It can’t be all that bad if they are allowing bathroom breaks…..
The manager distributed the bags to 25 male field technicians, telling them not to waste time leaving a job site to search for a public bathroom, the Rocky Mountain News reported Thursday.
IBM released their five predictions for Unified Communications which were delivered during Mike Rhodins keynote address at VoiceCon
1.The Virtual Workplace will become the rule. No need to leave the office. Just bring it along. Desk phones and desktop computers will gradually disappear, replaced by mobile devices, including laptops, that take on traditional office capabilities. Social networking tools and virtual world meeting experiences will simulate the feeling on being there in-person. Work models will be changed by expanded globalization and green business initiatives that reduce travel and encourage work at home. 2.Instant Messaging and other real-time collaboration tools will become the norm, bypassing e-mail. Just as e-mail became a business necessity, a new generation of workers has a new expectation for instant messaging (IM) as the preferred method of business interaction. This will fuel more rapid adoption of unified communications as traditional IM becomes the core extension point for multi-modal communications. 3.Beyond Phone Calls to Collaborative Business Processes. Companies will go beyond the initial capabilities of IM, like click-to-call and online presence, to deep integration with business processes and line-of-business applications, where they can realize the greatest benefit. 4.Interoperability and Open Standards will tear down proprietary walls across business and public domains. Corporate demand for interoperability and maturing of industry standards will force unified communications providers to embrace interoperability. Converged, aggregated, and rich presence will allow businesses and individuals to better find and reach the appropriate resources, removing inefficiencies from business processes and daily lives. 5.New meeting models will emerge. Hang up on routine, calendared conference calls. The definition of “meetings” will radically transform and become increasingly adhoc and instantaneous based on context and need. 3-D virtual world and gaming technologies will significantly influence online corporate meeting experiences to deliver more life-like experiences demanded by the next generation workers who will operate more efficiently in this familiar environment.
I think we can already see the first four starting to happen, number five is interesting, but I think it will take a little more time before 3-D virtual worlds become the standard. While the technology is certainly rapidly maturing, it is going to take more time for people to adopt, and for companies to provision hardware to the desktop, and bandwidth to support these technologies. IBM Predicts Five Future Trends That Will Drive Unified Communications
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Until now all of the work I have done with Lotus Connections has been with DB2 as the Database, but following my own advice for selecting a database platform, I will ultimately be using Oracle as the database, so I decided to give it a try now and begin the learning process. The good news, overall the process was really no different then DB2, I found one bug (if you could even call it that), and had Connections up and running in no time. Following the instructions for Creating Oracle Databases, in the Connections Infocenter, this created a database named LSCONN, and after creating the features databases for Activities, Blogs, Communities, and Dogear each with it’s own Schema. The Schema ID is what you need when you perform the Connections install. The schemas are
|
Feature
|
Schema
|
| Activities | ACTIVITIES |
| Blogs | BLOGS |
| Communities | SNCOMM |
| Dogear | DOGEAR |
Three out of four with fairly intuitive Schemas to match the service name, not bad, just watch Communities. When you install a Connections feature it will actually fill in the feature specific Schema in the User ID field on the database configuration screen. Next up is creating the Profiles database, this creates a database named PEOPLEDB with a schema of EMPINST. Once you have the database created you will need to populate it. having already created a working version of the “profiles_tdi.properties” to populate a DB2 database I was able to use the same file with a couple of minor modifications by default the JDBC driver specified is the one for DB2 jdbc:db2://localhost:50000/peopledb it needs to be replaced with the JDBC driver for Oracle jdbc:oracle:thin:@localhost:1521:PEOPLEDB (if you are not running TDI on the same system as the DB you will need to adjust the line to reflect that) and fill in the User ID and Password lines dbrepos_username=EMPINST (protect}-dbrepos_password=[fill in the password you specified when creating the DB] You can find details on the profiles_tdi.properties file here. The other property files (map_dbrepos_from_source.properties, and map_dbrepos_to_source.properties) required no editing at all beyond what I had done to use them for my DB2 implementation. You can find details on the map properties files here Before installing any of the Connections features you need to copy the JDBC Libraries on to the system that WAS/Connections is installed on. I simply copied the contents of the “oracle10gjdbclib” directory from the Oracle system over to the system that had WAS. The Connections install by default will point to c:/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1/jdbc/lib, but you can place the lib directory any where you want just change the location when configuring the database. Now for the minor bug you will encounter when installing profiles the database name defaulted to LSCONN, it needs to be changed to PEOPLEDB to point it to the correct database.
As I mentioned a while back my ability to connect in to the IBM Sametime environment regularly makes my life easier, so it continue to frustrate me that almost a month after Notes 8.0.1 shipped the embedded Sametime client still can not access the extst.ibm.com servers. Chris Pepin blogged about this recently and others commented there as well. So someone please explain to me how the product is GA and shipping, but IBM seems to consider it a risk to the stability of the Sametime server? I haven’t seen the bleedyellow IM server have any issues, and I know plenty of people connecting to it with the Notes 8.0.1 client . IBM please fix this recurring issue once and for all, I am not even going to ask for support of Beta builds, but if you ship it and expect customers to implement it, you should support it.
MLB.com has an article this morning on Blackberry support for MLB.com and Blackberry alerts for your teams news.
You don’t have to look hard to find a baseball fan carrying a BlackBerry these days. They hold onto them like Chase Utley holding onto his Rawlings glove at second base — practically fixed appendages for much of the time. As long as they are going to be that vital as a companion, they might as well be put to the best use for baseball season. Total team immersion has never been easier.
This is a nice reminder that it is just two weeks until opening day (and even less if you are a Red Sox or A’s fan who open a week from tomorrow) BlackBerry is baseball fan’s best friend
One day out of touch yesterday seems to have set me back three, but here are things I would have blogged about today if I had time.
Gia Lyons is now blogging publicly, and even better has loaded up her new blog with a lot of content that had previously been posted on her internal IBM blog. Â If you don’t know who Gia is, she will tell you all about herself right here.
If you missed it when Adam Gartenberg posted it, you have to watch the You Tube video  “You are so Fired”, it is funny, and makes a great point about IBM’s strategy with Sametime and UC.
Finally in todays Mary Ann from Gilligans Island was caught with drugs in her car, though her laywer claims it was left there by a friend.
Still in the works are posts on: Lotus Connections and Oracle, Connections and TDI, and Cache settings for reporting data in Profiles, though by the look of the week, I don’t know how many will be done before the weekend.
Heading up to Boston for a wedding early Sunday morning. I believe this is my first trip to Boston not related to IBM or Lotus. Driving up this morning, and back on Monday. My wife is not making the trip so it is just Molly (age 4 1/2) and me. Should be a four hour marathon of “why, why, why” . Wish me luck. Don’t forget to spring your clocks ahead and change the batteries in the smoke detectors. 
Technote 7011798 Detailed system requirements – Lotus Connections 2.0 beta I have to go through this in a little more detail, and it is beta so I would expect it will change a little before 2.0 ships, overall I don’t see too many changes from the 1.0.2 requirements. There is a new feature listed named Homepage, but no details on that yet, though I am guessing it will be similar to other features and will require a database and some disk space. 
Vinny blogged the other day about Google Apps for your Domain and the Sametime Gateway, which is also covered in Technote 1295505. Well it happened to me :(. Someone in the organization (we are not quite sure who) registered the domain name for Google Apps, resulting in the loss of Google Talk awareness on our gateway. We managed to take over administrative control of the domain, and delete it from Google Apps, we are now waiting the “up to five days” for the domain to fully be deleted and we hope to have Google Talk working again. So what I am wondering about is how Google allows anyone to register a domain in Google Apps and begin rerouting IM traffic without proving ownership of the domain? The other question is how do we prevent this from happening again, we were hoping to fix it by just disabling the chat service in Google Apps, and then maintaining administrative control, but apparently we need to delete the whole thing, so how do we prevent another person from registering us on Google apps? Thats one for Andy and Vinny to figure out with Google and get back to us on.
