Microsoft Virtual TechEd - Keynote

The ketnote started with a general overview of the thinking behind Windows 7. Specifically mentioned was the user backlash against Vista, and a general feeling that there wasn't much end user or OEM consultation prior to it's release, and it significant performance problems.

Windows 7 was tuned to reduce a lot of the performance bottlenecks and provide a faster user experience. For high end, multi-core CPU systems the scheduling algorithms have been updated to give better performance on those systems too.

Two new tools were specifically demonstrated.

Resource Monitor is a souped-up tool from Task Manager, which can also show more details about running processes, and show which files are open on the file system and how much readings and writing is happening. It can also show what directories are locked (this is searchable too), so you can find out why you can't delete or modify a file.

Memory usage graphic is also a bit more intuitive, showing clearly how much ram is in use for apps, standby caching and spare.

Likewise, Network usage is effectively the TCPView package from SysInternals with a graphical interface, but linked to the process list so you can see which processes have network sessions open, and to where, and what ports are exposed on the machine.

As a side note, Mark Russinovich's machine he was demonstrating did show "Google Updater" as a running program. Make of that what you will. "Apple Mobile Device" was also running, so presumably he's not using a Zune.

The second tool was Problem Steps Recorder, which is designed as a troubleshooting tool for remote helpdesks (ie. you spouse rings you up and says "It's not working!"). If the problem is reproducible, the user can run PSR and reproduce the problem. PSR will capture the screen on every click and keypress, and store the information in a ZIP file which can be e-mailed through to the helpdesk person.

It wasn't ALL hard work

(The EUT Development team, locked away in a back room, worked tirelessly to plan out the future strategy)

Some of the classic quotes that were heard:

Karoona: "Honestly, I haven't had very much to drunk."

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Dai: "It was amazing. Truly a touching moment that I don't think I'll never forget."
Mike: "What was?"
Dai: "The presidential inauguration"
Mike: "Oh.... I thought you meant SameTime."

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Greg: "Do we turn left or right here?"
Karoona: "Hmmm... I'm not sure. We might have to phone Dai"
Greg: "We're at the end of the driveway... How can we be lost already???"

ID106 - Notes & Domino Archiving: Offerings and Roadmap

The need for archiving is currently driven by 4 factors:

1. Reduce storage size of mail
2. Legal compliance and eDiscovery
3. Collection of Enterprise Content from other systems
4. Line of Business application optimisation

IBM currently offer 3... well, 2 methods for archiving:

Domino server based archives, which will continue to be available but are being de-emphasised;
IBM's Common Store product, which is being retired; and
IBM Context Collector, which replaces CommonStore, Email Manager and Records Crawler into one unfied system.

There are also plenty of 3rd party products out there.

Mobing forward, they intend to push more on personal (user) e-mail archiving, and support for a platform agnostic Enterprise Content Management framework that any vendor can hook into.

For the user side, they recognise that the current archiving system in Notes is difficult to use, even more difficult to find and doesn't always work. They presented a "vision" for the future of user archiving. They call it a vision, but it was really a narrated story with some concept screenshots which were literally mocked up with pencil and paper.

In summary, they're moving to have roll-over nsf file archives for the user (rollover is date or size-based, and is automatic). Archived messages will leave a stub message in the main mail interface, and the message searching window will contain a checkbox to enable searching of archived mail. Whilst archiving will continue to have a scheduled process, the user will be notified if the schedule is missed due to the machine being powered off. The user will also be able to restore the message from archives easily from a link in the message stub.

Some of the features may be available in a point release for Domino 8.5.x, but most won't be around until "Domino 9 or beyond", they say.

Notes Client on Citrix

This session, far from being what I expected (a hands-on this-is-how-we-do-it) was mainly details of how version 8.0.2 runs much better on Citrix than the previous version (which, it's generally agreed, was awful)

They recommend Citrix XenApp 5.0 to get it working, and there's a few tweks with disabling Windows services and tuning the Anti-Virus software to imporve performance.

They did a lab test of server loading, and managed to get up to 145 clients connecting per (2 x quad core cpu 64 bit server with 32Gb RAM) server. They tested with 32 bit vs 64 bit servers, dual vs quad core and differing RAM and explained where the bottlenecks seemed to be on each configuration.

I did ask the question about what load each user was doing and it was only email, calendar and writing a document in embedded Symphony.

Personally, I'd think that ocne you add the other server overheads (presentation server, SQL back end, WAN accelerators, load balancing servers, etc.) that you'd need for a production level environment, 145 users on such a grunty server doesn't look like that much of an acheivement just to get mail and calendar. After all, if you gave the users the newer browser-based iNotes client, they'd get virtually the same experience of a no-footprint client and you'd scale far more users per server.

BP305 - The document format dance

This session went over the various differences betweed ODF, OOXML and PDF formats.

At the heart, all three are XML driven and all are ISO standards. PDF is the clear winner for read-only content and archiving, and there's no reason why it shouldn't be adopted straight away.

For editable content, there is currently no clear choice between ODF and OOXML, and most programs do, or soon will, support both.

The speaker suggested that OOXML has a lot of support in the US, being Microsoft sponsored. ODF is the preferred format in Europe at the moment, so it could end up with ODF being the de facto standard for non-US companies.

Microsoft, of course, support the ECMA stardard OOXML, but not the later ISO standard (there were some alterations) and support for that won't come until Office 14. Interestingly Apple's iPhone editor also uses OOXML.

Lotus Symphony uses ODF, as does OpenOffice/Star Office as well as Google Docs.

So, the key take-aways from this is to use PDF for read only stuff, use XML where you can and ultimately keep your options open either way.

ID211 - Executing a security assessment of Domino

We all know I'm not usually one to prattle on about security, so I'll make this one brief.... :-)

The majority of the session was about patterns in hacking recently and things to watch out for. They're telling us that due to the current economic climate, security is becoming more important because:

• Desperate times breed desperate people, and if people need money they may see an economic incentive.
• Higher rates of staff turnover/reduction at companies may lead to higher numbers of disgruntled people whom have inside knowledge of systems
• Staff changeover in companies without proper change control in place may lead to an administrator leaving and their replacement thinking patches, etc. have been done when they haven't.

So, what are the hackers up to? Leaving the script kiddies aside, there's a general, iterative procedure that a professional hacker tends to follow, being:

1. Recon - investigate the system and find out as much as they can, determining internet points of presence.
2. Probe & Attack - check for open ports, WiFi sidejacks, open file shares, anonymous access
3. Gain toehold - get low level access as an anonymous or standard user in unobtrusive manner, social engineering attacks, etc.
4. Advance - use the towhold position to attempt buffer overflows, injection attacks, weak passwords
5. Stealth listening - consolidate their position, cover the tracks, look for further opportunities for privelige escalation, packet captures, etc.
6. Takeover - own the system via a rootkit, download data or use system as a launching place for attacks on other systems on the network or internet.

One of the particular things they mentioned to crack down on is open file shares. Having access to the file system would allow the attacker to download nsf files, or the address book. Having access to the ID files is a particular risk, because they can be downloaded and subjected to an offline attack. Certificate ID file too, because that could be attacked and used to certify a new admin.

INV112 - Using a Virtual Microsoft Desktop Alternative

The underlying message of this session was about the stranglehold that Microsoft have on the desktops at the moment, and how it's become less necessary.

Presently, the documents people are creating are tied to Microsoft's Office suite. That, in turn is chained to the Windows operating system, which is linked to the desktop (via OEM or otherwise). A major upgrade of any one of these components usually triggers an upgrade of the others. ie. Wanting to upgrade the office suite usually means upgraded harware, and therefore an OS upgrade too.

At the Office level, the way to decouple this is to use open standards (more on that in a later blog) to store documents, so it becomes irrelevant whether you're using Office or Symphony/OpenOffice. And using Symphony means you're not tied just to Windows as the OS.

To decouple the OS from hardware upgrades, they recommend looking at VDI solutions, as you can maintain the hardware for longer, etc. etc. They showed some Gartner reports and pretty graphs, but they're the same ones we've already seen about trends and TCO of virtual desktops.

The other thing, brought in right at the end, was a move towards Desktop as a Service. Basically, like VDI but with the desktop hosted in the cloud. Nice, but not sure how practical it is for a large company.

ID405 - Sametime Advanced

I'll say upfront, I was rather disappointed with this session.

Sametime Advanced seems to have some nice features is it, but I'm not really sure how much they would get used at Mars.

In addition to multi-user chats, there is a more formal "chat room" feature available, with document sharing included. The can also be accessed from a browser interface too. It's nice, but SameTime meetings gives you the same functionality.

Broadcasts are another feature - you can broadcast a message out to a group, and those that respond are joined into an n-way chat. I can see maybe ART or teams like that using this, for getting help on a problem.

Instant poll works similar to Broadcasts, but with a polling/survey message. Meh.

Skilltap is virtually identical to broadcasts, but specifically pointed to asking questions that require specialist answers. At the end of the chat, the questioner has the option of reviewing the answers and adding them to an FAQ. It's an interesting way of working, sure, but surely the last thing we need is yet another silo of information locked away somewhere else?

And then there's desktop sharing, which gives... well, desktop sharing.

The other major functional benefit, which is the main value proposition for upgrade, would be the ability to customise the look and feel and location of the Sametime notification baloons.

So, all in all, some nice stuff, but anything we'd actually use we already have perfectly good ways of doing.

BP403 - Best practices for migrating Exchange to Domino

This session revolved around 2 case studies of companies migrating from Exchange to Domino and 1 from a Unix mail system to Domino that had been assisted by IBM, and the lessons learned from those cases.

Interestingly, all the cases revolved around a highly de-centralised mail system moving to centralised Domino. No-one went for decentralised Notes, and no examples of centralised Exchange to centralised Notes were cited. One of the migrations had started, but was halted partway though at the customer request, due to the economic downturn.

Some of the problems encountered were (in my own view) basic project management issues. Failure to define standards first, risk management and training needs.

On the technical problems, a few of the challenges they faced were:

• local PST files, which IT may not even know exists if they are user created.
• .msg emails saved on the file system
• Mail archives
• Calendar/Scheduling lookups
• Personal Address books
• Non-Blackberry mobile clients
• Blackberrys requiring a full wipe and resync as part of the migration
• Recurring meetings
• Outlook Journal
• Outlook Notes
• Unattended/Generic mailboxes
• Inbox rules
• Password synchronisation and distribution

IBM consulting, for one of the clients, ended up using 6 separate toolkits as well as customised scripts to manage the migtations.

All in all, there weren't any "best practices" discussed. It was probably better to say that it was a "things to watch out for" or "why you should get IBM consulting to help you" session.

ID207 - Getting the most out of DAOS

This was a more in depth technical look at DAOS (Domino Attachment and Object Service) and, as I blogged previously, something we should definitely use when we move to 8.5

Aside from the obvious benefits of reducing the database size and de-duplicating attachments, another point raised was that mail attachments are typically quite static and are usually not accessed all that often. Therefore, by spinning them out to separate files on the disk, it's more cost effective to place the repository on Tier 2 storage, saving your faster disks for the databases.

It's also worth noting that DAOS is not just for mailboxes - it will work with ANY notes database. That includes mail.box, by the way, so once a message with an attachment hits the server, it's written to the disk once and once only, and the pointer stub gets routed through the server. They've seen about a 13% reduction in disk I/O, as well as a 10.5% decrease in CPU usage from this.

Of course, it's not all sunshine and roses. There are a few caveats to be aware of. These include:

• The size of the attachment still counts towards the user's quota size, even though it's not stored within the nsf file.
• The attachment size does NOT count towards the 64Gb size limit for an NSF file. In one case, a client has created an NSF file which is logically storing 2TB of data, but thanks to DAOS the NSF is still less than 64Gb. However, this database cannot be replicated to any non-DAOS server, because the replica would then be over the limit
• Copying/duplicating an NSF file file at the OS level, or deleting an attachment file will cause the DAOS system to go out of sync. Things will still work, but files will not be deleted off the file system when the documents are deleted until after resync/verification is done. This can be automated, however.
• Transaction logging must be enabled on the server, and the available space in the logs must be large enough to buffer the largest file you might want to pull out.
• You need to create/upgrade the database format to 8.5 format.

So, there's a few things to note but they're fairly minor, compared to the significant savings that can be made.

Sametime Unified Telephony

I attended two sessions on this, and the more I see, the more I like.

It encompasses most of the features that OCS 2007 Release 2 does (eg. Telephone/IM presence, Click-to-call, Click-to-conference, VC, embedded softphone, etc.) but with a few nice extras too.

Call routing is a good one. Users can add their own home, mobile, other numbers and establish rules on where calls will go. This goes way beyond call forwarding, though.

You can base which phone (if any) based on time of day, your Sametime status, physical location (as documented in Sametime via Location Awareness), and who the calling party is. It can try one phone, then divert to another on no answer, with different diversions based on these rules - almost the same level of functionality as an inbox rule.

The paradigm of having a personal number, that identifies YOU rather than a physical device is also a good one, which I can personally resonate with today. As my co-bloggers are aware, I ran out of mobile phone credit (mainly because I have to pay the inbound portion of international calls to the US). Sure, I could have purchased a pre-paid SIM, but then I'd have to tell everyone the new number.

With SUT (Sametime Unified Telephony), I could get a prepaid SIM here, and set that phone up in Sametime. A UK caller would call my same number, which would come in to ISB, hop over the WAN link as a VoIP and have a Mars USA PBX make a domestic call to me. So far, so good. UK calleds can reach me at my own number.

BUT.... If I wanted to make an outbound call to the UK, I can initiate that through Sametime too. Mars USA would initiate a call to my mobile, then it would route it over the WAN and the UK PBX initiates the other side of the call. Therefore, at each point it's a local call - even for outbound calls that (in theory) originate from my mobile.

Now, because the ST server is brokering the call, that means I can now seamlessly transfer the call between my mobile, desk phone, hotel phone, IP softphone, etc without hanging up the call, and the other party would never know.

The main strength of SUT over OCS is that the end user has full control over their personal call rules.

AD204 - XPages 101

This session was a primer on XPages, which is IBM's new method of writing web front ends to Notes databases.



It can provide a Web 2.0 style interface, and under the hood provides a full XML, AJAX, javascript and JSF (Java Server Faces) programming through the Eclipsed based development environment.



There's definitely a lot of power here, and basic UIs can be developed very rapidly. But, like anything, to do a thorough job will take time and planning, no matter what tools you use.



Depending on the future strategies, GSM and WebCC should take a look.

ID201 - Lotus Domino 8.5 and beyond

Dai will probably have more to add to this, but I was quite impressed. A few key features upcoming are:

Notes shared login: The initial login prompt can be removed from the Notes sign-on, and the ID file will be unlocked using the Windows login password.

ID vault: This is a server based repository for ID files, and can be used to automatically provision them to the desktop. It can also handle password changes, by helpdesk or self-service

Storage: This is the biggie. DAOS (Domino Attachment and Object Storage) works by pulling attachments out and storing them as individual files on the file system (optionally encrypted) of the notes server. It will also handle de-duplication. IBM have seen between 40-82% reduction is disk usage by doing this. Because mail files are smaller, it's more I/O friendly too, and reduces database compaction/reindexing/defragmenting times considerably. Also, because attachments are reasonably static, incremental and differential backups are considerably smaller and faster.

ID401 - What's new in Sametime 8.5

There are four main areas of improvement in the new version of Sametime:

Sametime meetings - is vastly improved. It was demoed at the keynote this morning, but the meeting room functionality, meeting recording, discussions, questions and minute taking features look very nice indeed.

Sametime client - not that much change between 8.0.2, but coming along is a DHTML based web client which can be provided on an extranet basis, which is reasonably feature-complete. Under the hood is a set of web-based REST APIs, which means customised clients can also connect in to this interface to. It does require a Sametime web proxy server, though.

Mobile clients - There are enhanced mobile clients for Blackberry & Windows mobile, as well as those clients also being able to use the web browser version too

Audio-Visual - AV performance has been improved, with new codecs provided to double the video/audio quality for the same bandwidth. There is also better bandwidth allocation/management provided. Also coming is interoperability with external video conference systems, including Polycom and Tandberg.

Intergration with Microsoft OCS will be there, but that's also being backported to 8.0.2 via a hot fix that will be available next week. (Can someone please make sure Alan sees this???)

Sametime 8.5 is expected to ship in Q3 2009

AD513 - Making mashups successful in the Enterprise

The first part of this presentation covered off much of the same material as in the keynote this morning using the Lotus Mashup Manager, but with a few more real-world examples of what some companies were using mashups for.

The second part looked in more detail on how to help to make them more effective, and more secure, in the enterprise.

On the effectiveness part, they discussed the IT central vs self-service vs hybrid models. For Mars, probably the hybrid model would work best: have a Centre of Excellence team to deisgn, build and document the widgets, then make them available for users to mash as they see fit.

For security, the Mashup Manager allows admins to set permissions on a "per feed" and "per field" basis, to ensure sensitive data can be excluded from mashups. It is also possible to track usage for auditing as well as utilisation purposes. The tracking/logging is in a very raw format, which might seem odd but it's acutally deliberate - you can pull the tracking data into a mash-up. ;-)

I'm sure there's definitely a place for mashups with us - bares much closer investigation.

JMP202 - Exploiting Lotus Sametime Platform & SDK

This session revolved around integrating Sametime with other applications and environments. It was interesting to see what some vendors are doing with ST, usch as Walkie Talkie voice integration, or integration with virtual worlds.

One of the major pieces of interest is Sametime 8.5 will offer a Proxy Server, allowing HTTP front-end access to community servers. Coupled with that is a web-based Sametime client which is fully DHTML based.

In addition to the obvious application of publishing Sametime client to extranet/internet clients without the need for a VPN, the other possibilities would be to publish presence information and initiate chats from BlogCentral, Associate Search and such.

JMP205 - Integration of Notes and Domino with Office, .NET and Symphony

This session was predominantly on integrating various Office suites at the software (VBA/scripting level) - how to get information out of Notes and into other applications in various ways. Pushing data from a Notes app out to an application (controlled via COM) was covered, as was pulling data from VBscript or OpenOfiice UNO scripting.

One of the examples shown was how to do a mail merge in Word, but using data from Notes contacts address list as the data source.

At the server side, the general technique was to use a Notes Agent running as a web service either providing SOAP access or presenting data as XML.

XML was the most flexible - once it is available via a URL returning XML, data can be imported or connected into Excel, Word, an ASP web page or presented in Sharepoint.

As an interesting side note, if the data is rendered as a pseudo RSS feed in XML, it can also be brought into Google Docs spreadsheeting tool as well.

Most of the details were fairly low level, so I won't blog about each option in detail but if this is functionality you might need, let me know and I can talk you through it.

SHOW401 - Build a complete, autonomic IT Solution

This session was an introduction to Lotus Foundations, which is offered as a prebuilt appliance on IBM and 3rd party hardware, as well as VMware image.

It's a Linux (SLES10 by the looks of it) based appliance, but with the OS and management on a disk-on-chip arrangement, to allow booting in the event of a failed, or unconfigured , disk array.

It's designed as an all-in-one small office (5 to 5000 user) solution, and offers File sharing (Windows, rsync, NFS and Apple), web server (L.A.M.P.), firewall with VPN support, ftp and DNS as well as Domino - no Sametime at this point.

At the hardware level, it supports drives in a RAID1 or RAID5, as well as Lotus' own idb (Intelligent Disk Backup). There's an auto-update feature as well.

All in all, for a small business it looks like a reasonable option. Not necessarily suitable for a banch office of a larger deployment, but I'm told that there'll be some annoucements about that later this week.

Lotusphere 2009

Almost all here! Greg & Mike arrived a couple of days ago and have been settling in. Karoona and I arrived yesterday on a very uneventful flight, and we'll be joined by Dai this afternoon to round out the EUT presence at Lotusphere this year.

So far we've had a couple of requests from the rest of the team to make sure we cover Email Archiving, Future of Quickplace, Sustainability and of course get the latest hints and tips in running our environment. Add a comment on this post to let us know if there is anything else you'd like us to make sure we cover.

With the upcoming Wrigley integration work we will also be putting special focus on tools and partners we can use to help make our two environments work seamlessly together and we will be investigating any offerings that we can use to cost effectively simplify our overall environment.

We have a full working Sunday ahead of us - unfortunately I drew the short straw so I get to start my day with "The A-Z of IBM Lotus Domino Security Features". I hope you're all as excited as I am ;-)

TechEd 2008, Day 5, 16:30

The final session I attended was Deploying & Scaling OCS Group Chat services.

In summary, MS have acquired a product which provides a chatroom facility (similar to IRC), but provides security (AD based) and logging. Whilst does require a separate server to run on than the OCS Messaging server, there is no additional application licensing required.

At present, it does require a separate client, but it does coexist niceley with the OCS client and there is plans to combine the two clients in future.

Some of the examples cited as potential benefit cases is project discussion rooms (because an archive of discussions is made) and global support teams, as members can come online and read the previous 18-24 hours discussions to see what issues/topics were discussed.

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This is my final blog post from TechEd 2008. See you in Berlin in November 2009!