Senthil Kumar's Blog

Growth and Comfort do not co-exist

2011-10-31T21:40:00.000+08:00

You have to keep reinventing yourself and that can happen only when you take risks. I couldn't agree more :)

Here is "Ginni Rometty" the new IBM CEO replacing "Sam Palmisano" on taking risks

Got to appreciate this man...

2011-08-18T07:42:00.000+08:00

What a leader he is, no wonder why Sachin recommended him to the board when he was offered the second stint for captaincy.. I love this Ind vs Eng series and the next 5 days will be very interesting :)

IBM Centennial Film - Wild Ducks

2011-06-17T08:24:00.000+08:00

World Cup Cricket 2011

2011-03-03T14:20:00.001+08:00

I think i am slightly late to the current world cup cricket party but i have been watching the streaming in the internet once in a while, reading reports, watching scores in HTC (they have a ESPNCricInfo app) and watching video blogs ( like Harsha's daily). When i start to write this, this reminds me of the good old days when i started playing cricket.

For people who know me personally you know how much i like cricket in the earlier days.. I used to play lots of street cricket in my very early age in 80's. We started going to school and college grounds to watch and play cricket using cork and cricket balls without mat. We all move as a gang in the morning and come home in the evening times to get some good scolding and at times beating from parents. Our faces would look red after playing almost whole day and mind you, it's not cold out there, it's damn hot but hey when you are young no one would give it a thought whether it is hot or cold.. All these things happen in the week ends.

During the week days, we play at our school using whatever we could ( rubber balls, tennis balls, plastic balls and sometimes even those corn stems, dried ones are good for hitting). All the team selection and the toss would happen during the course of the class and the matches begin during the lunch time. Haha, it was way cool.

Apart from this we love to play book cricket along with our own commentary. Those days we also listen to radio commentary a lot when players like Srikanth, Shastri, Kapil and Gavaskar plays the game. My class mate, Faizal Mohammed was among the greats in book cricket, he loves Kapil dev a lot and he himself is a fast bowler too. We take our science book which is the biggest of the lot and play cricket during free times. It's so very interesting, we have some dedicated note pads only for the team score cards.

Then came the B.Sc college days and later during my B.Tech university days, my playing has come down a lot but started watching, reading and commenting about cricket a lot. I love reading articles by R.Mohan from Hindu paper (now i think he's not there), Prem Panicker, Avinash subramanian from Rediff, and last but not least Harsha Bhogle and they are the ones who inspired me a lot in terms of writing and talking about cricket. Those days we do lots of debate about who is the best batsman and all that stuff :) People who know me personally would know that I always love Sachin Tendulkar both as a cricketer and as a person (some one who doesn't let success to his heads) and I personally always consider him as the best batsman in the world.

I also had written some odd cricket articles in the past, I will have to dig it out from my notebook. Will be doing that some day.. So these days i rarely play cricket and even watch but mostly read articles and watch videos clippings etc.

Anyways, for this world cup Cricinfo has introduced the concept of Harsha's daily a summary of the day's game which i like a lot. He'll bring most part of the match through his ever smiling way and I feel like i have watched the entire game.

Follow this for the rest. Thank you Cricinfo for this.

HTC Desire First Impressions

2011-02-10T14:02:00.000+08:00

Finally i have settled with HTC Desire after contemplating between this and iPhone 4 for some time and few friends stated to go for Android than iOS. Thanks to them. So i just bought this Chinese New Year, there was a bit of promo from Starhub for many phones including HTC Desire and i happily settled with one.. Here are my first impressions after using for about a week..

Pro's

Quick and very easy setup.. Just provide the Google account everything is taken care. Mails, Calendars ( I haven't explored tasks yet) and it even syncs your Facebook account including the events there.. So you can see everything at one place in your calendar. FB contacts will sync with your phone contacts.
Seamless connection between Wi-Fi and 3G. Picks up automatically based on your location.
Email client is cool, and at the moment am using only Gmail . Search also works pretty good highlighting the word that you searched for and also saves the word for next time search.
Browsing is breeze and the screen reacts sharply to pinches etc for expand and collapse very well.
Big screen means a lot when you want to read while commuting in MRT
Android market place app is way too cool when compared to Ovi store. Now i remember someone mentioned Ovi store is a joke.. Ok, am not bashing Nokia though b'cos i still love my E71.
5MP camera is good and have taken nice shots in day light.. Not tested in night times.
Overall phone looks are great when it is in hands.

Con's

Not many but one noticeable thing is the battery,, drains like rain water , very fast even though i don't seem to run any background tasks
Am not sure how Android works though, when i have finished using an application, does it still run in the background and so taking lot of battery life etc?

Overall it's very good and at this moment, i don't i regret not using iPhone b'cos in this part of the world almost everyone carries that.. Is there any specific thing which iPhone does very well when compared to HTC Desire? May be iPhone fans will know :)

The Nostalgia has dropped suddenly

2011-02-06T14:45:00.000+08:00

but only temporarily. I have been doing some Lotusphere nostalgia things just for a while and then came to end abruptly.. Well, i normally i am a good basher of myself but this time around i am not going to do that. I had to handle quite a few things in between and just couldn't sit and blog.

Frankly, it's a little bit hard to keep with things that's happening around you and then also allocate time to write about it.. But i would like to tell you this, i enjoy doing this work and so i can make some time. It's just that i am a bit lost in organizing all this properly. At times, i will think a bit complicated and cannot think SIMPLE.

Meanwhile, i am finding my way out to manage all these and already doing some home projects towards that. Having said that, there is indeed some good news that is coming up. Please stay tuned. I will try to update as and when things happen or may be a bit later ;)

As far Lotusphere 2011, there were some excellent all around news from LS2011 as well. I will have to read all the contents available and hear from friends before writing anything about it. But one thing is clear to me, IBM is taking more of the Lotus Connections route to re-brand the entire Lotus portfolio which will compete with Google more than MS. I think the strategy is very good indeed and a very long term vision. With all the push from MS around SharePoint I think companies are discussing more about Google than MS. At least IBM is giving that sort of a feeling but will have to wait and see.

Another certain thing is Lotus UI is going to change in the years to come and end users will start getting a feeling that finally the software is their own rather than only for developers and administrators. This will surely increase user adoption rate and we will hear some day from CIO's that my users are asking for Lotus and so we have to make a switch. The perception is going to change sooner than latter :)

Good day people... Cheers

2011-01-01T11:01:00.000+08:00

Wishing all the readers of my blog an

EXCELLENT NEW YEAR 2011 AHEAD AND ON THIS DAY I ALSO WISH EVERYONE TO LEAD A HEALTHY AND PROSPEROUS LIFE AND MAY ALL YOUR DREAMS,WISHES COME TRUE IN THIS YEAR AND IN THE COMING YEARS :-)

IBM to Collaborate with Leading Singapore Institutions

2010-12-31T11:05:00.000+08:00

IBM has announced a research collaboratory in Singapore, where researches from IBM will collaborate with Singapore local institutions to improve urban services. This is one of the project which will come under IBM Smarter Planet strategy.

From the news,

IBM will work with several agencies including the Economic Development Board (EDB) and the Land Transport Authority (LTA) to develop decision support tools to help Singapore more effectively manage its resources. As part of these efforts, IBM also intends to drive research collaborations with an ecosystem of research institutes and universities in Singapore.

The collaboratory will enable world-class researchers in Singapore and IBM's mathematical experts, renowned for applying advanced analytics to solve real-world issues, to share skills, assets, and resources to achieve common research goals.

Singapore is one of the most advanced cities with extremely high demands placed on its urban infrastructure (water, transport and energy) due to its geography, size, population and dependence on neighbors for natural resources such as water and power. The country has also been at the forefront on the global stage in rallying for liveable and sustainable cities for the future. Besides promoting a learning network through the hosting of the biennial World Cities Summit, Singapore also aims to serve as a living lab for companies to test-bed innovative solutions for densely populated, compact urban environments. The research collaboratory for smarter cities will advance this endeavor.

The Group director of LTA Singapore Dr Chin Kian-Keong stated

"For LTA, the use of technology has always been at the forefront of what we do - how do we squeeze out more efficiency out of our transport system, and at the same time making it safe."

Dr Chin said the research could provide intelligent solutions to real-life transport problems. "If you can get information of any traffic congestion to motorists way before they reach this incident side, and get them to detour, that will help to relieve the congestion that can be caused," added Dr Chin.

While Singapore already has mechanisms to control traffic and the traffic alerts in place, I believe this initiative would push it even further and could well end up with personalized commuting. Here is a little video to illustrate some of the upcoming innovations from IBM where personalized commuting is a part of it. Come to think of it, I see Singapore is already laying foundations for personalized commuting.

Once upon a time, West Indian Cricket

2010-12-29T22:52:00.000+08:00

Excellent Video on West Indian cricket...

Beware of Starhub Digital Voice Line Bills

2010-12-28T13:10:00.001+08:00

Recently, Starhub has been upgrading their IT systems and so the customers have not been receiving monthly bills in their usual billing cycle. I for one had not received my bills for few months ( but as i am making my payments by GIRO) every month the amount has been automatically deducted. And recently i have received bills for the month of December and i noticed that there are some charges towards the Digital Voice Home line which is around S$10 (originally it was free). Even though it's not a big amount for anyone in SG, i just wanted to clarify and called Starhub.

Nowadays, the line seems to be very busy and finally got connected to a customer consultant about 30 mins later ( thanks to the speaker phone facility, if not you got to hold the phone all the time). To my surprise the consultant told me that " The Digital Voice Home" is still free and Starhub has not introduced any charges till now. By diagnosing further, he told me that my Digital Voice line is registered under my old address where i lived many years back and was then using Starhub also.

So what could have happened is during the IT systems upgrade there are some details which are messed up and showed up as charges in customer's bill. And you know what, this has been happened for the last 3 months and since i have not been receiving any bills, i didn't had a chance to realise the amount. So eventually it turns out to be around S$30 which is a decent amount anyway..

Ok, the point here is Singaporeans are very busy in day to day life and don't have a chance to notice some of discrepancy in the utility bills. But these things could happen, so please be aware.

Had i not noticed, i would have missed around S$30 which could well be used for a family dinner in Food Court :) Say what ?

Lotusphere Nostalgia Part 3

2010-12-28T11:43:00.001+08:00

Ok, here is another awesome video during the closing session of LS 2010. This is done by a gentleman named DJ Steve Porter who is renowned music director, remixer and it seems one of this video Slap Chop Infomercial is viewed more than 11 million times.. Wow.

Well, we also need to congratulate the LS team for bringing in such great people and advertise the products. These sort of things will definitely appeal in general public. Look how people are enjoying themselves and some people i could recognize are Andrew Pollack, Nathan Freeman, and Mikkel besides Bob Picciano and Alistair Rennie..

Hmm, Let's see what is in store for Lotusphere 2011.

Lotusphere Nostalgia Part 2

2010-12-26T02:21:00.001+08:00

Key Highlights from LS 2010

IBM Project Vulcan - To me this is the single most important thing from LS 2010 even when there are other things like LotusLive, Lotus Notes Traveler etc.

Because it is going to appeal to both end users and as well developers and business partners. For the end users b'cos they are going to have an user interface which is very much like any other social software they use daily eg: Facebook

And for the developers and business partners IBM is going to release a common set of API's which will talk across the Lotus portfolio starting from Notes / Domino until Lotus Connections, Lotus Live and IBM WebSphere Portal. But it is not going to happen in the next release of Lotus Notes and Domino but will happen over a period of time. That's why Project Vulcan is not a code name like 'Hannover" ( code name for Lotus Notes 8) but is a blue print for the IBM future collaboration strategy.

That being said Vulcan will include all the latest technologies to achieve this vision namely HTML5, XPages,CSS3, Web Services and may possibly include WebKit etc. Of course it has to b'cos what IBM is trying to achieve is to make the entire concept of collaboration as "loosely coupled services" which can then applied across the organisation. To make that happen Lotus has to include all the Open standards ( it is already doing though) and only then if the developer wants to go integrate Lotus Notes with any of the services available in the Internet he / she will be able to do so.

Some questions comes to my mind though, while in the process of making it slimmer, will IBM cut down some of the features Lotus Notes has already got but for now we don't have to worry b'cos LS 2011 will answer those and shed additional light.

The purpose of this writing is only to highlight some of the key things about LS 2010 in my eyes b'cos i have caught up with LS fever now :) We may come back here again before I close down Lotusphere Nostalgia...

Thanks for reading this and stay good.. Cheers

Lotusphere Nostalgia

2010-12-24T12:40:00.000+08:00

With only 36 days left for Lotusphere 2011, i started browsing through the contents that are available from the past Lotusphere events. I will be including some of the interesting things for the next few days. Already caught up with the Lotusphere fever :)

Now, here is a video which is considered as one of the best in the opening general session of Lotusphere.

Fourth week in Independent consulting

2010-12-24T00:19:00.001+08:00

I am already in the 4th week in my new Independent consulting role and would like to say i have thoroughly enjoyed it. One of the key reasons I prefer this, is every single second of the clock is yours and you decide what you want to do with it. I didn't had much chance to connect with many of my old friends in the last few years mainly b'cos of the work commitments etc and one of the first things i did is connecting with them. I am stunned to see many of them in the FB and just repent why i haven't connected with them early.. it's really a fantastic feeling to see your old friends and talk with them. Almost all of them are having cute kids at least 2 and more in some cases :)

As for the work, i am fortunate enough to get some small work from customers and will be getting some additional work in the future (hopefully). The work that i am currently involved is more to do with business process re-engineering and i am currently identifying the as-is business process with the team. There are few other cases i am waiting for the customer's decision. Since this is a holiday season the decision will generally take a while. Having said that, this is just the beginning and i know it's a long way to go from here but i believe that i should be able to do it. If i take a look at the current situation the expenses are more than the revenue that is being generated but it will take a while to turn around the situation.

Having said that, I also get to spend some quality time with my family which i missed to a certain extent in the past. I enjoy being with my wife and kids and all the more since it is school holidays, they are also thrilled at me being with them :)

There is 1 more item, since i have all the time in this world now hopefully that means i can focus more time in blogging as well, pls send me your comments, feedback and i promise i will try my best to incorporate in my blog. Thank you so very much for visiting my site and your feedback / comments are much appreciated. Please drop a note to skumar75atgmaildotcom

P.S. If you are leaving comments in the site, kindly leave your name and URL (if any) so that i would be able to put comments against a name. It's little hard to reply for anonymous comments, am sure you understand what i mean. Please select a profile when you comment and there are options to enter name and URL. Thank you much for your time.

Graduation Day Concert

2010-11-27T21:59:00.002+08:00

My son Jai Ganesh has graduated from Apple Tree KinderGarten to join Primary school next year. We attended the school concert and ceremony arranged by them. It's always fun to see children performing in the stage. Jai also gave a opening talk with his fellow classmate before the class choose to opt for "We are the world; we are the children" song.. he also performed in a chinese song and always good to watch your kid performing in the stage.. his performance in "Jai Ho" song during his K1 last year was much appreciated by teachers and other parents.. Will have to upload in "You Tube"..

Doing opening talk

Collected the Certificates Already

We are the world song

Performing a wonderful chinese song

Nice step during chinese song

Photo Courtesy - Raymond ( Jai's friend Aaron's Father)

Browser Statistics

2010-11-26T23:26:00.000+08:00

I noticed that for this month November, Chrome is very close to IE. Interesting that many have opted for Chrome than Firefox.. Hmm, let me see.

Pageviews by Browsers

Internet Explorer

231 (39%)

Chrome

230 (39%)

Firefox

108 (18%)

Opera

8 (1%)

Flock

6 (1%)

Safari

4 (<1%)

NetFront

1 (<1%)

Version

1 (<1%)

An important announcement

2010-11-26T10:07:00.001+08:00

I am very happy to announce to the world that i have taken up Independent consulting role after working for more than 12 years in Cambridge solutions pte ltd Singapore (Advanced business partner of IBM). It's been a very long journey with the company from the level of programmer to presales consultant / project manager / solution architect all in one role :) I should say i had enjoyed most of the time but at times you feel tired of going to work especially after very long hours and some week end work. (They are some of the reasons to take up Independent consulting role but doesn't mean IC will need you to work less though the feeling is truly different and it's been some time i have been thinking of Independent consulting)

In any case, i have taken the decision and am going to enjoy the journey and look forward to it.. I am taking up work in my core areas first mostly with IBM Lotus and WebSphere Portal technology projects consulting and Project Management services while am also working with some Business process re-engineering projects etc. But i am very sure i would be evolving a lot in the years to come.

Hence, i have a request to my readers.. If you know of any work related with IBM Lotus technologies, Project Management requirements or BPM / BPR related work please let me know. I live in Singapore and would be willing to travel also. You can hire me on a project basis or for a specific duration. Drop me a note skumar75atgmaildotcom and we can discuss :)

Some changes in the site

2010-11-09T10:08:00.002+08:00

I will be making some changes in the coming days and i have started doing some already from changing the theme to removing the blog roll. I just got the feeling it doesn’t make much sense when you list a few gentlemen blogs whereas in reality you tend to see many other blogs. I will be making further changes in the days to come and very soon will write in detail about the reasons : )

LTAP 2010–A Lotus Technical and Professional Users Virtual Conference

2010-10-26T00:51:00.005+08:00

And the good news is Registration is Free. Please go ahead and register. It’s for 2 days on 27 and 28th of October. Gentleman by name Alan Forbes clarified most of the sessions are on demand and hence this part of the world need not worry (it will be 1AM for us in Singapore..)

I didn’t had a chance to attend events for a while now as I am fairly tied up with other activities. More on that part later. I have been wanting to write more on that but somehow i feel i need to do lot of things before i can go and tell anyone..

Anyways, meanwhile let’s enjoy LTAP with some great speakers in the list..

ROBOT Indian Movie

2010-09-29T20:41:00.004+08:00

I don’t generally blog about movies as i am very picky in watching movies. I used to watch many movies during the early days but have become very choosy for the 10 plus years or so..

Having said that, i should say this is one of the most awaited Indian movie that many people are looking forward for a long time.. The movie took about 2 years for production and some of the great people joined hands in this movie and releasing in Hindi, Telugu and Tamil languages in tandem. Looks like HBO is releasing with English sub titles in the west.

Firstly 2 Oscar award winners A.R.Rahman and Resul Kutty and then Superstar Rajnikanth arguably the second highest paid actor in Asia after Jackie Chan opposite with Aishwarya Rai Miss World in 1994 directed by one of the box office hit director S.Shankar produced by SUN pictures with a whopping budget of around Indian Rupees 160 plus crores which is around USD 35 million and in comparison to movie like Avatar which is around USD 235 million is no way near but for an Indian movie this is one of the most expensive movies done in recent times. If one has to believe what the production house and other media is saying this is the highest budget movie ever made in India film industry.

Atleast 40 percent of the budget is on the special effects and animation and is done by Stan Winston studios the team that has worked in Avatar movie. The movie action sequences are done by Yuen Woo-ping who did for movies like Matrix and other Jacki Chan and Jet Li movies plus lots of other talented technical crew including Randy the movie cinematographer and it seems that without him the movie would have taken a longer time to complete.

I wish the team Good Luck..

Here is the trailer which is set to release on 1st October 2010.

At the time of writing this i noticed in Singapore the movie is releasing tomorrow and is fully booked and in India all theatres are full for 1 week.

Nokia never sleeps

2010-08-14T01:55:00.003+08:00

I have been using Nokia E71 for quite some time now and i like using it most of the time. Although I have plans to buy iPhone, BB, and Nexus One in the coming years :) This particular feature “Alarm even when the phone is OFF” is a very neat feature which comes very handy when your battery is low in E71.

I realised my phone battery is low when i go to bed but i need to set an alarm for the morning. If i keep the phone running for whole night it will die in the middle and hence i just set the alarm and switched off the phone.

So when the time came in the morning, NOKIA wakes you up and gently asks whether i want to “SWITCH ON” the phone. Nice little feature but realised that this is not available in many phones including iPhone 4G and in some cases even the BB and Android devices.

Thanks Symbian and Nokia..

Need advice from Gadget gurus

2010-06-26T01:48:00.002+08:00

I am planning to buy a new notebook for my home office use. Though I don't run a business from home it simply means that i will have the following application server, web server and a database server installed for my learning. Mostly the list will include

IBM Lotus Domino server V8.5.x
IBM Lotus Quickr server V8.5.x
IBM Lotus Symphony
IBM WebSphere Portal V6.1.x with WCM
DB2 / My SQL / MS-SQL
IIS, IBM Http server / Tomcat / JBoss
Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino Designer and Administrator V8.5.x
Eclipse / RAD tools
MS Visual Studio
MS - Office full suite including Visio, Project etc
FeedDemon reader
Windows live writer
Nokia PC suite
IE, Firefox and Chrome
IM tools, Skype
Photo editing tools
Plus the Windows 7 system programs and Laptop manufacturer specific programs
And sometimes go crazy download and install web frameworks and once in a while gaming, watching movies etc

I am pondering over Lenovo Thinkpad 410 vs Thinkpad 410i vs Samsung R480

Lenovo Thinkpad 410 Configuration priced around SGD 2250

Processors	Intel® CoreTM i5-520M processor (2.40GHz up to 2.93GHz with Turbo Boost, 3MB L3 Cache)
Operating system12	Genuine Windows®7 Professional
Chipset	Mobile Intel® QM57 Chipset
Memory8	2GB DDR3 SDRAM
Hard disk4	320GB SATA HDD (7200 rpm)
Optical device5	Dual Layer Multiburner Drive (DVD-RW)
Graphics	Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator HD Graphics
Display	14.1" WXGA+ TFT with X201 LED Backlight Display
Battery	6-cell Li-ion Battery
Warranty	3-year on-site Warranty

Lenovo Thinkpad 410i Configuration priced around SGD 2050

Processors	Intel® CoreTM i5-430M processor (2.26GHz up to 2.53GHz with Turbo Boost, 3MB L3 Cache)
Operating system12	Genuine Windows®7 Professional
Chipset	Mobile Intel® QM57 Chipset
Memory8	2GB DDR3 SDRAM
Hard disk4	320GB SATA HDD (7200 rpm)
Optical device5	Dual Layer Multiburner Drive (DVD-RW)
Graphics	Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator HD Graphics
Display	14.1" WXGA+ TFT with X201 LED Backlight Display
Battery	6-cell Li-ion Battery
Warranty	3-year on-site Warranty

Samsung R480 Configuration priced around SGD 1500

Processors	Intel Сore i5 540M, 2.53 GHz
Operating system12	Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium (32 bit).
Chipset	Intel HM55 Express
Memory8	4GB (DDR3/2GB x 2)
Hard disk4	500GB (5,400rpm S-ATA)
Optical device5	Super Multi Dual Layer (S-ATA)
Graphics	nVIDIA GeForce 310M 512MB gDDR3
Display	35.56cm (14.0 inch) LED HD (1366 x 768) 16:9 Gloss
Battery	6-cell Li-ion Battery
Warranty	2 year local warranty

For the requirements stated above, which once would be a better choice? While i am tempted to buy Samsung purely because of pricing, i am not sure whether it can meet my requirements given above. Thanks in advance. Happy weekend ;)

My Journey with XPages

2010-06-22T14:50:00.003+08:00

Well, this Xpages thing is running in mind for quite some time. I had attended a training conducted by Stephan Wissel a.k.a Singapore Lotus Guru some time ago. During one of my chat sessions with him i was discussing with him about a simple task management sytem and told him i make use of some of the free wiki based tools for the same.
He told me that why don’t I write a Xpages application for the same for which I responded that after the training I will give it a try. He was kind enough to tell me that he could host the app for me in his server.
Work kept me busy and didn’t find much time to read and learn Xpages stuff. Yesterday, i was in a mood to learn and write some code and play with it. So I started learning Xpages. My usual way of study is I read a lot of theory first before start doing anything with it. Somehow I fel t that I should not follow the same for Xpages and started doing it and within a day I manage to put a simple application.
I learned Xpages and applied it for a simple task management system. This may not be a full fledged application but contain all the ingredients to make use of it rightaway.
My objective is very simple. I need to store personal tasks that needs to be done and the priority. Also a brief description of what needs to be done. I should be able to update it any time if I need to change (for eg. Changing the priority etc).And I can also delete the tasks if I don’t want it. Since the need is not complex, i want all this to be done in a single screen in Web2.0 fashion
Here we go, in traditional LND development, you will have a form to create the task list with the fields inside. If you build it will look like this,

You can start creating task documents using the above Task form. Then you need a view to show the task documents. Then build a view to show the list of tasks. It will look like this,

For a simple application, that’s all we need. With this one can perform all the CRUD operations using LN client. Now Domino does quite well in translating this and you could make use of this from the browser too. Wanna see that,

Upon clicking the link, it will take you the document itself

You can actually edit the document and update from here. Not so pretty but you can make it pretty by making use of custom HTML, CSS and a bit of Javascript. That will take some time though.
With the advent of Xpages, this is kind of breeze. How do we do that? I will show the output first before I go in to the details. This is how it looks at the end of it,

Much neater, isn’t it. The magic behind this is Xpages in Domino which is available from LND 8.5 Remember the first form we built in the beginning, now you need to build a corresponding Xpage and assign a data source for the same in this case it’s a Domino document. Once you are done with it you will have to do a simple data binding. Data binding is an important thing where for every element in the Xpage you match that with the corresponding field element in the Notes form. Let’ see how,

There are plenty of controls that is available with Domino 8.5.1 and using which you can built a nice looking pages as shown above.

Drag and drop the controls based on your needs, and finally place buttons for submit and delete. Since we have already defined the data source as Dominodocument before, clicking the submit button will create documents in the database.

Ok next thing is the equivalent of Notes View in Xpages. For which build a Xpage and define the data source as Domino view this time and choose the view you want to use. You can drag and drop the view columns from the data palette that is shown there, the output will be like this.

Notice the page navigation a.k.a pager has been added automatically. Now comes the best part, using Xpages you can tie this both in a single screen by making use of the container controls panel, table, include page and view. I have imported the style sheet that is provided in the training class Styles.css which and the image resources.
So I build a new Xpage called xpIndex which will include the above,

After that it’s all about just configuring the delete button so that all the things will happen in a single screen itself when you hit the URL http://localhost/tms.nsf/xpIndex.xsp

Upon clicking the task, it will be populated in my new task page and I can modify and submit. The changes will go in to the database automatically. Similarly, I can delete the document, for eg
Selecting a task New will be added in the new task page and upon clicking ‘Delete’ the system will prompt for the confirmation

and if you say Ok the task will be deleted,

That’s it. One more thing, until now you view this in browser and you just don’t have to do any more thing to use it in Notes client. Wanna see the Notes client view,

There lies the Xpages beauty…
Considering the fact, I have not done much coding lately, most of my work is related with Project Management, customer handling, team management and selling technical solutions to customers this is quite reasonable. Learn Xpages in a day’s time and building a simple app.
I will learn more from here and might just give it a try to build the same using .NET

Lotus Notes Domino App Development Wiki

2010-06-22T12:48:00.002+08:00

I wonder, why am i not able to the screenshot images in the above mentioned wiki. As far as i remember, i don't encounter this problem in any other web sites. Do you see this as well?
In chrome, i get this

In Firefox it's even worse i won't even know that there is a image in between the text

In IE 7.x it look like this,

What could be wrong here?

IBM Lotus - This last 2 weeks

2010-06-19T18:32:00.003+08:00

Originally i started writing a comment in Volker site and since it was slightly bigger i wrote a separate blog entry itself
It started with Volker in his typical way followed by Jake and John Vaughan. I read through almost each of the comments and it was definitely enlightening to go through each of it and how each one of us perceive about Notes software and i must say i thoroughly enjoyed it.
I have made comments on Jake's blog and from then on to read all the rest of the comments took a long time and digest. Every now and then Lotus community face this sort of discussion and i remember once i too have written along these lines in the past.
http://senthilkumars.blogspot.com/2006/02/laug-1st-meeting.html
Each time, i want to write comments in Volker site, there is whole lot of things running in mind and don't know exactly how to write about. That's what writing experience is all about. If you start writing on a daily basis, your writing will get polished and you know exactly what needs to be communicated and to be able to do that with just few words yet powerful. IMO, that's why Volker is able to sum up in a nice way and others like me think but whole lots of things comes to mind and stop and then again lots of things comes to mind while you sleep etc.
Before i start i have to say "I just love IBM". Even though i have never worked there, i am just attracted by Big Blue IBM. I get excited every time i hear that IBM makes software for big corporations and they are massively scalable and nothing comes close and simply not comparable to other vendors. They have just about everything for a big company to be their customer and even smaller ones. Am bought by the IBM brand much earlier somehow.
After i completed my Engineering i was selected in a campus interview to join a IT services company and it was there i was first introduced to Lotus Notes R4.5 in the year 1998. In my team we were 12 trainees who started reading through Lotus Notes CBT and were given training on the platform by our senior employees in the team. And it's about 12 years now. All this while, i have been working in Notes and Domino and until 2006 its very much Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino, LDDM, Lotus Workflow.
After that, the market started slowly dipping in SG for Notes. Not much new development in Notes. Singapore Gov is a very big customer of Notes and every Ministry, Stat boards, and Agencies associated with Government uses Notes for Email. Not only for mail and plenty of applications in Notes and lots of services company has made huge money until one day the Gov said: We are going to standardise our operating environment (SOE) and the following are the software that will be available in each of the civil servant desktop and the list doesn't include Lotus Notes. It's a massive deal SGD 1.5 billion (atleast from outside it looks so). The consortium that won the deal includes Microsoft who are the key software supplier. And that means, its Exchange over Domino for mail. And the project has officially started in the year 2007 and its still on going. Not sure how successful will be but analyst like Gartner predicted it will not yield much gains though.
http://senthilkumars.blogspot.com/2010/04/soeasy-is-not-so-easy.html
Anyways for people who built their skills around Notes and Domino, they have to move on and in my case, out of 12 people in my team there was no one doing Notes except me at that point in time (team mates were smart and they changed careers am not repenting though) and i for one continued with IBM but its just that i shaped up skills in Presales and started in WebSphere Portal technologies and WCM. As a IT services company, it made a lot of sense to them that they can make more money in Portal and WCM rather than just Notes in which applications can be done usually 1/10th of the cost and even IBM reps were pushing for the Portal and WCM than Notes purely because they cannot add any new licenses in Notes and only by selling new licenses they reach their target. Because majority of the Notes systems are not very complex systems and usually 10 - 15 apps can be maintained by a developer and administrator, it's not visible to C-level management.
May be IBM should have delivered things like Lotus Connections in Domino platform as Nathan very rightly stated or i wonder why not a SharePoint like system is delivered in Domino platform. I just wonder, why IBM has not capitalised on a opportunity like this. They had 140 million seats during year 2004 or something and if they had polished Domino and built a system like Sharepoint on top of Domino wouldn't they have increased the business to double. IMO, Domino had everything what Sharepoint is doing today and i wonder what would have taken to built a system like that. May be IBM perception of collaboration was different and they wanted to make it more of a process centric rather than document centric.
Volker has asked a very genuine question why IBM has acquired Lotus in the first place and how Domino is perceived by other divisions of IBM. To find out answers, I digged through some of the interviews by Steve Mills to understand what can i make out from the statements. That has given me some broad level understanding. I will quote some of the items here
Excerpts from
http://www.information-age.com/channels/management-and-skills/features/313746/an-interview-with-steve-mills.thtml
IA: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are building huge data centres across the US and Europe with a view to offering software-as- a-service, storage-as-a-service, email-as-a-service and more. They see themselves as the new large utility companies, delivering application services. So does IBM see that as something it would want to replicate?
SM: For the consumer, no. We have made it clear in the market that our orientation is not toward [the consumer]. It is not that we won’t help others serve the consumer, we are happy to do that, but we don’t want to be consumer facing. That is not our forte.
IA: Acquisitions have become a central part of IBM Software’s expansion strategy, and that has moved the portfolio up the stack from middleware and systems software into the applications layer, with FileNet and Cognos products. Can you give us an idea of whether there is a clear applications line that you do or do not want to cross?
SM: So I am the guy that makes these decisions, and [I can tell you] there is a clear line. However, the line is more related to an understanding of the ecosystems in which we participate.
Take FileNet as an example. Clearly, there are people who look at FileNet as an application. But most of the code, by weight, is infrastructure not application code, even though it has application-like characteristics.
He goes to say that
What this comes back to is that we are not afraid to deliver applications, but we are clearly very selective about where we do it. It is in spaces which are highly exploitative of infrastructure.
Even though this interview was done quite some time back, we can still see the mind set and we will have to definitely take this as voice of IBM. The above answers some of the questions that were asked by the Lotus community and that is IBM is not interested in consumer facing because that is not their forte and they are very much in to providing infrastructure software and services than applications.
That's why IBM never shows product in their marketing because they are not consumer oriented where as MS and Apple are.
And that's why IBM don't want to produce good looking and nicely polished UI because they are marketing to end users.
Their market segment and the areas of focus are very different from others and that's why IBM is hugely successful company and know what they are doing.
So if you are working with Lotus technologies it is expected that they may not carry a UI like Apples or Microsoft's and it's up to the consultant to build up nice UI's with the software because IBM is not selling to end users.
So to come to a conclusion, my take is as a consultant we can love a particular technology or product but still has to keep options open, we definitely have to pickup different skills and need to apply when it is needed. In my case since i love IBM, i managed to move to WebSphere Portal, WCM, OmniFind, along with LDDM, Quickplace/Quickr, Sametime etc. Besides development i also do presales and project management.
When i write this, in Singapore there is only a handful of Lotus Notes jobs and to be precise its only 5 from the job site and WebSphere Portal is also very less.
J2EE and .NET openings are quite a lot and nothing wrong in picking up .Net / J2EE and infact IBM wanted us all to know J2EE and if one fine day Domino is consumed by WebSphere which is their home grown and not acquired as in the case of Lotus, they don't want people to loose out jobs.
Ok now what, go back and think about what you could do to make yourself more marketable. Learn Xpages or .NET? Am going to learn both and other technologies too. Happy learning...
Update : This post is not supposed to be meant as Negative. IBM has done a great deal to Lotus Notes without which Lotus wouldn't have come this far. All am trying to convey here, IBM probably have a different strategy and may be it doesn't gel with what we think. Project Vulcan is a prime example for that kind of commitment. IMO,if we understand the technology fundamentals my take is it's not very difficult to apply and learn new technologies right? That's how i want to view and move. Life has to go on.
Long Live IBM Lotus

del.icio.us Tags: IBM,Lotus,Notes,Domino,Community

IBM Project Vulcan Demo

2010-06-01T16:23:00.003+08:00

IBM Project Vulcan Demo from Serdar Basegmez on Vimeo.

Lotus Notes - Project Management Thoughts

2010-04-20T09:18:00.003+08:00

This was in my draft for quite some time and finally released today.
In the early morning today, i was thinking of day to day situation where as a PM, i need to know what my team members are working on today and how much of that is already completed.
I will be using this information in the regular status meeting with the customer, so that when the action items coming out during that meeting i can easily visualize when can it be accommodated considering the current work load. The customer also will be able to see exactly what the team is working and which resource is doing what. This will be particularly good when the whole team executes the project in the customer site which we did for one of the migration project recently ( more will come soon on that)
Eventually, one would come to know what are the activities we did for the complete project and who are the people worked on those. And this data will be really helpful when we bid for the next project.
MS-Project would probably help me out if the information is required only for me and of course with the help of Project server, i would be able to share this information with others. But i am not sure how complicated would that be. And i doubt they have something like a local replica which i can carry across to my meetings all the time. Even in this era of connectivity all the time, there are definitely still places where a local replica is going to help you a lot.
In those situations, IBM Lotus Notes will help address the needs. You can build a functional application in few days time using the Lotus Domino Designer which is free.
There are some very good products that are already available in Lotus Notes and Domino platform. For eg: Genius4Domino is a very good product for project management tool for a project group available as both Lotus Notes client and Domino web based application.

SOEasy is NOT SO Easy

2010-04-20T09:15:00.002+08:00

Singapore government's plan to standardize the desktop and network components is underway and we all know the analyst firm Gartner has some doubts on the feasibility of achieving the kind of savings that government is trying to achieve (SGD 500 million).
Part of this initiative is also the migration of Lotus Notes to MS Exchange platform. I am very keen in exploring this area to see what would such initiatives finally bring to the table.
If this portion of the project is successful that will mean the government agency users will start using Outlook as their email client instead of Lotus Notes. As such it's only messaging nothing beyond that and this part is not difficult.
But Lotus Notes client is much more than a email client unlike MS-Outlook through which all the business applications can be built and accessed. Now the issue starts there, to convert all the Lotus Notes applications / Domino web based applications to MS platform.
There is no easy way to convert these applications to rival platform as much as MS touts (even it does at the end of it you are going the same functional application in the MS platform). Recently, i have encountered a customer scenario where they want to convert a Lotus Notes document repository application to MOSS and expect to work in the same fashion. The LN application contains lots of rich text data and MS architect team tried to convert this application using the MS Transporter suite but failed miserably. Not much of the information is transported and is not up to the team's expectation. After trying several rounds, they came to Lotus team for assistance.
So the point here is the government will have plenty of such applications and custom workflow applications, tracking applications, content management applications etc. MS team has to basically rewrite all the existing apps in MOSS platform ( not all the apps can be built in MOSS there are quite a no. of apps that need to built in .NET) and even to move all the data from current Lotus Notes to MOSS they need to work closely work Lotus consultants.
Just wondering if all the applications has to be rewritten from the scratch what is the ROI we are talking about or the cost savings we are talking about.
I would welcome any thoughts or debate in this...

Nokia Maps

2010-01-22T07:40:00.002+08:00

This is cool and excellent news indeed,
Navigation on Nokia. For Free, Forever ;) I am sure that brings smiles to all the the Nokia users. However at the moment that support 10 plus devices and additional support will come in future.
For N97 originally not included, the new date is Jan 28th. E71 dates is not released yet.
http://maps.nokia.com/explore-services/ovi-maps

IBM Project Vulcan

2010-01-19T06:23:00.003+08:00

Is going to leave everyone to dust. One of the announcements from Lotusphere 2010. Looks like Google Wave, Facebook, Connections, LinkedIn etc and know what, everything to be delivered in Lotus Notes client in what IBM calls Continuity, Convergence, Innovation and New opportunities.
This is definitely going to be a big leap forward in the areas of collaboration and productivity yet supporting all the Notes apps that you had built in the past. I wonder how IBM is able to achieve this sort of backward compatibility but i am sure that it's not an easy task.
Here we go some sample screen shots by far the best through EdBrill.com

IBM Software Technical Certification Day

2009-11-01T21:56:00.003+08:00

IBM has conducted a software certification day for all of its partners lacking the relevant certifications on 30th October. They provided the workstations and a friendly lab manager to assist. They also stated that the IBM team will be there to help to ensure that partners have the best opportunity to qualify. But i don't remember seeing anyone though :)
Anyway, I made most from this opportunity and took 2 certifications.

M13 - IBM WebSphere Portal Technical Sales Mastery
LOT 955 - IBM WebSphere Portal Deployment and Administration

and cleared both. Soon, i will be receiving the electronic certification from IBM. Thanks IBM for conducting these and these things will definitely trigger to go for more certifications.

Basics of WebSphere

2009-09-26T08:42:00.002+08:00

Good read to understand the WebSphere basics. Oldie but Goodie.

IBM Lotus Knows Campaign

2009-09-25T00:08:00.002+08:00

Did you go and see the new Lotus Knows in IBM site? Go ahead and watch it.

Linksys Router Troubleshooting

2008-12-27T12:23:00.000+08:00

Since last night, I couldn't access the internet using my wireless router. I am using Linksys wireless router WRT54G version 4 to access the internet. I have 2 computers which connects to this router, my notebook running on XP and my desktop running on Vista. My ISP is Starhub and i called them to find out whether the issue is from their side. We did some troubleshooting together, and found out that with the direct connection to modem, i can access the internet without issues.

So the next thing is to connect through the router wirelessly. When we tried, it didn't worked. So now we know the issue is cos of the wireless router and not cos of the modem.

I called up Linksys then to connect with the support staff and explained the problem. A gentleman explained me the steps i have to go through and finally we got it working. I asked the staff, we are troubleshooting the issue now but in the first place what is the cause of the problem? The reply was: there could be 100 reasons why the router could stop working, some of them are; there may be a in the ISP and when it got restored, somehow the router is not able to identify that and hence the problem. So while he was not sure of the problem, he knows how to resolve it.

Anyway's, we didn't do any rocket science all we did was to go through the steps by restoring the router to the factory settings. I have stated the steps here to troubleshoot the issue for everyone's benefit.

Problem: Not able to connect to Internet using the wireless router, but able to connect via modem (To access via modem, need to enable LAN by going in to Network connections)

Answer:

Step 1: To restore the factory settings in the router – reset the router by holding it for 30secs. Connect the cable from the router through any of the ports from 1 to 4 to the computer

Step 2: Access the router from browser http://192.168.1.1

User ID : blank

Password : admin

Step 3:

In security Firewall uncheck the Block Anonymous Internet Requests

Step 4:

Under Administration UPnP disable it

Step 5:

Give a SSID name and change wireless channel to something shown above

Step 6:

Select WEP in security mode, give passphrase and key 1 10 digit hexacode. Save settings in all the above steps

Step 7: Connect the cable to modem and router, turn off modem and router.

Step 8: Turn on modem and after that turn on router after a while. There you go, i connected to the internet and works like charm :)

PS: I asked the support staff, why can't you put these steps in your Linksys support site. He replied that it may differ with ISP and hence they cannot put this in their web site. So i have put up here which works for Starhub. May differ for Singtel users.

Words Cloud

2008-12-08T12:44:00.002+08:00

I tried Wordle inputting my blog and the output is here. If you want to try click the image.

What am I in the eyes of Typealyzer?

2008-12-07T13:04:00.001+08:00

del.icio.us Tags: Typealyzer,Personality

I noticed this link through Stephan Wissel (Lotus Guru in Singapore) and Jonathan Wong (cool IBMer and I have started reading his blog lately)
This is what Typealyzer thinks after analyzing my blog. Of course, I need to start blogging regularly to find out whether am this on a long run. As of now this is what i have got,

ESTP - The Doers

The active and play-ful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.
If you want to check yours visit Typealyzer

Bud Light Beer Commercial

2008-10-26T07:41:00.000+08:00

Steel Pole - Bud Light Commercial - video powered by Metacafe

Lotus Top Gun

2008-08-10T19:10:00.001+08:00

Last year, around this time i was selected as one of the Lotus Top Gun in the class. Its really a nice moment indeed :) This time IBM is not having the Top Gun classes in Singapore and is happening in KL. I just saw a Tweet from Stephan Wissel, he has just returned from KL after Lotus Top Gun 08.

An Entry after a long time

2008-06-11T07:09:00.000+08:00

Its been quite a while since i wrote my blog posts. My last entry was in April 2007. Many things have happened since then and one of the prime reasons why i couldn't blog as much as i want to is my role has changed of late and my focus is more on project management and presales. Most of the time, i am very busy going for meetings, working at the deliverables of the meeting, project management - guiding the team as to how the end deliverables would like and attending project related meetings. Apart from that, working on the proposals for new projects. Given the project is live now with just one more site to be signed off, i am back to my presales activity again.

Well, the project which i was working is a dealers portal based on IBM Websphere Portal 6.0 and Websphere Portlet Factory. We built 2 virtual portals for the dealers and the other one is for Intranet users. I will write down the details a bit later, and now i have few other important things to convey.

First is the Lotus Symphony v1.0 available FOC (free of cost). Symphony 1.0 is definitely much better looking than the other beta. I have downloaded and started to use Presentations which is pretty nice looking with the thumbnail views. Though i am preparing in Symphony, i still save it as a PPT file for MS compatibility cos the same file i can send to other colleagues who are using MS Office. I am spreading this word about Symphony internally in my office and i will have to notify to my senior management about this.

Ok for all of you who are using MS Office, see the alternative Lotus Symphony which is FOC. You will take sometime to learn but i am sure anyone can learn that.

Stage is Set - WorlCup 2007 Finals

2007-04-27T08:08:00.002+08:00

It's all set for a scintillating finals between Australia and SriLanka. Though Australia is the no 1 team in the world my heart says SriLanka this time and its not just emotional.

I did some comparative strength and weakness of both the teams and this is the outcome.

Batting Bowling Fielding

5 4 5 Australia

4 5 5 SriLanka

The difference is very marginal but in my opinion the bowling is going to decide the fate of WC Finals 2007 and Muralitharan, Malinga, Fernando and Vass are the key. Muralitharan in particular will be the danger man for Australia. Tackling 60 balls from Muralitharan will be the key for Australia to try and win the finals..

Just my thoughts :) Cheers all

IBM Lotus Product Demo Links

2007-04-25T18:51:00.000+08:00

For the benefit of people who attended seminar on Knowledge networking and Web 2.0 on 23rd April monday at IBM Park View Square. Giving all the product demo links for you.

Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, Lotus Notes 8, Dashboard Framework

Download and enjoy in your leisure time. Thank you all for your feedback. It was a good feeling to go through it. Cheers all

Knowledge Networking and Web 2.0

2007-04-23T06:28:00.001+08:00

I am delivering a presentation today at IBM Park View Square on Web 2.0 and Knowledge networking along with my Chief Architect Mr. Mani. Last 3 days kept me busy in preparing for it. It's a enjoyable experience though without much sleep etc. I couldn't prepare this piece earlier, as i was working on a Portal project presales and thought i have got at least one week to go through this but all of a sudden my better half caught up with a bad flu and had to rush her to hospital. She was completely down for more than a week and in the recovery path now and hopefully she will be completely alright in this week.

First time, am seeing flu which is there for more than 3 days. She had to undergo blood test and some X-ray tests as well as her temperature was 40-41F all the time.

Well anyways i manage to find time in these 3 days and put up a presentation for my audience. Since this is actually a follow on event to LCTY 2007, i hope most of the audience are a Lotus shop. And am gonna pitch 2 new products which is gonna hit market soon. You know it already, Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr.

And there is already one more seminar coming up on 26th April on WPS. Will cover that soon as well. Cheers all :)

Lotus Notes Domino 8 Public Beta Available Now

2007-03-11T02:23:00.001+08:00

Back in India, expectations are sky high about Indian cricket team winning World Cup 2007 in West Indies. Meanwhile, i am very excited about Lotus Notes Domino 8 beta release here..

Public beta is available now for download. Go ahead and enjoy !!!

Real "WOW" begins next week

2007-03-09T04:29:00.001+08:00

Just can't wait to see the Notes 8 Beta, have seen glimpses of it before both Classic and Eclipse based. Really look forward to seeing by next week. Via Ed Brill

Meanwhile, i also have my LAUG meet up where hopefully i can see Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections too Cool :)

Lotus Expeditor 6.1

2007-02-12T14:37:00.000+08:00

I have recently attended a 4 days class on Lotus Expeditor in IBM. I must admit it was a wonderful (both personal and professional) 4 days in the recent past. All the days were absolutely fantastic in terms of learning and hearing lots of good things about Lotus. The trainers were absolutely awesome in engaging us in some whiteboard discussions where we had enough chances to put forth most of our points :) and get answers too. And the mates who attended the session with me were real good guys - most of the them from TechSales and absolutely have a flair for selling and joining in some excellent debates. The other group is from Technical services - fantastic guys who plays with WAS (Websphere Application Server) and WPS (Websphere Portal Server) every day.

The interesting point to note with these Tech Services guys is they are able to see everything from 100% technical point of view. These guys are having some real cool discussions in terms of really implementing the concepts with Java programming. I must say that i am really motivated after seeing their working style for these days. Thinkpad is a must for every employee in IBM and almost 80% of the workforce is mobile so that they can work anytime, anywhere. They don't have to come to office everyday to be productive and can work from home too if they want.

So many things happened and i am digesting whatever i have heard now.
Lets come to Lotus Expeditor. What is that and how is it useful for an organisation?
Lotus Expeditor comes with 3 components viz client, server and toolkit to build Composite Applications. They say "Universal client" because it runs everywhere - Desktops, Laptops, Devices like PDA, Mobile phones etc, and KIOSKS and can work in connected and not so connected and completely disconnected environments as well.

Lotus Expeditor is the common run time based on Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform) on which Lotus Sametime 7.5 (already running) and Lotus Notes/Domino 8 is going to run. It is basically Eclipse RCP plus other services like layout, managed browser, security, synchronisation etc etc. Some say that Expeditor provides client runtimes and applications run on top of it. The reason to say this is because of the fact that Expeditor itself can be deployed from a centrally managed portal server (and hence the name server managed clients) and applications can be pushed to the Expeditor client desktops or any of your devices from a central server.

The true business value of Expeditor comes from the fact that it gives the users flexibility to work in both connected and disconnected environments. The classic example would be the Insurance agents where they have to travel to locations with no Internet/GPRS connections.

And here are other reasons:

Server managed clients so applications can be automatically pushed when its available.
Composite applications - Simply put it is the portal which can work offline. The huge value comes from the fact that it makes the users productive in the context of the business process of what they do. They don't have to switch to multiple applications when they work with the customers. And the best part is they can even do this even when they are offline. These things will be of immense value if you are J2EE customer or portal customer today. Such things were non existent in the J2EE world.

If you are Notes/Domino customer things like offline data/applications, replication is something which we do traditionally and hence the value would come from the fact that you could build composite applications based on NSF data alone or if they want they could mix with the data from all other sources like Portals or other J2EE applications or even Microsoft applications. Behind the scenes it is going to be WSDL and other Web Services components which is what makes the whole on-the-glass aggregation happen. Plus because the whole thing now is going to run on top of Lotus Expeditor (which is also the underlying architecture for Lotus Sametime 7.5) plugins you develop for Sametime and Notes/Domino can work interchangeably. I was sitting besides Stephan Wissel (the Lotus guru in Singapore) during the session and picked up lots of things when i talk with him. He is truly a great person. Whenever i speak with him it will always be enlightening for me and actually it motivates me to learn and talk.

There are just too many different combinations that one could think of with Lotus Notes Domino 8 and Lotus Expeditor. I will put down as and when i read more about the subject.

It was tempting for me to say that Lotus Notes for the first time can also serve transactional applications if you code your composite application that way. For instance, you could have a composite application like BankTeller application runs inside ND8 client but serves the transactional data. I am not sure exactly whether it is possible and i leave this part to subject experts :)

All in all i thoroughly enjoyed the complete 4 days and very much look forward other training sessions. Thanks all people.

Happy New Year 2007

2007-01-01T13:03:00.000+08:00

Wishing every soul in this planet

A VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR 2007

May this new year bring all that you need in life. Just in case if it doesn't
GO FOR IT.

Little different feeling

2006-12-31T21:20:00.000+08:00

We decided to put our son (Jai) in Childcare nearby home. Registration is done and he is gonna go there from 3rd Jan 2007. It was a nice feeling altogether the one my dad would have had when he put me in Lower Kinder Garten. In Singapore, we have 2 more optional levels before i put him in K1 or LKG.

First in Nursery1 or N1 which i have put my son in and after that N2. Look forward to see him in classes in the coming days, he has already started saying take him to school. I really hope he will enjoy the classes and hopefully i would facilitate with a learning environment at home too.

MS - Sharpoint Server 2007

2006-12-31T21:10:00.000+08:00

I attended a 5 days training session on MOSS (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007) in Avantus.
Originally it was intended only for MS tech guys in my company but i managed to get inside. The prime intention is to learn and some obviously draw some comparisons between my favorite LND and SP. I know i cannot compare LND with just SP cos SP requires many other things to get it work.

I will try to write this in detail later but the conclusion i had to draw is - if your infrastructure is Lotus already, i don't think its a good idea to use Sharepoint. If you are a MS shop yes you didn't had anything of this kind before and oh yes, you could move with additional M$.

In my opinion, if you are already LND shop and also use Quickplace, you are in the game already :)

Things i missed to cover - IBM Lotus Sametime 7.5 Demo

2006-12-31T20:59:00.001+08:00

I gave a presentation recently to one of the prospective customer on IBM Lotus Sametime 7.5. That made me learn about Eclipse RCP and overall Eclipse. I am sort of new to Java world but it seems like i have to learn more in the near future. Lotus Sametime 7.5 is really a huge way forward based on Eclipse. The fact that it is very extensible and it can even inlcude your Workflow applications real time is amazing.

I have to become a Java guy to do all this, but i think i don't mind to become one :)

Things i missed to cover - LAUG 8th Meeting Dec 2006

2006-12-31T20:39:00.000+08:00

This was our last session for this year and we had a little dull crowd as it was a festive season everywhere. We had a gentleman from AXS-ONE explaining about the compliance management of everything from Email to Digital Records management and the entire life cycle of the records management.

I had a detailed chat with Stephan Wissel who is now the "Lotus Technology & Productivity Advisor" from IBM Asean about the future of Domino Designer, Domino Server and Lotus Expeditor, Lotus Ventura. It was really an enlightening session for me and i get to know the happenings in IBM toward Lotus Notes and Domino. I was damn happy to hear all the great news and look forward to see everything in the year 2007.

Thank you very much Stephan for the wonderful session.

Things i missed to cover - PMI Training

2006-12-31T20:18:00.000+08:00

We had a Project Management training in our company to get more people to become PMP certified professionals. One of the prerequisite to appear for PMP exams is to attend 35hrs of training which will earn you 35 Professional Development Units or PDU in PMP terminology. A gentleman from ProWiz by name Mr.Ravindran took the sessions for us, and i must say its no sleepy sessions.

He made the sessions very interesting by giving us many exercises to do as teams and individuals. The entire crowd was split in to 4 groups and challenged by questions from every topic.

The easiest of all is the Initiation stage and thereafter its was all very challenging. Planning, Execution, Quality and finally Completion. I loved almost all the sessions and i managed to get a passing score in the mock test provided on the last day :) I will definitely write the exam this year and i initially thought i cannot for more than 6 months to take the exam. I have already missed close to 3 months. Let see how it goes from here.

Things i missed to cover - IBM Lotus Quickplace Demo May 2006

2006-12-31T20:01:00.000+08:00

One of the key resources was down with fever and i was asked to do Lotus Quickplace 7.0 presales demo for one of our prospective customers. I have worked QP3.5 before but haven't seen QP7.0 yet, the time line for the demo was just 4 days away and i just started doing QP setup in my Notebook.

I wanted to show my customer some POC with fair bit of customization, themes that matches the needs, with their corporate logos and some related corporate content i took from the Internet. I must say i really enjoyed working for that 4days. It was real fun and its was very simple and transparent for end users that they could create sites on their own in few minutes time.

The audience were really impressed when they saw some of the features and one particular feature they are very impressed is the mailing the content from your favorite mailing tool to the QP content site. You don't have to really login in the QP site to post the content, QP sites are associated with mail IDs and users can post the contents from the favorite mail tools.

Things i missed to cover - LCTY 2006

2006-12-31T18:29:00.001+08:00

There are lots of things i missed to cover in the year 2006. May be i am very lazy to update every now and then when things happened or may be our culture also has got to do something in this. I cannot say that i am damn busy all the times that i don't have any spare time. There are definitely times, when i feel like blogging but just couldn't do it. So i take this opportunity to blog some of the things that i missed when it happened.

First of the things is the LCTY (Lotusphere comes to you) sessions in Singapore. In the month of March when the preparations was on for LCTY i went and had a discussion with my SM(Senior Management) about having an IT stall during the LCTY session. The obvious things are to get additional branding and additional projects :) In April, IBM Singapore also announced sponsors from partners to have their logo and names in the Singapore CABS (Taxis) for LCTY. We decided to do both and went for taxi sponsors and also put up a stall. We started seeing the cabs hitting the roads with IBM Lotus on it and IBM also covered some nice ads in Singapore Straits times. All this taxi ads were there for a month and lucky for me i could see one near my block car park itself. My son and i are in the picture.

On April 21, 2006 my team went early and set up the stall with Scandent Group flyers and a nice little presentation for stall visitors. I must say it was an eventful day, i met lots of people from various companies and did some boxing :) as it was the overall theme for LCTY.

Well, i look forward to this year LCTY and i am sure it is gonna be good as always.

The Famous Deal - IBM and MS

2006-11-16T15:00:00.000+08:00

A bit of history this time. When i was Googling about IBM and MS i found some interesting articles/deals. One of the article is about the famous deal between IBM and MS and how MS became a multi billion dollar company from nothing. Its definitely worth reading.

After completion, you will contemplate whether Bill Gates really a Genius or anyone can become so!!!

So the moral of the story is :
Sometimes, its not what you know that matters, its who you know really matters? Taken from one of the Singapore taxi drivers business card, who also happened to be a Letter writer for accidents etc.

Updated the last 2 lines on 19th Nov 2006.

LAUG 7th Meeting

2006-11-15T00:09:00.000+08:00

The 7th LAUG meeting at IBM City centre today went pretty good. A Team (Mitsuru and Mike) from TeamStudio came all the way from Japan to give a presentation on some of their flagship products. Though i have seen some of their presentations through WebEx demos before (courtesy Benjamin Green - TeamStudio) today i managed to see it live. Almost all the tools are quite cool and some of them are a must in the Notes/Domino environment (CIAO - Check In And Out) is one among them.

Nowadays, we hear a lot of people saying their Notes environment is out of control. The reason is simple. Because Notes is a Rapid Development environment we tend to keep building applications and one fine day hundreds of applications sitting in the app server with the least amount of document possible. I have seen in many places, hundreds of design elements with many duplicate copies of the application/design elements with no version control at all. So, then it becomes tedious for anybody to maintain and people start saying Lotus Notes in not good.

But the fact is we didn't put any control in the first place. Had we put proper controls, source code controls etc etc. we would not have messed up this much. That's where TeamStudio products can help. For all other platforms there are tools available for team of developers to manage the versions of the application and if any problem a way to roll back to previous code and so on. Unfortunately they are not available for Notes environment. Products/Tools like Team Studio CIAO, Analyzer and Delta will help in bridging the gap and take the Notes environment a long way.

Visit teamstudio.com for more details

Made up my mind

2006-11-05T10:53:00.000+08:00

Today, i finally made up my mind to use this blog much more than i have been doing so far. I am willing to cover all that has happened in the past with the present in my posts. But how am i going to differentiate this two? At the moment i am planning to include the month and date(if possible) in the title of the entry.

The reason am doing this is to remember all the good things i have had in the past and hope to continue the same in the future and more. I always think that my memory is so good that i can tell many of the things happened during my childhood, even my mom don't remember.

Ok, so there we go... lets see how it goes.

Effective Team Collaboration in On-Demand Work Place

2006-02-25T09:37:00.000+08:00

Attended a half-day seminar on Effective Team Collaboration in On-Demand Workplace conducted by IBM. It was a very good and different from the usual ones. IBM has started doing some great things around Lotus marketing and it is evident in these events. The crowd was pretty decent in number and for the first time i have got DVD's as take away with lots of IBM software evaluation copies.

The presentation was indeed good by Scott Bain - Manager IBM Software Technology Group followed with nice demos from Mark Moore. The presentation was well organised and started with Domino v7 and Sametime integration and explaining the newly introduced Web services in Domino. Got some very interesting points including the free presence awareness, and IM.

This particular feature is available from v6.5 but the sad thing is not many know about this and hence haven't tried in their environments. I don't know of anyone who is using this in Singapore. Initially, i assumed that i require a Lotus Sametime server component to make this work but after taking some time with the speakers after the presentation i found out that its just a matter of turning ON the feature while installing and configuring Domino. Now i am convinced to give it a try in my notebook to begin with.

So then the presentation moved to extending Domino to Portal infrastructures. They covered some of the features of Websphere portal and how it can work with Domino and several other transaction oriented apps. They were explaining how collaboration could extend to portals and will in turn help the customers.

Till that stage, they were explaining about tool based collaboration like E-mails, IM, Discussions, Application databases which we are doing today. In the future there is going to be "Activity based collaboration" which is also called Contextual collaboration.

What it means is this : For a particular goal/activity to be accomplished users are using various tools like Emails, Chats, Word docs to generate artifacts. And the common thread which connects all these is that particular "Activity". The thread which links everything is called an Activity thread which is what Activity centric collaboration all about.

The users might have used various tools, interacted with various users and would have prepared various artifcats like word docs, spread sheets so on so forth. But at one shot, the system will show the users about all the things which has happened on that particular task and what is happening currently.

Sounds exciting!!! Today this technology is available in the form of Lotus Workplace and customers can make use of it straight away. But if users want to stay in the evolutionary path who is currently using Domino v6.5 upwards or Websphere Portal they can wait till "Hannover" time frame and Domino Next which will have Workplace technologies sowed in everywhere.

I look forward to "Hannover". Meanwhile i will start exploring about Workplace :)

LAUG 1st Meeting

2006-02-21T22:32:00.000+08:00

So i have attended the 1st Lotus Asia User Group Meeting in Singapore. I initially thought this group was there for quite sometime and i missed many of their meetings. Luckily, i didn't miss any as this is the first one. Seems that there used to be a Notes user group in Singapore long time before but it remained silent for whatever reasons.

Today, the group is rejuvenated again by conducting their first meeting @ Springleaf tower. Happened to meet couple of IBMers too and shared my opinions - i was a bit emotional when arguing IBM has to do more than what it is doing when taking the technology to the management. It was certainly not to just hit IBMers, infact we as developers also have to play a key role when we build/showcase applications to customers.

But my point to IBM is, if customers are not choosing Lotus Notes/Domino as their platform how do i develop apps using that as platform. Of course, I have to do my bit to go,push,argue with my customer base that - look these are the list of things this platform (Notes/Domino) can offer , now you show me a platform which can do all this in one single box. Mine stops there. I can do that and am doing it. But i think its very hard for me to have access to their senior management and convince them.

Right, i am asking IBM to play that role cos i know only IBM can do that. They can talk to corporate/government agencies about the role Lotus can play inside their organisations.
I know that day is not so far and will come soon, and i am sure IBM will do that.

Meanwhile, i hope that i can participate regularly in the LAUG monthly meetings and hopefully i can contribute something back to the community. Thank you very much Stephan for making this happen and thanks to all attendees.

After all, i love this IBM Lotus Notes/Domino platform. I earn my living through this and i badly want to contribute something to it.

Replication Mode

2006-01-21T03:12:00.000+08:00

Lately, i have started using local mail file replica than to use my mail box in the server. They are actually for some good reasons.

One is to avoid the network traffic that i would be generating when i access the server each time for my mails. And the other is, i can do all my work related to my mails fast when am in disconnected mode or say replication mode. I would set a auto-replication every 15-20mts so that only at the time of replication i use my network and rest of the time leave it for others :)

I am thinking this way.. If everyone in the organisation does the same way as mentioned before a lot of network bandwidth can be saved and used for some other useful purposes.

Notes/Domino allows this to happen.. So why not take vantage??

IBM Lotus Notes Domino Training

2006-01-01T03:18:00.000+08:00

Last week went very good indeed as i was taking training classes for polytechnic students in my office.. Yes, they are doing their final year Industry attachment project in our company and i happened to take training for them in Notes/Domino.

They were 5 students from Nanyang Poly and 1 from Temasek poly. It was really interesting for me and was very happy to give some people training in my technology.. A lot of people from Notes community are talking about giving school people training in Notes/Domino (including Nathan Freeman) so that people coming out from school knows a technology other than MS..

I think MS is doing that and that's why every 6/10 wanna be IT professionals will have MCSE certification. If IBM has to change this kind of trend they have to take Notes to all particularly to schools/poly and colleges.

Before the start of the session, students told me that they haven't heard something called Notes/Domino but they do use Outlook at times cos that's what they have in their polytechnic to get their queries answered from their teachers via E-mails.

So i showed them Lotus Notes client and explained them as a PIM tool (includes E-mail, Calendaring/Scheduling, Group Calendars, Collaboration) what it can do in an organization.. They were very happy to see the Discussion DB's and immediately started with posting queries and answers.. I can see the joy in their face..

Most of them have done Java and .Net projects in their curriculum and they haven't seen applications like this before.. I showed them E-mail client first, Calendering and Scheduling, Group Calendars, Resource reservations etc and said all of them are out-of-the-box and this is not all :).. They were so pleased to see this and agreed that it can do a lot for any type of organisation...

Initially, i was showing them only Notes and started with "Story of the Notes" clipping from Julian's blog.. I slowly showed them with the advent of Internet, Lotus came out with their HTTP engine and code named as "DOMINO" and adapted that as the product name for their back end server after that..

I then opened the same discussion DB which they were playing around in Notes to show them in WEB. In Firefox browser the DB opened like charm and everyone in the room were astonished...

I showed them slowly the Domino designer the RAD tool for building Notes/Domino applications..

It was a very short span of time of 3 days in which i showed the capabilites of Notes/Domino and what it can do any organization.. I loved the way the training went and lotsa my training skills showed up during this sessions..

All in all i am very happy that i have shown them that there is this technology called Lotus Notes/Domino which is now a proud member of IBM Workplace..

Good luck to all of the students who came for training..

Change in the blog title and content

2005-10-14T05:22:00.000+08:00

Lots of early morning thoughts made me wake up again from the bed which leads to a title change for my blog. Yes, i am renaming my blog to "The Power of IBM Lotus Notes/Domino".

This decision is made keeping few things in mind. Earlier i thought of writing of whatever i feel but mostly on Lotus Notes and my own personal feelings, thoughts etc and hence named as Mirror Image.

Now i have decided to get a step ahead by keeping myself positive and focus more on positive side of me rather than just this is not good, that is not good. May be i am finding a bit hard to explain it but i do hope i would do better in the times to come.

So from now, i would write on Notes/Domino of whatever i know, i understood, i experience, i read for the benefit of myself and largely to my customers, friends, colleagues et all.

I hope i am going to enjoy of whatever i have chosen to and i sincerely hope other too will feel the same.

After a long time

2005-10-14T01:19:00.000+08:00

I am writing this after a long time. Its about 1:15 AM here and i was not able to sleep.. i thought i would read some thing good about my platform before going to bed again.

I wanted to read the article in the developer works web site on How to manage mail boxes in Notes/Domino but till now i haven't opened that at all.. I have been browsing for the last 1.5hrs. That is the drawback when i sit in front of my Laptop.

I will see something and start reading forgetting about the one originally i had in mind. I somehow feel like reading many Lotus geeks writings on whatever they write about Lotus technologies. There is whole lot of people whom i watch. In particular Ed, Nathan, Stan, Alan, Rocky, Tom, Ben Rose, Ben Poole, Jake, Julian, Jon, Joe, Mike, Bob to name a few.

I have been working in this technology for the last 7 years but i still feel that somewhere am lacking. I don't know whether that feeling is only a mind set or something else. One possible reason could be here in Singapore not much applications are built around Notes/Domino. So what am doing now is to maintain the old age apps built in 90's.

Its interesting at times and challenging too because of the production related issues. As the application data grows, because of the way the application was developed it would have all kind of issues.

Poorly architectured, poorly written code Domino apps are running in my customer places.. Not to say i would do a 100% good job but am sure that i would have taken lot more points in to account before i do something.

I should say not many people would know Notes/Domino to that extent. Even an experienced Notes programmer knows just to write an some Lotus Script code to solve the problem. Absolutely no thoughts what is the impact when its rolled out to say 1000 users at a time.

The customers are also not willing to share clearly how many users are going to use this application. They would say some small number or in many cases the vendors are not even asking for actual no. of users who use the application.

Vendors think that they might lose the deal if they quote high and they quote less.

And i should say when it comes to Domino, people take everything for granted here. They just deploy the applicaiton in the server and that's all, they assume the app would run for ever and in many cases there would not be a Domino administrator. Even if they claim they are, they are at best their network administrators or mail administrators and not real Domino admins.

When it comes to Domino, there is this next thing - they want everything at a very little cost cause somewhere they would have heard this jargon RAD.

So all in all it frustrates me what to do on all this.. I wouldn't have constructed things nicely here but i hope that i'll improve in the days to come..

IBM Workplace Solutions - Hilton Singapore

2005-06-22T02:27:00.000+08:00

Today there was a seminar on IBM Workplace solutions at Hilton Singapore. It was a half day seminar and it pretty much talked about Lotus Notes/Domino, WebSphere Portal, and IBM Workplace.

In brief, what i understood is that IBM Workplace is not a replacement for Lotus Domino. Infact, when you already have Domino up and running, you just don't have to do anything except to be in the upgrade path 6.5. Eventually you will get to IBM Workplace when both the product line merges.

In other words, Notes/Domino is evolving and soon will become a J2EE compliant under IBM Workplace technology. Domino server will soon become a provisioning server and can manage its own client components based on the role a user has got.

It also means that some of the offerings under IBM WP like IBM Workplace Service Express is for the new customers who don't already have Notes/Domino or a Portal Infrastructure.

Hannover

2005-06-17T00:10:00.000+08:00

Check this out :))))

Hannover

Senthil Kumar's Mirror

2005-04-27T17:42:00.000+08:00

My first blog. Inspired by Ed Brill, Nathan Freeman, Stan Rogers :)