Personal entry .... gotta tell ya about my award winning daughter!

Victor Toal  June 23 2008 10:13:58 AM

I normally don't get all teary eyed and such, but my daughter was recently awarded Student of the month for her grade level by the Rotary Club here in town. We did not know anything about it but it turns out they select one child each month that has to have show itself as an outstanding individual both in academics and in their personal life ... They go through an interview process and for some reason the Rotary club thought that my daughter was a good candidate. that must be all Japanese the genes from her mother's side ...

Here a picture of my daughter at the rotary Club awards dinner,

• Comments [2]

IBM Open Mic Invitation: Domino Server Performance (June 25th)

Victor Toal  June 23 2008 09:55:40 AM

I have been swamped with work lately, hence no posting. This is a quick post just to show I am still alive ....

IBM has another open mic invite, I really like these calls, there is soo much you can learn from them. I advise anybody and everybody who has time to at least listen in with one ear to see if you can't learn something new. There is ALWAYS something new to be learned in these calls.

Victor

=====================================================================================================================================



You are invited to participate in an IBM Open Microphone call with IBM
Development & Support Engineers for Domino Mail Routing Configuration
(version 6, 7 & 8). There is no charge for participating.  The topic and
dial information for this call is:

Title:  Domino Server Performance

Date:  June 25, 2008
Time:  10:00 am eastern US time (2 pm GMT)

Phone Conference Info:
Toll free US:     888-339-3503
Toll call US:     719-457-2702
International Dial-in Info: Click here =>
http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21307718:
Confirmation Code: 5422681

The IBM Open Mic calls are intended to provide you the opportunity to
interact directly with the IBM Lab developing IBM software products, in
this case the Domino Mail Routing team, to have product questions answered.
For details about the Open Mic calls, please see the Lotus Support Open Mic
technical exchange page  (
http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?&uid=swg27011126).

You can submit your question in advance via the Notes 8 forum using the
Open Mic Invitation for this topic in the "Open Mic" category. We will also
take questions not submitted in advance. Questions should be of general
interest and by their nature help you install, configure, manage or
optimize your environment or processes. Troubleshooting of specific
problems should still be handled by Technical Support, not by Open Mic
calls.  For reference, you may wish to review the articles below:

Notes Domino Best Practices: Performance.
http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=203&uid=swg27008849

Link to Open Mic Invitation:
http://www.lotus.com/ldd/nd8forum.nsf/GeneralCategory/a0ae3b8628e085f58525746d0071eae8?OpenDocument

You will need to provide your name and company affiliation when dialing in.
You will need a touch tone phone to be able to ask questions. The calls
will be recorded and posted to our Support web site as podcasts.

You are receiving this invitation because you are a Lotus Domino customer,
who has contacted us for technical support in the past. If you do not wish
to receive mails like this one from IBM, please reply to this e-mail and
change the Subject field to: unsubscribe , e.g. unsubscribe
user@company.com. Please be aware that this will also unsubscribe you from
the regular FAQ Response mailings.

Please remember to book your calendar for this call. We look forward to
talking with you!

The IBM Lotus Notes/Domino Team

• Comments [0]

Lotus Greenhouse Webcast Series: Domino Web Access / June 13th 11:00 AM EDT

Victor Toal  June 10 2008 09:10:48 AM

If you are not a member of the Lotus Greenhouse, see if you can't join. It is a great place to get information, look into beta versions, exchange knowledge and network. Here is another one of their webseries that they do regularly,

Victor
=================================================================================================================================================================

Lotus Greenhouse Webcast Series This week's Topic: Domino Web Access
Webcast Description:	Vinod Seraphin our chief programmer and John Immerman our development manager give a live demo on Lotus Domino Web Access. Vinod and John will give an overview of the new features and provide a roadmap for several initiatives to further exploit Web 2.0 technologies and practices.
Date and Time	June 13th, 11:00 AM EDT
Calendar Invitation	(See attached file: DWAinvite.ics)
Dial-In Details	Conference telephone numbers: Confirmation Code: 6364402 Participants, Toll free: 888-523-1245 Participants, Toll: 719-325-2186 Participants, Tie: 650-2050 International telephone numbers: (See attached file: IntlDWA.txt)
Web Conference Details	Unyte Web Conference Information 1. Go to the URL - http://www.webdialogs.com/join/ 2. Click 'Join a Meeting' button in the top right corner of the page 3. Enter the Conference ID - 3336625 4. Enter your name and email address 5. Click the 'Log In' button *If this is your first meeting with Unyte Meeting we recommend that you perform a system check to ensure a successful conference. To begin click: http://www.conferenceservers.com/browser/?brand=SametimeUnyteMeetingProM
About Lotus Greenhouse Community Calls	Presentations are posted before the Web Conference and can be found at: https://greenhouse.lotus.com/lotus/myquickr/lotus-greenhouse-webcast All calls are recorded and will be posted at a later time to our Quickrplace Lotus Greenhouse Webcasts

• Comments [0]

May 22 IBM open Mic on Domino Mail Routing Configuration

Victor Toal  May 16 2008 06:40:51 AM

Got another open mic invite. This one I am pretty sure I will listen in o, at least for a while since mail routing is an important item for any Domino admin to refresh and master. Even if you think you know it all .... you never really do!!!

=====================================================================================================================


You are invited to participate in an IBM Open Microphone call with IBM
Development & Support Engineers for Domino Mail Routing Configuration
(version 6, 7 & 8). There is no charge for participating.  The topic and
dial information for this call is:

Title:  Domino Mail Routing Configuration

Date:  May 22'nd
Time:  10:00 am eastern US time (2 pm GMT)

Phone Conference Info:
Toll free US:     888-430-8705
Toll call US:     719-325-2414
International Dial-in Info: Click here =>
http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21305178
Confirmation Code: 4591362

The IBM Open Mic calls are intended to provide you the opportunity to
interact directly with the IBM Lab developing IBM software products, in
this case the Domino Mail Rouing team, to have product questions answered.
For details about the Open Mic calls, please see the Lotus Support Open Mic
technical exchange page  (
http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?&uid=swg27011126).

You can submit your question in advance via the Notes 8 forum using the
Open Mic Invitation for this topic in the "Open Mic" category. We will also
take questions not submitted in advance. Questions should be of general
interest and by their nature help you install, configure, manage or
optimize your environment or processes. Troubleshooting of specific
problems should still be handled by Technical Support, not by Open Mic
calls.  For reference, you may wish to review the articles below:

Best practices for large Lotus Notes mail files
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/notes-mail-files/

How to limit the number of threads used for sending large messages
http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21108351

Controlling spam: Advanced SMTP settings in Lotus Domino (see Parts 1 & 2)
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/spam-smtp1/

Link to Open Mic Invitation:
http://www.lotus.com/ldd/nd8forum.nsf/GeneralCategory/3850091cc79dd9eb8525744a00673987?OpenDocument

You will need to provide your name and company affiliation when dialing in.
You will need a touch tone phone to be able to ask questions. The calls
will be recorded and posted to our Support web site as podcasts.

You are receiving this invitation because you are a Lotus Domino customer,
who has contacted us for technical support in the past. If you do not wish
to receive mails like this one from IBM, please reply to this e-mail and
change the Subject field to: unsubscribe , e.g. unsubscribe
user@company.com. Please be aware that this will also unsubscribe you from
the regular FAQ Response mailings.

Please remember to book your calendar for this call. We look forward to
talking with you!

The IBM Lotus Notes/Domino Team

• Comments [0]

Inofficial poll: Instant Messaging Usage Policy - who has one?

Victor Toal  May 12 2008 01:55:46 PM

I am sitting at a client and we are going through the stages of a new IM environment. they are bringing ever-more amounts of users on-line and we had our first "usage" incident. One of the users (the one we found, who knows hoe many more there are) added a non-face picture to their business card. Nothing obscene, mind you, just a dinosaur picture. My first reaction was that a simple IM usage policy that points out specifics would be in order. That way you can point users to a page of regulations so when they decide to be recalcitrant you have something to occupy them with.

Now, here to my poll:
Who out there in IM land actually has an IM usage policy of any shape or form? I would really be interested to hear what topics were covered and how long it is and how often it gets reviewed (if ever) and updated.


Send me some comments!!

• Comments [2]

Domino / Sametime and Siteminder

Victor Toal  May 7 2008 10:28:34 AM

I am currently on a project with a client for a Sametime environment. this client is big on security and they use Netegrity/CA SiteMinder for their SSL/SSO environment. This is actually the first time I am working with SiteMinder so there are a few things I fond out and maybe they will help you. I would also appreciate insight by anybody out there who has more experience in this who might be able to either correct me if I am wrong or point out more issues that I have missed.


Sametime and Netegrity/CA SiteMinder
Officially, Sametime STLinks (the web access of Sametime) and SiteMinder is not supported by Lotus. If you call with a problem, you are will told that you are on your own.

Here are some tech notes on the subject right off the bat for you to start looking into this:

(1248541) Online awareness not working in STLinks API applications when using Netegrity SiteMinder

(1243943) Integrating Sametime 7.5 with Netegrity SiteMinder

Basically, you can use SiteMinder on the box that Sametime is installed on and you can get it to work. The Meetings will work and all is hunky-dory. The big B-U-T comes when you want to tie in other web applications and use STLinks for that. That is currently not supported. Mind you, there are ways around it (the client has it implemented) but if you call support with it you will be SOL.

The way you do it is to manipulate the content of the servlets.properties file on the web server you are trying to enable the awareness on to accept the SiteMinder token. I have had to tweak the STLinks Java heap on the Sametime server for better performance to make sure that the awareness look-ups don’t bring the web server to its knees but it works fine. Again, you are on your own here though if implement it.

DWA and Sametime

There were some issues with earlier versions of Sametime and DWA and problems with buddy lists popping up but these seem to have been resolved. This client does not use Domino for mail so I have no way of independently test and confirm this but I have not found any issues with this in my research on the web.

Quickr

There are some internal IBM documents that are not (yet) open to the public that show how to integrate Quickr 8.x with Siteminder. I am not sure when they are due out. there are some older publicly available tech notes on QuickPlace/SiteMinder integration that I found that in the whole are still applicable to Quickr 8.x.

Here some interesting issues form the field: the client had some real issues getting SiteMinder to work – and it all came down to a version issue. The only version that did not crash the HTTP task on the Domino Quickr Server (Domino 8.0.1, Quickr 8.1) and then subsequently crash the whole machine was version 6 QMR3 CR03 of SiteMinder. There are probably a few HF out son that might help with earlier versions but from what I can see, SiteMinder 5x versions are probably not going to work.

Quickr connectors will work as well with SiteMinder but it requires a HF to run and you have to use basic authentication.

Quickr/Sametime integration with SiteMinder

As of now, it does not look like it works. My investigations as of now show it is not supported to pass a STToken or LTPS Token from Quickr to Sametime with SiteMinder. I am still looking into this as I have not yet tried out the whole thing with Sametime 8.x and Quickr integration yet. I might be able to get this to work the same way we have STLinks working with SiteMinder but I have not yet tried that. Look at this blog in a few weeks, I will update on this as soon as I take a shot at it.

• Comments [1]

Free On-line training by IBM - Lotus Quickr 8.1, June 03-05 / 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM

Victor Toal  May 5 2008 11:19:57 AM

This came to me from an IBM Partner mailing I got along with the invite for the Sametime training. It is a link to a free 3 day on-line seminar on Quickr 8.1. Reading the announcement I must say they plan to cover allot - I might even listen in a few times myself depending on my schedule - it is always worth to listen in and learn, I always hear something new or find an error in understanding that I had ... it is humbling sometimes!!!

https://www-304.ibm.com/jct09002c/isv/spc/events/description.jsp?eventÙC60E2A53A95FD3852574210063FF26


Be there or be square!

• Comments [2]

Free On-line training by IBM - Lotus Sametime 8: Building solutions for the communications and collaboration platform, May 20-22 / 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM

Victor Toal  May 5 2008 11:19:57 AM

This came to me from an IBM Partner mailing I got. It is a link to a free 3 day on-line seminar on Sametime 8.0. Reading the announcement I must say they plan to cover allot - I might even listen in a few times myself, though I doubt I will be able to steal away 3 days in a row from work ... but then again: "You don't look a gift horse in the mouth" as they say ...


Follow the link to the page with more information and the link to sign up.


Be there or be square!

• Comments [0]

IBM Lotus Notes Out of Office Feature on May 8th 2008

Victor Toal  May 5 2008 11:18:09 AM

I got this announcement but due to being at Admin2008 and being sick over thew weekend I did not get to put it here for you yet:


<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< IBM ANNOUNCEMENT >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


You are invited to an IBM Technical Exchange Webcast call about the IBM
Lotus Notes Out of Office Feature for ND6, ND7 and ND8. There is no charge
for participating. The IBM Technical Exchange Webcast Calls offer
information about how to use our products.

Title:  Notes Out of Office Feature

Date: May 8th (Thursday)
Time:  10:00 am - 11:30 am Eastern US time (2 pm in Dublin & London, 3 pm
in Copenhagen & Berlin & Paris & Rome)
Conference URL:
http://www.ibm.com/collaboration/webconferences/center/meetingdetails.jsp?meetingId=53FB77016FD0BB78A782791A9F105A89
Password:      notes000prz

Audio by phone:
   Toll free US:  888-539-3613
   Toll call US:  719-457-2703
   International Numbers Click here:
http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21304084
   Confirmation Code:  1409402
Please dial in 5-10 minutes early to allow time for registration of all
participants before the presentation starts.


Session Details
This session will cover some of the new features of the Out of Office
functionality in ND8, as well as common troubleshooting actions that can be
taken to address potential problems in your existing ND6 & ND&
environments. It is recommended that, prior to the call, attendees review
existing material about the Out of Office feature, found at the links
below:

Guide to the Notes/Domino Out of Office. Part 1: Out of Office Design and
Features
http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=203&uid=swg27006404

The new IBM Lotus Notes 8 Out of Office functionality
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/notes8-ooo/

Lotus Notes Out of Office Agent, revisited: Part 1
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ooo-pt1/

Lotus Notes Out of Office Agent, revisited: Part 2
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ooo-pt2/


When Dialing In
When dialing in, you will need to provide your name and company
affiliation. You will need a touch tone phone to be able to ask questions.
The presentation will be recorded and (in potentially edited form) made
available via the web page containing dial-in numbers above.

You can find an up-to-date schedule of upcoming Open Mic calls and Webcast
calls, as well as links to slides and recordings from past calls, here:

   http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg27011126

Open Mic calls are Question & Answer sessions with a panel of subject
matter experts covering your  questions without going thru a slide
presentation.
Webcasts are slide presentations by a single presenter followed by
Questions & Answers related to the material covered, as time permits.

You are receiving this invitation because you are a Notes/Domino customer
who has contacted us for technical support in the past. If you do not wish
to receive mails like this one from IBM, please reply to this e-mail and
change the Subject field to: unsubscribe , e.g. unsubscribe
user@company.com. Please be aware that this will also unsubscribe you from
the regular FAQ Response mailings.

Please remember to book your calendar for this call. We look forward to
talking with you!

The IBM Notes/Domino team

• Comments [0]

Live from Admin2008 - What I have been up to so far

Victor Toal  May 1 2008 01:14:31 PM

Time for another quick report on the conference. I am really taking it easier this year. Not that ther eis not tons of new stuff for me to learn though! I only am trying not to overload my system, I have only so many brain cells to fit things into and three days can burn you out allot.

Here some of my favorites:

Lotus Open labs:

Sametime Labs:
I am really taking advantage of the labs this year. I like hands-on stuff as I my few remaining brain cells retain information better if I get to actually do stuff rather than read about it. I am especially looking at Sametime of course, specifically into plug-ins. I am mainly an administrator and architect, anything that has to do with developing stuff is a weakness of mine and I need to work on that. I do not intend to do any development in the future but I really need to be ore comfortable with the topics just to make sure that when I am discussing topics that include that kind of information I can actually speak with a bit more authority on them than up until now. Plug-ins are so essential to Sametime and also Domino now and I need to be "down with that" so to say.

Quickr Labs:
I also look into the Quickr labs even tough they are a bit basic, it does always help to be familiar with what kind of education is out there. Anything users can learn will create expectations that administrators need to fulfill or rectify (if they are incorrect).


WAS/Portal/Portlet labs:
Allot to learn there. I do not do allot of Portal work, simply because I consider my knowledge to be way too light. But with the increasing integration of different systems you just have to familiarize yourself with all of it, you never know when you might be the onl one on a project that has time to do work on an issue and the PM dropped it on your plate - "git'r done!" so-to-say ...

Sessions:

• I missed one session I really wanted to hear this morning: Rob Axelrod's client crash/fault Analyzer session. that wodl have been very beneficial for me but I had some mail to catch up on ans several phone calls to attend to. I was too late and only got out of my room towards the end of the session. Shame really!

• All the Sametime sessions by Chris Miller area always worth it. He packs a short period of time with allot of information and I like his sense of humor, as long as I keep my phone turned off so I don't suddenly find myself the center of attention!!

• I visited some of the "basic knowledge " sessions just to have a refresher. There are so many new features and configuration possibilities that it really pays off to re-visit the things you know you already know "well enough" I had some surprises there that will save me some time and effort in the future.

• Security related sessions are always a must. with the ever changing playing field of dangers we are exposed to from hackers it is important to stay on top of it all.  Franciska Whitlock has an interesting one 'Fixing your top 10 security holes". That one is a must for anybody, even if you think you are already as tight as a clam.

Ask the Experts:
Sometimes called "Asked the drunken experts" or "Drunken Master - the fight of the wild monkeys". It is a great place to ask questions. I will often just sit there and listen to other's questions and he answers they get, it can be very educating to just shut up for a while and take in (I admit to having a hard time with the shut up part of it).


Right now I have to rush off to another session, I will write some more updates later.

• Comments [0]