06/30/2008

Category

As part of the "end of the month, last day at this pricing" accounting work, it was my job this morning to count up the countries represented out of the Collaboration University registration - 11 so far and counting. So I'm starting to think that not only will translation be an interesting topic, but we might need to set up a translation server at the London registration desk! Seriously though, I'm hoping to have some RTTS (real time translation services/server) content lined up soon. There's a demo on Greenhouse using more advanced Statistical Machine Processing (SMP).

The good news on our multinational audience at CU - so far, there's at least two registrants from all but one of the countries, so almost everyone will have someone to speak to in their native language during the reception! And it also means I have to brush up...in 2006, if you were there in London, you heard me welcome you in 12 languages...

Here's a Wordle...we'll fill in more countries as we go:

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Hello World!


Of course there's still an afternoon left in June, so who knows, we might get another country before I have to do the midnight development work changing prices and the website!




Posted by Rob Novak At 12:28 PM Location SNAPPS Glactic Headquarters | | Comments (0)

06/26/2008

QuickImage Category Collaboration University

The first three weeks of Collaboration University's new website and registration for the 2008 events have been quite eye-opening. The community is crazy for Quickr, Sametime and Connections this year...I suppose when you release two versions of everything, folks can use a little technical training. A few days into the "soft launch" of CU registration - which is what I call blogging and letting Alumni know about it - we had registrants calling saying "did you get my registration 10 minutes ago...want to be sure I get into the workshop..."  Big thanks to the Alumni who signed up right away - you get the best deal as we extended a discount to you in appreciation of your prior attendance. That discount is good regardless of any early registration deadlines. Huge thanks to those who are coming for a third year - Juniors, we'll call you.

Just a few minutes ago, out went the newsletter email notice about Collaboration University - if you read my blog you'll probably get one - with more info on the workshop concept we've cooked up this year. In short, we've designed a workshop for admins and developers to work together on a deployment (cats and dogs, living together!), and then again on a set of changes to an application. Critical changes! Must haves! Unreasonable business sponsor! (Me). All this in three hours...for about a month of experience.

A surprising percentage of registrants are choosing the do the workshop - so much that they are halfway subscribed in BOTH Chicago and London. We may have to figure ways to expand them if this keeps up.

So while I'm on the topic, it's probably good to mention that the super-duper-earlybirdy registration for June ends, well, when July starts. That's next Tuesday.


Posted by Rob Novak At 8:26 AM Location SNAPPS Glactic Headquarters | | Comments (0)

06/24/2008

Category SNAPPS Travel

Some of you know that Troy Reimer, SNAPPS Quickr guru and LotusScript deity extraordinaire, is moving this week from Lawrence, KS to Abbotsford, BC, Canada. Driving two massive trucks (well, not himself) containing all your worldly belongings, with four kids, across the country is daunting to say the least. I've been keeping tabs on his progress since he left yesterday morning - he keeps replying "have I got a STORY for you". Anyway, he'll be settling in tonight in Evanston, Wyoming - just passing through Laramie now. This puts him just past the halfway point on his journey. We're all wishing Troy and his family safe travels!

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Of course Troy will continue to be a full-time SNAPPS employee, with simply more use of Sametime, Lotus Quickr, Voip phones (we LOVE our Aastra 57i CT phones), Skype and a VPN. That reminds me, I need a VPN. Jeez.

UPDATE Thursday afternoon 3 PM CDT...Troy is in Washington now, on his way to Seattle for the night. Just a couple hours of driving left for the day, then 2 hours to Canada tomorrow. I wonder how long it'll take to cross the border with two huge trucks holding everything you own?

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Posted by Rob Novak At 7:06 PM Location SNAPPS Glactic Headquarters | | Comments (1)

06/23/2008

Category Travel ILUG

After three weeks on the road, it's good to be back home temporarily. While my flight from Boston last night was delayed and we arrived home (again) at 2 am, it was nonetheless nice to drive my own ridiculously large car (read: hit the $100 pump limit before the tank was full) home to my ridiculously large TV. Only problem was, it's been 90 deg F here in Kansas and our air con has been on the fritz since late fall. So today a new AC fan pump was installed, and it's slowly cooling down - so Liz tells me.

June 1-7 were in Dublin as you know, at ILUG 2008, a brilliant conference of 400+ that has amazed me as a participant for the third year of four. Just astounding how such a small group of people can pull off a conference if this size and quality.  June 8-11 were in the home of Warren and Kitty Elsmore in Edinburgh where, in addition to castle-touring, bus-riding and whisky-experiencing, we were treated to all three Bourne movies on a big screen and a delightful semi-formal traditional Scottish dinner on our last night:

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Treated like Scottish royalty by the brilliant Hostess Mrs Kitty Elsmore


Then a quick trip to London to see the Collaboration University venue and to ensure we have enough seating capacity - which could be an issue this year - and lunch with Mike Smith, our London co-producer from The Turtle Partnership. While walking back from IBM South Bank past the Royal Festival Hall, this sign caught my eye - a little too coincidental perhaps:

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I would WEAR red heeled shoes if I could click them and avoid Heathrow


After a brief couple half-days home, the last four days were spent in Westford, MA at the IBM offices with a meeting of the Penumbra Group, a rag-tag fleet of ships on the journey for...wait no that's BSG - the original one at that. Right. So we were briefed on things happening now, in the future, and with many paragraphs of legal disclaimer on some things that are in the incubation stage. I also had the opportunity to meet with the product management teams for Quickr and Sametime separately to discuss Collaboration University and potential demos and announcements there, and let's just say that there's so much new since last July that we have a lot of demo and presentation work ahead of us.

Troy meantime had his last Kansas hurrahs and packed his home for a move 2,000 miles northeast of his current location. Relocating to the southernmost possible town in British Columbia, Canada, he's trucking his way across the great plains, Rockies, Pacific northwest, and more for the next four days or so. Not to worry, he is still full time with SNAPPS - let's just say we'll be using Sametime, Skype video, and Voip more than usual. That and, poor guy, when we have conference calls with our clients on Central European Time, he'll be getting up with the chickens.

In the meantime and during all this travel, SNAPPS has been steaming right along. We are staring down the barrel of 9 projects at the moment in different stages of development or proposal - much more than in past summers. As we finish each project, we seem to have deadlines approaching for three more. I can only throw up my hands and apologize to some of these folks who have to wait for us for proposals or to start projects...we are into October with booked and certain work efforts.

Did I mention I was hiring?

Posted by Rob Novak At 2:46 PM Location SNAPPS Glactic Headquarters | | Comments (3)

06/18/2008

Category

Have been (quite obviously) working on an upgrade to Blogsphere, and Dec is helping me out. Thanks Dec!

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Posted by Rob Novak At 8:25 AM Location SNAPPS Glactic Headquarters | | Comments (3)

06/16/2008

Category None

I'm really happy to report that Lotus Connections 2.0 went live on Friday. Good timing - I need it for a client, and for Collaboration University. However I was hoping for a quick download during lunch. Guess I'll be having a nap afterwards - I forgot my Melatonin anyway...

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P.S. That speed is jumping around between 130 and 200 kb/sec...and it's not me, I have 10 MB fiber. Guess a lot of people are interested in "Connecting".

P.P.S. While it's still a monster, I do appreciate having this be labeled nicely and packaged together. My Portal installs of past years were a little...cryptic. Any product that needs bloggers to post the guide on how to download and extract the product needs work.

Posted by Rob Novak At 12:29 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | | Comments (2)

06/14/2008

Category None

Be prepared for some serious learning from serious instructors...

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Don't forget that your kit...

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Remember that over here, we mix religion with everything...

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And I mean everything...

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Yes folks it's over...but the photos are just starting to leak out of my camera, which is filled with 350 of the finest moments at ILUG 2008! I'm back in the US tomorrow and will - after enjoying a sleep-in on Father's Day - be posting more of the best moments from ILUG. I'm happy to have been part of ILUG, and thrilled to have been one of the Green Shirt Brigade.


Posted by Rob Novak At 3:01 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | | Comments (1)

05/28/2008

QuickImage Category None

Even while packing for ILUG next week, I can't help but to announce with as much hooplah as I can muster in this small space that Collaboration University 2008 registration has opened today. With a brand new website sprucing up the joint, we're all excited to begin the summer-long journey towards another successful and excellent conference on Lotus Quickr and Sametime. We're even adding some Lotus Connections content focused on integration and APIs.

I alluded in a previous posting to some changes this year, and suppose it's time to let them be known.

New Look
As you can see from the new website and comparing it to the Internet Archive, we've taken on a fresh new look - something you can expect to see throughout the Collaboration University experience. We're using Dojo, a lot more pretty pictures (from our own cameras!), and a lot less text.

New Digs
First and foremost, we're moving from Kansas City to Chicago - already mentioned that, but it's worth a repeat. Second, the venues are NOT hotels. What this means for our attendees is that they'll have a choice of hotels, many within walking distance, in two cities with excellent transportation! It also means the rooms will not be so cold, and the projectors will probably work all the time

In Chicago we'll be at the IBM Innovation Center, located on the Chicago River a few blocks from Michigan Avenue. I have visited the building twice this year, and folks it is a great place to have the size and type of conference we produce. In two weeks I'll be in London visiting our venue there, IBM South Bank. Just a few blocks from Waterloo station, Marriott County Hall, the London Eye, and accessible from all over central London. Our dates (both start on a Monday and run through Wednesday):

Chicago: September 8-10, 2008
London: September 15-17, 2008

Many thanks to Ed Brill for assisting with the introduction at the IBM Innovation Center, and of course to our co-producing partners The Turtle Partnership in London, and Darren Adams from IBM for assisting with the London venue.

New Content
Let's see, since last July's conference we've seen two releases of Quickr, two releases of Sametime, an entire new product with Sametime Advanced, the Webdialogs acquisition which became Sametime Unyte, two point releases of Lotus Connections (with a massive 2.0 release coming any week now)...there's a lot to talk about, isn't there? While we will cover the "basics" to some degree, you can count on the content being fresh, new versions and old covered, and we'll be delving into Connections for several sessions  - enough to satisfy everyone's need for new technical information.

New Workshop Concept - Like, Real Life
For our workshops this year (Wednesday afternoon post-con), we're trying something different. We're going to give you a month's experience in 3 hours! The workshop will focus on Quickr Domino development and administration. Developers will go to one room and work on an application - with significant help - for 90 minutes, while the admins will start with a "bare bones" install of Quickr and apply best practices security settings, modify LDAP, configure notes.ini and qpconfig.xml, and set up MSSO. Next, each developer will pair up with an admin to deploy the application and test it. If that's not real-life enough, your resident business client (me) will request a critical change in the application so everyone - developers and admins alike - can learn what choices you have to make when deploying changes to a production Quickr environment.

Homework & Prerequisites
So every time there's a conference, there is always a mixed bag of experience levels showing up at the door. It's the nature of the beast. With so much packed into a 3-day schedule, our approach has been to start with more basic topics and ramp up quickly. That means the first few sessions could be too basic for experienced attendees (though I've never been told that it's not challenging enough by the end of the day). So we're planing to release some basic sessions electronically to attendees in August as pre-conference "level set", for those who would like a head start. Totally optional, but those who go through them get 3-4 more sessions! The main benefit is that we can all start faster and get into more complex topics on the first day.

So please go have a look around the Collaboration University website, and register early! As you might expect, there are early registration discounts, and as a "thank you" to past attendees, an Alumni discount.

Now, back to packing! Dublin here I come...

Posted by Rob Novak At 4:19 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | | Comments (6)

05/23/2008

Category None

Make sure you reply to the confirmation email you'll receive from ILUG today, if you're a registered attendee! It lets the organizing team know that indeed, you'll be coming. Please don't let us down - so many people are going to great lengths to make this the biggest, most successful user group meeting ever held! So one more time:

A picture named M2


Posted by Rob Novak At 10:45 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | | Comments (2)

05/16/2008

QuickImage Category None

The SNAPPS Quickr Templates for Quickr 8.1 were all posted Tuesday morning, and have been tested by people who found them (like 200 of you, thanks to other bloggers catching on within an hour!). Then I re-posted them this morning without full text indices, as it appears at least one index was corrupted. Not a huge issue, but they didn't need to be there anyway. So far, only 5 or 6 people have reported issues. Some have been definitely configuration issues, following all of the doc, etc. Some are issues that are new with Quickr 8.1 - we have at least one SPR open due to what we found, and another Quickr bug we haven't traced all the way yet.

So far, so good. There are some important concepts to note, they're in the doc but to outline:
*Upgrading placetypes is not trivial, but is necessary if you're moving up from Quickr 8.0 or 8.0.0.2.
*We achieved our 100% common source code goal for compatibility with 8.0, 8.0.0.2, and 8.1.
*If you're new to the SNAPPS Quickr Templates, sign the databases and placebots as directed. The most common problem is unsigned design. If you don't know what this means or don't have the access on your server to do so, ask your Administrator to do the signing.

Will post more information soon folks. Enjoy...

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:49 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | | Comments (9)