Updated: Mystery solved thanks to @pherrmann, Lotus Mobile Bonus Pack ( I never saw it as a download in passport before, they really shouldn’t tease me like this) As has been widely reported already this morning Notes/Domino 8.5 is GA. I am wondering what this download is as it is listed on the passport site, but not yet available for download 
Solve the Notes 8.5 Mystery
The best $39.99 I spent in 2008
I welcomed in the new year with a complete meltdown of my laptop. Things started to go wrong about 4:30 PM on New years eve, and with in an hour I realized that I would be reinstalling my laptop completely. I might have been really aggravated except for two things. First and most importantly I was prepared for a disaster! Second, for a while now I really wanted to get a clean start I have had this machine about 18 months which is probably longer then I have ever gone before with out starting clean, I just didn’t think I would have the time to do it before Lotusphere until fate intervened When I first configured my laptop I had the foresight to take an image of the OS Install before anything else, it took about 45 minutes to restore that image. After a few Windows updates, and Lenovo system update I was ready to go. ( I could snapshot the machine with all my software installed but lets face it over 18 months the software I used has changed significantly so I don’t see the point) Over the years I have tried various different backup strategies, with varying degree of success (OK If I had a Mac I would be using Time Machine), but last year I was looking for a solution that just worked, and required no intervention on my part to maintain it. After looking at a few options I went with Carbonite. Once you subscribe you select which folders should be backed up, and just let it run. Over the year I used it a few times to restore individual files (some times just to test it, a couple of times due to accidental deletions). After restoring my OS I logged in to the Carbonite site, installed the application, and put it in recovery mode, like magic my data started flowing back to my machine. For the most part I do keep local backups as well on external drives, but those drives are not always connected, and are at times out of date, while the Carbonite backup just keeps on going. In a complete coincidence earlier in the day on December 31, I had blogged some 2008 statistics this left me with a screen shot of how many pictures I had by year since 2002, giving me something to match my restored data against which it did perfectly! So how do you back up your PC? Are you ready for a disaster (or at least a crash)? In the process of reinstalling I made some changes to the software I use Trilian is being replaced by Digsby Adobe Reader is gone replaced by Foxit Reader I have not yet reinstalled Microsoft Office for the time being I am going to hold off, and see how far I can go with just Symphony. Speaking of Symphony I am running the version in the Notes 8.5 Client, would have been nice if Notes 8.5 had shipped in time for my little disaster, so I am back to a recent Beta Drop until 8;5 gold is released.
2008 by the Numbers
Instead of a traditional look back at what was a very busy 2008, I present you 2008 by numbers Blogging 
My number of posts per month seem to have taken a dive in April/May I suspect having twin boys in March might be one factor in the dramatic change in my blogging pattern this year. Twitter was probably another factor as some information that use to wind up as a short post on a blog, now wind up on my Twitter stream. Twitter Thanks to TweetStats I have some insight in to the pattern of my Twitter usage 
Clearly my Twitter usage increased throughout the year, and I think the real spike from March to April was in large part due to my acquiring an iPhone, making me a truly mobile Twitter user ( I had previously used Twitter on my Blackberry, but the experience is much better on the iPhone though this is probably an Apples to Oranges comparison comparing an older model Blackberry to an iPhone) 
TweetStats is also telling me what days of the week and times of day I like to Tweet Photography For those of you who don’t already know I love taking pictures (mostly of my kids). Last December I graduated to a DSLR, which would probably be one of the factors in an explosion of the number of pictures taken this year. 
This view from Picasa shows my photos by year since 2003 when I bought my first digital camera (my daughter was born in September of 2003) after three relatively steady years, followed by a dip in 2007 this year saw a big increase of pictures taken (and I still have a few hours left to add to the total). 
My photo distribution is basically level throughout the year with a big spike in April no doubt due to Abe and Jack’s homecoming. In addition to Abe and Jack’s arrival this year other family milestones included Molly graduating from pre-school in June, and in September she turned five and started kindergarten. This past November my wife and I celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary. Wrapping up So that’s it for 2008, onward to 2009 looking forward to seeing many of you in a few weeks in Orlando. Wishing everyone a Happy and Healthy New Year.
Introducing the 2009 version of the Lotusphere Bloggers Boat Race (no boat required)
The last few years Warren has coordinated the Lotusphere Bloggers Boat Race. Unfortunately since Disney replaced the Swan Pedal boats with electric boats it has not been much of a race (and really I am not just saying this because I beached my boat last year!) Over dinner last summer at Collaboration University, Warren and I were discussing this when a new idea was born- The “Lotusphere Blogger Open”. It will be 18 holes of Miniature golf at Disney’s Fantasia Gardens Miniature Golf course which is in walking distance of the Swan and Dolphin. Since Mini Golf is a bit different logistically then a boat race we are planning on holding the event on Thursday evening following the Closing Session. The idea would be to have groups of four or five starting around 5:30, and wrapping up in time to let people head off to dinner or whatever plans you might have for Thursday night. We will have more details and a site to register up soon. For now if you are interested in participating please drop a comment here, so we can have an idea how many people to plan for. (remember you don’t have to be a blogger to participate) If you are a Lotus Exhibitor as in years past you will be hit up on the show floor to provide some prizes for the event, but if you are interested in sponsoring the event, or offering up any prizes get in touch with me please.
Abe and Jack's Nine Month Checkup
Abe and jack turned nine months old today, and had their checkups. They are both doing great, here are their results. Abe weighed in at 16 lbs 12 oz and is 27 1/2 inches long 
Jack weighed in at 19 lbs 5 oz and is 28 3/4 inches long 
We will see the doctor again in 3 months when they turn one. I think we are going to start counting down the days until then when we will be done with formula and start them on milk.
Lotus Connections Profiles Population Wizard, What is Really Going On Under the Covers
I have been doing quite a bit of data integration lately to bring together data from four different sources in to Lotus Connections Profiles. Along the way I have learned quite a bit about Tivoli Directory Integrator (TDI). TDI while a little complicated at first is a pretty flexible tool capable of carrying out all the data integration both initially, and maintaining the data across systems. If you are installing Lotus Connections your first interaction with TDI will be via the Database Population Wizard, a guided interface which executes TDI scripts in the background. I thought it would be a good idea to put together some information on what is actually going on in the background, as a way of explaining TDI a little, and gain a better understanding of the process. I am using the following software TDI 6.1.1 (Part Number C9666ML) TDI 6.1.1 Fix Pack 3 TDI 6.1.1 IF0008 Connections Database Configuration and Profiles Population Wizard (Part Number C1L11ML) My database is DB2 though Oracle and MS SQL are also supported ( I have worked extensively with Oracle and DB2) When you launch the population wizard the first screen is the Database Configuration 
As you fill in the fields, the values are actually being stored in a file named profiles_tdi.properties (this file is located under the Wizards directory in “TDIPopulationTDISOL” this is the TDI Solutions Directory that will be used when executing TDI for Profiles. We will come back to this file a little later but here are the relevant sections dbrepos_jdbc_url=jdbc:db2://db2.the80s.com:50000/PEOPLEDB dbrepos_password={encr}k2bdc4849865965597ULZ7kTRrzm7q/4pAxPtLgfQXT1TVdC8l7cYVotd+Tryy8287TpX5HM8wMAnfo= dbrepos_username=lcuser dbrepos_jdbc_driver=com.ibm.db2.jcc.DB2Driver The next screen is where you configure your LDAP Connection 
and the relevant lines being populated in the profiles_tdi.properties source_ldap_url=ldap://sitcom.the80s.com:389 source_ldap_use_ssl=false Next up is the credentials to connect to LDAP 
and the relevant lines being populated in the profiles_tdi.properties source_ldap_user_login=Sitcom Administrator source_ldap_user_password={encr}Xs9eJLne8LBtcYq5Yo+91Hrd1jnS6RG4sd9699655VHZYmBeEbSOpvkds7+9IXvlDjgwu7cGcfAJvzCu/X Next is defining the search base, and the LDAP search filter in this example my O is ‘the80s’, and I am filtering for Person Documents 
and the relevant lines being populated in the profiles_tdi.properties source_ldap_search_base=o=the80s source_ldap_search_filter=(&(uid=*)(objectclass=inetOrgPerson)) In the next screen you map the attributes from your LDAP to the fields in Profiles, these values will be saved in map_dbrepos_from_source.properties which is also under the Wizards directory in “TDIPopulationTDISOL” 
These values should be set as they apply to your environment. While not completely relevant to this topic the key field is the PROF_GUID field which needs to be set specifically for your LDAP. For Domino LDAP is is ‘dominoUNID’ This table will display the specifics for the various LDAP configurations supported in Connections. Any field you don’t want populated should be left blank, and will contain the value ‘null’ in the propertied file. PROF_GUID=dominoUNID PROF_FLOOR=null Finally when you populate the database you have the option to run other jobs at the same time, these values are stored in the profiles_tdi.properties 
country_table_csv_file=isocc.csv – this is to populate country code information in to the COUNTRY Table (isocc.csv is provided in the solutions directory if you are using standard ISO country codes) The remaining options are more company specific so you have to find the source for the data in your organization department_table_csv_file=deptinfo.csv populates the DEPARTMENT table with your organizations department scheme organization_table_csv_file=orginfo.csv populates the ORAGNIZATION table with your organizations organizational units emp_type_table_csv_file=emptype.csv populates the EMP_TYPE table with employee type information workloc_table_csv_file=workloc.csv populates the WORKLOC table with your organizations work location In addition for each job there is a line defining the separator, they are all defaulted to ‘;’ workloc_table_csv_separator=; To change them you need to edit the file, there is no option in the UI The final option is to run the Mark Managers task, run this to mark managers so that Reporting Structure will display properly in Connections (only run this task if you are providing the org structure in the data load) This is all the configuration the wizard requires and if you simply let it run, it will populate the database with the parameters you selected. What you will see next is how you can leverage the setup information provided in the wizard to run these jobs individually, schedule them to run on an interval to maintain the data, or leverage the configuration already completed to run your own custom jobs. TDI should be launched from the Solutions Directory in this case WizardsTDIPopulationTDISOL. Edit tdienv.bat for your environment, run it, and then execute ibmditk.bat in from where you installed TDI (Program FilesIBMTDIV6.1.1 is the default) Once launched open the profiles_tdi.xml, and expand the Assemblylines sections. 
Each assembly line represents one set of data to be managed, you will notice the various jobs that correspond to the steps we looked at earlier for example “populate_country” is the job to populate the COUNTRY table. Opening up the populate_country assembly line we can see the various components of the assembly line. “http://www.flickr.com/photos/curiousmitch/3119673012/” title=”tdi3 by CuriousMitch, on Flickr”>
The first thing you should note is that there are multiple config tabs, this is a recurring them throughout TDI and takes a little getting used to. The top Config Tab is the configuration for the entire assembly line. The one below it is the config for a specific flow in this case “update_db”. An assembly line can contain one or multiple Feeds and Flows. Though they don’t appear that way each of the items in the red box is a clickable item. For example JDBC URL which as you can see contains the value we specified earlier in the properties file. We could simply type it in here, but look how many assembly lines and how many configurations we have that might require the same value. If we click on “JDBC URL” we see that the Expression is {properties.profiles:dbrepos_jdbc_url} 
If we navigate away from the Assembly line and over to the Properties section we can see the various “Properties” files attached to this configuration 
On the Connector Configuration tab we see that this is where the assembly line is connected to the “profiles_tdi.properties” file we set up earlier 
On the Editor tab we can see the values assigned 
By defining the properties here, and configuring the assembly lines to use references instead of hard coding them, the TDI solution becomes much more manageable. For example if you have a production and a test environment you can maintain your assembly lines to be identical and simply use different property files this will save you lots of time when you make changes to your solutions. As you develop your own assembly lines you can define your own property files and properties with in them for ease of use. Lastly you can execute an assembly line without launching TDI to do that you need to run ibmdisrv.bat which is in the directory where TDI is installed (again run it from the solution directory) followed by the xml file which contains the assembly line with a -c parameter followed by the assembly line to run with the -r parameter. To run the populate_country assebly line we looked at above the command would be “ibmdisrv -c profiles_tdi.xml -r populate_country Additional Resources Lotus Connections Infocenter: Populating the Profiles database Tivoli Directory Integrator documentation IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator Users Group You Tube has a few videos with examples of TDI, the search results are here. .
My Lotusphere Sessions now have Times and Places
Looks like the Session times are all up now for Lotusphere and I appear to have a very busy Wednesday Afternoon SHOW302 Getting your feet wet with Lotus Connections will be on Wednesday 1/21 from 12:30-2:15 in SW Osprey, here is a wordle created from our presentation 
ID105 What Were They Thinking? When UX Design Collides with Reality will be on Wednesday 1/21 from 3:00-4:00 in DL S. Hemisphere II and here is the wordle for that presentation 
Lotus Connections 2.0.1 Graphical installer for Fixes
I was reading Technote 4021466 which provides information on the Update Installer for Connections 2.0.1 when I noticed this The Update Installer for Lotus Connections provides the following functionality: Graphical user interface (GUI) support Silent installation option Installation and removal of individual and multiple-code updates Logging and tracking, recovery features and prerequisite handling So I am not sure how I missed this until now, but there is now a Graphical Installer for Lotus Connections Fixes and Fix Packs, this will make a lot of people very happy 
I am going to play with this a little more tomorrow, but this should make fixes and fix packs much simpler going forward. In addition there is also now a complete Lotus Connections 2.0.1 Fix List available
Using Activities to plan your Lotusphere Session
This past week has been spend finalizing Lotusphere presentations which are due in today. Chris Whisonant and I are presenting SHOW302 Getting Your Feet Wet with IBM Lotus Connections. Our session will provide detailed steps to install and configure Lotus Connections, which we will be doing live on stage. Preparing the presentation itself was no small feat, we had the process broken down in to nineteen sections which we split up between us, and then we both checked each others work for accuracy, spelling, etc. Each section on average went through three revisions, some went to as many as five revisions. When it was all finally done we had to assemble it all together into one master to submit. Needless to say to do all this and not drive ourselves or each other crazy we needed the right tool to manage all this enter Lotus Connections and Activities, (actually we used Activities not just to plan our session, but to submit our abstract and get our session). Here is a screenshot of our Activity 
To give you a better idea how we used it, here is a breakdown of what was in each section Abstract – the final version of our abstract as a reference to make sure we delivered what we pitched Presentation – this section contained all of the drafts we submitted as well as the final version Presentation Sections – this is where we gather the various sections, and comments, and tracked corrections that needed to be made, without giving away all of our secrets here is a screenshot of part of this section 
Random Thoughts – this was a section to gather ideas that did not necessarily fit a section of the presentation, as well as ideas we need to come back to later on for the actual delivery of the presentation e-mails – using the Activities sidebar plugin in Notes 8 we dragged and dropped all the e-mail related to our session in to the activity, so as we were working we had everything in one place, here is a screenshot from the Notes client 
Useful Information – in this section we kept Conference numbers, Links to Unyte meeting rooms, etc so when we had to work together we had all that information in one place. Of course we also used To Dos in the Activity to keep ourselves on Schedule, and in Notes 8.5 you can easily incorporate Activities To Dos into your Notes calendar If you have not yet tried Activities and you want to head over to Bleedyellow and give them a try, and of course come see our session at Lotusphere and learn how to build your own Lotus Connections environment.
Test Post Please Ignore
This is a test, it is only a test, had a been an actual post there would be something to read here!