the second half being complete garbage. We’ve seen databases where the middle part of a structure has been moved by two bytes for no apparent reason. We’ve seen data in totally incorrect formats. It is these unexpected situations that cause Analyzer to crash. We still don’t know quite what causes these situations. Sometimes we can track an issue back to the Mac Designer Client (remember that?). Sometimes we suspect a Notes beta or even a beta of one of our products might have written the data incorrectly.

Over the years we’ve fixed all of the Analyzer crashes that we have identified, but the nature of these fixes is that they’re always very specific to a particular data structure. Analyzer crashes are now rare, but there are many hundreds of data properties within Notes and the code for handling each one needs to be checked to make sure that it can handle anything it encounters without crashing. We have kicked off a project internally to completely protect all of our data-handling code. Our goal is to get to the point where no unexpected data can crash our products. Ever.

So we are launching a campaign we’re calling the ‘Find-A-Bug Challenge’. Why the campaign? I have two hopes. First, that we’ll find the bugs that are hurting you the most. It’s a huge task to bullet-proof all of our data handling code and although we’ll get to it all, I’d like to prioritize the areas that are causing the most pain. Second, I want to bring home to everyone within Teamstudio that it’s a big deal when our products crash. To our customers, I know that you’re insanely busy and that reporting our bugs to us is not high on you priority list, but if you can find time to let us know I can promise you that we’ll take the issue seriously. Bug reports don’t have to be fancy - if you have a database design that’s crashing one of our products and can send us a copy of the design, that’s all we need. No need for screenshots or lengthy explanations. So, what’s in it for you? Well, outside of just knowing that we are taking your issue seriously and will do out best to fix it, we’re also going to send out what I think are some pretty neat t-shirts to users who submit bugs to us.

If you think you have a bug to report, we would love to hear about it! We’ve put up some information about the Find-A-Bug Challenge on our website with details on how you can submit. And of course, if you have any questions or concerns, please comment below or feel free to contact me directly at mark_dixon@teamstudio.com.

Posted by Mark Dixon At 7:14 AM | Location Beverly, MA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category IT Governance
Not who as in the Top Gear guy, but what. It's from the Department of Defense and stands for Security Technical Implementation Guides. One of these guides covers Application Security and Development. Just wondering if anyone out there in the yellowverse has come into contact with any of these, what the review process was like, and whether you uncovered any tools to help automate this review. John

Posted by John Kingsley At 2:36 PM | Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Category Fun

Teamstudio recently conducted a survey, just for fun, where we asked a variety of questions from length of commute to when we would come out of this recession. It was fun to do with some interesting results. If you participated in the survey, thanks very much. If not, you might still enjoy the results posted below.

Since we were curious to see what differences might exist between Lotus Notes Developers and Admins, (and in my case, Managers and C-Level executives), I grouped those of you who are either and Admin/Manager or a Developer/Manager as either Admin or Developer. I also group Managers and C-Level executives into a single category. For those of you who are a Developer/Admin, I left you alone. Finally, we did not have anyone who described their role as "Procurement" respond to the survey, so I left them off. We had 107 people respond to the survey.

There were some interesting and in some cases, unexpected results. The results are included here as an Excel spreadsheet. Some of the highlights (at least for me) are as follows:

        - There seems to be more optimism about when the recession would end than what I expected to see, although Admins are a bit more optimistic than Developers. However neither group is as pessimistic as Managers and C-Level executives.
        - All agree that Internet surfing is the biggest waste of work time, with Admins and Developers having almost identical results.
        - Admins on average get less sleep (I could have guessed that ) and less exercise. (I guess they are busy chasing their end users and developers around work all day.)
        - Developers are (apparently) willing to drive further to get to work.
        - All groups prefer coffee as their caffeinated beverage of choice, but Admins felt more strongly about it. Surprisingly, NO ONE completing the survey selected an Energy Drink such as Red Bull.
        - More than 25% of Admins don't have time to read. Those who do prefer novels followed by Science Fiction. Developers also prefer novels followed by nonfiction.

I hope you enjoy reviewing the results from this survey. Please let me know if you have any follow up questions. I am happy to do my best to answer them.

Scott

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 9:16 AM | Location Beverly, MA | Permalink | Comments (0) |