The Domino Chick

Notes Goddess Guest Blogging for Kathleen - who is busy

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

Hi all - Notes Goddess Susan here -  I'm in an airplane heading for Boston for Admin2008.  Kathleen McGivney is NOT busy - she's off on her Honeymoon in Italy with the Awesome Atom.  She sent an email from her MacBook with has no Lotus Notes and no IBM software at all on it, so she really did disconnect from work, but obviously she missed the Admin crowd.  Here's Kathleen's message from Italy.....

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From Kathleen, on holiday in Italy:

Buon giorno! I've got a post all cooked up for when I get home from my honeymoon. While I'm out, though, you can keep up with me on Twitter and check out the photos that my husband and I are posting under the 'kandahoneymoon' tag on Flickr. And you can check out my brand-new personal blog here for more in-depth updates.


I'm sad that I'll be missing everyone at Admin2008 in Boston, but a honeymoon in Italy beats being cooped up in a conference room any day. :-)



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Posted by: Susan at: 03:03:13 PM
Location: Boston, MA

Lotus Notes and me, BFF

Sunday, April 6th, 2008

Apparently there's a meme going around the Lotus blogs about how we all got started with Notes, so I thought I'd share how I started with Lotus products.

In 1995 I worked as an accountant at Rockwell Semiconductor Systems, which eventually became Conexant. We used Lotus 1-2-3 with a lot of complicated formulas for certain accounting processes, and I quickly became proficient with it. The company was using MS Mail at the time and decided to migrate to Lotus Notes. I was friends with a bunch of the IT guys because I was the geek in my department and helped a lot of the others with their computer problems, so they told me they were looking for groups to do a pilot of Notes. I immediately set out to convince my department manager to let us be the pilot group, and he agreed, as long as I could train everyone to use the new mail program.

I went to some train-the-trainer sessions and taught my department how to use Notes. I helped with their everyday issues (mostly usage differences between the two mail programs) and soon moved on to developing applications for my department's use. I attended a series of onsite classes on Notes application development and realized I wanted to change careers. So, I moved to New York, of course.

After a short stint at another consulting company, during which time I continued to work on Notes development and gained my certification, I went to work for Binary Tree and learned a bunch of stuff during my tenure there. I then moved on to another company who was on 4.x but had sections of the company who were migrating off cc:mail and Notes 3.3.4 on OS/2. I'd only worked with 4.x before that, so working with 3.3.4 while I upgraded them to the latest version was another learning experience. I have worked with Notes, Domino, and related Lotus products ever since.

So, what's your story?

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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 10:59:26 PM
Location: New York, NY

Symphony as a daily tool

Sunday, March 23rd, 2008

When IBM Lotus announced Symphony as a stand-alone, free suite of tools, I was very happy, for a number of reasons. First, because I love the open-source movement and what it has contributed to computing, and I am proud that IBM both contributes to and utilizes open-source projects. And second, because I don't use Office, and now I don't have to justify that choice. :-)

Those of you who know me or work with me know that I haven't had the Microsoft Office suite installed on my current laptop - ever. Before Notes 8 went beta, I had been using OpenOffice.org as my main suite of productivity tools, and since the integrated tools became available I have been using those. (Symphony and the Notes 8 productivity editors are based on the core OpenOffice.org office suite code and use Eclipse and Expeditor to deliver the user experience.)

I have built every presentation I've done in the past 3+ years in OpenOffice, Notes 8, or Symphony. In fact, I am using Symphony spreadsheets and documents to help me plan my upcoming wedding! You should see the insane wedding-related spreadsheets I have created using this thing. We even wrote the ceremony and vows in a Symphony document - and then saved it as a Word document so we could share it with our officiant.

There are some things that I'd like to see improved, specifically with regards to interoperability with MS Office products, because some formatting and features tend to get a little messed up when you change back and forth between the MS and open document formats. However, I find it to be a fantastic tool and have successfully replaced MS Office as my daily office productivity suite. I suggest all IBMers, partners, and customers consider doing the same.

I mean, hey, why not? It's free!

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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 06:15:00 PM
Location: New York, NY

Wednesday at Lotusphere ’08

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

Man, Lotusphere is completely nuts this year! (In a very good way.) There are tons of people here and so many great sessions going on that it's hard to choose which one to see. I finished presenting mine yesterday, so today I plan to actually attend some sessions (shocking, I know). Some highlights will be Paul and Bill's Worst Practices session at 10 AM in the Dolphin - I plan to get there early as I hear that there's a video that they'll be running before the session that's a must-see. Just after their session in the same room, there's a session on AdminP that I'm sticking around for, since it's one of my favorite topics. I also plan to attend Ed's session on marketplace advantages for IBM Lotus Solutions (which, incidentally, is also in the same room later in the afternoon - apparently I should just stay in DL N. Hemisphere D-E all day).

Then, of course, tonight is the party at Universal Islands of Adventure, where I'll be riding roller coasters that scare me half to death - if the weather doesn't turn on us like it did last year!

What are the highlights that you've seen so far this year at Lotusphere?

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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 06:06:12 AM
Location: Lake Buena Vista, FL

Notes from Lotusphere, Day 1

Sunday, January 20th, 2008

It's only Sunday night and Susan and I are halfway done with the sessions that we're presenting together. We started on Sunday at 9 am by co-presenting our hands-on session on using Domino Domain Monitoring. It will be repeated on Tuesday at 8 am, but I think the pre-registration is already full. Standing room only!

I'm looking forward to attending the Opening General Session in the morning. I'm hoping they do something big around Symphony - obviously not a new product announcement, since it's already out there as a product, but I'm sure there will be a lot of talk about it. I'm using Symphony for tons of things already. I haven't had Microsoft Office on this laptop in the 2 1/2 years I've had it, and was using a mix of OpenOffice and the embedded productivity editors in Notes 8 for my documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, but now I'm using Symphony pretty much exclusively. (I do have the MS Office Viewers on my machine so I can double-check that everything looks okay in presentations.) I'm even using Symphony Spreadsheets to help with my wedding planning! Of course, I also have a Notes database for non-budget-related wedding planning purposes.

I won't be liveblogging the OGS, but Ed will be, so that's the place to watch!

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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 10:34:00 PM
Location: Lake Buena Vista, FL

Lotusphere is almost here!

Monday, January 14th, 2008

It seems like just yesterday that I was in Orlando presenting at Lotusphere '07, and now Lotusphere '08 is right around the corner! I'm really looking forward to seeing everyone and presenting my hands-on sessions, and I'm especially looking forward to seeing the cool stuff that the Lotusphere team has in store for everyone. There have already been some announcements - like the location of the Wednesday night party and the new Lotusphere Idol session that promises to be a really interesting way to audition speakers. Add in the fact that Sunday is now a full-blown conference day, with Jumpstart and Hands-on sessions all day long, and this promises to be a fun, knowledge-filled, exhausting (in a good way!) Lotusphere.

I am going to have limited time to catch sessions in between speaking, meeting with customers, and roller coasters (I kid, I kid), and I have tons of sessions on my "want to see" list, so between now and then I think I'll be spending some time trying to narrow down my choices. I know there are some topics I'm excited about - mostly around future products and performance - but I would love to hear what everyone else is looking forward to seeing.

So, tell me - what sessions are you most excited to see this year at Lotusphere? What's on your must-see list? (Besides my hands-on DDM session, of course.)

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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 11:49:48 AM
Location: New York, NY

A goodbye to Jonathan

Friday, December 14th, 2007

This morning, a friend and colleague, Jonathan Sir Hendrey, passed away suddenly in Austin. Those of us who had the privilege of knowing and working with him are extremely saddened by his passing. I was fortunate enough to work with Jonathan while in my role in FSS and we became fast friends. We kept in touch after he left FSS and collaborated on various projects, as well as just hanging out and talking whenever we were in the same location.

My favorite Jonathan story is the time that he decided he wanted to buy an Audi. Not just any Audi, but an Audi convertible that was located at a dealership in Santa Monica. Now, Jonathan lived in Austin, so this was quite a dilemma. What did he do? Well, like any other FSS Engineer with a bajillion frequent flyer miles would, he flew out to L.A., had the dealer meet him at the airport, and went to test drive the car. Since I lived in L.A. at the time, I went with him to the dealership and took a test drive with him. He liked it, so he bought it and then promptly drove it right back home to Austin, top down the whole way.

I'll miss you, JSH.

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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 06:25:54 PM
Location: New York, NY

Liveblogging Paris!

Tuesday, December 4th, 2007

I am currently at the Premium Support Summit in Paris at IBM Descartes. So far, I have heard some interesting questions from delegates, including some enhancement requests. One enhancement request, which I will be contacting the development team with soon, is for Policies documents. Back in 2006, I blogged about how to modify settings documents to push location document fields and ini variables to clients. This is a great workaround for those administrators who wish to push one or two ini variables out, but difficult to manage for large organizations or organizations with large numbers of ini variables to manage.

For those of you using this workaround, who would like to see something incorporated into the Policy or Settings documents allowing administrators to modify client-side ini variables by simply adding them to a list in a field or dialog?

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Posted by: Kathleen McGivney at: 05:45:26 AM
Location: Paris, IBM Descartes