Domino 64-bit — is it worth it?

At least when it comes to 8.5.1, is it worth all the trouble?  Everyone is clearly excited about performance improvements that the 64-bit version offers.  The native support of the 64-bit architecture is a big plus on its own, you must have that in order to be counted a modern piece of software.  Many kudos to the Lotus server team for making it happen.

But what about the other products and the other pieces of the server?

Not everything — native IBM and 3rd party — works with 64-bit.  For example, SameTime, still a 32-bit product, does not recognize that Domino is even installed, if trying to run on top of the 64-bit version.

The lack of ODBC support is a huge problem.  Luckily, it is soon to be solved by the 8.5.2 release.  As the Lotus team is fighting to revitalize Lotus Domino as a valid application development platform, shipping a product without the ODBC support was a mistake.  There should’ve been a big huge disclaimer at the beginning of the installation routine: if you use ODBC, don’t install this version.

I hope that the 8.5.2 release will address all these issues.

You should know the other guy’s products when selling in a competitive market

Whether you’re selling software or cumquats, unless you’ve got the market cornered, you really should know what the other guy is selling. You should know what the other guy calls his cumquats, what they taste like, what they look like — in short, you should know every detail about what the other guy is selling. Why? Because inevitably, at some point in any given sales call, the prospect will ask if your cumquats are as sweet as the other guy’s and whether they will grow in the same climate conditions. If you don’t have answers to his questions or, worse yet, if you admit knowing nothing about the other brand, the sales call is over and the prospect is calling the other guy to come in and talk about his fruits. And rest assured that the other guy will have no qualms about talking up the sweetness of his cumquats as compared to the sourness of yours.

So you better prepare and rehearse your answers. Know how the 2 products stack up against each other. Know the other guy’s cumquats as well as you know your own. Otherwise you appear either arrogant or uninformed and in either case, why should the prospect listen to you after that?

Cumquats or not, but if you’re pitching SameTime, you really should know how OCS works.

Lotus SameTime in a Microsoft shop? You better believe it

I heard IBM say it, but I did not wholly believe it.  SameTime is not only for shops that run Lotus Notes.  It is targeted at everyone else, too.

Today I had actually participated in a conversation with a company that is looking to deploy SameTime on top of Outlook, Exchange and Active Directory.  What drew them to SameTime was all the great things that this product offers: security, integration with 3rd party IMs, archiving, LDAP integration, clustering, etc.

I am now a true believer — Lotus SameTime is not just for Lotus Notes.

Lotus’ spell checker

Now that version 8 of Lotus Notes and SameTime has an inline spell checker, I am constantly wondering who puts together their dictionary files. There are some rather strange omissions from the dictionary.

I suppose I’m OK with my name, Kassabov, not being there. I’m even flattered that it suggests that I correct it to “Casanova”, which is way better than the Firefox’ suggestions of “Kassandra” or “Impassable”. It weirds me out to think of myself as Kassandra The Impassable.

I also understand and I’m OK with the fact that certain 4-letter words are excluded, too.

But what is wrong with a simple word “ass”? When did the donkeys get removed from the dictionary?!

Of course, I couldn’t stop there and had to explore what else is missing from the dictionary.  To my surprise — Mike Rhodin is not there.  It seems OK with Ed Brill, but not with Rhodin.  I think if I were the General Manager of a brand, no product would go out without my name being included in the dictionary.  Yes, perhaps I do have ego problems.  So what?!