Category: July 2005
I'm off to Manchester for the next few days to do a server hardware migration.
Nothing serious - just moving a Domino/Domino.Doc server from some aging hardware to some shiny newer hardware. Should be pretty easy...
Unfortunately, this means I won't have much in the way of access to this blog, so expect very little from me until early next week.
Comments (0)Philip Storry July 28th, 2005 07:03:10
We all know that Office sales are down, because Microsoft has saturated the market, and nobody sees a reason to upgrade. Nevertheless, I think that there will be one last surge of sales with the next version of Office.
I say last for good reason. The next version of Office will introduce the new XML format, which we should be able to get specifications for. That means that the competition can finally break the file format monopoly that Microsoft has had for a while... Corel (with WordPerfect) and Sun/OpenOffice.Org (StarOffice and OpenOffice.org's Suite respectively) have done a good job of making compatible import/export filters for the existing Office formats, but with closed file formats there's only so much you can do.
A new file format for Office may sound like pain and hassle, but I think that once the benefits are explained to the key influencers in organisations - senior management, executive teams, and so forth - people will upgrade. Just so that they can then convert their data to the new format.
Because if it's in the new format, when the Office 12 licenses expire (probably in about 2009), you can just migrate to some other suite that's cheaper but understands the Office format.
The drivers of this process will be government departments, most likely, who are under increasing pressure to use such open formats.
That's not to say that Office will die. But it is to say that an open file format will, I hope, give those who only use 50% of Office's features an escape route to use something else at last.
Or maybe I'm just thinking wishfully.
Comments (0)Philip Storry July 27th, 2005 10:00:00
There are some things that users just keep asking for, and a yearly view seems to be one of them. Yesterday, the request came in yet again from one of my users.
The thing is, she's sure that she's used a product alongside Notes to view and print her calendars in a yearly format at her last organisation. But I racked my brains, and could think of nothing. I know that we used to recommend Lotus Organizer GS for such things, but I didn't think they still shipped/supported that - and I only see the stand-alone Organizer on IBM's website. I'd rather implement something that's supported, and will consider third-party solutions quite happily. Especially if they require little or no deployment. *grins*
So, what do people use to handle the more advanced calendaring requests of their users?
Oh, and IBM - I know you can deliver improvements to the Calendar interface. You did it in R6.x with the Summarize feature, for instance. So could you consider a yearly calendar view, capable of just showing busy days as filled blocks and non-busy days as empty blocks, a bit like a gantt chart? And a group calendar that's actually usable - that's a common request as well. Both these things would please my users, and probably quite a few other people too. So, IBM... Pretty please? With icing and sugar on top?
Comments (2)Philip Storry July 26th, 2005 10:00:00
My plans for this evening were cancelled, so I spent a short while trying to figure out what had gone wrong here.
Replication conflicts is the short answer, I'm afraid.
Anyway, it all looks fixed now, but I'll test it by queueing a document up for release tomorrow whilst I'm at work.
Comments (0)Philip Storry July 25th, 2005 21:57:19
Chris Miller has some great slides from his presentation at Advisor Vegas 2005.
One set of which covers optimising the performance of Domino Web Access.
And at work, I'm just securing and optimising our new shiny external Domino Web Access machine.
Great timing, Chris! Thanks for the slides - they're very useful. :-)
Comments (0)Philip Storry July 25th, 2005 10:20:00
My last entry appears to have, well, disappeared. Which is odd.
I was just editing the last article to get rid of some formatting errors (the font had changed when I published it manually via the web interface) and BOOM! - it vanished. I'll try to look in to this, but won't be able to do so until Wednesday at the least I'm afraid.
Meanwhile, if you were hoping to read about the Out of Office re-engineering, please accept my apologies...
Comments (6)Philip Storry July 25th, 2005 08:09:56
Going back to Ed's posting on the differences between mail clients, Norm Van Bergen asks why Exchange can send Out of Office replies immediately, whereas Notes sends them only every six hours.
Fair question, and it boils down to the way in which the two products handle out of office.
With its strong heritage as a workflow and application platform, it was natural to implement it in Notes using the tools to hand. That meant using scheduled server-side agents. Unfortunately, the agents are a little complex - they not only check the details of incoming emails against a list of addresses/subjects in order to decide whether or not to reply (or reply with a special message), but they also have to maintain a list of people they've replied to already, and update that list when necessary. That might not sound like much, but as someone's out-of-office period continues, the number of people in the list grows, meaning more comparisons every time new mail arrives. This increases the time taken to run the agent. Not by much, but by just enough.
The agent could be run after mail arrives - but if it were, that ever-slightly-increasing workload, combined with the overhead of starting/stopping the agents themselves each time they're run, would gradually kill a server. So instead, the agent is set to run every six hours.
On an Exchange Server, this is no heritage of workflow or application handling. So Microsoft simply looked for something else to use when implementing the Out of Office agent. They settled on their server-side mail rules system. The Out of Office agent is just a special system rule, which never shows up in the normal rules list in Outlook.
So the Out of Office agent is run as mail is delivered, as all other mail rules on Exchange are. Of course, the Out of Office mail rule is considerably more complex than any other mail rule, but that's about it. The behaviour of it is hard-coded into the Exchange server application, meaning it has less startup and running overheads than the compiled LotusScript agent that Domino/Notes uses. It also has no scope for modification, whereas you could change the behaviour of the Domino/Notes agent if you wished.
I'm unsure that we should drop the agent method, as I have no doubt that some large customers have customised the functionality a little. But I am thinking it might be nice to offer an alternative method. Since R5 of Domino/Notes, we've had the ability to run server-side mail rules in mail databases. In R6, the option to forward mail from within those rules was added. So it seems as though we could fairly easily extend these rules to do it the same way that Exchange does. It would have to be a special system rule, as it is in Exchange, but otherwise I think it would be pretty simple to extend the current technologies to implement this - the R6 mail router is obviously much closer to being able to do the job than any previous one has been.
But if we offer both methods, how do we decide which one to show the user?
In the R6.5 mail templates, we offer two methods of deleting mail - soft deletions and the old Trash folder method. The mail template switches between the two depending on whether or not soft deletions are enabled. The same trick could be used here - let the Administrator set either a database property, or a field in the profile document. (I'd prefer a field in the profile document - no need to go adding database properties for this feature, really!) Then let the mail template hide the alternative method's menus/agents and so forth based on that setting. It's probably easier to maintain than the other obvious solution - two versions of every mail template! Which is nice and clean, but would be a nightmare for IBM to maintain.
Am I overlooking something? Is there some mistake I've made? Or could we really have what users want - immediate responses from the Out of Office agent? If so, it would be lovely to see this in Release 7.5...
Comments (2)Philip Storry July 22nd, 2005 11:47:00
I didn't bother posting about the 7th's attacks in London, because it didn't seem worthwhile. I keep this blog for technical stuff, and have a LiveJournal and a private diary elsewhere for personal stuff.
But today's attacks are worth a brief mention for their complete incompetency.
Firstly, they attacked Oval. Guys, the cricket's at Lords today, not the Oval. You're in the wrong half of London.
Secondly, the timing... Lunchtime? Well of course nobody was hurt. In London, like any other metropolis, you're a short walk away from food at lunchtime. Very few people are on public transport at lunchtime. Just those coming in to work late, or going home early.Thirdly, at least one of you threw the bomb and legged it. Which is an, um, unconventional method of suicide bombing, to say the least.
And lastly, the
most important thing. Now, I have to stress that the importance of this
one can't possibly be underestimated. You see, the problem is that the
BOMBS DIDN'T EXPLODE.
Which is, it's generally agreed, rather
a critical problem when you're trying to blow something up.
It's actually hard for London not to laugh at this. Don't we at least deserve better than trainees?
Anyway, we're all fine, and our emergency services and Transport for London did their usual excellent work. Many thanks to them, and many more thanks to those who asked after those in London when they first heard about it.
Now, back to work! I know most of you read this at work, so quit slacking!
Comments (0)Philip Storry July 21st, 2005 21:52:03
I spent most of yesterday setting up a Domino and Domino.Doc server on a Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 machine, across our WAN. (I'm in London, the machine's in Manchester.)
I have to say, it was quite pleasant. The whole experience was done via a web browser and an ActiveX applet, and setting aside my dislike for ActiveX I have to say I was a little impressed. The ActiveX remote control applet isn't bad in terms of providing options and functionality, and the performance of remote control was pretty good - at least as good as UltraVNC over a similar connection.
That virtual server will have three servers in it, and serve our training room in Manchester. Because it's training, if one server there goes down the whole room is probably a bit useless anyway - no backup domain controllers, no backup mail servers. So we're just imaging the one virtual server, and if the hardware dies, we can just get new kit and re-apply our image.
I wouldn't yet recommend Microsoft Virtual Server for actual business applications, but I liked what I saw and can see it being useful for environments like our training one. Well worth looking at, I think.
Comments (0)Philip Storry July 20th, 2005 11:00:00
Hosun Lee and David Price have chimed in that they like the fact that they can simply drag and drop mail from their mailbox to a local PST file.
OWCH! My head!
Guys, this really isn't a good thing. REALLY.
Yes, you feel organised after you do it. And it helps keep you below quota. But on the other hand, it's an Information and Corporate Governance nightmare.
Here's the scenario. Your organisation is being sued. You have a copy of the email that's needed to keep the shareholders happy and your bank account healthy. Except it's in a local PST file.
And you're on holiday.
How is your legal department supposed to find that email?
Don't try to excuse it. Yes, you can put it on a network - where someone now has to get a search tool to search both your Exchange Information Store AND all the PSTs. (Not to mention keep nagging people to cull mail from their PSTs and compress them, because they're running out of space on the server.) It's a maintenance and information management nightmare.
Not to mention that there's always people who don't even put their PSTs on the server. So when their desktop PC (or laptop) goes boom, they lose all their email. Was it backed up? Puh-leeze. Be serious. Why backup a desktop? All the data should be on the server.
And server backups are no guarantee. In a disaster recovery event, not all servers might be brought back up at the DR site. Sometimes, "less important" servers are left off the DR plans. So you could find yourself at a DR site with functioning email, but no idea what that phone number you need is, because it's on a server that's not available right now.
Oh, and anyone using PST files also loses the right to talk about Outlook Web Access, for obvious reasons.
It's not that PSTs are bad themselves, or that Outlook is bad. You could do similar things in Notes (I've banned archiving before now because users do it locally, then lose their data when their laptop dies...), but Notes tends not to encourage it.
Information like how to archive locally (in Notes) or how to create PST files (in Outlook) is viral in nature, I'm sure. Someone finds out somehow, and uses it to stay below quota. Before you know it, everyone is doing it, as the secret gets out. And once the genie's out of the bottle, you're shafted.
I have some remote users who came to us from another organisation, and didn't get a policy to stop them from archiving. Trying to stop them now is almost impossible politically, because they've just become packrats. Worse, they do it on their local machine - their laptop! The only solution we've found is to use the same grapevine that the problem got round on in the first place - we're allowing them to archive for the moment, but when someone's machine dies we point out that the local archive wasn't supported by us, and wasn't backed up. People are slowly stopping doing it as more data is lost, and we'll soon be able to apply that policy and have them grateful for it!
So be warned. Keep it in your mailbox. And if you're an administrator, get them to keep it in their mailbox. By hook or by crook. Because otherwise, those emails are going to disappear sometime...
Comments (4)Philip Storry July 19th, 2005 22:37:00
So, in my last blog entry, I said that the only thing I missed about Outlook/Exchange was the delayed mail sending feature. And I meant it - it's a nice idea. The implementation's a bit sloppy, though, and I've always thought it could do with some polish. So, here's a proposed feature request that I might submit to IBM for their implementation of delayed mail sending...
Delayed mail sending in Notes/Domino
The purpose of delayed mail sending is to arrange for emails to be sent at a suitable time - e.g. after an embargo has been lifted on information, or when a specific time comes around such as the close of a market or a deadline.
User interface changes required
When composing the email, the user can select an option to delay mail delivery until a specific date and time. When the mail is submitted to the mail server the mail router, seeing that it the message is marked for delay, checks that the intended delivery time has not already passed (just in case!), and then marks the message as "Held, pending delayed delivery".
If a user chooses to mark a message for delayed delivery whilst using a local replica of their mail database, they should be warned upon sending the mail to replicate as soon as possible to prevent misunderstandings causing mail to not be delivered before its intended time.
Changes to the mail.box design
Messages marked as "Held, pending delayed delivery" show clearly that they are pending and their intended delivery time when viewed in the mail.box, to assist the administrators of the messaging system when troubleshooting mail. Additionally, a new view with pending delayed delivery mails sorted by intended delivery time (sorted descending) should be added.
A new action should also be added, allowing an Administrator to remove the delay for a message, causing it to send immediately.
Changes to the router software
In order to prevent abuse or mistaken misuse of the delayed sending feature, the router should have some specific changes made to better support administrators' abilities to control mail flow and prevent capacity problems from occurring. It is by no means expected that all users will need to send mail with a delivery delay - quite the contrary. It is more likely that only specific departments (IT, Facilities, Communications/PR, Senior Management) will require such an ability. Therefore, it is suggested that the following options be made available for configuration in the Server Configuration Document:- A radio button option, allowing the sending of delayed mail to be:
- Disabled completely
- Enabled
- Enabled for users in the following group(s) in the Domino Directory:
I think all those options are sensible, A maximum forward timeframe during which mail can be delayed is a must-have. The ability to restrict to just one or a few groups of people who can send delayed mail is very important, as it reduces the scope for abuse. (As does checking the user still exists - no sending nastygrams just after you've left the organisation!)
Most of the other options should be self-explanatory, but I'd like to explain one option I put in - the option to send an additional failure message to another email address other than the sending user. That's for the helpdesk staff, to be honest. In a modern IT environment, you don't want the helpdesk staff getting all your administrative alerts - but you would want them getting something like this, because they're going to be getting the call from the user about the strange delivery failure they just got. The option of alerting another email address helps out there, going that extra mile so that your helpdesk can possibly even call the user and explain what went wrong before they read the failure message themselves!
I don't recall the Exchange implementation being anywhere near as complete as this, by the way. I do recall it not delivering mail for users that had been deleted, but that was about it. As a feature, the Exchange implementation is pretty basic. But the Notes/Domino version should be better, and I think that the edge given by that feature list would do the trick. Feel free to tell me if I missed anything important, though...
Comments (0)Philip Storry July 19th, 2005 21:48:00
Ed Brill asks what bugs us when we move away from our normal mail clients to other ones. Naturally, being Ed, the focus is on Notes, with a particular focus on comparing with Outlook.
Well, I really have to agree with some of the comments made - Chad's comment about the Copy Into New feature is spot on. That even bugs me when I'm using my Blackberry - the very idea that I can't just create a new to-do or calendar entry from an email (or any other combination/direction) bugs me no end, and it's possibly the most under-rated feature in the Notes mail template in my view.
Subhan's comment about the way Notes handles folders is good - the fact that I can easily put a document into many folders is very nice. I think he misses the more important fact, though - even though the document's in a folder, it still shows up in views. Which means that I always have the All Documents or Sent views for finding those pesky lost emails.
Gerald Mengisen touches on those all-important views, and also mentions Send and File. Send and File is, of course, a spin-off of the view/folder system - but nicely done. He also mentions the fact that you can just hit the escape key and choose to only send a mail, rather than send and save - which is something I use every time I send a test message across my servers, I must admit!
Lyset mentions the Outlook feature to delay mail sending. Good call, that's about the only thing I've EVER missed about Outlook. Yesterday, my mail servers took a hit as someone in Communications sent a 2.5Mb PDF to about four hundred people out there on the internet. The poor router was quickly bogged down by the recipient's slow ISDN connections, leading me to a hairy ten minutes of hoping that SOMEONE on the mailing list had a half-decent pipe. Luckily, it was just a temporary thing, as all the slow pipes clumped together for a short while. As they got dealt with, the outbound queue gradually slipped downwards in numbers. But I can't help thinking that the ability to delay the mail sending might have been useful- if combined with training for users who'd need it, naturally... I'll have a quick think about that, as I'm in two minds about it. Part of me says "just build a mailing app to do it!", and part says it should be something the router can do anyway...
I've thought for a short while about what it is I miss most in other applications when I leave Notes behind, and for a short while I was going to say "Private views" - the ability to create my own quick and dirty view to show something of use to me. But that feels like cheating.
However, it does give me my answer. My favourite feature of Notes is the customisability. The fact that I can change the basic design of the mail template to do something that benefits my colleagues is great. We run with a customised mail template at my workplace, and I'm currently evaluating the OpenNTF Mail Experience design to see what we can (and can't) use from it to improve the experience we give. I'm betraying my administration roots here, but that's certainly what I've always likes about Notes.
Of course, if I think of anything else, I'll be sure to let you all know.
Comments (4)Philip Storry July 18th, 2005 23:26:13
Vector Capital has bought WinZip for an undisclosed sum of money.
I've been wondering just how WinZip has been staying afloat for the past five years or so.
WinZip's business model was stuck in 1995. They made an adequate ZIP handler in the days of Windows 3.x, and charged you not only for the main program, but also had the balls to make the self-extracting archive creation a pay-for extra.
They could do that, because back in those days they were the only decent Windows GUI archive program. Sure, RAR under DOS had a nice text interface, and there were plenty of nice archiver shells for DOS that could handle PKZip, ARJ, RAR, ARC, LZH, LHArc and others. But who wants to do all their archiving in a DOS box? WinZip was the first to make it nice, simple, and Windows-based. As Windows took off, WinZip cleaned up the market - especially in 1995, when Windows 95 introduced long file names to the scene. Now any holdouts doing their archiving from the command line had little choice - it was WinZip or very strange filenames in your ZIPs.
But the glory days of being first soon faded. And WinZip never really went anywhere. RAR became WinRAR, and has a nice simple "the one program does everything" business model. The WinRAR self extractor is pretty nice, yet WinZip carries on charging for theirs.
What's more, the competition does more than WinZip - solid archiving, recovery data, saving of NTFS streams and security data, volume splitting, versioning, and more. Whilst most users may not want most of those features, WinZip looks very expensive for what it does when you compare it to its competitors.
But the final nail in WinZip's coffin has been the growing availability of completely free options for archiving, which are at least as good. I remember seeing PKZip for the first time - and it was a registered copy, too! Registered to a small company that you may have heard of - IBM. Now, imagine what sort of sum a site license for a company the size of IBM would be. It's certainly more than 29 bucks. And that's where PKWare made their money back in the days of PKZip - selling to corporates, governments, and so forth. You can bet it's probably also where WinZip has made its money over the years, too.
Enter the Info-Zip library. It reads and writes ZIP files. It's been around for years, and WinZip itself is based on it. The Info-Zip library is free and open-source - their license is amongst one of the most liberal of them all. But it remained in the backwaters until the Internet exploded. However, now anyone can download the Info-Zip libraries as a precompiled DLL or source code, and write their own ZIP handler. Now archivers are commonplace, and most are better than WinZip. The final nail in the coffin was probably the addition of Zip Folders to Windows XP - which had previously been only available in a Plus Pack for Windows. The Zip Folders system is basic, but stops people from needing to download WinZip to open ZIP files. Anyone not realising how bad that is should go to the back of the class...
Looking back on it all, the thing that surprises me most is that WinZip never tried to create a new archive format. For the time period between 1995 and 1999, they pretty much owned archiving on the Windows platform. They could have exploited that by introducing a new file format (let's call it .wzip, for argument's sake) and allowing it as an option. If it had been better, it would have gradually grown in acceptance and could possibly have replaced the .ZIP format completely. A new file format has been tried by PKWare recently, which introduced new compression methods and larger ZIP file limits. WinZip followed in their wake, but did nothing much more. The completely lost the opportunity they had nine years ago when they were the only option for long file names on Windows 95, and instead chose to implement such exciting technologies as the Wizard mode - the first thing most people turn off, even if they're non-technical.
(Does anybody like Wizard mode in WinZip? If so, have you sought medical attention for this disorder?)
I'm being unfair, actually. WinZip did diversify by charging you for add-ons, but I'm not sure that's a great business model if your competition offers the same functionality as standard. Comparing WinRAR with WinZip, for instance, I note that WinRAR does self-extracting files and has a command line version as standard. They have no equivalent of the Outlook Companion extra that WinZip does, but is the Outlook Companion really worth twenty bucks? Sure, you can drive that price down to just ten bucks by buying a bundle of both products - WinZip and the Outlook Companion - but then you have to have had the presence of mind to have tested both products at the same time - this is shareware, after all. I doubt many people trial both concurrently - you're more likely to trial add-ons only after you've decided to buy WinZip. And whilst that sounds like it makes more people buy at the higher price, it won't - the hassle of the add-ons probably drives people away. If it were all in just one package, you'd probably get more sales of just the one package because it becomes hassle-free.
The other problem that WinZip has had is that they've never charged for upgrades. Now, as a registered WinRAR user - and WinRAR does the same thing - I like this policy! But I can't help wonder where their money comes from if not from me - a satisfied customer. A strange conundrum indeed in the case of WinRAR, who have no add-ons to sell - but at least it explains why WinZip have such an odd product lineup.
I'm now left to wonder what Vector Capital will do with WinZip. They'll probably undo the moronic product line-up and introduce a one-program-does everything line, like their competitors have, and start charging a minimal fee for upgrades. And they might also pursue the OEM market, to try and get some pre-installs and keep their mindshare - WinZip can still do things that the Windows ZIP folders can't do, like decent testing of archives and so forth.
What's most interesting is that the article mentions a marketing and distribution deal with Google, which I'm wondering about. Maybe Google is about to start indexing the contents of archive files on the internet as well? Otherwise, why would Google even be interested in this sort of thing?
But I'm at a loss as to how WinZip can be turned around beyond that. Without some pretty serious development work, it seems a lot like the proverbial parrot in a certain comedy sketch we all know...
Comments (0)Philip Storry July 18th, 2005 22:07:00
I scheduled a post to go live on Friday, and happily went out to someone's leaving drinks that night. Then yesterday I went to a stag do.
So imagine my surprise today when I checked up on my blog, and found nothing new in it. Which is odd.
I had my hosting service move me to a server that's in the right time zone the other day, and no agents seem to have run recently. I think that the two are related, and I'm certainly not asking for suggestions or advice. I'm logging an issue with the host, and I hope it should be sorted out shortly.
Comments (0)Philip Storry July 17th, 2005 21:42:44
At work, I maintain the Blackberry server. This means I have to have a Blackberry, apparently. Something about being able to test and support the service, I think. Nothing to do with gadget lust, or my employers wanting to be able to phone me at two o'clock on a Sunday when there are problems...
For ages, my Blackberry has been a darned old one. Even when I describe my new one as "new", I mean "new to me" - it's not top-of-the-line stuff here. I get the senior management's cast-offs, because I'm not important. (Until something goes wrong, that is. Which means I'm rarely important around here, if ever...)
My old Blackberry was a black-and-white (well, green and black if truth be told) model which served my purposes well enough. In fact, I was quite fond of that green screen because it reminded me of my old Palm III, which served me so well!
On paper, the colour Blackberry I moved to is definitely an upgrade. It's got a colour screen (with half decent fonts!), a USB connection, better software, and (I believe) a faster processor.
But when I actually use the Blackberry, it feels more like a downgrade.
It's just the little things that make this upgrade a bit of a damp squib. For starters, the screen's shorter. I'm supposed to read emails on this thing - a shorter screen isn't a help. Given that the emails are stripped of formatting when I read them, screen size becomes more important than colour or how nice the fonts look. What's important is how much I can read, not how pretty it is.
And despite the hardware being faster, the interface feels slower. This is a common complaint on "upgrades" these days, it seems, especially on devices that can't afford to throw processor cycles at the problem - although the hardware is faster, the more complex software eats away at our gains.
But these are just niggles. You can get used to these problems. The two big problems are pretty simple...
Slower reconciliation
The newer device reconciles (synchronises) my mail and calendar over the air every ten or fifteen minutes. My old one reconciled every couple of minutes.
This small difference is noticeable for me. As an administrator, I'll often be updating large views in something like the Activity Trends database or the Domino Web Server Log database, so if mail arrives when my Notes client is indisposed, I read it on my Blackberry. The faster reconciliation rates of the old device meant that the process was near seamless - by the time I'd read the email and filed it or deleted it, the Notes client was back again. I'd carry on with whatever it was I was doing, and by the time I switched back to my mail, reconciliation had taken place.
But the slower reconciliation cycle keeps getting me. I still expect emails I filed or deleted two minutes ago to have been filed or deleted in my Notes client.
I can manually reconcile, but it hardly seems worth it - yet I also dislike the idea of just waiting for it to happen. I presume that RIM have increased the time between reconciliations to reduce load on their network - which is understandable, given their success. But it sure is annoying to find your shiny new "upgrade" behaving like this.
Shortcuts
My old Blackberry had shortcuts on its main menu. Not all of them made great sense, but you quickly learnt the useful ones. L for the Calendar. M for your Mail. F for Profiles (where you change the device from discreet buzzing to loud beeping for notification).
The new device doesn't have these shortcuts.
It doesn't even have them as an option, as far as I can see.
If you press any number key, it assumes you want to make a phone call. Pressing any other key whilst at the main menu is ignored. Which would be great if the device was much use as a phone, but anyone that's used a Blackberry knows what good they are as phones. They're fine as PDAs or for mail, but unless you have one of the really new ones that look like phones, they're just not good phones.
So
why remove the shor
tcuts in favour of semi-phone functionality? It seems to me that this is
a real misstep for those that have used Blackberries before, in the hopes
of making something work slightly better as something it isn't anyway.
Worse still, I didn't get "Blackberry thumb" with my old device, because shortcuts meant I wasn't holding my thumb over the scrollwheel all the time. But the removal of shortcuts means I'm now using the scrollwheel to switch apps, and it's not a natural angle really. I'm getting Blackberry thumb after a month with this new device, despite almost a year with my old one and no problems.
To be fair, the web browser on the device is immensely better. And the fonts are pretty. But it's just not as USABLE.
I'm not really sure it's an upgrade. It's only memories of a fifteen minute synchronise/backup cycle on my old serial device that keep me with this faster USB-based device. But only just.
Backwards compatibility should extend beyond software APIs, and into the human aspect. This upgrade has been frustrating and ultimately unsatisfying.
(I'm really hoping that the full over-the-air synching of the Blackberry Enterprise Server 4.0 software makes up for it, though. Although it still won't cure my Blackberry Thumb...)
Comments (0)Philip Storry July 15th, 2005 09:00:00
Chris Miller has started what looks to be a great (albeit probably short) series on the basics of replication topologies.
This is, he correctly points out, not often understood all that well, or tended to properly by administrators. Head over and check it out. I'm sure that this will be a great reference for both newcomers and the experienced alike...
Comments (0)Philip Storry July 14th, 2005 22:32:51
Just musing, but something occurred to me about the future of collaboration. When you speak to people who've used collaboration systems like Notes, you find that the reason Notes works is that it allows you to take your data with you.
Of course, Notes extends that beyond just data and into the actual use of the data - allowing you to take your business processes (workflow) on the road as well.
In a nutshell, that's the success of Notes. Getting people working when they're not actually connected to your network by a rather short network cable.
Of course, this doesn't come free. You have to massage your data to get the benefits - Notes requires the use of the NSF data store, which is nowhere near as interchangeable as the average Word document. It's all swings and roundabouts.
There's heritage there, driving that particular downside - Notes began to evolve when networks themselves were rare, and when sneakernet was dominant. The novelty of being able to take your data with you so easily was definitely something that outweighed the additional steps needed to get your data into a suitable NSF (or set of NSFs). Notes has benefitted most from visionaries who saw this as an opportunity to look beyond the data itself, and see how people actually work - and then fit the solution around that.
This is important, because all of Microsoft's attempts to collaborate have fallen a bit flat. The reason for this is that they have an enormous advantage that they don't want to lose - by the time they started shipping collaborative software, they owned the de facto standard file formats. Microsoft's attempts in collaboration are restricted by an unwillingness to move away from those file formats.
That makes a lot of sense in one way - you can then try to sell collaboration as an add-on to your existing technologies, rather than taking collaboration as an opportunity to reflect upon your workflows and perhaps improve them. Microsoft's collaboration strategy is one of demanding as few changes as possible from the customer in how they handle their data.
The problem is that the file formats themselves are now the restriction for Microsoft - if nothing else, because they just won't move around as easily as data in a database can. This is why Microsoft's acquisition of Groove is so important.
But it's only important in the short term. I'm going to go out on a limb here, and make a quick prediction - that Microsoft's long term collaboration strategy relies upon WinFS.
WinFS is Microsoft's much-delayed searchable, fast, database-oriented storage system that will replace the use of a folder (or set of folders) on your hard disk for the storage of your files. The desktop version has been delayed, but it still coming. What's faded off the roadmaps is the server-side version, which basically had massive scaling problems. Searching tens or hundreds of thousands of documents, totalling gigabytes or more, is difficult. But there was to be a server-side version, and I have no doubt that it will arrive eventually.
So, there you are with WinFS on your laptop, and WinFS on your network. As both are databases, what's to stop you from automatically exchanging data between the two of them? From replicating a small subset of the WinFS server side down onto your laptop?
I know what you're thinking - you're thinking that they tried this with Briefcase in Windows 95, and quietly retired it some time later when it became obvious it didn't work.
But WinFS will be closer to the way NSF works than the way a normal file system works in many ways. I believe that replication could well be a capability it will have. Maybe not in the standard setup, maybe as an add-on install for corporates. But it's certainly possible.
With the ability to take your data with you, Microsoft are a hop and a skip away from a solution that truly competes with Notes. An application framework, strong security and document routing are all that's needed. With .NET as the application framework, WinFS/Active Directory providing the security and Exchange/Outlook providing the routing, you have a solution.
Of course, the big question then will be which approach works better - an approach which attempts to fit the tools around your workflow, no matter how bad it may be (or good the tools are) - or an approach which puts the tools foremost, and asks that you change your workflow/working practices where necessary.
I have a feeling that the former will probably be more popular, no matter how inappropriate it may be sometimes.
So, do you see the same future I see?
Or am I just bonkers?
Comments (1)Philip Storry July 4th, 2005 09:00:00
I'm catching up on my RSS feeds, and found this wonderful item on Boing Boing - Wifi War!.
It reminds me of a holiday I went on with a bunch of friends. We'd rented a hotel in the off-peak season, and took laptops, PCs and networking gear and so forth. There was, of course, a wireless access point. So we had a little debate on the exact name we should choose. We settled on:
Wardrivers-BringBeerAndPizzawhich amused us greatly.
Sadly, the hotel was in the countryside in Wales, and you could only get a signal on your mobile phone if you walked half a mile up the road. So unless there were wardriving sheep in the area, I doubt anyone but ourselves saw it.
It almost worked, though - we all brought beer!
Comments (0)Philip Storry July 3rd, 2005 15:27:00
A combination of work and play has kept me away from my blog, as seems frighteningly usual. In this second half of the year, I intend to do a little better than I have in the past.
In particular, apologies are due to Richard Schwartz, whom I left in the middle of an exchange. Luckily, it seems I misunderstood him in the first place, and I think that we mostly agree on this issue now. Apologies for both the delay and the misunderstanding, Richard!
One final note on the XML issue is that it is, ultimately, all about import and export of data. And that this is one thing that Notes has gotten gradually worse at, or so it seems to me. Are we really stuck with the same old import/export filters? The RTF filter seems to be the worst, but on the whole import/export just isn't that good in the Notes client. Which is odd, given how good the connections are on the server end - the (basic) XML interface on the http server and the DECS functionality (now native in R6.5, if I recall correctly) show that interoperability on the server side is good. And with the Web Services stuff coming in R7, it's obviously getting better. So why can't I save a view as an Excel spreadsheet? Why can't I choose which columns to export from a view when saving it as CSV? Compared to the server side, the client is a bit of a joke in terms of data import export.
Maybe the Hannover R8 client can address that. It would certainly be a compelling reason to move up to it, I think...
Comments (0)Philip Storry July 3rd, 2005 12:20:32