Autor: Christian Tillmanns

R.I.P Lotus Foundations. Another story of a lost opportunity

The writing was on the wall and now its official. Lotus Foundations is dead. I don’t think that there will be any migration path to anything else.
What annoys me most, is the fact, that IBM again bought a perfectly good product and killed it. Two years. Twice they changed directions in marketing and distribution. Every time we had to change our strategy, too. We did it, because we believed in the product and IBM.

Dear IBM, you made us loose money. It wasn’t the product, that was perfectly good. It was your incompetence in bringing it to the market. We even gave you money for co- marketing, which was completely useless, because you don’t know how to approach SMBs.

You didn’t even had the guts to schedule a partner call, to give us the bad news.

You want us as Business PARTNERS. A partnership builds on mutual respect.

You know, that I was one of the most active supporters of Lotus Foundations. I always defended you. You just have to read my contributions in LinkedIn.

I am sad. I feel betrayed.

I am not mad at the Lotus Foundations Team. I had the honor to meet and talk to quite a few of you. It was always a pleasure to work with all of you.

PS: If anybody comes up with „that is only about Passport Advantage“, forget it. Outside North America there is no other distribution channel. For us, that is the end, except IBM comes up with something else.

Now that was fun today … and sweet!

Today was an event, I was looking forward to. SNOUG-SR (Swiss Notes User Group Swiss Romand) had it’s second reunion in 2010 today. Guess what, it was great. Why?

The location: We where all invited to Camille Bloch. One of the most famous chocolate makers in Switzerland. Ragusa, Torino are their its main brands. It is a small company with 100 to 200 employees – depending on the season.
In the begining, Michael Snijders, head of IT, introduced us to the history of Camille Bloch. Apart from the fact, that Monsieur Camille Bloch set up this company in the Bernese Jura, where most of you wouldn’t want to be buried, they have quite an interesting IT history. They bought their first IBM system 1948. This is not a typo. They have been IBM customers for 62 years. I don’t think that there many companies, that have an „IT“ history that long and we are talking about an SMB. Today they are using Notes, Traveler, Sametime and Quickr. If possible always the latest release. They are looking into Alloy and UC.
Their Domino servers run on Ubuntu. I asked Christophe Boss, the main Domino admin (I wonder what nick name he has in the company), why they use an unsupported plattform. His answer:“ I am the support!“ For Camille Bloch, Ubuntu is the most cost effective solution. It looks like it runs great. Boss talked about a few issues in the beginning, but he solved them all. (yes, I will pester him, until he gives me the documentation). Now they are thinking about moving Traveller and Quickr to Linux, too.
After the introduction Snijders showed us a Box. An original Notes 3 box with the floppy disks still in their little sealed plastic sachet (If you don’t know what floppies are, ask your grannie).
After the intro, we had a very interesting speach about the Notes NRPC Parser by Andrew Magermann.
And then came the part, everybody came for, a tour of the company with „degustation“ in the end.
After the Lunch we had for 12 bucks at Camille Bloch, we talked about other interesting stuff. Teamstudio showed of some of their products and IBM SR had some very interesting news about the IBM/Lotus road map. They showed the latest screenshots of project Vulcan and if that is the future of Notes, I feel a bit better. It is cool. I mean not just cool. Cool cool. And if until then, that dreadful campaign „Lotus weiss“ is over and forgotten, Lotus actually has a chance to be on the map again (in case of getting a marketing campaing going that deserves that name).
„THE BOSS“ showed us the Snapps QuickR app for his iPad. Now I need an iPad … oh, and QuickR, too.

The Snoug Team: The SNOUG SR reunions are always free. Everybody just does it for the fun of it. During lunch we found out, that this was anyway the most cost effective way to do it.
I have to thank the SNOUG team for the wonderful idea to go to Courtelary and when I drove back and I could see the tipps of Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau in the light of the sinking sun. Just a great day.

Not even a headline: EOL for Lotus Foundations Appliances

I am really sad about it. I liked these boxes.

October 26, 2010

Effective October 31, 2010, IBM will withdraw from marketing the following IBM System x products. After this date you can no longer obtain these products directly from IBM.

You can obtain these products on an as-available basis through IBM Business Partners, resellers, or distributors.

9234AC1
9234CNU
9234DNU

Replacement: none

There may be a lot of good reasons, why IBM will not bring a replacement. But I get the impression, that IBM looses another opportunity to gain market share in the SMB market (I mean SMB by internationally accepted standards, not IBM standards).

That‘s what I like about Lotus Foundations

Last week we (finally!) found a CMS system, that seem to fit our needs. Concrete5 is almost perfect for people like us, who hate to fiddle around with websites. Together with Lotus Foundations it is a perfect match.

  1. Create a team
  2. Copy the files for concrete5 in the WWW folder of the team
  3. Add a virtual web server

That‘s it. 3 Minutes of work. Most of it sipping tea while copying.

Unfortunately IBM just does not get the grips, how to bring Lotus Foundations to the market.

I mean I like my Mac but…

…does it really have less problems then a Windows machine? I have had this MacBookPro 15“ for a year now, but was it a step forward from my old trusty IBM (not Lenovo) ThinkPad with XP? Not really. I expected more. More speed, less problems.
Let’s start at the bottom. We use a Lotus Foundations Appliance and that works flawlessly with Windows. Finder on the other hand, has huge problems. Sometime it takes ages to connect to the file server. Especially on our Lotus Foundations demo box. If I want to copy files to LF, very often I can not do it with finder, due to permission problems (no problem in Windows, and no, it is not a problem of the user).
If I click on „Programs“ in Finder, boy does it take long, until it shows the list.
Finder is extremely slow in opening a folder, too.
Now we look at Lotus Notes. Since I have 8.5.2 it got worse. I don’t think it is faster then 8.5.1.
(I use Windows 7 in VMWare Fusion and there the Notes Client is faster). 
When I start it up, it comes in the foreground every few seconds. Can’t it just stay in the background, until it is ready?
Whenever I switch from Notes to for example Firefox, Notes does something that looks like a reload of the whole Notes screen and comes back in the foreground. Also the menu bar keeps all the Notes menus, even if I have activated the window of another application. I have to move the cursor over the menu bar to make the menu items appear.
If I click on any icon in the Dock, that application comes in the foreground, not Notes.
 Notes 8.5.2 crashes much more then 8.5.1.
… it does definitely not „scream“.
Oh, and Firefox
I never got any drop down list in the search until yesterday.
I really like iWork.
Right now, the cursor disappeared, while writing this text.
That happens once in while in Notes, too.
iPhoto? Great
… but overall?
Do I want to go back to Windows? Who knows? Probably one day I find out, why my Mac is so slow and I get some insight why everybody tells me it is such a cool gadget.Probably the same reason, why everybody tells me Outlook is the better mail client … because everybody says so.

BTW: Windows bores me to death, too. Apart from a few new features, there wasn’t really a huge step forward in the last 20 years. People still mess around with folders in file systems and use MS Word as a information storage system.

Other Mail Servers on Lotus Foundations … not that easy

Yesterday I tried to install other mail servers on Lotus Foundations

Kerio:
error: Failed dependencies:
libuuid.so.1 is needed by kerio-connect-7.1.1-1951.linux.i386

I can‘t find that lib for 32bit.

Zimbra:
Checking for prerequisites…
FOUND: NPTL
MISSING: sudo
FOUND: libidn-0.6.0-14.2
MISSING: gmp
FOUND: /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6
Checking for suggested prerequisites…
FOUND: perl-5.8.8
MISSING: sysstat does not appear to be installed.

###WARNING###

The suggested version of one or more packages is not installed.
This could cause problems with the operation of Zimbra.

Do you wish to continue? [N] y

###ERROR###

One or more prerequisite packages are missing.
Please install them before running this installer.

Installation cancelled.

Bugger. I know that Julius in France does it.

Next one.
Zarafa:

Zarafa Outlook Sharing, version 6.40.2-22452
(C) Copyright 2004-2007 Zarafa, The Netherlands
Please visit http://www.zarafa.com/ for more information.

Zarafa requires MySQL 4.1 or higher. Please upgrade your MySQL
database and restart the installer.

Bugger again…
I think the best bet is on Zimbra. Let‘s see if I can get the missing parts.