Pressure from the cloud

Published
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Simon Scullion
on April 24, 2009
in links
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No, we’re not talking meteorology here!

I have been keeping an interested eye on some of the developments from Amazon with their Amazon Web Services, so when I saw the following tweet from friend/colleague/troublemaker @MasterMark, it made me sit up!

Oh, dude! It’s a war, and cloud is a battlefield. #orcl swallows #sun, and days l8r, #ibm announces the end of licenses. http://is.gd/ueWt

He is referring to this article, announcing the availability of IBM technology in the cloud, running on AWS’  EC2 platform, with an innovative approach to licensing.

On Amazon EC2 you can run many of the proven IBM platform technologies with which you’re already familiar, ….. By choosing Amazon EC2, you can get started in either of two ways. You can pay by the hour only for what you use, through Amazon EC2 running IBM. Alternatively, you can bring many of your own IBM licenses to run on Amazon EC2.

This got me thinking of the impact that this could have on certain internal applications that suffer from performance and scalability issues. For example, global instances which see spikes as people come online across different timezones. Do you scale for the spikes, or the average load and take the performance hit during peak use?

Amazon’s EC2, combined with applications such as IBM’s Websphere Portal, is now giving the enterprise an interesting choice. Do we put the application server out in the cloud, and have the flexibility to scale up and down according to demand?

Yet many corporations are still wary of the cloud, preferring to keep things on the inside, under their watchful eyes. So how would a large organisation replicate and offer something capable of this internally? I imagine virtualisation would be at the heart of any attempt, but the investment required would be significant, if not exorbitant, both in infrastructure and software. Could they even get close to competing on cost, ease of administration, billing…?

When will we see new expectations - I’ll call them “cloud-induced” -  take hold in the enterprise, where factors such as flexibility, agility, almost-zero required investment, take an increasingly higher priority? It strikes me that it will rapidly become harder for IT departments to provide and manage internally-hosted solutions that meet user expectations, as awareness of the cloud’s capabilities grows in the business.

Think about it. All Amazon ask of us is a credit card number….

ScribeFire, Zemanta, and a hidden tracking image

Published
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Simon Scullion
on March 17, 2009
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Yesterday’s post was created using a is a great add-on for Firefox, ScribeFire, which:

is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog.

However, in making a minor edit to the post, I noticed some code at the bottom:

<div class="zemanta-pixie"><img src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=[long tracking number here]” class=”zemanta-pixie-img” /></div>

Where had that come from!? At no point had I consciously selected an option to add it there!

So a quick search later, I’d learnt that Zemanta is a service built into ScribeFire, providing additional related content to “enrich your blog posts”.

A comment on Brent’s blog explained how to deselect this “option” in the ScribeFire settings, under the ‘Publishing’ tab, look for ‘Automatically insert invisible tracking pixel for statistics gathering’.

Bad boys, ScribeFire and Zemanta, for not being open about things, and  enabling this option by default. At least provide a link to an explanation as to what “statistics” are being gathered, and for what means!

Changing Habits

Published
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Simon Scullion
on March 16, 2009
in Personal and Social Media
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It’s overdue that I talked a little about what I have been up to, and the shift in my professional focus over the last few of months. My “role” is no longer directly Lotus product related, but now has a broader collaborative scope. For those readers following me on Twitter, this is probably already apparent, through my increasingly regular tweets about Confluence(s) and Qwaq(ing)!

So what am I doing exactly?

Well, basically I am working as part of a small team, on initiatives to drive better collaboration within my internal organisation. This involves making best use of our current tools, and looking at some new opportunities along the way.

There is a lot on the go, and it’s keeping me both busy and engaged. I’m finding it a great opportunity to channel much of the enthusiasm I have built up over the last few years around collaboration, social software, and the continuous innovation in this space.

Wikis, wikis, and more wikis…!

At the top of my list is driving adoption of our enterprise wiki. Confluence is a powerful platform, and it is easy to demonstrate simple examples where teams and users can work more effectively. By getting my hands dirty working with some of the more advanced macros, I am discovering more about the potential of the platform, and am able to put new ideas in the hands of the users.

Qwaq, Qwaq! No I haven’t turned into a duck!

I have been interested in “Virtual Worlds” for the last few years, though not particularly from a personal perspective. I find my first life offers me much richer entertainment options than Second Life! However in an enterprise context, I have long thought they provide an exciting opportunity to change the way we interact. Over the last few months a group of us have been using Qwaq Forums internally to explore some of these opportunities. We are building out some scenarios demonstrating how the technology can be of benefit for large, global organisations.

So what’s it to do with Changing Habits?

In many of my recent conversations, I have found myself discussing corporate culture, working habits, ways of driving adoption, as part of a broader theme of participation. One of my favourite lines is that “we have to get into the habit of participating”.

So there are two sides to the title of this post.

Firstly, I have a worry that my own efforts here on the blog don’t do a great job of backing up some of my arguments! Therefore this post is something of a renewed commitment to my active participation here. Daily links and tweet summary posts don’t count as blogging!

Secondly, I wanted to leave you with a question. What habits do you find you follow, relating to your participation in blogs, twitter, wikis and the like? Good or bad!

So, did anyone notice the redesign!?

Published
by
Simon Scullion
on March 11, 2009
in Personal and blog
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Considering the lack of love I’ve been showing to my own blog, I can’t really expect otherwise!

I’d been meaning to do quite a bit of house-keeping for some time. I actually also had a blog over at malapata.com, which I have now imported and redirected here. Wordpress made that easy enough. Does anyone have any recommendations on setting up link redirects to specific posts? Do I ned to bother?

Getting a more personal theme was also something I wanted to do, and so having looked into the fantastic K2 theme, thought I’d have a go at reusing my old malapata.com design and applying it here. K2 made it pretty easy to do, and now I guess I’ll just be tyweaking as and when I can!

Oh, and I guess it’d be a mistake to commit to getting back into the blogging habit!? Hang on, not sure I ever did!

MS Excel moving with the times

Published
by
Simon Scullion
on December 1, 2008
in gripes
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Over the last few days I have been spending more time in MS Excel than can be considered good for my health! As I tweeted this morning, this has obviously hasn’t been without its frustrations!

I don’t often use Excel for more than basic stuff, but this time I am putting together a front end to a simple reporting tool in our internal Confluence wiki. More to come on that in a later post, but allow me to get this off my chest first!

First up, I wanted to do some string concatenation. Easy I thought, only to find out that the CONCATENATE() function does not allow a cell range to be used as a parameter!

Google to the rescue, where I came across this great little snippet of VB which does the job nicely:

'*****************************************
‘Purpose: Concatenate all cells in a range
‘Inputs: rRng - range to be concatenated
‘ sDelimiter - optional delimiter
‘ to insert between cell Texts
‘Returns: concatenated string
‘*****************************************
Public Function MultiCat( _
ByRef rRng As Excel.Range, _
Optional ByVal sDelim As String = “”) _
As String
Dim rCell As Range
For Each rCell In rRng
MultiCat = MultiCat & sDelim & rCell.Text
Next rCell
MultiCat = Mid(MultiCat, Len(sDelim) + 1)
End Function

Next I wanted to create some links between workbooks. Easy right!? Its easy enough to create the links, but I didn’t like the full filepaths it was using:

C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents....\

So I went to look for a way of creating relative links….

It turns out that in some areas, Excel hasn’t exactly kept up with the times. This article gives us some insight:

it just can’t be done in Excel. A *LONG* time ago Microsoft wrote the original Excel version 1 for 512K Macs. Those beasts had a nonhierarchical file system and mostly only one floppy drive and no harddrive, so there could only be one file open with a given base filename. And Microsoft decreed this was Good & Sufficient, and it hasn’t changed at all since. Yes, all OS’s under which the most recent 3 or 4 versions of Excel runs now have hierarchical file systems spanning multiple local and networked drives, but Microsoft seems not to care to expend the resources to bring this bit of Excel functionality out of the mid 1980’s.

So a dead-end there then! :-(

The same article goes on to finish with an assessment of things….

Excel simply hasn’t evolved from its original implementation in this respect. It’s nice to imagine Microsoft fixing this, but it probably won’t happen until well after they provide built-in support for flashing text. Microsoft seems to prefer adding eyewash to adding serious features that have been in competing spreadsheets for over a decade.

Sad, but likely true. I had to chuckle, rather than cry.

“New-Generation Workers” Want Technology Their Way

Published
by
Simon Scullion
on November 26, 2008
in Technology
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Today I caught a discussion on the findings of a survey carried out by Accenture.

Millennial generation students and employees (those aged 14 to 27) expect to use their own technology and mobile devices for work and are increasingly choosing their place of employment based on how accommodating companies are to their personal technology preferences

Yet more evidence demonstrating how our consumer technology choices are making their way into the workplace, meaning that the companies that best accommodate these demands will gain a competitive advantage through attracting, and most importantly, retaining, the best young talent.

Observing this, it appears we are increasingly demanding in our requirements for consumer technology, increasingly fickle with our choices and loyalties, and increasingly adept at managing the change new technology presents us.

Yet this often goes against our corporate mandated use of technology, where we are stuck in our old ways, show blind loyalty to old technology, and told that change is painful and risky! (I’d love you to chip in with candidates for each category! ;-))

So why is this still the case?

Will the “Millennial generation” win over their elders?

An Object Lesson On The Value Of Social Media Proficiency

Published
by
Simon Scullion
on November 20, 2008
in links
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Through my twitter stream, I came across this post, which is quite simply a fantastic account of how a company which understands the opportunity behind promoting and supporting its employees in their external blogging efforts, can harness the power of the medium.

Today, we used our social media machine to accomplish something big and visible that we just couldn’t have done any other way.

It talks about how EMC’s employee bloggers contributed to a highly successful new product launch announcement

We’ve now got a small army of EMC bloggers who are very proficient outside the firewall. They write well, cover things from an interesting perspective, and are each “followed” by many in the industry.

and the results

Perhaps one of the most effective “big idea” launches I’ve seen anywhere in our industry, ever.

Completely unachievable with a “1.0″ approach, I might add.

Then goes on to discuss some of the details of how they got there

How Did This Come To Be?
Easy.

We thought having a cadre of effective external bloggers was damn important, and we invested in getting what we thought we needed.

No one thing, a lot of little things:

* We made it “OK” to blog externally. We created external blogging guidelines (not “rules” or “policy”) in the input of our bloggers.

* We created a lightweight governance function in the event that our guidelines needed clarification or application to a particular circumstance.

* We created an internal support group of people who were either blogging externally, or wanted to. We gave people encouragement and coaching.

* We asked our PR organization to embrace and leverage our external bloggers, and change how they did things sliightly.

* We gave people an internal platform to practice (EMC|ONE) their blogging skills in a safe environment.

The bloggers brought the passion and expertise, though.

We just harnessed it.

Great to see real-world examples where this is both happening and being discussed.

Source: http://chucksblog.emc.com/a_journey_in_social_media/2008/11/an-object-lesson-on-the-value-of-social-media-proficiency.html

PS: Unfortunately I didn’t catch who tweeted the link to this, so can’t add you to the credits, apologies! :-(

Reading encrypted email in Lotus iNotes

Published
by
Simon Scullion
on October 1, 2008
in Lotus
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I have seen this crop up a number of times over on Twitter, and a couple of colleagues recently picked up on my response with the solution.

have you tried importing your ID into iNotes? allows you to read encrypted email

Their question was, “how do you do that?”. So here is my explanation:

  1. Select “Preferences” from the menu options top right of the screen. Lotus iNotes menu options

  2. Select the “Security” option from the preferences list on the left. Lotus iNotes security preferences

  3. Select “Import Notes ID” button.

  4. Browse to your ID file, enter your Notes password and press OK. Importing your Lotus Notes ID into iNotes

  5. That should be it!

You should now be able to read any encrypted emails you may have received.

I hope that helps!

So where and what have I been up to…!?

Published
by
Simon Scullion
on October 1, 2008
in Personal
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Yes, yet again, other than my twitter updates, the blog has been devoid of “real” content for quite some time!

That is not to say that there hasn’t been much going on, rather the opposite, “real” life standing between blog and blogger!

So here’s what I’ve been up to of late:

  • Brothers came over for a visit
  • Sorting boat paperwork so that she can actually be sailed!
  • Working on the boat so that she can actually be sailed!
  • Sister in-law came for a visit
  • Sailing (not our boat)
  • Weekend in Salamanca
  • A week at home alone without the girls ;-)
  • Sailing (finally!)
  • A week in Extremadura
  • A week in Menorca
  • Sailing, including a Sunday racing
  • Daughter starting “big” school
  • Gardening
  • In-laws visiting
  • Trying to catch up with my photos on Flickr
  • Building a wardrobe
  • debating names for the daughter in waiting….

Boring huh!

So while there has been progress in some areas, in others, the todo list keeps growing!

The road back from “lousy”

Published
by
Simon Scullion
on July 24, 2008
in Lotus
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Bruce has posted a quote which got me thinking….

“No IdeaJam is not the issue, just people afraid of Domino applications as they have only been exposed to lousy ones in the past”

Putting it mildly I’d say!

I’m a strong believer that the “bad reputation” suffered by Notes is far too often due to shocking Notes app development. That can include every aspect from programming to UI. All too often this is extended to Domino apps, aided by the mess that Domino makes of web development if we leave it to its own devices.

So a question for you. How many times have you seen an experienced web developer brought in to help on a Domino project? Exactly! Time and again its the original Notes developer asked to “put that app on the intranet”.

And I’m not trying to say that a PHP developer or the like could come in and work magic with Domino. Just that good results depend on the Notes developer adding new tools to the toolbox. At the same time, employers need to recognise the breadth of knowledge required to be a competent Notes Domino developer with the latest releases.

Xpages can save the world!

Bruce goes on to ask whether Xpages are the answer. In one word, No. The introduction of XPages, like composite apps, and even web services before it, just add to the problem IMHO.

If Notes developers aren’t already up on their CSS, Javascript, etc, then they’re not up to building respectable Domino apps, let alone taking advantage of XPages.

I’m not so sure it can be solved simply providing CSS themes or samples either. There are plenty of examples out there. Notes Domino developers need to be prepared to explore new areas, outside of Domino Designer, and then come back and work in what they have learnt. Those doing this are ready for XPages, like any of the new features that have come before.

I’ll sum it up in one word. Attitude.

A penny for your thoughts!

So what can we do about it? The Lotus blogsphere is only the tip of the iceberg. We all recognise that there are far more developers out there that don’t even read the blogs or forums, and aren’t privy to all our ranting and raving! We need to reach them to solve this problem.

Sample apps with a few “Wow, how can Notes do that!? Can I have it in my XYZ app?” features, to help push these developers into pastures new can only be a good thing.

But if Lotus were to show users and management what all this new “stuff” is really capable of, with some must-have, must-use, out-of-the-box templates, that really demonstrate the capabilities bringing a benefit to the business, then that would certainly help.

As Bruce’s quote attests, in today’s economic climate, business will not invest in new product, let alone new features, if they don’t see a clear benefit. Something only compounded if they have been scarred in the past.

Notes and Domino developers need to be forced out of their comfort zone, pushed by business drivers demanding functionality delivered through the new features. Lotus for their part, need to regain the confidence of the developers with a polished product, avoiding some of the disappointments and frustrations in prior versions.

My money is on it taking some time.

PS: One more thought, do other technologies suffer the same problems?