Groupware News

Today is the proudest day of my life. I am NOW an official member of the most prestigious organization in the world! I’m not sure what number I am in the GONADS queue, but I’m glad I queued up!

Do you have the stones? Email The Grand Poobah, the man with the BIGGEST GONADS OF THEM ALL …. Steve McDonagh

In what has become one of the more interesting soap operas on Planet Lotus, here’s the latest I’ve heard about DDM. Perhaps some of this is redundant, maybe even common knowledge. However, it seems to be a bit of a disconnect from what I had been previously told.

Here’s some history for you my yellow peeps.

For the past 8 months, I’ve been working on a project that would use DDM. I initially wasn’t sure I wanted to use it but knew that DDM had the functionality I needed. There were, of course, questions about DDM’s future so I probed. I hammered. No matter to whom I spoke or whose blog I read, clear answers were no where to be found.

I would have an easier time finding a quarter at the bottom of the Delaware River between the Ben Franklin and Walt Whitman Bridges after 6 weeks of torrential rains flooded Northeast Pennsylvania & Northwest New Jersey and stirred up all the muck in said river then getting someone at IBM to say what the hell was going on with this thing!

In any event, it seems as though DDM will be supported for the next 5 years however only on ND 6.5 or 7. It is not supported on ND8, Vista and/or Office 2007. I found this out Monday and it was news to me. This was the first definitive answer I received and it was AFTER I got everything working with ND 8.0.1, Symphony, Office 2003 Windows 2003 Server & XP clients with no apparent issues. I’m not a fan of Vista or Office 2007 and will get to it eventually but that isn’t the point.

Now this is what gets my goat. If I want a “properly supported environment", I HAVE to keep all of my DDM users on ND 7.0.3, Office 2003, and XP!

So, let’s see here … end of mainstream support for Office 2003 is January 2009 (That’s less than 6 months away), XP is April 2009 (That’s next year!), ND 7 is most likely EoL in 2010 or 2011 … BUT DDM will outlast them all with a projected EoL of 2013! WOOHOO!!!

Quickr is the heir apparent however; there is no corresponding template that can be used for migration. At this point, I’m not really sure of what role Quickr Content Integrator plays. Perhaps the migration templates lie there but for a new implementation, I’m not going to add, on the low side, US $30,000 to my project.

As I stated in my IdeaJam on the subject back in May, would it really be that difficult to update DDM for either ND 8 or Quickr? I have it running now on 8.0.1 without any major mods so how hard could it be?

Your thoughts?

Perhaps I just wasn’t paying attention but the BlackBerry Enterprise Server v4.1 SP6 is now available from tSupport. According to the release notes, notable additions for this version:

* Rich content email messages
* Support for Notes hotspot links
* Support for Sametime v8.0
* Support for Notes-Domino 8.0.1 (I didn’t know that wasn’t supposed to work! Been running 4.1.5 for months on it!)
* Ability to control the interval at which the BlackBerry
* Messaging Agent reconciles the read/unread status for messages between devices and the mail db (NICE)
* Lots of fixes

I haven’t had a chance to peruse all the release notes but, here they are.

I’m looking for opinions and reasons. What’s the best backup solution for Domino and why? Or, what’s the worst and why?

I want to know what you’re thoughts are so don’t just say “Jimmy’s Backup Sux!”

What are you using now or have used in the past? What do you like about it? Not like about it?

Thanks My Yellow Bleedin’ Peeps!

Well, hello there. How are you? It’s been a while since we last chatted. I guess with that S.L rant, GWN is officially back in business.

To the many of you I’ve run into through the past few years since GWN was last published, thank you for your kind words about the previous incarnation.

To those who are unfamiliar with Groupware News, well, I’ll have to save that story for another day. For now, suffice it to say, I had some really good times with that thing and then life happened. That sent me on another wild ride and here I am.

So, I’m glad to be back. I’m glad to see some of the battles occurring for our product … AND REALLY glad to see all the thoughts out there.

Not for nothing but there really is one person to thank for all that and that’s Yancy. He does a great job with Planet Lotus. I’m on that thing all the time and tell everyone to head over there. It is the fountain of useful knowledge. Yancy, we all owe you a debt of gratitude, sir and I thank you.

With that, it is now 2 AM in the East and Ladies and Gentleman, I give you the brand spanking new, Groupware News!