Lotus Notes Books

IBM learns lessons of its past

London - Tricky things for technology companies, milestone birthdays. For corporations on the cutting edge of technology, whose business is all about the very latest piece of kit or new IT service, getting older is not necessarily something to celebrate.

And for IBM, which is navigating the 100th anniversary of its foundation this month, there could easily be the temptation to melancholy. This, after all, is a company that so dominated the technological development of the computer age that its supporters in the Sixties dubbed it Snow White to its rivals' Seven Dwarfs, and its detractors harried it for alleged monopolistic practices throughout the the Seventies. IBM's pre-eminence had begun eroding before Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg was even born.

But “it's not just about what you create, it's also about what you choose to leave behind,” the company says, in an essay on its anniversary. “Leadership often requires shedding emotional attachment to that heritage. Consider the IBM Personal Computer. It was a product that spawned a whole new sector of our industry. But several years ago it became clear that the PC was not central to our future - or the future of computing. So we got out.”

And that is why the anniversary is a genuine cause for celebration. While IBM may no longer be making products that the average consumer comes across, it is still a technology goliath worth $200bn. That puts it behind only Apple ($300bn) and level-pegging with Microsoft. With more than half its $100bn annual revenues coming from selling services to corporate and government customers - things like integrating, implementing and advising on their complex IT systems - it is leader in a market it largely created, and rivals such as Dell, Oracle and Hewlett-Packard are racing to copy its mix of hardware, software and services capabilities.

Sunit Gogia, an analyst at Morningstar, says Big Blue can look to the future with confidence. “What their history gets them is trust - they have long-term relationships with clients, and they have come to be seen as a trusted vendor - but ultimately their future comes down to answering their clients' question: can you solve the problems of today?”

1914 Flint hires Thomas J Watson, a cash register salesman whose activities had landed him in trouble (he was sentenced to a year in jail for cornering the second-hand register market, but successfully appealed), but whose business nous was unquestionable. He was made general manager, then president.

Book Review: IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1 – balfes.net

I will start by saying this book is a good resource for anyone wanting to know what features are in Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1.  The book pretty much covers most areas you would expect in Lotus Notes and is a great overall summary with many examples.  I really love the format of the book, it was very easy to follow, very well written, and easy to read.  I loved the appendix!  The different chapters about add-on products was a great benefit. There were at times I felt like I read some things in one chapter and almost the same thing in another chapter with little value added.  I really wish there was more around development techniques and best practices and in general I would have preferred a little more depth in some areas.  For instance, there was a lot of material about Composite Applications but most of the information was based on 8.0.x stuff.

There is also a free chapter you can preview: Chapter 8 – which is an extracted Chapter that anyone can check out here , it covers a lot of information and should be quite useful for developers.

Ok, here is my constructive feedback.  I will first say that the product documentation is something that needs to be addressed and I can see why many of these areas were not covered, but if you follow the yellowverse you will see the many blogs from IBMer’s, partners, and customers talking about these topics.  Since this is an “upgraders guide” it was difficult for me to figure out how hard I should judge on some of the areas.  The book clearly hits end user, admins, and developers so I took the liberty to just throw it all out there!

End user and Administrative areas:

Managed Settings – using Domino policies you can push down Eclipse plug-in preferences.  They definitely should have mentioned this or walked through the policy screen like they did the Widget policies.

LiveText, Toolbox, and Widgets – arguably one of the most popular areas of the 8.x release and I see a small mention of it in this book.  This probably deserves its own chapter considering the new options that were added in 8.5.1.  Creating your own recognizers is also a popular topic in the forums.

Serviceability - it would have been nice if the book included a chapter on serviceability.  For instance, what the directory structures are, where to find logs, how to look at and evaluate the output from the IBM support assistant.  In my experience this stuff is very valuable to companies and admins supporting a rich client.

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