Have You Designed a Car without an Engine Today?

Half baked ideas? No, they were completely baked and ready to go....except for a strategic piece. Lost in translation or just lost in space, hard to know sometimes where to assign the lack of accountability.

A Cloud solution that is not quite ready for the Enterprise or an application that you are working on when you suddenly realize no one thought about who would use the solution, let alone, why they need it.

Governments, countries, airports and many organizations run into this it seems more often today than ever before. The site, Why Projects Fail, might be useful to you.

Imagine if in walks your business leader with an announcement of a cool new car they dreamed up for the company to produce. It's just a drawing right now, maybe a clay model, but they have a vision!. They have searched out some vendors that promise to make everything nice and clean, like never before, and they asked to let them do everything so the leader can focus on the end game. Agreements are made and a date set to expect everything to be ready for the "1st auto show of the year".

Shortly before the eagerly expected date, the leader calls the vendor and asks if everything is ready. They reply, yes, of course, we made sure you have roads from your office to the show. The leader is confused and asks, where is the engine for the car we designed? The vendor replies no one said anything about the engine, we provide the roads for you to drive and look how nice they are all black and smooth topped."Where's my engine!?" screams the leader. Engine? Replies the vendor, we don't do engines.

I have been in numerous meetings over the years where parts of these discussions went on and I wondered why it happened in the first place.

Would better meetings help? Would an ESN like IBM Connections or Microsoft Sharepoint or Jive? Was there a problem in Microsoft Project? Not enough project managers? Too few? If you had used a different email system none of this would have happened.

It is easy to be carried away by the excitement of a new project and just as easily to be led astray. Just because the client asks to go to the Cloud does not mean you should block it, or help, without some clear logic and information.

Last night I wrote and compiled a two page list of questions for a client that wants to migrate mail systems... to Domino. I broke up the questions, some 60 or so, into 3 groups, the "old info" , the "future info" and the "co-existence".

The actual list could be 80 pages, like an SUT document I worked on previously, or one page. The questions and answers will come but being prepared is more important.

JMP206 : Calling Home: Enabling the IBM Sametime Softphone in ST9 the Slides

For those that showed up this morning, thank you all. We hope you gained some insights from us.
There was a question about the characters one can or can not use in a password field when installing and configuring Sametime and Cognos.
Please keep in mind I do not have the direct quotes from IBM for this but here is what was posted recently in a Skype chat we had.

Invalid characters: % ^ & /
Valid characters: ! @ # $ * ( ) \ . ~

http://www.slideshare.net/kbmsg/jmp206

Embed is not working right now, will edit later.

When Microsoft Fake Support Calls

A few months back I posted this about a consulting company that called me about a virus on my pc that called them.

Now my grandmother, at 91 years old, get this call and she manages to get their number and name from them, and the number works. Quite sure the name is just an alias, as how many people from India are called Steve Johnson I wonder? They claim they are from Windows Technical Department.

So naturally I wanted to have some fun and managed to get my IBM Sametime SUT call recorded using a 3rd party tool called SoundTap Streaming. Looks to be free for personal usage just not for commercial business.

So anyone else want to have fun, just call and say they left this number with yur sister/mom to call them back, the number is 210-888-9112.

The first call (you can listen to it) (the recording may sound like an echo but that goes away) was me calling and asking for Steve. After some brief discussions around which Windows machine and what this was about he led me to the event viewer and claimed all the "errors" were viruses. He would need me to be connected to their Certified Microsoft Support team and would call me back to fix it all. Which they did a few  minutes later.

The second call (you can listen to it) was to have logmein setup and let them into my pc. At this point I had to say hang on it says you can transfer files when I give you access. And they insisted that I could cut them off at any time and although I suggested they walk me through the process, they would not do it.
as you can see from the screenshot, it all is through logmein and looks correct.

It was at this point when the person on the line said I should let Jennifer (note their spelling) on by clicking OK and I asked if she was Jennifer and she said no, Jennifer was next to her.  After a few tries and my effort to redirect them, they hung up from me. That did not stop them from asking me to click OK as you can see how many times they tried. They ask you to ignore the warning about unsolicited calls, a nice touch they added or just a generic note from logmein, either way, it is impressive how tenacious they can be.

Please do yourselves a favor, let your non-IT friends and relatives, especially older ones, realize that just like the dishwasher repair people do not randomly knock on your door or setup service calls, neither does any computer company you have not just called yourself.

EDIT: I was told that if they get inside your computer they then deny you access and hold the system ransom for $250 to unlock it again. aside from probably stealing any financial files and leaving code on your pc.

IBM Sametime 9 Announcements Posted

4 flavors but you need to wait 10 days for electronic code availability.

John Del Pizzo posted this blog about the IBM Sametime 9 Availability

Some excerpts:

Sametime Communicate is all about individual communications needs. It starts by unifying all of Sametime's instant messaging capabilities into one offering – including Offline Messaging, Skill Tap, Instant Polls, Persistent Group Chat and more. We build on that with 1:1 voice and video capabilities, including Bandwidth Management Tools for Sametime calls. We even added the ability to link Sametime to your telephony or telepresence system over a SIP trunk. Yes, your Sametime Connect client can be your phone or video endpoint without any additional licensing. We include mobile, browser and rich clients along with all the API's and 3^rd party plugins to integrate your existing services into Sametime or put Sametime services where your users work every day.

Sametime Conference is for multi-party collaboration. This offering blends our award winning zero-download, browser-based meeting capabilities with our new video MCU for continuous presence, high definition video. Use Sametime meetings for multi-party audio calls, dial out to your favorite audio conferencing bridge or use partner plugins or adapters to integrate Sametime Meetings with your favorite video conferencing system.

Sametime Complete bundles both offerings together and delivers additional value all its own. With Complete, we extend continuous presence video to video calls outside of meetings. We also let you share your screen or an application right from a chat window. In addition, use the Sametime Connect client to invite colleagues to your meetings by just dragging their name from a contact list and dropping it on the meeting room or clicking the meeting icon at the top of a chat window.

Link for Sametime Complete 9.0 Announcement

Link for SameTime Communicate 9.0 Announcement

Link for SameTime Conference 9.0 Announcement

Link for SUT 9 Announcement