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Some of you may have noticed the new tag line we are using at Teamstudio, “Get the most from Notes”. We feel this new tag line is more representative of what Teamstudio is all about. Our products and services help those building and managing Lotus Notes/Domino-based applications get the most out of the Notes/Domino platform.

Most Lotus Notes developers already know this. Whether you are using CIAO! to help control your application development environment, Configurator for global search and replace, Delta for database comparison and merge or another Teamstudio product, getting the most from Notes is what you have been doing with our products for more than 12 years.

Products and services for Notes Admins from Teamstudio are not as well known, but many of you have been “getting the most from Notes” by using our products for more than 5 years. Whether you are using Build Manager to help control the deployment of applications to your production environment or another product or service to help you manage ACLs, agents or overall usage of your Notes applications, you already know how our new tag line is consistent with the products and services we deliver to you.

So what happened to “Just Enough Governance for Notes”? Did it go away?

Although we did decide to change the tag line, we still feel the need for IT governance in the Notes world is important. We know it is an area where Teamstudio can help, but it is only part of what we do. If you go to the “Resources” section of our Web site, you will find a log of useful information there. And you can still get IT Governance help. Whether you are looking for policies references to help you form your own policies, or sample implementation guides, you will find it here.

I hope you agree that the new tagline, “Get the most from Notes” is more indicative of what we do. I would love to hear from you on this. Please feel free to leave a comment here or email me directly at scott_johnsen@teamstudio.com.

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 09:04:37 AM Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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I recently came back from a trip where I was working with several customers to implement source code control systems. I wasn't in Kansas, but I could see it from my porch. But my real message is that 8.0 and beyond really changed the Notes development environment, and everyone needs to consider implementing some source code controls.

Let me explain. I updated my mail file to 8.5.1 because I wanted to be able to accept meeting invitations in preview mode (a really cool feature in 8.5.1). Then I opened my mail file in 8.0 and discovered I could not accept meeting invites in preview mode. You see, it wasn't just changes to the mail template. This feature also requires changes to the Notes client, even though there were no new features in this release. Because this feature was implemented in the Java views and forms, it was not something I could change by opening the template in Designer and copying. Because it was implemented in the Java views and forms. This would seem to mean the days of tweaking your designs on the production copy of the database are quickly ending.

So now that you have another copy of the database on your server for implementing new features (and maybe fixing things that users think are bugs), you need to be able to tell how the two databases are different. And this is where the source code control system comes into place.

You see, good source control should allow you to identify the user request for the change you are making, and it should help you manage the different versions of your applications. I can't tell you how many databases I've seen with design elements that are named 'Copy of...'. At one site, the developer admitted to me that he could delete all 20 of the private agents in his database that were one-time only data fixes (because the source code control system could always bring back stuff that was deleted).

So, sooner or later, you are going to need a source code control system. I am sure you will find it will actually make your life easier.

Posted by John Kingsley At 07:18:24 AM Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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The aim of a good administrator is to have complete control of the content of, and access to, the servers they are responsible for in order to maintain a highly reliable service.

The aim of a good developer is to implement new databases, features and functions in the shortest time possible in a controlled fashion with minimum defects.

Unfortunately, these objectives are often in conflict. The administrator often sees the developer as a disruptive element wanting to deploy buggy, untested code into their beautifully controlled environment that will disrupt and destroy it. The developer sees the administrator as unnecessarily rigid, forcing them to jump through many bureaucratic hoops to get the simplest change deployed.

Sound familiar to you? If so, what do you do about it? Play this ‘cat and mouse’ game every day? Work to peacefully coexist? Ignore this dynamic all together? The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way.

There are solutions to this challenge. By setting up a process that addresses how code moves from development, to test, to production, you can control what code is moved into production. At the very least, this will ensure you are aware anything new.

Naturally, there is a lot behind this process. How much testing is required? Who has the authority to move code out of test? Is it possible to skip this step? The questions can go on and on. Teamstudio has developed a number of policy guides to help you with this. The policy guide on Application Delivery (PRO 10) is particularly helpful.

Of course once you have a process in place, you need to enforce compliance. The great news for admins is that there are ways of strictly controlling deployment to production. But your developers won’t be satisfied unless the solution still flexible and efficient enough to deliver legitimate updates in a timely fashion

Normally we wouldn’t promote Teamstudio events as part of this blog. But this issue has been coming up more and more lately, so we thought we would make an exception to let you know about an upcoming webinar that will show you how you can resolve these issues. The webinar is Thursday, December 3, 09:00 ET, 15:00 GMT. It will also be available on demand after the live event.

Register for our upcoming webinar to find out how easy it can be to resolve such issues. Thanks for indulging us in the promotion of this event.

Posted by Michaela Murray At 08:37:38 AM Location Huntingdon, UK | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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Several years ago I was working on a new software release for a previous employer when the CTO came into my office asking a favor. He wanted me to let one of the developers on the project implement a feature “his way”. You see, the issue was that he found what he thought was a clever way to implement one of the new features required by the users.

The problem with letting him do things his way was that other developers on the project felt it simply wouldn’t work. More importantly, the business said this solution failed to meet their requirement. The proposed design was pretty cool, but we really needed something that would work AND met the needs of the business.

So why was the CTO so adamant about this? It turned out that this particular developer possessed some unique knowledge because he had been with the company for a very long time and worked on many business critical applications over the years. The CTO was afraid that he might quit if he didn’t get his way on this new project.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Essentially, the CTO wanted to let the project fail in order to retain this guy. Incredible!

I spent a lot of time working with the VP of Development to find a way around this with no real solution in sight. As it turned out, the guy quit within a week. Whew! That was a close call.

In telling this story since then, I’ve come to realize that my experience is not unique. Projects are often held hostage by a key member of the team. So what can you do to prevent your project from turning into a complete disaster when it is being held captive?

There are a few things you can do, but it is important to recognize that losing those sorts of people doesn’t usually end up being as painful as you think it’s going to be.

Following is a short list of suggestions:

• NEVER allow individuals to hold projects hostage to their expertise, experience or knowledge. It is a rare project that ends in success when this happens.
• If a hostage situation occurs, remove the problem immediately. Project delays and challenges will only increase until the problem is addressed. It’s better to make this change on your terms instead of theirs.
• Contact the business immediately to let them know what happened. There may be a delay in the project because of it, but do your best to minimize any negative impact this might have on the schedule.
• Recognize (to the team and yourself) that removal of a key resource may slow a project down at first, but a well managed team will recover quickly and produce a much better result in the long run.

I’d love to hear your ideas on this. Have you been in a similar situation? If so, what did you learn that might be helpful to others who find themselves in a similar situation?

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 08:59:20 AM Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

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Very interesting post on Ed Brill's blog recently, though I don't think this is as unique to any one platform as Ed wants you to believe. This is just as easy to do in Domino as it is in Google and comes down to the management of security policies.

How many organizations out there are dutifully managing ACLs using groups? If an unknowing admin were to add say, the "Everyone" group to a group that was nested, at some level, inside the "LocalDomainAdmins" group, how long would it take you to discover that? How many apps would be affected? How long had it been since the change was made? My guess is that there are very few people who would have even known that it happened, let alone, what the damage was.

A deep understanding of the contents of ALL (yes I said all) the groups in your address book is incredibly important. However knowing the effect a group has on the access to applications (mail included) is even more important. The problem is being able to quickly learn what the effective access is to your applications at all times. This can be a full time job and very difficult to do on a regular basis. Just knowing that a group was changed is one thing. Knowing what effect that had is what is really important.

Exactly this issue is what led to the creation of Teamstudio's Admin Suite of solutions. If you are having difficulty knowing who changed what and when, who has access (really!) to which applications, you are not alone. Feel free to give us a call, or contact me directly at craig_schumann@teamstudio.com. I would be happy to show you how we can help.

Posted by Craig Schumann At 04:13:09 PM Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

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IBM surveyed more than 2,500 CIOs and compared what executives at companies with high-profit growth are doing vs. those at low-growth companies. The results are interesting.

Highlights include:

Do you integrate business with technology to innovate?	High Growth: 64%	Low Growth: 33%
Do you focus your time on providing core technology services?	High Growth: 23%	Low Growth: 40%
Do you aggressively turn data into actionable information?	High Growth: 58%	Low Growth: 36%
Do you expect standardized business processes?	High Growth: 61%	Low Growth: 50%
Do you manage change successfully?	High Growth: 61%	Low Growth: 43%

The full report can be obtained at www.ibm.com/ciostudy.

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 09:17:20 AM Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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According to s Business Software Alliance survey, these are the 10 industries most often reported for software piracy:

1. Manufacturing
2. Sales/Distribution
3. Service
4. Financial services
5. Software development (Surprising?)
6. IT consulting
7. Medical
8. Engineering
9. Education
10. Consulting

Question: Are these really the worst industries for software piracy? Or do they simply contain the most whistle-blowers?

The September 14 issue of Computerworld has an interesting article on the topic.

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 08:06:24 AM Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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The role of Technical Director (TD) at Teamstudio is responsible for pre-sales activities as well as post-sales implementation and training services. We have an opportunity to learn about a lot of Lotus Notes implementations. When asked a general question about our clients, The TDs will usually respond with “it depends”. Our customers are quite varied, and surprisingly unique from one another in a lot of ways.

Since we have a variety of products to help our customers understand who has access to what, who has accessed what and when, as well as what Notes agents have access to, we tend to learn a lot about our customers Lotus Notes/Domino environments, applications and processes.

One area that is more consistent across our customer base is with regard to data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities. It is surprising to me the number of customers we talk to who either have not implemented a DLP plan or are unaware of such a plan. You might not think your company has much in the way of confidential data, but one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Think about what exists on your company’s servers, databases, laptops and file systems across your company. You may not store credit card information, but every company has financial statements, sales projections and employee lists that are valuable to someone outside your organization.

If you haven’t already implemented a DLP solution, it’s worth a look. Not only can this save you from a very expensive and painful data breach, but it can also help you with your data discovery requirements.

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 07:56:16 AM Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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Sandals. Not a mission critical piece of workout gear, but if you want to avoid a nasty fungus.... Two days earlier I saw one of our account managers at the gym in stocking feet - he forgot his sneakers. But he has two pair in his trunk. (Side bar - at our office in the US, you are very likely to run into some Teamstudio person at the gym. There is another company in our complex where you are very likely to run into one of them on a cigarette break down by the pond. Talk about corporate culture!)

Anyway, I have been to the gym dozens of times, but sometimes something gets left off. Have you tried running with a dead MP3 player? It turns out that any manual process, like getting ready to go to the gym or releasing a new update of an application, can occasionally have missed steps. No matter how often you do it, no matter how well documented your procedures are. Missing a step in the gym prep routine isn't usually a big deal. But missing a step in releasing that application can be. I know one of our customers didn't have that single property to Require SSL connection turned on, and ended up having to pay for credit protection for thousand of customers.

I am sure you all have your own horror stories. The moral of the story is if you can automate your release procedures so that you can have a repeatable process where nothing gets skipped, you should. It also turns out we have worked with a lot of companies to do this, and could probably help you as well.

Posted by John Kingsley At 07:42:40 AM Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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Automation Station

As we have discussed many times on this blog, eliminating tedious manual chores from Lotus Notes Administrators will reduce the chance for errors. We have also discussed how this will allow Admins to work on more interesting tasks. One of the things we don’t talk about much is how adding automation to your repertoire will allow them to deliver a more consistent, agile and auditable service for your business.

According to a recent Analytics Automation survey done by InformationWeek, half of respondents claim to have saved 50% of all full-time employees previously involved in those processes. That’s impressive.

As businesses expand and contract in response to today’s evolving business realities, Admins must find ways to capture, track and analyze changes to applications, ACLs, application agents, etc. This is not an easy task certainly, but it’s critical because understanding those changes is the basis for securing data, improving service levels and meeting compliance requirements. Automation of key tasks can certainly help here.

Finally, enforcement of existing regulations, changes to those regulations and new regulations is very likely to improve. The worldwide financial crisis experienced over the last 2 years and the almost guaranteed overhaul of the health care system in the United States are only two of the reasons we can be sure more regulations are coming and better enforcement of those regulations are likely to occur. As such, the auditable service you provide will become even more important than it is today. Doing so through automation will not only be helpful, it could very well be required!

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 05:31:07 PM Location Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)