Simon Scullion

Kevin Hansen in an open letter to Mike Rhodin:

You have the world’s attention at the moment. For the sake of all of us who live and breath Lotus Notes/Domino, please make full use of this brief and rare opportunity.

Out of a strong belief that Notes 8 is the most important release of Notes in the last decade this blog has frequently been a location where I can beg and plead anyone at IBM/Lotus to do more advertising and marketing to get that message out to new audiences. Yes, there have been a number of activities on that circulated around Notes 8 … but its not enough. And, what is out there doesn’t get to the right people. And when it does, it leaves them confused asking “what does an animal hybrid have to do with my company — or Lotus Notes?”

My point is that it is frustrating to believe so strongly in a product and have to frequently respond to questions like “is Lotus Notes still around?”

It is. And it has a great story to tell.

More >

Well worth a read.

Tags: ibm, lotus, notes, symphony

Peter O’Kelly sums up the key strengths of the Lotus story and how that faces off to Microsoft’s offering:

I think there’s more to the story, however: if you consider the Eclipse.org-based foundation in Notes 8, along with the OpenOffice.org-derived Lotus Symphony “productivity editors”, the fact that Notes 8 runs on multiple platforms (eventually multiple versions of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS), and the fact that Notes is also a template-driven application development platform (with a tightly-coupled and purpose-built, multi-platform server counterpart), the competitive overlap goes far beyond Outlook. You could argue that aspects of Notes actually compete with Windows, Office (not just Outlook), and even the .NET Framework.

Emphasis mine.

He was commenting on Michael J. Millers article on the latest version of Notes and Domino.

Thanks to those who responded to my previous bleat for help, I have been back to try and get this working but still no luck!

The situation is as follows:

• Domino 7 sever running on RHEL as a guest in VMware
• I can ping from the host both IP address and hostname of the guest
• I can ping the host from the guest
• The Domino server is up and running and I can connect over http and run the Domino web admin
• nmap shows port 1352 as open on the guest
• I have allowed incoming traffic from the guest to the host in my firewall
• the VM has a fixed IP addressed and is running in host-only mode
• I have added the IP address and FQHN for the guest to my host’s “host” file
• I can connect to the guest from the host via SSH and FTP

The continuing problem is that I can’t connect from the Notes or Admin client on the host. I’m not sure whether I made that apparent before. I have tried the following:

• I have a connection document configured for the server.
• I have tried using both a FQHN or the IP address as destination address
• When I try opening a database and enter the server name, I get the error:
  ---------------------------
IBM Lotus Notes
---------------------------
The server is not responding. The server may be down or you may be experiencing network problems. Contact your system administrator if this problem persists.
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------
• When I try opening a database and enter the IP address, I get the error:
  ---------------------------
IBM Lotus Notes
---------------------------
Unable to find path to server. To trace this connection, use File - Preferences - User Preferences - Ports - Trace (Notes client) or Trace command (Domino server)
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

To me this makes no sense, and is beyond my networking problem-solving abilities, I feel I can’t see the wood for the trees!

Has anyone else done this? I can’t imagine I’m the only one! So I must be missing something simple, right? Any ideas most welcome!

In the meantime, I going to install a Notes client in another guest VM and try to get them talking.

Wish me luck!

Still catching up with email and blog reading, not helped by the excitement over the Notes Domino 8 release while I was away!

This post from Michael Smelser caught my eye:

The functionality I am referring to is running the Notes client in “Kiosk” mode, that is running a Notes application as if it were a stand alone product. What this does is it launches an application full screen on a users computer with no toolbars or bookmark bars.

So how do we manage it? Easy!

To launch the application in Kiosk mode use this in your Notes icon, startup script, whatever:
“[path to Notes executable]” /kiosk “[path\db.nsf]”
(e.g. “C:\Program Files\lotus\notes7\nlnotes.exe” /kiosk “af\main.nsf”

I didn’t know how this was done either, thanks Michael!

James Governor of RedMonk raised a question that has come up a few times in the Lotus blogsphere, on the subject of Ubuntu as an IBM supported OS.

I mentioned the fact that DB2 is supported on Ubuntu, a fact which doesn’t really fit with some of the justification for not supporting Lotus Notes and Domino, that Ubuntu is not an “enterprise” operating system.

James followed up this morning, and wonders whether

Ubuntu really just isn’t seeing much in the way of enterprise adoption as yet

Sounds like a chicken and egg situation to me!

Ubuntu is an extremely popular desktop distribution, so in my opinion, chances are support for software like Lotus Notes on Ubuntu would go a long way to opening the door to further enterprise adoption. I realise this is not an adequate cost justification, but if we’ve managed to get the Notes 8 Beta running on Ubuntu by ourselves, my guess is there isn’t a hell of a lot that IBM would need to do to get this sorted.

One other point I have mentioned before (can’t remember where!) is that with Ubuntu support, could IBM Lotus not look to provide more of an “appliance” (along the lines of Nitix), if not for production, at least for testing or demonstration purposes?

With a consistent support for Ubuntu across the IBM portfolio, they could potentially provide a serious offering to the SMB market. Taking the appliance approach and therefore “hiding” the underlying technologies somewhat, certain barriers to entry could be eliminated, at least from an install / admin standpoint.

Good luck trying to get more on this one James, there are lots of us very interested in where it could lead!

So, tonight I managed to have another go at getting the Lotus Notes 8 client running under Ubuntu.

Disclaimer: I do realise this is not supported, and I agree with John and his rules of engagement, curiosity has just got the better of me!

Thanks to Nathan’s tip on the Beta forum, I manually created a notes.ini file which was missing from the install, and managed to launch the client!

Unfortunately it didn’t take me long to encounter NSD running but I realise I’m on my own with this, though my guess is there’ll be a few others than just Stuart and I!

I’ve been taking a load of screenshots throughout the process, and will try to get full write-up of my adventures so far. Stay tuned!

Back in Windows-land, I have had a quick play with the client too, and to answer Bruce’s question, I like, a lot! On first impressions, I think I’d go as far as to say that having to go back to the Notes 7 client now is going to be as enjoyable as working in Notes 4.6 was, prior to Saturday! Again, more detail to come.

On another note, Christopher Byrne made a good point in a comment over on Ed’s blog regarding a common tag for all this. I’m with him on using “Notes8Beta” for technorati.

The public beta of Lotus Notes and Domino 8 is now available!

Go and get it!

Having seen the demo and followed all the news over the last year or so, I am really looking forward to this install.

Lets hope the wait has been worth it, I’m sure it will have been.

As can be expected, Ed has more details on the release.