Welcome to 12.0.2, Please Uninstall Your 32-bit Notes Client Edition

 

I just got back from the HCL Factory Tour in Milan, will post about that next week, but first, I need to explain this.

As you may, or should know, HCL created a 64bit client that is now available as of 12.0.2. Yesterday it appeared on Flexnet.

I asked in Milan what HCL did to help customers upgrade from their 32-bit clients to the 64-bit one because, in the beta, one would get the error message above when trying to run the installer.

2 different HCLers told me you could just install one over the other, but it is not recommended.

I pointed out that the beta said one could not, but they insisted.

Well, I am here to point out you can not install over the 32-bit client to reach 64-bit nirvana.

The error still appears.

So, off I went to uninstall 12.0.1FP1 32-bit client.

I did this on my personal server, which doubles as my test client, then started the 64-bt install.

One should run the NICE tool, yes there is a new NICE64 tool, and if you wish, restart your PC before running the 64-bit 12.0.2. installer. But I did not.

If you have to ask why HCL is doing this, then turn in your IT badge, it has been a long time waiting for this to arrive.

Now the installer is free to get moving. The entire process, including downloading the code, took under 30 minutes and that was with me trying to install over my 32-bit client, grabbing the screenshots, writing this post in between clicking ok, etc.. Your time should be about 10 minutes.

By the way, the 64-bit client download file is 1GB. Domino is only 800MB, just sayin'. It used to fit on some floppies.

Anyway, the bottom line is if you are doing a client/laptop/OS refresh soon, you need to go to the 64-bit client.

It was implied by HCL, well strongly hinted, that the next version would be the last 32-bit client, so you need to start planning for it.

There will no doubt be more posts by people pointing out aspects that still need 32-bit parts like Jesse did here: https://frostillic.us/blog/posts/2022/11/17/notes-domino-12-0-2-fallout.

Other Ambassadors have posted in our private chat about various issues the 64-bit client has with some application items, more info will be coming, no doubt, so developers, your time to test is here.

You may also need to think about which version of Microsoft office you installed and if anything depends on it, so test it, but you should have installed the 64-bit of that as well. This is from a conversation I had with a customer on the way to the train and airport which made me wonder what might happen.

So caveat emptor and start testing and preparing your plans and progress.

Starts right up, all of the .nsfs I had, and the workspace is there just like before. I did not clean out my notes.ini, but you should or just strip it down to the basics and let it update, but that is for another post.

As always, feel free to reach out for help from me, fellow HCL Ambassadors, your Business Partner, or HCL rep.

Happy Installing! Now on to my server update, Traveler, Nomad, Verse, and Ontime Freemium Group Calender updates(their video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxCIEQ5fjOQ). I will post updates once each is done and how long it took to do them.

Server Update Info: Including shutting down Domino, installing the update, restarting the server, and then all the server updates running, the total time was 6 minutes until I could access it from my client. Naturally, in full corporate environments, your timing will vary.

Traveler Update Info: Traveler 12.0.2. now enforces that you shut down Domino before installing it. So, although the actual time to install Traveler is a minute or 2, the process takes longer due to the shutdown, and then I did a clean reboot as well.

NOMAD Update Info: Delayed, no 12.0.2 documentation has been indexed yet, so there are no details about it beyond downloading the 1.0.5 code which I got in beta, unzipping it to the domino root folder, and running NOMAD as a server task. Product Management says 1.0.5/12.0.2 version is not up yet on Flexnet. Will update this once available.

Verse Update Info: Although I thought it would be inside Domino 12.0.2, it seems that is not the case, so it is still a separate update. The current version is 3.0, which you can download from Flexnet. Follow these instructions, https://help.hcltechsw.com/verse_onprem/3.0/admin/vop_configuring_server.html. You should have it up in about 10 minutes if you have all the other parts in place. If not, you may need an hour or so to configure whatever you are missing. URL looks like this example if you need to run in parallel to iNotes: https://keithbrooks.com/verse

Ontime Freemium Group Calendar Info: It will probably get done over the weekend.

SnTT - Rooms and Resources Accidentally Delete a Resource and the Reservations

Last week I gave a session where I outlined a bunch of things I would like to see in the new Rooms and Resources database template should it get updated.

Yes some things were just more defined views, but other things that would make it more useful to admins, and users, were also included.

Well yesterday I learned the hard way about some things I knew, but I guess had not quite gotten to fix yet. Let me explain.

One of my clients has some very full RnR databases, 1 per region. Sometimes, against my preference, names or very similar names, are used in different places.

Tasked with clearing some old rooms, I set out to do just that and get on with my day.

And, of course, as you may have guessed, I deleted an active room.

Very active room.

400 reservations active.

As I saw when the pop up asked me if I wanted to notify people. I said no to that, knowing I can fix this. Well a few hours later, here is what really happened.

Oh.Yes.I.Did.

Domino problems are caused by admins, truth (except for developer agents that run amok).

I say, no problem, go to trash and undelete it. No Trash View in this R9 template. Note to HCL, please add one. Go into developer mode figuring it would be in the hidden view.

No

Call client developer and ask what they think, SOL. Soft deletion was not turned on.

Damn. Thought we had enabled it after last issue, but maybe the template got written over in an update or a restore and maybe we had only set soft deletions in the database itself and not the template.

In any event, I was blocked this route.

Call restore team, can you provide me with a backup from the prior 24-48 hours ASAP?
Yes, no problem they said.

Great, restore completes and I go to try to get back the data and...it shows me what I see now, not what I should have seen for a day ago.

AGH!

Call restore team, ask how it is possible. Well replication was on, ok, try again, turn it off this time.

And get notification, go open it up, same problem!

Well now I am confused. Got the team together to figure it out, and it seems they do incremental backup sand logs.

I said I don't want logs just data.

And 3rd time lucky, I open it up and it is the old data. Perfect, I start to copy a doc to test that pasting it back in will work.

BAH! No dice, this database doe snot allow pasting of documents.

WHAT!?!?!?!?!?!

Call back the developer, ask how I, as the admin, can not do this. Well, she knew why and where to look to fix it. And now I will let you know because someone out there will read this after pulling their hair out.

Open the database in the Designer client and go to the views section.

Find the view you need to paste into, you will need 2 of them.
The first is the resources view itself because you need to copy back the deleted resource.
The second is the view of Reservations, by Resource so you can paste back all of the reservations you killed accidentally.

Once you have the view open, locate the Querypaste section as shown in the graphic below and REM out all of the code there and save it.

Once you do this and reopen the database you should be able to paste everything back in.

Then run a Fixup and Updall to get everything cleaned up and reindexed and then test making a reservation that honors used and open times.

You learn something new every day, even after all these years.

EDIT: Adrian asked me on twitter about Adminp and Busytime. I forgot to discuss it, so here is what we did and what you should check.

Adminp at the customer is set to run on a set schedule, so it did not worry me, but you should go into the database and clear the delete request otherwise you will lose the setting in the names.nsf for the resource.

Busytime, I did not rebuild it because my tests showed it was working. Presumably because the dates/times had been in the database already and did not update but if you run into problems, you should follow the technote and clear the old busytime and let a new one start.

ISBG now NCUG My Session "Why Didn't Anyone Tell Me Notes Could Do That"

ISBG / NCUG Why Didn't Anyone Tell Me Notes Could Do That from Keith Brooks

This session was about how to make your case to get changes pushed through to end users.

How to talk to management and other teams to give users a better experience and in turn provide happier customers and fewer support tickets.

SnTT: What if You Only Want Sametime, Meetings or Connections but NOT Mail in IBM Connections Cloud?

For years, since it was a wee little LotusLive, we, the greater Business Partner community, have told customers they could go to the Cloud one step at a time, or everything at once. Easier said than done sometimes. The hybrid or on premises decision, which IBM imposes on your organization BEFORE you start out, is just the tip of the iceberg.

Maybe your preference is Connections or Meetings or Traveler(well you could, not sure why you would) or Verse or Docs...anything BUT mail.

You see, mail is of course the big one, the main reason usually why people want to go to the cloud.

So when one of our clients realized a bit late in the day that they needed to do something fast for their Sametime servers, we suggested the IBM Connections Cloud.

Why build a whole Sametime infrastructure when you can have one permanently in the Cloud and updated all the time and it costs you less than a license fee a year? Seems like a good deal, right?

As someone who builds out Sametime infrastructures, this is much cheaper than having me build you one, that is, presuming you can or want to go to Cloud.

Well, it has been at least 3 years since I loaded a customer into the IBM service, while some of the process has stayed the same, the rest was a new thing for me. And now you get the benefit of my sleepless nights.

For this post, we will presume you have Cloud licenses, of some sort, either dual entitlement or purchased or some other IBM named license that grants you Cloud usage and access.

Once you request from IBM your login credentials (most people get an email about it when the dual entitlement went out, but easier to ask IBM to resend it then find it) you can start the process of setting up your cloud domain.

For this project, because we thought it would be a possible migration down the road we recommended a Hybrid approach. The truth is no matter which way you chose, the details below will work for you.

Once chosen, one has to detail the Domino passthru server name, ID, cert.id files, passwords, mail directory name, directory name itself, etc. and reach a point where IBM's server talks to your server, and with some DNS changes, everyone gets along real well. Note usually any issues at this point are Firewall and/or DNS related as we presume you know your Domino infrastructure and how to create IDs and passthru servers,

Now comes the fun part.

If you have a small organization(between 1-50), you may want to just create everyone manually, but when you are a few thousand people, that is not practical. Oh and remember this is WITHOUT email.

How do you do this? Normally when you register people, it starts the whole mail file and directory process, oh you can selectively add/remove parts manually but how do we bulk process people?

Well you will need to do a few more things with IBM before you start this process. Note to IBM, a nice flowchart of what to do, when, how for each option(Cloud or Hybrid) would be REALLY nice and helpful.

First thing to do is to request from IBM an Integration Server (about this here) account to provide FTP uploads of .csv files. This request, for a LLIS (Lotus Live Integration Server) account includes the steps as follows from here:

• Send an email to support@collabserv.com with Integration server enablement request - Your Customer Name in the subject line. The email must contain the items in the following list. The first three pieces of information can be obtained from the Organization Account Settings page for your organization.
• Organization name
• Customer ID
• Organization contact email address
• Email address that is to be used to access the integration server. This account must already exist in the cloud and have the Administrator role. This account does not need a user role or any subscriptions assigned to it.
• You can request additional email addresses that are to be set up as integration server users, as long as they are existing accounts with the Administrator role.
• You are notified when enablement is complete and you can use the integration server. Note that your CSR might need several days to complete your enablement. This enablement account is known as the integration server user account.

Once this is done you will get a reply with details to login and set up your FTP links.

The MOM tool will not be used because that is for Mail Migrations/integration with the Cloud in case you were wondering.

Now comes the part that drove me crazy for a while, the .csv file.

You can read about it and see example pages here, here and here among other page of the documentation online.

Suffice it to say, because I know if you are reading this, and in the process of trying this, you probably said TL:DR for the documentation or like me tried it a few ways and felt like breaking a baseball bat on some tech writers head.

And to you, lucky winners, I am providing the exact syntax and details.

You need to understand IBM envisioned people only using Mail, or only using Connections as the primary reasons for moving to the Cloud so  there are actually 2, yes, two, .csv files you need to create to get any user registered as a Sametime user.

Got that? Neither do I but this will become HCLs issue to correct soon enough.

The 1st .csv needs to create the user, and thus a Connections account. 

DO NOT JUST MAKE A MAIL ACCOUNT THAT WILL NOT BE USED. IT WILL TAKE OVER THE USERS RECORDS AND POINT THEM TO THE CLOUD. 

You have been warned.

Here is what I did, you may have better luck with different ways to create the .csv file, but this is how I did it.

Once you get the list of users from the customer, you will need to break the list down to 200 people at a time. Why? Because that is what IBM has the system set to handle currently. If you put in 201, it will provide a failure report and not process. Again, you have been warned.

Open Excel and create a header row with each column for one item and they look like this, syntax matters so check the docs if you are not sure!
emailAddress  action subscriptionid givenName  familyName  language  timeZone  country

Details to be put in each column under the heading:
Emailaddress - put in the users email address
action - Add (Add is used for new people to be registered/provisioned, see here for the other choices)
subscriptionid - Found once you login to Connections Cloud and go to Admin-Manage Organization from the top right side, then click on Subscriptions from the left side and get the Connections

Subscription Entitlement ID

givenName - First Name
familyName - Last Name
language - en_US for US English (Language list here)
timeZone - America/Atikoka (This is EST, Time Zone list is here)
country - US (Country list here)

(Originally IBM also included password, but since the system automatically sends the user an email with a temporary password with the links to Connections Cloud and to change their password, we figured we did not need this option. If you think you need more options or more specifics in registering people, here is the complete list of field options.)

Sounds so simple, right? So you fill in the spreadsheet, then click Save As, find the basic .csv option and save the file. Oh, but you need a specific name as well, see here for more details.

Format of the .csv file name is: customerId_prv_seqnum.csv

customerid -  Found once you login to Connections Cloud and go to Admin-Manage Organization from the top right side, then click on Organization Account Settings from the left side
prv - leave as prv
seqnum - you need to go to http://www.epochconverter.com for the UNIX time that the file needs. Keep in mind all future csv files must have a time stamp after the prior one or they will not get read. A bit of a PITA but understandable for an automated process.

so an example might look like this: 22792279_PRV_1556820735.csv

Now login to your ftp client and the LLIS and upload the file. My efforts showed the file was picked up by the server every 7-10 minutes. 200 people would be registered in about 10 minutes.

Once the file is picked up, the ftp site will add 3 new folders to your login location, error, report and processed.

If all goes well your file will be in processed and your report will show a new file for each upload and a code of 463.

If it did not go well you will see your file and a trace file in the error folder and the report will tell you which line failed and why. Usually syntax, I had some cut and paste spaces in a few cases that caused me issues

Great, moving along now we need to create .csv #2 and get all these fake Connections users real Sametime accounts.

This one is much simpler because we only really need 3 columns:

emailaddress

action

subscriptionid

emailaddress - put in the email address

action - AssignSeat (this is so the existing registered person gets Sametime added to their account)

subscriptionid - Found once you login to Connections Cloud and go to Admin-Manage Organization from the top right side, then click on Subscriptions from the left side and get the Chat 

Subscription Entitlement ID


Name the file as above but change the timestamp and upload the saved .csv.

You can login at anytime to your Cloud instance and check the users have been created and have Sametime included in their options.
And that is how to register users that are not using Mail into Connections Cloud and you can do this for the other options or when you need to migrate their mail later on:Connections, Docs, Email, Traveler, Meetings, Verse, Chat

Good luck and remember, syntax matters!

Is Your Company #DominoForever or Exiting Stage Left?

A good friend of mine sent me a link to this post from David Giller and I recognized much of what he posted (crowdsourced) happens in all industries and businesses.

But for those on the cusp of debating "should we stay, or should we go", read on.

"Too little, too late" is what I hear and see from people and my reply is, quite honestly, well, there is not too little now thanks to HCL.

Too late is a relative term in an Enterprise. If you decided today to change your course, it would be months, possibly years for some of your larger companies, before you even took a step forward with a new partner or vendor to architect where you are going.

There are also the costs involved in any big project, and this would be a big project. Ask yourself, or your executive, do you really want to spend money on swapping one mail system for another?

A rough estimate I use with customers asking is, at a minimum, the cost to migrate will exceed $1,000 per user/email address moved.

The number doubles if you are big enough and need both worlds maintained in parallel. 

The number triples if you also "must have" coexistence so your calendaring and scheduling can work together.

And I did not even get to your licensing and hardware purchases, that is if you are not going to a Cloud solution.

If you are going to a cloud solution, don't forget the costs and time involved to get your security, Directory, and single sign-on parts to work and upgrade your telecommunications because that bandwidth is going sky high next.

Okay, enough scary tactics, feel free to argue with me, I am all ears to anyone who says I am lying. Maybe my numbers are off, if anything, they are low. Seriously.

Back to Mr. Giller's post, here is my SCNDT (Sametime, Connections, Notes, Domino, Traveler) version of some of them. You need to recognize and fix these before you face the end of the road:

• No business teams are providing requests for new applications, if they ever did, and you find you are not being involved in the meetings about the future of business applications.
• When was the last time someone asked, and you got approval, for application enhancements?
• When was the last time you DID NOT SAY "give me a few days/hours I will come up with something". And instead explained to your boss how this would be a serious enterprise required application that should be on the next IT budget meeting. If your apps are not Enterprise need, your infrastructure is not either.
• Your admins left or were moved along and it is now up to the help desk or the developers, if any are still around, to maintain the environment. Would you let the pizza delivery person fix your Porsche?
• Rolling out SalesForce? ServiceNow? Not integrating them with Domino? You have lost a huge opportunity because you know what? Both of the former requires a small army to customize it so it is useful. You already had much of this at your fingertips. 
• Your company may say they want "best of breed" or the latest app in the Cloud, but you know your company and why that is probably not the safest most secure way to implement something that really could have been built on Domino.
• Someone complains about the high cost of maintaining the Domino Infrastructure.
• Ha, April Fool's, no one ever complains about the high cost of the Domino Infrastructure, except Microsoft and Google.
• Executives say they want O365 but really have no business reason for it. the Outlook they use at home is not the same as in business. Directories and lookups, calendars, public/private information, multiple depositories for files are just some of the "functions" they have yet to use or think about. 
• Look at the companies that tried to blame their problems on their email system and moved away from Domino only to die a miserable death soon afterward or fall into a serious free fall. Hello Comcast, BlockBuster, and Qantas Airlines to name some famous ones.
• If your executive that has backed SCNDT all this time is now shying away, or leaves, who you gonna call? I am available.
• Have you tried to provide ideas for how your infrastructure could be leveraged to management? They are grasping at straws and need a light, no matter how small, to help them.
• You hear about database bloat. Look, you are the admin or developer and you should be trying to retire a database a day, that is about 250 a year and no one will argue with you even if you say you removed 30, 50, or 100. Be proactive or face negative reactive management.
• There is a lack of vision by the management to understand how to leverage the SCNDT platforms to streamline and automate processes – instead of simply replicating the same backward manual way things have always been done….in Excel. And Excel, which is over 30 years old, is what runs many sales teams and finance departments. Just. Stop. It.
• Some Microsoft tech complains about having to cover your servers when you are on vacation, you do take a vacation I hope, and you don't try to educate them, you lose the best chance of getting them on your side. Remember, no one ever says they love Exchange.
• Training doesn't exist. I get it. But you know what? Leverage the hell out of your intranet. Wiki, blog posts, status updates, if you are not posting something, then the executives think it doesn't exist and what doesn't exist, doesn't get funded, and disappears. 
• 1 great admin can manage a few dozen servers and between 1-3,000 users or more if given the right tools, for support issues and has minimal complaints and usually exceptional uptime. Learn your craft, read more blogs, go to user group events....The opposite of having bad admins is a sure sign the end is nigh.
• Management thinks that Domino data is simply “ONE OF” the other systems that we have (resulting in siloed data being dispersed across multiple systems throughout the organization, making 360 degrees reporting practically impossible). This one I stole from Mr. Giller's post because it is still true.
• If your organization cannot articulate their current or future business processes and expectations in a way that makes sense to a normal person, you may have a problem.
• Middle management is more interested in their job and budget than benefiting the company. Small mind = no advancement.
• Not leveraging Domino policies, Panagenda's Marvel Client or any of the configurable options that make user's lives better. I have been told by clients that Notes "should look and act like other apps" so they do not enable all the preferences. My retort usually is something like "Tesla didn't build a car, they built a car everyone wants because they included options people want and need." Yes, this is public enemy number one of a reluctant IT staff to maintain Domino.

</soapbox>

The Rebellion Strikes Back

My apologies, this was scheduled incorrectly.

If you were not at the HCL Factory Tour Part 2 recently in Milan, you may not appreciate all the Star Wars references but, us being geeks, we go with the flow.

There were about 100-120 customers, business partners, and IBM Champions in attendance, many of us worn down from travel to/from Think in San Francisco barely 10 days ago.

We converged on the HCL offices in Milan, Italy with Richard Jefts and his crew of ex-Empire leaders.

We proceeded to have 2 full days, 3 if you stayed for Portal day (I did not due to flight schedule) of sessions. Myself and a few other IBM Champions were tired from all the learning. 

We are used to doing the sessions not attending so many in a row.

I messaged my kids at one point that I was reminded how they feel every day at school, been 26 years since I finished my MBA.

Nothing, was boring.

There was a track for technical and a track for Business. I skipped the developer sessions, I am sure my developer friends covered that stuff very well or will soon enough for your review.

Business partner sessions, sales sessions, HCL services, the future of the Champion program session, and some other ones I can’t really discuss publicly, as much of it is not written in stone until the deal is finalized and should properly come from HCL itself.

However, we did get to weigh in on many aspects and I think the partner community will be quite happy.

We also had the pleasure of walking around Milan on our way to dinner the first night, and as you can see from the picture below, we all did a group photo at the Duomo in the center of Milan. 

Thanks HCL for a great time and, my luck, got to spend time with Russ Holden at my table who now heads all Notes and Domino development (maybe more, but if you know Russ, then you know it is in great hands) and Richard also sat with us but, as the host, was quite busy.

So what can I tell you? Let’s talk about the current and future of Notes Clients/Verse, Sametime, Nomad, Places, Technical Advocacy (near and dear to my heart) and closing speaker @VoWe.

V10 highlights on the left graphic and Verse on Premises upcoming Features and you can read them on your own. 

An interesting highlight, for me, is while web browser apps will maintain all languages, Notes and Domino and on premises applications are going to lose some languages, including Hebrew. So if you are from a smaller country, you may want to verify there will still be a client in your language. It is a monetary decision based on licensing and number of users. I hope to change their mind, will see.

There was some discussion about a mix of Verse and NOMAD, the application to read your Notes applications(except mail) via a browser and not the old NOMAD of running Notes from a USB. Ideally it would be good but doesn't sound like a true panacea just yet.

V11 Notes client is shaping up. Plans are to do a release a year (YEAH!) and over time make it easier to update your clients. There is of course the Verse client that was meant to be light weight and the “future”, but undoubtedly, due to key customers, the Notes client as we know it, java et al, will continue on.

Not surprising, the UI teams efforts, while clean, were reminded that the, ahem, elder employees, need more contrast schemes. It looks a little cleaner, some things are getting reworked and less “html section” like so the UI appears to all be one window.

Sametime Update

There will be a release, the Limited Use V10 version out soon. As you can see below some of what is included but the main item is Persistent Chat is part of it. 

We will have to wait until the end of the year for the next full version of Sametime which will also be numbered in synch, and possibly emerge, at the same time as Notes and Domino 11.

 

Unfortunately we did not get the previews of the revised templates coming but it sounds like at Engage, in May in Brussels, they may appear. 

The team was quite surprised but our enthusiasm to see/hear and give feedback about some core templates in need of modernization and not just UI.

At the end of the 2nd day, Volker Weber gave us a history of Lotus coupled with his take on the HCL/IBM deal and future. Always great to see him and spend some time talking with him.

Overall, what I heard and saw was impressive. Yes some items are off limits until the deal closes but you can see the fun is back in people's eyes, something we have been missing for quite a few years now. Now to see if the tide can turn and give Notes and Domino a Renaissance like when Steve Jobs came back to Apple.

Hey You!

Yes, You! 

You reading this post. 

You have a job to do. 

Sadly I know from experience only 5% of you will follow through on this, but here it goes anyway.

If what we have been doing all these years in the Domino space did not change anyone’s opinion, why should it now? The answer my friends, is it can change, only if we change.

When I set out writing this blog, over 1,000 posts ago, I had started and stopped a few times while I found what was missing in our YellowVerse. The Evangelist. IBM did not, and in some ways still does not, provide the information people in companies today need to help them keep their jobs, and thus IBM hardware and software, soon to be HCL software.

The SWAT teams, the Tiger teams, the Men in Black (I was one) did not publish anything public over the years. They were probably not allowed (?!) and so it happened that IBMers told me to keep writing and doing more, because their hands were tied.

The only exception, was when Antony Satyadas ran his "Project Liberate", to compete against MS, which was really about price points. His efforts were the closest anyone came to really pushing back against the world and promoting Notes & Domino. Sadly that was short lived and in 2008 and 2009. As we know, the CXO never chooses a product because of functionality, and rarely on price alone.

So what do I want you do? I want you to earn your IBM Champion (hopefully soon to be HCL Champion) status by being the person that your company needs, wants and relies on, and not in an the usual administrator or developer type of way.

Your mission, and you really have no other choice but to accept it, as you will see, is to make every.single.person in your company know what Notes & Domino, Sametime, Traveler, Connections, etc. do for your company.

If you have Connections or Sharepoint it will be pretty easy to accomplish this task.

Stealthily or upfront, makes no difference, you can do this, and you will, we will get to why you should do this soon enough.

Afraid your boss will go crazy on you? You are making them look better, even though they will say otherwise. Tell them you are helping their cause by asking for more budget to support all the great applications.

Your peers will think you are crazy….until they “get it” and start doing it themselves for their own applications and areas.

You need to start simple, here are some ideas.

1. What applications do you use inside your company that run on Domino? You may not even know what they all do. Look at your Domain catalog and get some clues. Ask people, look at the apps, if you have access, and think about these questions:
2. What does this application really do for our company? Does it onboard people or make the process easier/faster, manage passwords, handle expenses, payroll, sales, marketing, audio/video, PR, manage executives calendars, etc.
3. How much money does this applications make the company? There is a reason Fortune 100 companies still run Domino applications inside their world, because they are critical to their businesses.
4. Alternatively how does this application save us money/time/resources? If not, you may want to raise a new project to your boss to retire some older ones.
5. What applications could benefit from some new coding or UI/UX? Why raise the downside? Because if the app is so meaningful, it should be treated like an Enterprise application, not a back office cast off.
6. Going Cloud or staying on premises can also get the same treatment because there is a reason you have chosen to go that route.
7. Support ticket updates. This can be tricky but important. If you know that you have rarely seen repeat tickets from users, this is a high rate to promote yourselves as permanently fixing issues. You may see how many people you supported in a month, or a year, and realize your reach is much more than you thought.

There are unlimited possibilities for you to provide these “status updates” or blog posts or wiki details inside your company. Talk about the data, the business value, the greatness that you love.

Start with one item, alternate every week or every few days. Explain it in business terms and in your own way.

You will slowly get feedback, and followers. You will also get complaints and enhancement requests, both excellent feedback for you and your team. If you know how to respond to the complaints, do it, if not, ask me or one of the other bloggers or IBM Champions.

You may get known as The Notes Guy or Lord Admin or Domino Guru or Lotus Evangelist. And that is always a good thing for you. You may also want to share and discuss some of this with your IBM/HCL or Business Partner representative when the opportunity arises since they can help you further.

Here’s why, if you read this far…

Your job is at stake.

Period.

Every single day/week/month/quarter, maybe not now but down the road, if you don’t do the above “promotions”, your management, and your users, dream up ways to get some other product brought in to be used because they don't even know what they own or run.

Not fair? No, it isn't, but you need to fight back and find a way to get the word out.

If your company does get that far, guess who is probably out of a job? You might get retrained, but so far, from my view, that is about 25% of the time. Not good odds.

It will be hard, you will get flack, and you will think no one is reading it, and you might be low on the totem pole, but if you have tagged the posts well and sprinkle in some magic terms that relate to your company business, you will start getting noticed. 

Be prepared, don’t just say you were doing this for fun, or because I sent you, provide your mission statement.

“My job is to do the best I can for the company and encourage management in their efforts and by providing this data I believe will make us a better company”.

Or something along these lines.

No double speak, no BS marketing mumbo jumbo, no buzzword bingo, just straight and to the point.

Nothing hurts as much as an ignorant executive make a choice that may not be in the best interest of their company without pointing out to them what their business value is, and why they have it. They don't know, often don't care, and that is why this is so important of a task I assign you.

This is not a technical battle front, it never was aside from the early days because no one did anything like Notes. Yes, we have new goodies inside R10, and down the road R11, but those need to be put in business benefit terms, as I have written about previously.

So, are you going to save your job?

Going to be a part of the next generation of Domino applications in the world? Become an IBM/HCL Champion next year because of what you started this year?

Or going to live in fear forever.

Need help? Reach out to me through any number of ways from my blog or other ways. I am easy to find.