The Turtle Partnership Blog

As you may know the Agenda for ILUG in Dublin has now been published so hope you can make it. Looking down the agenda there are great sessions from an impressive list of excellent speakers, such as Bill Buchan, Chris Miller, Paul Mooney, Rob Novak, Bob Balaban, Rocky Oliver to name but a few.

A couple of sessions stand out for me (OK, I am biased) .....

Our own Gabriella Davis will be presenting "The Security Nip/Tuck - Tightening up your environment with Domino R8" on the first day.

In this comprehensive session Gabriella will take you through the new security enhancements introduced in Domino and highlight the most common security loopholes you may not be looking out for. Its aimed at organisations who may have originally installed Domino on versions 5 or earlier but have not reviewed their security. So they may still be running the original keys, using physical certifiers, not utilising SSL or TLS for data transport, keeping copies of User IDs for backup and may not be aware of what can now be controlled and managed with policies. So these aging environments may unnecessarily be ever more exposed to security threats.

Gabriella hopes to not only show that Domino and Notes security has kept up with the growing security risks but also explain how important it is to review and revisit security decisions made that were based on earlier versions.

I am also pleased to see that Valerie Wang, RIM Product Manager for IBM Technologies, will be presenting "Taking Lotus Collaboration beyond the office on your BlackBerry smartphone". I saw Valerie at Lotusphere and she was great speaker. In this session Valerie will outline a key theme from RIM - how you can effectively mobilise your infrastructure and applications using the BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

Once again  the ILUG team have put together an impressive free Europe-based Lotus technical event. They deserve a big round of applause for their achievement, particularly when there is so much great new stuff coming out of IBM Lotus to learn more about.

Mike Smith | London | TrackBacks (0) | Comments (0)

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There's a whole world of Google out there - my favourite one right now allows you to generate a Google search 'fight' between 2 words or phrases.  I already did Lotus Domino vs Microsoft Exchange and I'm not sure the huge win for Exchange is good or bad but then I moved onto the serious work of Chocolate vs Strawberry (Chocolate by 4:1) , Bagpuss vs Clangers (Bagpuss) and Stones vs Beatles (Beatles 2:1). Give it a go here Google Fight -
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Gabriella Davis | London | TrackBacks (0) | Comments (0)

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After 3 attempts over 8 years to make it to Rome, Tim and I finally organised ourselves and had 5 days in Rome and 2 day in Sorrento (with a day trip to Capri).  A quick whistle stop, unfair and biased summary below that may be of interest to anyone else going.

The Good

1. Colosseum - we opted not to be drawn in by the touts trying to catch tourists for a 'personal tour' and instead skipped the line by walking down the left hand side and spending 4.5 Euros on an audio tour which you wore round you neck and played.  It had to be returned within 2 hrs so we did the audio tour, returned the devices then spent another 3 hours just wandering around.  .
2. Open top bus tour - cheesy but amazingly good value and handy for orientating yourself.  We paid 23 Euros for 48 hours hopping on and off the buses all around Rome and twice caught the last bus of the day sitting upstairs in the open air as the sun set we got to look at the architecture of Rome for 90 minutes. Bliss.
3. St Peter's Basilica - a fast moving queue, free entry, an amazing and fascinating building and Michaelangelo's Pieta.
4. Pantheon an architectural marvel, beautifully preserved (and right opposite a McDonalds!)
5. La Minervetta B&B hotel in Sorrento overlooking Vesuvius with floor to ceiling windows in each room.  Just be careful when ordering an omelette for breakfast that you don't just specify 'no meat' or you'll end up with a Sauerkraut filling (it looks like harmless onion before you put it in your mouth.)
6. Hotel La Scalinatella, Capri .  They made an exception and let us sit and have the world's most welcome glass of Prosecco on their terrace even though we weren't guests they treated us beautifully. Thanks to them we got to see the Capri we hoped to find (the one belonging to Noel Coward not the one belonging to hoards of tourists looking for cheap D&G sandals)
7. Our apartment on Via Panisperna 3 mins walk from the Colosseum.  Rented through www.haldis.com who do corporate rentals, it was beautifully equipped, central and with high speed internet.  Plus they couldn't have been more helpful.  

The Truly Awful

1. The food.  I can't even tell you about the food.  Truly terrible food. Even at one meal a day we only managed 2 decent meals in 7 days.  One at the bar underneath our apartment and one at a cafe on via Serpenti .  I understand that going to touristy places means being inundated by tourist restaurants and I expect them to overcharge but why they also have to have lousy food is beyond me.  Two of the worst were actualy recommended in travel guides
2. The swarms of tourists.  I know we were two of them but honestly if all you want to do is experience a place and absorb the atmosphere you're completely out of luck.  Places like Piazza Navona and the Trevi Fountain are best avoided.  Sorrento and Capri were especially heinous with English tourists and pubs selling Stella - summed up by one waiter in Sorrento who, when taking our order said, "hey English! you want Wine ? Beer? yes? you English party party !".  Oh god.
3. Fiumicino airport - hasn't been cleaned at a guess since 1951
4. The Vatican Museums.  We wanted to see the Raphael rooms and obviously the Sistine chapel but were in no hurry - what I wasn't expecting was the equivalent of a busy Sunday afternoon in Ikea.  I'm quite claustrophobic and after the following the crowd into the entrance we were then all forced on a 90 minute route march, no stopping, no turning back until reaching the Sistine chapel by which time I was a gibbering wreck.  Tim felt it was overrated and he should have stuck with sculpture(!) but that may have been the stress of the afternoon (take plenty of water with you and prepare to be crushed) On the upside we were both amazed and intimidated by The Last Judgment fresco on the adjoining wall and glad we made it through.  
5. The drivers - especially the guy who took off the front of our car on the last day.  I'm very glad when Hertz offered us the 'super insurance' on top of the insurance we already had at 20 Euros per day we went ahead and took it.  It was the mention of the 1000 Euro excess for damage and 1500 Euro excess for theft under their standard cover that convinced us the super cover was a good idea.  As the guy at Hertz was keen to point out to us when we dropped off what was left of the brand new car we picked up - if we hadn't spent the extra 60 Euros we'd be 1000 Euros in the hole.

Gabriella Davis | London | TrackBacks (0) | Comments (1)

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I have survived my first day and a half in Rome despite London Heathrow's shiny new Terminal 5 nearly sapping my will to live along with my will to travel.  I came perilously close to going home once I'd fought my way through.  I'm not sure what was worse

-:the security system which is so automated you have to put EVERYTHING in its own little tray which then auto slides along and through the scanner ready for you to empty at the other end and then circles back to the beginning again. Imagine the security checkin done by Yo Sushi and you have the general idea.  Except it doesn't work.  It got stuck and of course there are fewer staff because it's more automated so no-one to push it through.  Not to mention the huge backlog of people decanting their every belonging in trays (I travel with 1 bag and I racked up 6 separate trays)

-: the preponderance of shops everywhere with gates shyly nestled amongst them making them impossible to find and miles to walk between

:- the bizarre decision to make no announcements at all.  Boarding happened when everyone, as though with a hive mind, got up and made their way towards a woman at a counter (we followed) and then somehow knew to turn left and follow one of 2 tunnels down to the plane.  It was so bizarre Tim had to ask the flight attendant if we were on the flight for Rome or not as we'd seen and heard nothing to confirm it.

:- oh and BA's new 'Galleries' business lounge.  Which is at the far end of the Terminal.  Up 3 escalators (2 if you're First Class - lucky bleeders) and then carrying everything back down again because the down escalators were broken (already??).  Oh and inside - remember that time they overhauled your school lunch room to make it more 'modern' - well that's what we have.  White Formica and stools as far as the eye can see.

Still we made it and the Colosseum, Trevi Fountain, Spanish Steps and a very nice apartment on via Panispera (above a noisy bar but I like it) later we found this great camera obscura image of the street outside reflected through the shutters onto our kitchen wall this morning.

Gabriella Davis | Rome | TrackBacks (0) | Comments (1)

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Many enterprises want to sync a shared Company Address book or CRM with their BlackBerrys. The problem is that the BlackBerry's address book syncs just with the user's personal address book, and it is inconvenient to try and integrate a personal address book with a shared Company Address book.

So we have put together a Shared Contacts app to provide a simple solution when you want to sync a shared company address book or CRM with your BlackBerrys.  And its free. And available right now on our website

The main idea is to provide an easy-to-use application to run on the BlackBerry which would let BB users search their Company Address book for contacts, make calls and send emails, in the same way as they do within their own Address Book.

The flip side of this is to make it easy to add the push technology to any Domino address book or application. To help we built a sample Notes Database with some simple contacts forms and views, along with the scripts and agents to handle the pushing of contacts data out to the BlackBerrys. The database contains instructions in its 'Using This Database' on how to integrate the push components into any database.

We think the whole solution is nice and simple, but can easily be extended in many directions.

The Contacts application can be downloaded to your BlackBerry here: http://lotusphere.turtleweb.com/contacts.jad

The Notes Database can be downloaded here: http://lotusphere.turtleweb.com/bbcontacts.zip

Full setup instructions can be found in the 'Using This Database' document.

This is the first iteration of the application and we are already working on the next version. This will have a pseudo-replication model, where it maintains a 'replication history' for each BlackBerry and sends down only changes.

(P.S. Tim has also put a more technical post over on www.notesberry.org )  

Mike Smith | London | TrackBacks (0) | Comments (6)

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I spent some time troubleshooting a common ST problem recently.  Everything on a new clustered server appeared fine but when starting a meeting on the new server it would fail to connect - the start up messages show ST_HOST_UNREACHABLE.  Now that's a fairly common problem if there are DNS issues or even with LTPA tokens called something other than LTPAToken but nothing I could find looked wrong.  To avoid running around in circles endlessly I asked Carl if he could think of anything and using the java debugger when the meeting launched we could see that the hostname it was using definitely looked wrong (it was only the domain part not the host part) so having definitively narrowed it down to a DNS issue I carried on looking.  I eventually found the problem in a replication conflict in the cluster information document in STConfig.nsf  - deleted the spare document and restarted and it was all fixed.

Gabriella Davis | London | TrackBacks (0) | Comments (0)

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After 2 failed starts and 8 years of trying, Tim and I are finally off to Rome this Friday and I'm completely overexcited (and more than a bit over-planned bearing in mind we only thought of booking it 2 weeks ago).  We have 5 days in an apartment 5 mins walk from the Colosseum and then 2 days in a hotel in Sorrento.  It's on my top 3 of places I want to go to and the only one I'm likely to manage for several years and we've drawn up a top 5, Top 7 and Top 8 list of things to see (depending on time) as well as walking tours  - most of which will probably fall by the wayside.  I'm also optimistically taking 5 books.  

Anyone have any pointers?

Gabriella Davis | London | TrackBacks (0) | Comments (3)

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So one of my most anticipated features for BES 4.1.5 (which itself briefly made an appearance then disappeared due to DST issues) was the introduction of HTML fidelity mail on the devices (hotlinks! images! umm.. colours!) and I have now heard from several sources (some of which I even trust) that it's not going to be available until later in the year with a subsequent cilent release and a SP update of the server.

This is when that squeezable "stress blackberry" really comes in handy

Gabriella Davis | London | TrackBacks (0) | Comments (0)

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I've had my head down working on several infrastructure projects recently and haven't been posting as much as I should, then I realised that I should be posting why I'm not posting !  So as an example, this weekend alone I built or upgraded 5 servers at 3 different customers to 8.0.1 and I start on Quickr 8.1 trial installs next week.  I offer that together with my lousy posting record as evidence for anyone wondering how the 8.0.1 Domino server is taking off with clients.  

To get my daily dose of daylight I had to make time today to take a walk in the park and see how confused the deer were with the beautiful spring day on Saturday followed by several inches of snow today.  Snow on roses and clematis is not something I've seen before in my (overgrown) garden.

Gabriella Davis | London | TrackBacks (0) | Comments (0)

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Enjoyed the Lotusphere Comes To You event at Wembley Stadium yesterday.

Firstly the new Wembley was a great choice (we even got to see the hallowed turf with organised tours), its an impressive stadium and a quality venue. LCTY opened well, the keynote from Bruce Morse, Lotus VP Unified Communications did a good job building on the cool new stuff we heard about at Lotusphere - Notes & Domino 8.5, Expeditor, the extended Sametime family, Sametime Unyte, Bluehouse, Foundations, Portal, Forms, Connections, Quickr - Bruce had a lot to cover and I thought he put it over well.

There were good sessions backing up the keynote, though personally I would have liked more about Quickr - especially given that Quickr 8.1 launched last week - and a little less about Websphere Portal. But overall I thought LCTY delivered what it promised with some style.

Bruce mentioned that the new Foundations communications servers for SMB will be coming to the UK later this year. This is great news. We are currently piloting a Foundations server here at Turtle and it is impressive, very easy to set up and to manage.

LCTY is being repeated in Manchester tomorrow.  

Mike Smith | London | TrackBacks (0) | Comments (1)

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