Groups were meant for forming

Linkedin is now accepting invitations for groups. I have requested one for Lotus Professionals.
Figured might as well try to expand our horizon right?

I like it, created a Yahoo! group for it. Why not a Quickplace?
well there are some issues on my side(hosting, equipment, space, resources) and Yahoo! just makes it easy as pie. I would like to move it and other groups to Quickr and am working on building a box with it on it.

But this item is about evangelising other ways to communicate. So I am branching out to other spaces. Will I do a facebook entry(a bunch already exist so no). Myspace? Not likely either.
Second Life? Only if I get more than 25 people asking for it. I have yet to find 25 people who use it.
I have an avatar in world and it is stuck at the Lotus compound :-)
Got the shirt too, in world.

So please let me know where/what else can i do to promote/grow Lotus Evangelism from your perpsective.

Sharepoint or how a rolling stone gathers MOSS 3.0

So I attended a microsoft Connections event this morning because one of my clients wants to review sharepoint and CRM 3.0.

Let's stick to Sharpeoint as it is much more interesting.
First of all, how many people know what is involved to install this application?

The presenter, Jeffrey Lin did an excellent job. Even answered some hard questions. Did a great demo. Now the part he didn't mention, although I asked one piece of it.

You need Exchange, SQL and (I love this one) Windows Sharepoint Server 2.0!
WHAT!? Some upgrade.

Now those of you in Lotus la la land who have let Sharepoint in to your organization now have a huge fight. Exchange is now available to anyone who wants it and you can see where that leads.

All because you did not want to push the Domino products? Quickplace was/is a great product, Quickr is even better. No limitations, no giant message store.

Now I can see Sharepoint looks smoother and more professional than Quickplace but functionality, out of the box, is what is important. Anyone can pay a development house to make your site prettier.
Microsoft goes out of their way to integrate it to Outlook/Exchange and use SQL as its repository. And then there is Live messenger added to if you want presence/IM.

So again you have to add all five pieces(Exchange/SQL/WSS 2.0/MOSS 3.0/Live) and services to get what comes in 1 Domino servers with a Sametime added on one and a Quickr server.

Now here is something from a report dated March 2006 done by the great state of North Dakota. Page 5

"In addition, the cost of providing access to SharePoint sites outside of State government is
prohibitive, so it is recommended that SharePoint be available only from within the
State’s firewall, thus VPN access would be required for external users, who would also
need an AD account and the associated AD CAL.

SharePoint’s history of upgrades has not been smooth. Each new version of the product
has been a wholesale redesign without an automated migration path, and each site would
be manually duplicated after a version update."

I could not have said it better. While this is from a year and half ago, some of this has not changed. There still is not path to upgrade well. But they got the repository in SQL so that is at least better news.
WSS 2.0 was like an odd file server the way it worked.

And hey, try attaching a few 100+MB files into your MOSS and see if it stays healthy.

I'm Back in the Saddle Again!

Recovering from sleepless nights and the baby, but the day job keeps me going.
Stay on top of it all and don't let them drag you down.
So on with some new stuff.

Microsoft is Clueless and their COO admits it!

If you read Ed Brill's blog, and you should, you will have seen by now or within a day 2 postings.

First is the article from Michael Vizard which you can read here:
http://www.esp.e'http://www.esp.eweek.com/article/Exchange+Equals+Profits/214670_1.aspx

"Within the land of IT, nothing is a bigger pain to own, manage and run than Microsoft Exchange. Everywhere you go customers have horror stories about the installation, maintenance and, above all, uptime of their Microsoft Exchange implementations. "

The 2nd article is an interview with Kevin Turner COO at MS he says:
"If at times Microsoft has seemed vague in describing its software plus services initiative and the Live application strategy, it's because the company simply hasn't completely figured them out yet. "
OUCH!
Read more of the 3 part interview here:
http://www.eweek.com/search_results/0%2C1208%2C%2C00.asp?qry=interview+kevin+turner§ion=&site=7

So how do your clients feel when you walk into the room and show them these articles? Or email them to them?
If they don't know about this madness they will still love MS!
Save the world one client at a time.