The Domino Chick
2007 Domino Administration Survey: the developers want to hear from you!
Thursday, January 25th, 2007
A few Lotuspheres ago, the development team responsible for all things Domino administration put out a survey asking people what they'd like to see with stats & events, reporting, and statistics. The results of that survey eventually became Domino Domain Monitoring, which is an incredibly valuable tool for Domino administrators. (For more on DDM, see these resources. ) This year, the same team has asked us to distribute the 2007 Domino Administration Survey. It includes questions about security, archiving, and many other Domino features. If you're a Domino administrator, please fill out the survey! Information on where to send the completed results is included in the link.Permanent Link | Comments: Read (0)
Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 11:04:03 AM
Location: Orlando, FL
Liveblogging Worst Practices
Wednesday, January 24th, 2007
I'm in the front row of Paul Mooney and Bill Buchan's session, BP104: Worst Practices in IBM Lotus Domino Environments - Learning from the Mistakes of Others. We've just endured a 15 minute pre-show in which Bill's sobriety (and sanity) was questioned a number of times and several images involving Bill and a wet kilt were burned into our collective minds.I attended this session last year because Paul told me he'd throw things at me if I didn't, and it was well worth it. This year they've got a new set of Worst Practices with some pretty hilarious mistakes so far. I'll update after the session with some highlights.
Update: The session was, as usual, fantastic. Paul and Bill had some excellent screwups to report. My particular favorites were ECL Hell and Son of Email From Hell. The latter involved a user sending a 500 MB email to 428 people. Reminds me of the time I was visiting a customer and they found a message sitting in the router - a mere 50 MB email, but sent to well over 10,000 people. The routers were, as you'd expect, a tad busy. I suppose I should submit that one to Paul and Bill for next year!
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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 07:34:18 AM
Location: Orlando, FL
YellowSpace and SpeedGeeking
Wednesday, January 24th, 2007
As I'm sure many Lotusphere attendees (really, anyone who has attended a conference) know, a lot happens outside of the formal conference sessions and panels. Hallway discussions and ad-hoc brainstorming sessions are some of the many things that make attending a conference so beneficial. Just walking around Lotusphere, you hear speakers chatting with each other about session ideas for next year, customers giving a developer feedback that, in some cases, might end up as a new feature in a product, and, if this were a cartoon, light bulbs popping up over everyone's heads.Which is why the folks behind Lotusphere decided to create YellowSpace, an "unconference" within the conference. This takes some of those informal discussions and brainstorming sessions and creates new ways to do them. Some of the ideas will be familiar, like Birds of a Feather Sessions, where you can get together with experts and peers to discuss topics of interest. Some will be new, like Boomerang sessions, where IBM Lotus developers and experts listen to what you have to say about our products, and SpeedGeeking, a fast-paced, crazy event where you move from table to table, chatting with experts on a 5-minute stopwatch.
I'm particularly looking forward to SpeedGeeking, because I think it'll be a fantastic, hectic, and fun way for people to get access to the experts. Come check it out tonight at the Grand Harbor South Ballroom in the Yacht & Beach from 5:45 - 7 PM. And be sure to check out the many other YellowSpace goodies, like the Lotus Blogging Community BoF tomorrow at 7 am.
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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 06:14:00 AM
Location: Orlando, FL
DDM Education Resources
Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007
On Monday evening, I facilitated a Birds of a Feather session with Harry Peebles, one of the developers behind the wonderful Domino Domain Monitoring feature. During the BoF, Harry mentioned a post he created on DeveloperWorks that lists out a slew of excellent Domino Domain Monitoring education resources. I've linked to his post above, but will reprint his post here as well:DDM was first introduced in Lotus Domino V7.0. It is a administrative tool to facilitate problem determination and resolution.
DDM helps reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of Domino administration. It distills and correlates a huge amount of otherwise indigestible data across an entire server domain.
Its highly usable interface allows a systematic approach to resolving server issues; its configurability and flexibility accommodate diverse enterprises; and its more efficient monitoring and problem resolution leads to server stability and up-time and allows you to focus on business needs, not the mechanics of administration.
DDM should become the primary monitoring interface, but is optional! The DDM architecture facilitates future extensibility and programmability.
A self guided tour of DDM has just been posted to the Lotus Sandbox. These ~20 minutes of slides provides good understanding why everybody should be using DDM.
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/sandbox.nsf/Threads/67F76112ED2E136C852571DB0054F760?OpenDocument
Here is a ~4 minute demo. While the film is based on a beta user interface (not what shipped with Domino 7.0) it remains useful for getting a quick idea of what is available.
http://demos.dfw.ibm.com/on_demand/Demo/IBM_Demo_Lotus_Domino_Domain_Monitoring-Aug05.html
This wonderful DDM Redpaper explains many details ...
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp4089.html
This workshop introduces you to DDM ...
Lotus Education on Demand: Domino Domain Monitoring (DDM)
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27007060
These two Lotusphere 2006 presentations slides do not include any audio, so the content is diminished, but there is still good stuff here ...
Lotusphere 2006: ID112 - Using IBM Lotus Domino Domain Monitoring in the Real World
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/sandbox.nsf/905e6e55aabb7a8685256cb50053f18c/3e7ff7e99c4ba1b88525713700540e7b?OpenDocument
Lotusphere 2006: ID110 - Getting the Most Out of IBM Lotus Domino Domain Monitoring Probes
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/sandbox.nsf/905e6e55aabb7a8685256cb50053f18c/caed1ebd76f70b6a852571370053e191?OpenDocument
And if you'd just like the Redpaper and tutorial document that Susan and I used in HND201 - Domino Domain Monitoring, you can get them by following the links in this post I wrote last year while liveblogging another DDM session.
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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 04:30:00 PM
Location: Orlando, FL
Two sessions - HND207 and ID209
Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007
Paul and I just finished our hands-on session, HND207: Domino and Portal - getting them to talk to each other. As you can see on Paul's site, we had quite a full class for the integration hands-on session and everyone was excited to get to work! We've already started talking about some improvements and additions we can make for next year.I'm now sitting in the front row at Art Thomas and David Schneck's session, ID209: Administration Process: Guidelines and Improvements. As Susan and I know from doing an AdminP session at Lotusphere for the last two years in a row, this is a hot topic and people are always interested in learning more about it. As you should - it's a workhorse of Domino and keeps a lot of things going behind the scenes, so having a good understanding of how it works and how to keep it running smoothly is essential for a healthy Domino system.
I have one more speaking session tomorrow, ID214: Best Practices for Clustering Performance, and then I'm done talking. Though I am kind of looking forward to being able to actually take a deep breath and relax, I have really been enjoying speaking at Lotusphere '07 - the attendees seem energized, the products we are talking about are very exciting, and overall the conference just has a great vibe.
It's about time for the session to start... more later!
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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 03:06:28 PM
Location: Orlando, FL
Liveblogging the Lotus DPI lab
Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007
I'm currently sitting in the Deployments, Performance, and Interoperability lab (which has a blog you can check out here) in Dolphin Europe 3. There are a ton of really brilliant people in here who are just itching to talk with customers about whatever challenges you might have with pretty much any Lotus product, so stop on by! The lab is open from 9 AM - 6PM every day except Thursday, when it closes at noon.I'm off to prep the lab machines for my session with Paul Mooney on Portal and Domino integration. That session is today at 12:30 PM in Swan Osprey 2. We'll also be doing a session on Clustering Performance tomorrow at 1:30 in Swan 10. They're both sure to be interesting sessions, so please stop by and see us!
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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 08:52:18 AM
Location: Orlando, FL
