Friday, February 19, 2010

International Housewares 2010 Student Design Competition

This coming March 14-16 is the International Home and Housewares 2010 Show here in Chicago. As part of the show, the association has the 17th annual student design competition. This year 283 students throughout the United States submitted their designs. I am proud to say that my son, Brian did pretty well and got an Honorable Mention Award and got a small sum of money to pay for school.

Brian and his colleague designed the MWLUG 2009 fixture that greeted attendees last year. Starting with the MWLUG Conference 2010 we are hoping to make it an annual competition similar to what the IHA has done for the past 17 years. The winning designs will be built for the conference. The design competition will be divided into two categories, one for graphics and the other for design.

International Home and Housewares 2010 Student Design Competition

Supply Chain Management <=> Domino

Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to attend a presentation by Michael Hugos who has written a number of books on supply chain management. It is interesting on the simplified approach that he preaches. It is very similar to what our philosophy has been towards developing our business applications for our customers. All these business applications that we have developed reside on the Domino platform.

The flexibility of the Domino platform is idea for managing these processes for a small to medium organization. Domino is not idea for a high transaction environment, but that is not necessary for small and medium size companies which makes up most of the companies in the world. Domino provides multiple ways of integrating with other environments, some of which is simple like email or a CSV file and some more complicated like Web services. In an every changing business climate, companies need to be extremely flexible in how they architect their solution and Domino give us that. The flexibility provides timely responses to a dynamic business environment.

Domino never gets the respect it is deserves. For example, a client of ours uses both Notes/Domino and Sharepoint. One group decided to use SharePoint because it was the thing that they heard people are using. What would have take one day with Domino is still not completed after 3 months. So imagine what it might be costly the company for not having this completed in a timely matter especially in this dynamic business environment which I believe is now the norm.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

MWLUG Conference 2010 Theme

The theme for the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference 2010 is "Building a Community Through Collaboration". This reflects the goals of this conference of building our Midwest Lotus community. With the addition of the West PA Lotus User Group our community has gotten a bit larger.

Lotus Quickr has been so far a great tool for us to plan this conference. It has many things that I do not like and will change as I customize the template, but it has helped us bring together all the different user groups who are involved. The number of tasks that is required to make this conference happen is enormous. Since everyone is a volunteer, the more tools we can use the better.

Monday, February 15, 2010

West PA Lotus User Group Joins the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference 2010

We are please to announce that the West PA Lotus User Group has joined and will be participating in the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference 2010 that will be held on August 19-20, 2010 at Cleveland, Ohio. We are now up to eight participating Lotus User Groups that include:

- Central Ohio Notes/Domino Users Group
- GRANITE Lotus User Group
- Minnesota Lotus User Group
- Northeast Ohio Lotus User Group
- Northeast Wisconsin Lotus User Group
- Southern Wisconsin Lotus User Group
- West Michigan Lotus User Group
- West PA Lotus User Group

As Gregg Eldred mentioned last week will are moving forward in finalizing the location and activities of the event. That is a lot of things planned so stay tune.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Installing Sametime 8.5 Entry Server on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Issue

Has anyone installed Sametime 8.5 entry server on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server. I am getting the message "This operating system is not supported" message. Is there a work around to bypass this check?

Free XPages Training in Chicago

As Roy Rumaner and Alex Kassabov blogged, GRANITE is having a technical seminar that will be graciously hosted by PSC Group at their offices in Schaumburg, IL on March 15. This XPages training is part of our GRANITE technical series that we have started. This first session of the series will be available for both members and non-members at no cost. For non-members we normally charge $15.00 for each event. If you were recently laid off, the entire XPages series will be free of charge. I strongly encourage everyone to join GRANITE since it provides many benefits to the Lotus community.

GRANITE is put together by volunteers whom like myself devote our time to help the Lotus community. With the recently layoffs at Abbott of their Notes developers and layoffs at other organizations, this is a good time to get yourself some training on the newest Lotus technologies. We will be also working with the IBM VIC in downtown Chicago to provide addition technical seminars in addition to our bi-monthly meetings in which we have two to three technical presentations.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Year of the Tiger

This Sunday which is Valentine's Day is also Chinese New Year, the year of the Tiger, Metal Tiger to be exact. Our family celebrates on New Years Eve and we have a feast of food that includes some of my favorite bakery goods that my mom makes. In China, Chinese New Years is traditionally celebrated for the entire month.

Snow and More Snow

I guess Chicago is now getting its share of the snow. There is about a foot of snow so far and we are expect to get another 5 to 6 inches where I am. After that the cold and wind comes. I wish I was back at Lotusphere. I really did not get a chance to enjoy the weather in Florida.

Monday, February 8, 2010

Great GRANITE Lotus User Group Meeting

Today was our February 2010 meeting for GRANITE. We had the largest number of attendees since 2008. Hopefully we can continue building our membership through 2010. We were able to sign up two new members today.

Thanks to John Head and Mike McGarel for their Lotusphere 2010 wrap up of Project Vulcan, Project Concord, and XPages. Mike also did a presentations on using OpenNTF templates to develop your own intranet. Our thanks to Mac Glore for getting us the meeting place at the IBM Center at the last moment.

I think we need to switch away from deep dish pizza for lunch at the GRANITE meetings. I can feel the cheese building up on my veins. Looks like an evening of exercising after this blog posting.

We have a new GRANITE event coming up, but I will let Roy Rumaner or Alex Kassabov talk about his up and coming event. We are planning a new GRANITE web site so look forward over the next couple of months to see what we have done.

CollabSphere 2022 Presentation: COL103 Advanced Automation and Cloud Service Integration for your Notes/Nomad Applications

Our presentation for CollabSphere 2022. Learn how to quickly add workflow automation into Notes/Nomad applications using No-code tools that ...