When I'm Mobile....Beep,Beep

Continuing on recent discussions from WES, RIM has a bunch of clients for you and your Blackberry friends. Not all available yet, but Sametime has been for a while(I am updating my install doc for it, look for the post this week).

Go to this page for all the details and then get in on the notification or beta for each of the mobile clients.

1) Sametime - You always remember your first..and still advancing.

See this IBM PRESS Room Announcement:

The new BlackBerry Client for Lotus Sametime extends real-time collaboration from the desktop computer to the BlackBerry smartphone, including instant messaging (IM), presence awareness, contacts, broadcasts, file transfer, click-to-call and other features. Traditional landline phones become obsolete through the combination of voice-over-IP with presence awareness via IBM Lotus Sametime and corporate network and wireless routing with the BlackBerry® Bold® smartphone. In addition to IM, presence is seen throughout the smartphone applications. For example, a customer can use instant messaging within their calendar or an email to get an urgent answer in the moment without breaking the work flow. If instant messages aren't fast enough, the click-to-call feature is one button away.

2) Connections - The next generation BlackBerry Client for Lotus Connections, developed by RIM and available May 8!

3) Quickr - Coming soon? But not fast enough for me and my clients

4) Symphony - Coming soon?

Of course you need to move to BES 5.0 for some of these to work with all the benefits. We can help you if you need it.

By the way if you were looking to mobilize your applications and work force to leverage your investment in Lotus and RIM technology, let me know as I will be doing a LCTY event on this topic soon, look for slides.

Research in Motion, and they really are too!

Gregg Eldred posted this over the weekend and it was mildly interesting to me, on many levels.

Basically, RIM now has a public blog, http://blogs.blackberry.com/. Interesting because last I knew, officially, this was a no-no(and possibly in some cases why you as a blogger may not have been hired by RIM).

I am very glad to see this is out there, although yet to be seen what direction it takes, the initial posts are of interest, especially if you have a Curve.
My wife will finally be happy her phone does what mine does.

Now if we can just get them to blog on Lotus specifics...

So my wife had an issue with her Curve not synching calendars properly. Anything she would write in Lotus Notes would not get synched or crash during synch.

We dealt with this a few times, but the bottom line is it came back and is not funny...to her of course.

My immediate thought was to update the desktop software which she had on her PC and oddly enough there was a release of 4.7 on April 23, 2009.

Excellent!

Download the 200MB+ program, which includes the Roxio(Bad Memory Usage IMHO) Media Manager.

Installed it, waited almost an hour for it to finish, watched the Ascendant/South Park Impact video, and their Lotusphere 2009 video too which includes my image of a Lotus hat at 0:58.

In any event upon restarting the PC the new desktop software now asks to upgrade my wife's Curve. It NEVER did this before. And shows that her device uses 4.3 or earlier versions and can go to 4.5. COOL!

Decided to wait on the update until daytime hours, just in case I fry her phone. Having had a horrible Friday, and I thought best to hold off on the update another day. Posting on that next.

So while waiting for the install as well, I luckily found this post, on the Blackberry support forum site details how to fix the synch failure for her phone.

There seems to be an issue with the Attendee reference in the mapping fields. While I understand why this would create a problem, in theory, none of my wife's appointments include attendees. Well, either way, it's resolved now.

So RIM is NOT dead, I still believe IBM should buy them and am thinking more and more I want 2 phones, an iPhone(once you have clients using it, it begs the necessity) and a Blackberry as my HTC8125(WMD) is just dying a slow and painful, for me, death.

Now to figure out how to use both of these with one chip and one data plan.

Keep up the good work everyone in Ft. Lauderdale and Waterloo and wherever else development gets done.

Sun, Sun, Sun Here it Comes

IBM to buy Sun? About time someone did, if only to own Java and get it fixed.

When I discussed it with Microsoft about 5 years ago, SUN's stock was around $3-$5 and would have been pocket change for them, plus they could have killed Java before it went open source and allowed C# to rule.

Well fast forward a few years and what do we have now? Java has been open sourced and IBM may or may not want their hardware, although a stronger UNIX/Linux server may come out of this. But the services people and sales force might be of use.

Is it worth $6.5 billion for IBM? No idea, I still believe IBM should buy RIM and stick to that idea. It makes more sense from a social media, communications, messaging and even device levels.

IBM for now is happy working with RIM but for how long will Microsoft share it and for that matter can Lotus Notes Traveler expand enough to replace a BES?

We live in odd times, interesting is so last century.

LotusWorld, the next AppStore?

This showed up in my email box sometime in the last few days.

Coming soon! Find tons of great applications designed for your BlackBerry smartphone in one convenient place - BlackBerry App World.

So now RIM is doing it too. Makes sense for them.
Imagine, if you will, What a Lotus or Domino World would be like.
Openntf could be one way to do it and I am sure IBM has some other view on this as well.
or do they? Or have I forgotten someone's site and if so, please let me know.

Imagine if every little app you or I offer for free, instead charge a nominal amount of money, say $1-$5 per template or programming effort. Could we micropay our way to riches as some have on the Apple AppStore? Lotusworld.com by the way is some Lotus car site, but the name sounded good to me.

An interesting idea which maybe is worth it for those not quite an application but more a nice to have idea. Maybe I am being a capitalist.

Then again what if every organization needed your little app?

EDIT Update 3/12/2009 Lotus911 I believe showed an app like store and was trying to expand that idea, as was I think Planetlotus at some point. But I could be wrong in this memory.

Fud Buster Friday #9 - Religion

This post is for anyone in one of the following religions:
Democrat vs. Republican
Job vs. Outsourced
Imported vs. Domestic (Beers! What did you think I meant?)
Coke vs. Pepsi
Oracle vs. Anyone
Google vs. Microsoft
Blackberry vs. iPhone
Microsoft vs. Everyone
Lotus Notes vs. Exchange

Say what you will but there is a lot of religion going on in your life and mine these days.
Just finished Yom Kippur, a solemn day of thinking about past sins and trying hard to change one self for the better.

So I can relate to the problem of religion in the IT world.

Religions for centuries would impress on others to join their own, sometimes at the threat(and it wasn't just a threat) of various tortures and death, sometimes with bribes and others with a shrug.

Luckilky, in modern times we don't still do this...within IT, other countries is another issue entirely.

The put downs, FUD and other ideas put forth often times come back to bite the speaker.
You as the speaker look bad, I don't care if you are Steve Ballmer or Steve Jobs or Steve Cohen. Someday, and that day may never come, the payback is going to hurt.

It is one thing to not confess everything, it's another to lie or just make up stories which aren't valid pr blame someone/something for no good reason.

Admittedly I may post thoughts to Twitter which at times can unsettle my Microsoft followers, but they are truthful in their wording, albeit at times harsh criticisms.

I do try to stay on the open and honest path and please correct me when I haven't! As happenned once with a post I made that was deleted because I didn't check all the facts.

So the moral of the story is if you must go and have converstions along any of the topics in the front of this post, just remember to play above board and try to be respectful of the other side.

Sametime on a Blackberry, the Followup

Some of you may recall when I posted about the doc I put together for getting the Sametime client from RIM to install and be pushed out to your community.

Happy to report there were over 160 downloads of the doc. Quite a few from someplace called NONE. Must have been the Microsoft guys.

Anyway, happy to hear it has helped so many people, evidently I did too good of a job with it as most replies to an email we sent out came back with this:

"It is installed and running great.
Thanks for the follow up. The documentation was great as well."

If you just can't do it or haven't updated your BES to 4.1.6 yet, let me know, always happy to help.

Happy to have helped everyone and will update you when my article is ready on other clients as well. Now back to submitting abstracts for Lotusphere.

BES 4.1.6 further update on Domino Conflicts

Happy Yellow Day to all!
In a previous post from July 29th I discussed the work around to resolving the broken Traveler and Sametime.
What you don't know is the details about it.

Yes the INI setting is the problem.

It basically stops all servlets. RIM informed me they would document the change in noets.ini and warn people about it. RIM suggests people NOT load anything else on their BES box. Those of you in big companies have no problem with this.
SMB have a problem. Running their Domino server as their mail and SMTP server with Sametime on it, Traveler and BES is how they do it.
According to RIM support this is not a sanctioned installation. However, as I discussed With them, if they don't say you CAN'T do it, people will do it. Even if you say so, they will still try :-)

Without the notes.ini line added, RIM claims you will see performance hits and degradation due to how the new server handles HTML emails. With under 10 people on a box I will take my chances, usually once a client gets over 25 on a BES I suggest they build a new box for it by itself.

RIM support, in case you never called them, is really great and never lets me down no matter how odd the problem is (waiting on call back about pushing the new clients out if you are reading from RIM support), IBM support is better, only because in this case they had the test infrastructure to figure out the issue, which was undocumented by RIM at the time.
Always helpful, full of information and willing to listen to your thoughts, many other companies should contact RIM and find out how to fix their service side.

BES 4.1.6 upgrade may break Lotus Notes Traveler

A technical posting, ask for help and others who have this setup and it works or doesn't work.
If like many small companies you run a Domino server and it also hosts BES and traveler, you may have a problem.

We upgraded a BES to 416 from 415 this morning and since then Traveler has stopped. It is running on the server fine, but the clients can't connect, error 36 usually.

Something has affected the servlet engine and Traveler clients can not connect to the server.

You can test it by going to your server from a browser and typing servername.com/servlet/traveler

You should then see something that looks like this picture.
If you get a 404 error, you have problems.

Perhaps this is the issue: Default port number is 50125 for IPC (Inter process socket connection between Lotus Notes Traveler Server and its HTTP server servlet).

All feedback is appreciated. My phone thanks you.

Nothing but the net or is it the RIM of the net

Let's suppose RIM bid on the unused wireless spectrum. What would it gain?
TV capacity to your phone in an efficient way? Perhaps.
A stronger presence for remote areas and consumer usage, possibly.
A private network to kill off At&T, verizon, et al? Definitely.

Does the Cloud need RIM? Not really.
Do you need a Blackberry? Why?

What does it do that you can not do from almost any other device?
Not talking about iPhone right now.

What does BES do that the Good server can not?

What do you really need from your phone?
Voice dictation for sending emails would be nice.
A 3d holographic view of web pages or text would be helpful as the tiny screens we read are slowly going to kill our eyes.
Intelligent controls on the device. If I am pulling mail from a site without a spam control at the server side like my ISP, thanks Comcast, why can't I run one on my phone? Maybe this exists, haven't checked, sorry.

What about elderly people that need bigger keys or larger screens/fonts?

Also why can't my blackberry, or any other phone handle multiple streams of BES/Traveler or Good? That would be helpful in this day and age when the average person has a 1/2 dozen accounts, even if they only read 2-3.

I have the following (leaving out all my business clients that I have email with and forward to my main corporate email):
Comcast NEVER checked
Yahoo in use
Gmail rarely used
MSN very rarely
Netscape forgot password
corporate daily
personal daily
kids they are just learning to type
wife's
This blog's email
previous personal domain
previous business domain

But can I get more than one of these on my phone via BES, Traveler or Good's usage of PUSH email? NO. Even if I had a BES or whatever server to handle them all, the answer is still no.

So we are almost there...but not quite. And as more devices are internet connected does it look better to have a phone or a web device with a built in speaker and mike for VOIP?

Some questions I have been thinking about as I am in search of a new phone and look for a realistic answer to my dilemma.

Anyone from RIM, Google, Nokia, At&T or anywhere have some inputs I 'd like to hear them. otherwise if you know a VC I have a pitch to make.

IBM to buy RIM

Blackberries will be renamed Blueberries.
In their own way, RIM has gone down a path where they may want to think about it.

About 4 years ago while interviewing with Microsoft about competitive positioning(don't sweat it, I think they just wanted free consulting), I posited that SUN would release Java as Open Source within 2-3 years. Got it.
I suggested they buy SUN(stock was not even $5 then) to ensure:
1) Java dies, rather than go open source(they thought C# would work for people)
2) Provide Windows servers with a fully integrated hardware platform and built in distribution
3) It was cheap, pocket change even for Bill and he could kill it if he wanted
4) Or it could help Microsoft get into Linux on their own terms

Also suggested IBM would buy Novell as they were already following a path of past IBM M&A when the money provided to a partner eventually was returned in stock and then finally in a new IBM division. This one hasn't made it yet, but Novell hangs on with Linux, I still see this as a great opportunity for IBM and Novell.

Back to RIM. Lotus worked with RIM very early on(remember the mushroom shaped blackberry) and we were thinking it would kill server revenue to RIM, instead it made email stronger as RIM made it clear they really did not want to be a contender for email messaging system of the world. I think in this case they made a wise choice.

However the last few years has seen growth for RIM, but at the same time, competition from places unexpected, Apple and Google. Can RIM beat them, possibly, but I do not think by themselves. Would it help RIM to have a "native" email system? Most definitely and in many cases if you understand the architecture of a BES you will see what appears to be the logic of architecture like a Domino server. Not 100% mind you, but as RIM had to scale they took a familiar approach(to me at least).

Now RIM provides Lotus Connections clients, similar to the 2 different IM versions for Sametime. A great partnership is in place, and a merger of Lotus with RIM would be catastrophic to Microsoft in many ways...unless Microsoft too has an iPhone killer in their plans.

My guess is they don't as Bill has left the building and with him went any original thoughts of how to corner a market.

If I was the Product Manager at RIM working with Lotus, I would be expecting to hear such thoughts, I wonder if this is the case.

La La La La ...Lemon

From my Partner connections blog since not everyone can read it there.

Yes, it's Berts favorite song from Sesame Street! Why? I think out of the box sometimes.
A bit off evangelism, although not entirely (see my public blog for the latest on that one by clicking the logo) today.
I have a theory, which I espoused with Ian White who was blogging here for a while.
Why is it all great smartphones so to speak, come from companies that are named after or for a fruit? Apple, Blackberry(RIM) and probably many more.
Then there is Motorola that just names phones like a bad personallzed license plate!
So the next phone to bring joy to the world should be called strawberry (although RIM probably bought the rights to it) or maybe a Melon (if you ever saw the Back to School movie you might get the reference.
But I think the world is ready for the Lemon phone. Smells good thanks to the citrus bark used to line the inner casing. Can always be found in the dark thanks to a yellow hue that glows(it is NOT radiation), a pebble grain casing(like the skin of a lemon) to give it good gripping power on your dashboard or hand.
Inside it would only work with Lotus, well because you can do these things, just ask RIM or PALM about exclusive clients. And it would run all your notes apps without havng to rewrite them since it actually runs an eclipse version of R8.
So why a Lemon, because no one would ever expect it to work and think of all the fun the press would have with it.
BUT THE THING WOULD WORK! Just not for Exchange.
So why not do it? IBM surely can get someone (Nokia preferably because they grok UI) to work it out.
Stranger things have occurred in life and maybe, just maybe, the mass commercial world, not just business, would also want it. Get Connectria or Prominic and all the other Domino hosters to help set up the network for it.
Would it be so bad to obtain a few million Lotus clients.
After all it's a fruit and everyone likes to turn lemons into lemonade.