Lotus Guru

Category Lotus Notes Career

UPDATE: Don't forget to read all the comments (and probably come back later and check for more) as a lot of folks are chiming in with additional great advice, links, training resources, etc.

A while ago I was contacted by someone who had recently been let go from their job as a Notes Developer to see if I knew of any opportunities, etc., etc. I did not, but I did share a good bit of advice on networking and job hunting. Today I received a similar email from a former colleague, and thought I really ought to share that advice with the community, just in case it's any good and might prove useful to someone else. Mr. Balaban has also offered his own advice while we're on the topic.

So, you lost your job. Congratulations, your new job just started, and it is "finding a new job"! It is full-time, and involves wide ranging activities to promote yourself, beyond simply updating your resume, including:

Sign up on LinkedIn

- Once you're on LinkedIn, fill out your profile (basically copy/paste your resume, and include a picture), then start linking like crazy with the large number of Lotus folks I'm sure you already know (and if you don't know very many yet, refer to the next topic on blogging and meet more that way).
- Also, and perhaps more importantly, join the following LinkedIn Groups which frequently see job postings:  Lotus Notes/Domino Technologies,  Lotus Professionals,  Lotus Software Professionals, Gurus of Lotus - Worldwide, etc.
- Do job searches on LinkedIn too.

Sign up on the BlueSkills job site

Though still in beta, you should definitely check out this IBM/Lotus focused job site set up by our good friend Paul Mooney.

Blogosphere

- You've got time to kill, and nothing will make your resume stand out more than being able to point folks to a bunch of well-written posts. Don't worry too much about trying to "compete" with more experienced bloggers - most employers won't be that familiar with the wider world of Lotus blogging, but your resume will give them a reason to look at yours, so it just has to be enough to give them warm fuzzies about your technical and communication skills. PROOFREAD carefully, both for spelling and verbiage errors, since having none will make you stand out more.
- What comes up first for your name in Google? If it's not good stuff about you (and your name isn't "John Smith") you'll want to raise your profile and blogging is a good way to do it.
- Build awareness of yourself (and drive more traffic to your blog) by commenting on other people's blogs as much as possible. Follow PlanetLotus.org carefully so you can be among the first to comment. That said, don't comment just for the sake of it - only if you can contribute something of value to whatever the subject is (doesn't need to be much, but something).
- And of course, keep up with all the Lotus blogs on PlanetLotus.org.

BleedYellow

- Get on BleedYellow's Sametime server - helpful details from Andrew Pollack here.
- There are probably groups/communities that are worth checking out which might be helpful.
- You can launch a blog on the site, so that might be a way to get started blogging if you want to try that.

Twitter

- You may already be doing this, but follow the Lotus crowd on Twitter since they might post something about openings they hear about.
- Figure out Twitter search and notifications. I've not done a lot of this so am no expert, but you might find some nuggets that way.

Lotusphere et. al.

- Try to go.  At least you don't have to beg your boss to send you (sorry, bad joke). You might be able to get a free pass from one of the vendors with extras that came with their booth, in return for spending some time as a "booth babe". Long shot but if you are a good talker it might be possible. Its often cheaper for them than paying for travel for a junior employee with little technical knowledge. Sell yourself.
- There are also FREE conferences coming up with similar networking and educational opportunities, such as IamLUG in St. Louis and UKLUG in Edinburgh.

Traditional job boards

- Dice is good, Monster maybe, JustNotesJobs.com might still be around - post resumes everywhere you can think.
- Call every recruiter that seems to be posting Notes jobs and tell them you're available and give them a sense of what sorts of jobs you would be good for, even if the current one isn't one of them. Give them a simple story to tell their clients so they can sell you. Be brief, and don't oversell or sound desperate. Get your resume into their database. "Hey, I wanted to find out more about this opportunity since I know a number of people that might be looking" is a great opener since it makes you sound helpful and not needy. "This particular opening is probably not a good fit but I wanted to throw my resume your way if down the road one of your clients needs someone who..." and then give them the 1-2 sentence summary that they would use as an opener to their clients.

What else? Please chime in, and for those in this boat, good luck!

Posted by Kevin S Pettitt | 06/17/2009 2:38 PM | Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (13)

Category Nokia E71 Symbian S60 Lotus Traveler AT&T

AT&T is now offering a slightly tweaked version of my trusty Nokia E71, the E71x (shown), for a subsidized price of only $100. I'm not sure what goodies, if any, my $400 unlocked model retains that might have been disabled on this one, but for now I will blindly choose to believe there must be some if only to stave off feelings of regret.

The real significance of this new offering?

It is now official, Symbian/S60 has arrived in North America as a carrier-supported smart phone OS, bringing Lotus Traveler for Symbian that much closer to mainstream. For AT&T, this brings to three (and with iPhone/Traveler integration coming, soon four) the number of Lotus-compatible smartphone OS platforms it supports: Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian.

AT&T's big selling point for the E71x is that is the "The World's thinnest smartphone" and I would have to agree it is quite nice to be able to "front pocket" this phone without being constantly reminded you have done so. The Symbian OS has taken some getting used to though, so I don't see this becoming a huge seller right away. Still, I am looking forward to more random encounters (Warren, you don't count ) with fellow E71 users, even at the risk of wishing I hadn't paid $400 for mine.

Posted by Kevin S Pettitt | 05/26/2009 10:56 AM | Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category Lotus Notes UI Design

Lotus Blogger Extraordinaire Tony Palmer has a nice writeup on user interface design, with links to resources and other helpful tips. Well worth a read and a bookmark.

Link: My quick tips for UI design and another example

Posted by Kevin S Pettitt | 05/14/2009 3:38 PM | Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (2)

Category Ytria ScanEZ Lotus Notes SnTT

Among the many great things about Ytria's ScanEZ tool is its ability to perform operations on a Notes database in what amounts to a background process. In other words, the Notes client itself is not tied up waiting for agents or other lengthy operations to finish running.

So let's say you're testing a new application and you want to purge 20,000 OpenLog error log entries (you of course ARE using error logging in your code, right?). If you try to delete them using the Notes client, plan on grabbing coffee, since Notes will be unusable for a while. If you're hitting a server database, or deleting, say, 200,000+ documents, you should plan on grabbing lunch. If your network connection to the server is less than stellar, you might even have to wait until you leave for the day and hope it finishes by morning. And at the end of all that, you still have a ton of deletion stubs which are of no use unless you actually replicate the database somewhere.

The "better" approach would be to write a quick LotusScript scheduled agent to grab a document collection and do a dc.RemoveAll. Or if you have soft deletions enabled and don't want to fill your trash bucket, you could loop through the collection and do a doc.RemovePermanently. Either way you're still stuck with deletion stubs whether you like it or not.

The "Best" approach that I know of is to use ScanEZ. It opens in it's own application window, so anything you do to a database within the ScanEZ interface doesn't interfere with your ability to use the Notes client. To delete a bunch of documents there are many ways to select them. You can select them in a view first and open ScanEZ, or you might simply select all documents based on the "LogEntry" form within ScanEZ itself. You can also do much more complex searches to filter down to the documents you want to touch (whether to delete them or do anything else). No matter how you select them, when you're ready to delete them, you can even choose "Do not create deletion stubs" and "Also delete responses and sub-responses". Then just hit "Yes" and go back to working in Notes. It may still take a while to complete the operation, but you don't need to wait around while its working.



Oh, and if you've been doing it the hard way for a while and have a million deletion stubs laying about, you can also use ScanEZ to delete them all in one go.

Posted by Kevin S Pettitt | 05/07/2009 12:20 PM | Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (4)

Category Plagiarism SearchDomino Lotus Domino IdeaJam

Note: I have held off posting this entry for nearly a week after I attempted to contact Dheeraj Pal about this matter, both via email (through LinkedIn) and by commenting on the various blog entries in question. I even made an attempt to contact one of his colleagues via email (also via LinkedIn). I have had only indirect acknowledgment of these communications, in the form of the removal of my comment from one entry, and the total removal of the two other entries. Why the one entry is still posted is anyone's guess, but as of this writing it will serve as momentary proof that I'm not making this all up. After consultation with several respected members of the Lotus community who also believe this behavior should be called out (and who have seen all three posts when they were still there), I am now going ahead with posting this entry...

In researching how to correct inaccurate Lotus Notes folder unread counts last week, I noticed this marginally useful tip on SearchDomino.com posted on May 10, 2006 by Erwin Hommes (with an alternate method in a response to the same post by "Karie S."). Not finding satisfaction from that Google result, I opened the next one and discovered that Dheeraj Pal had lifted the aforementioned SearchDomino tip, and it's response, and posted it virtually word for word on his Techartifact.com blog on February 12, 2009, making *no mention* that the tip wasn't actually his.

My curiosity piqued (or perhaps inflamed would be a better word), I decided to check out Mr. Pal's other posts, and discovered two additional examples of plagiarism (since removed after I commented on both):

- Mr. Pal's How to copy files from one Domino server to another post from April 13, 2009 is/was a blatant rip-off of Bruce Elgort's 2007 post here. (Side note: The even funnier thing is that Bruce's post is ALSO plagiarized by Hasnain Yousuf on IdeaJam of all places.)
- His post entitled Lotus Domino: CalConn task does not return Free Time for adjacent domain in Hub-Spoke; Free Time is grayed out was copied directly from this Lotus technote.

This may come as a shock to Mr. Pal, but passing off other peoples' work as your own is called plagiarism, which is a form of FRAUD. It's perfectly fine to post excerpts from or links to other peoples' work, but ONLY if you link back to the original and make it clear that you are not the one that wrote it. You can even get away with reposting entire blog entries like Bruce's if you do it right.  

Why does this matter? What's the Big Deal?

Completely ignoring the impacts on the people whose works have been copied, which are admittedly slight, the key problem here is that those works have been used to artificially inflate someone's credibility in the eyes of readers, who may include potential employers, clients, or others prepared to reward actual technical expertise where it is perceived. This inflated credibility in turn puts others competing for the attention of those same employers, clients, et. al. at an unfair disadvantage. So in a sense we are all victims here.

I should also point out that the site is selling advertising through Google Adsense.

Given that ours is a community that prides itself on authenticity, you might say this rubbed me the wrong way. What do you think?

UPDATE: After Paul Mooney, Rocky Oliver, Steve McDonough, and myself posted new comments on the one remaining plagiarized post, the post has just disappeared from the site, and I just received this email from Techartifact Admin:

Hi

We have recalled all the lotus domino post and put them under review.

Thanks for pointing it out.

Regards
Admin

UPDATE 2: In attempting to re-post my previously "deleted" comment with help from Steve McDonough, we realized that it had probably never actually been posted on the site because WordPress was disallowing embedded links. The odd thing is that the comment DID post in the browser window I had open (I have the saved html file that shows it, and Steve experienced the same behavior when he tried). So unless the comment was stored locally on my machine, I'm guessing the comment did get stored on the server but not displayed for others to see because of whatever spam controls might have kicked in. So in fairness, it is possible (though doubtful) that Mr. Pal did not see the comment in question last week when I posted it. Perhaps somebody more familiar with WordPress can shed light on what may have happened. In retrospect I should have sent an email to abuse@techartifact.com, webmaster@techartifact.com, and admin@techartifact.com and not just Mr. Pal through LinkedIn. Regardless, the fact that the other two posts were removed after I called them out as copies is a clear indication that my message was being received. Techartifact Admin should have sent the above response then.

Posted by Kevin S Pettitt | 04/28/2009 5:00 PM | Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (20)

Category Lotus Notes Workspace IdeaJam

Another "Please give us a better Workspace" idea was recently posted on IdeaJam, this time by Thomas Leriche. The key difference here is that I have taken the time to troll around IdeaJam and the Lotus Blogosphere fore as many related links as I can find and put them in the comments of this idea (see comment 7):



For good measure, I will post the same links here:

From Mary Beth's old blog:

{ Link } June 14, 2006: Lots of discussion on a workspace prototype, with screenshots
{ Link } January 3, 2007: Update on the fact that the workspace redesign wouldn't be in 8.0
{ Link } February 13, 2008: Questions about the Gridded Bookmarks (followup to previous link)

From the 8.5 Beta IdeaJam site (hint: go vote for these):

{ Link } Nathan T. Freeman on 31 May 2008: Change the way the Workspace works
{ Link } Nathan T. Freeman on 31 May 2008: Update the Workspace

Related IdeaJam ideas (some titles paraphrased):

{ Link } Patrick Kwinten on 25 Jan 2008: Idea to be able to save different workspace sets
{ Link } Jim Roysdon on 03 Apr 2008: Zoomable Workspace
{ Link } Patrick Kwinten on 07 Jan 2009: Extend Undo function to (deleting) DB icons from the Workspace
{ Link } Tomas Ekstrom on 14 Feb 2008: Choose whether to stack Workspace icons at the application level
{ Link } Thomas Adrian on 11 Sep 2007: Doubleclick on workspace = File - Application - Open
{ Link } Patrick Kwinten on 03 Jan 2008: Workspace update (some great thoughts on updated functionality and UI)
{ Link } Jan Flipsen on 29 Jan 2008: workspace management (more great suggestions)
{ Link } Patrick Kwinten on 19 Mar 2008: Option to set a default workspace page to open
{ Link } Karen Demerly on 01 Nov 2007: Right-click, Arrange by..., in workspace pages
{ Link } Keith Brooks on 08 Nov 2007 and { Link } Keith Brooks on 08 Apr 2008: Keith *really* doesn't like being stuck with a gray workspace
{ Link } David Camara on 08 Nov 2007: Ability to [programmatically] manipulate Workspace (i.e. to find/remove dead icons)

Other Links:

{ Link } Panagenda's cool Workspace skin tool

If you know of any others please post them here and in the idea above. I will update this post as I find more.

Posted by Kevin S Pettitt | 04/13/2009 9:00 AM | Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category Breville Blender Design

On the occasion of the discovery at the mall that smoothies are an excellent fruit delivery vehicle for picky three-year-olds, I bring you the first in an occasional series of posts touting great design from (way) outside the Lotus software world. The story unfolded yesterday, when much to the chagrin of my pineapple/banana smoothie toting wife and despite a recently consumed batch of chicken nuggets, our young son decided he would finish said smoothie all by himself. Eyewitnesses (or would that be *ear*-witnesses?) reported hearing several shouts of "Yum!" interspersed with the occasional "Mine!"

Quickly recognizing the tremendous opportunities for expanding our son's nutritional horizons, and noticing that we were in a mall at that moment, my wife and I immediately set out on a quest for a smoothie maker. A short time later we received a brief but illuminating education in home smoothie manufacturing courtesy the good folks at Williams Sonoma. and shortly after that we were the proud owners of the Breville iKon Hemisphere LCD Blender (pictured here).

Why does this matter to folks accustomed to reading about Lotus Notes? In a word, *design*. In a market dominated by mediocrity, this blender is a wonder of good design, both functional and aesthetic. As practically any recently married couple can attest, the $70 Hamilton Beach that Aunt Millie purchased off their wedding registry just doesn't work very well and is a pain to clean by hand (UPDATE: Since dissing Hamilton Beach blenders I have been informed that there products may actually be better now than I remember, so I do recommend checking them out). Typically there are unblended bits of ice or whathaveyou left at the bottom of the vessel, and most of us probably think that's just the way its supposed to be. Newsflash: It isn't!

So in the same way that good software design costs a bit more but raises user expectations while making those users happier and more productive, the Breville sets a new standard for blender design. Here are just some of the design features that have motivated me to write this piece:

- THE BLADES. They are *sharp*. They look sharp too, which I've never noticed about other blenders. More importantly, the whole blade assembly is designed to sweep the bottom of the vessel in order to avoid the typical collection of unblended debris. Even better, the whole bottom of the vessel, which includes the blade assembly, easily detaches for cleaning.
- THE VESSEL. Shaped to promote even mixing, easily readable measuring marks, very comfortable handle. and dead easy to hand clean by unscrewing the bottom/blade assembly.
- THE SOUND. This thing is quiet. Relatively speaking that is. I would never run most blenders early in the morning unless I *wanted* to wake everyone else in the house. The Breville is quiet enough that I wouldn't be too worried.
- THE PLUG. Since one of the most repeated lines in the instruction manual is "unplug before...", the plug itself has been designed with a little finger hole to make that process painless and avoid damaging the cord by yanking on it.
- THE LID. again, a convenient finger hook to allow easy removal of the very snug-fitting lid. No broken fingernails.
- THE VERSATILITY. Yeah, we bought it thinking "Smoothie", but its a blender with many more capabilities. And with it's ability to uniformly blend whatever you put in it, you can do more with it, like mince meat for gourmet hamburgers.
- EASY TO CLEAN. As already mentioned. You don't have to necessarily run it through a dishwasher cycle before using it for something else (though you will need to let it dry thoroughly and going from garlic pesto to raspberry smoothie might require a bit more diligence). The bottom unscrews easily from the vessel with just a little force (though helpfully they include a wrench-like "removal tool" if your he-man hubby screws it on too tight).

So we're out $200, but I am confident that the immense ease of use, practicality, and output quality of this blender will translate into huge value over the many years of frequent use we anticipate. After all, our son is not the only one in the house who is fresh fruit challenged .

Posted by Kevin S Pettitt | 04/12/2009 2:05 PM | Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category IdeaJam Lotus Notes Icons

Well how about that.

Posted by Kevin S Pettitt | 04/09/2009 1:14 PM | Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (1)