Do clouds fill your horizon?

Today i had a discussion with somebody asking me the question what our vision is around cloud computing.

First of all, good question!

Bringing your current IT systems to the cloud might be a brilliant idea, according to the big cloud bases solution providers like Amazon, IBM, Google and Microsoft. But we believe that hybrid models might be a better solutions for most of the companies we know for the moment.

Earlier this year i wrote a blog item about ‘The future of email’ and i still believe that solutions like email, simple websites, instant messaging and basic collaboration functionality might serve you very well from the cloud and even hosting, test, development en simple IT services from the Amazon cloud is a great option saving you lot’s of in-company hassle. These commodity services will do fine for most organizations.

But before moving your email, documents or content to the cloud you might consider some legal related policies and technical impact, some examples;

• How does user management work, can you integrated with your corporate directory?
• How does single-sign on work in cooperation with you other systems?
• Can you restore single documents or email when required?
• Can you deliver data in case of an audit of legal research?
• Can you still integrate email with your CRM system?

All these items might be requirements set by the business and need to be reviewed before just moving data to the cloud, this is besides the trusted relationship you need with your new cloud based solution provider. I can imagine that IBM of Microsoft are somewhat more trusted parties then ‘multicloudapps.com’ or ‘cloud4all’ (examples).

This is just about collaboration and communication, mostly commodity services that can easily be hosted anywhere. This might even be your new virtual PBX. But what about the software close to your primary business processes like your ERP system or your PLC’s in your manufacturing process?

This might be different for every company. I can imagine than a consultancy company might be very happy using a SAAS based ERP system but a manufacturer of medicines might have some issues bringing his intellectual property and production process outside his premises.

conclusion

So, after all i think that cloud based solutions work very well for commodity services (this is no news i guess), SAAS based solutions might work very well for non missions critical systems without heavy security demands and on premises will be there for another while for systems close to your PLC’s and business processes.

When a name changes, does this take away the magic?

What happens if your name changes, does the magic disappear?

The ones reading this blog or working in the IBM collaboration business for a while might recognize the name Eniac. Since early 2000 Eniac Essentials is working in collaborative and integration solutions based on IBM software, mainly Lotus and WebSphere, and created multiple references around complex projects in this area and published multiple presentations, articles and items in the BP forum and public forums as SOA specialty partner, beta partner of several products and so on and so on.....

We are happy to announce....

Sinces 2005 Eniac is part of Imtech NV and we think it's now time to move in, with proud we would like to announce that from januari 1st our name is converted into Imtech ICT Integrated Solutions!

We believe that information management is highly important for every organization in the coming years and we believe that the integration of information is key for building business related solutions and therefore we built a project related organization with full focus in creating solutions in this area.

For the coming years we join forces with out sister company Imtech ICT Velocity resulting in almost 100 professionals in the area of messaging, collaboration, portals, social intranet, service oriented architectures and business integration.

About the magic.....we feel this will stay and we work hard on expanding it towards the market, thank you for all your support in the last couple of years. Let's Connect, Socialize and Integrate towards the future!

Data reduction to the max

With the new IBM Lotus Domino 8.5.x features you are ready to dramatically reduce your data volume which saves resources, backup time and storage and thus money!

Which features am I talking about?

- Design note compression
- Document compression
- De-duplication of all data (archiving)
- De-duplication of attachments (DAOS)
- LZ1 compression of attachments
- Optimize pasted bitmap

Design compression is one of the simplest actions. You enable the feature on your templates and the new databases created from that template will be using about 50% less disk space. Since even an empty database can be multiple MB in size (mail85.ntf is 30 MB!) and the reduction can be multiplied by the amount of databases related to that design the savings can be quite reasonable.
You can enable the design compression for existing databases on your servers with a simple compact option and your users will not notice the difference even if they use clients with lower release than Notes 8.
Data volume reduction is relative to how large a database is compared to the design size. If all your mail files are more than 500 MB in size, the gain will not be much. But if you have 5,000 mail databases on your server, 15 MB x 5,000 = 75 GB, might seem significant to some.
ODS: This feature is available since version 8.5 and requires ODS 51.

Document compression is enabled in the same way as Design compression. The data volume reduction differs a lot depending on which kind of data is stored, but according to IBM can be up to 60% for a document. We have not seen numbers quite as large like this in mail file document compression.
ODS: This feature is available since Domino 8.0 and requires ODS 48

Archiving is a way of moving Notes data out of active mail files to an archive copy. You enable archive policies which are applied via organizational or explicit policies. You can only archive personal mail files and based on time specific criteria, not size. It is recommended to archive to a separate server to have the best effect. If you have multiple servers hosting mail files, clusters for instance, archiving is in fact de-duplication of all data.
Server based, policy based archiving has not been very reliable, like one of the following blog items will show. IBM Lotus Domino 8.5.1 promises to remedy most of the problems we have encountered in previous releases. Apart from fixes, no major things have changed so the archiving works with any ODS and mail template on your 8.5.x servers.
ODS: this feature is available since R6.5 with ODS 43, but possibly any ODS.

De-duplication of attachments (DAOS)
We have shown that the promise of data reduction is actually delivered. This new feature of Domino 8.5 is quickly proving to be the major cost reducing and performance enhancing feature. With DAOS attachments which are the same across DAOS enabled database on a server are stored only once and outside the NSF. This reduces to the NSF data and the de-duplication of attachments in a read-only store facilitates fast backups and reduces IO. In 8.5.1 more work has been done for communication between DAOS enabled servers and communication between clients and DAOS enabled servers. How cool is it, that a mail with a large attachment sent from your PC will not have to send this attachment if it is already on the server. This also happens when servers replicate data. On the fly attachments are compared to the DAOS catalog and determined if they still need to be transferred. All this lowers storage, disk IO and network bandwidth.
The DAOS estimator is very usefull in determining the estimated amount of DOAS and NSF data results.
ODS: This feature is available with Domino 8.5.x and requires ODS 51 at least.

LZ1 compression of attachments
LZ1 compression of attachments is not new. This has been available since R6 together with network compression. LZ1 is a fast compression method which vastly reduces the size of files without needing much resources on client or server. To correctly implement this, you have to enable it in the advanced database properties on mail.box-es and mail files. Even local mail.box-es need to be enabled for LZ1 compression. The local mailbox.ntf is already enabled for LZ1 compression, so the resulting mail.box is as well.
The mentioned DAOS estimator is also useful to show that you have a lot of attachments either not compressed at all, or compressed with Huffman only (pre-LZ1 compression).
See the stats below:

Compression Statistics:
None: 425173
Huffman: 139633
LZ1: 158006

The reason for this is that although you enabled all mail.box-es and all mail files with LZ1, the router is not compressing incoming SMTP.

If you combine this LZ1 information with DAOS and know that 2 attachments which are the same, but stored with different compression techniques are NOT the same for DAOS. This means that DAOS is less efficient than when all attachments are stored as LZ1. Hence it is very important to make sure all attachments are compressed with LZ1. You should re-compress the attachments (compact option) for current data (see important information below) especially when using DAOS. The ability to compress incoming SMTP with LZ1 is available in Domino 8.5, but should only be used with 8.5.1. I will explain how this is done later.
ODS: This feature is available in Release 6.x and requires ODS 43 to enable it.

Optimize pasted bitmap
Many users know that Print-Screen is very useful to grab information from your screen (in Windows) and are able to send this via e-mail to support or other users. However, the clipboard is storing this screen-print in BMP format and it is pasted as BMP as well in your Notes client. BMP is not the most efficient way to store images because they are very large. Users can work around this issue of sending large mails with screen shots in it by importing other formats like JPG or GIF or transforming the BMP to JPG (for instance in MS Paint) and pasting that information. Notes can do this for you on the fly with a simple client side Notes.ini parameter: OptimizeImagePasteSize=1
ODS: This feature is available in Notes 6.5.5 and up and has no requirements for ODS, but 43 is expected

Combined
Before you ask : "This is all very nice, but can I combine all these methods?" my answer is "Yes, you CAN!"

Let us know what your experiences are.


References:
LZ1
http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg21090049

Recompress
http://blog.nashcom.de/nashcomblog.nsf/dx/design-compression-issue.htm?opendocument&comments
and
IBM support: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg21370344

Image paste
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=899&uid=swg21136853

Social publishing with Lotus Connections

The past weeks have been very interesting while doing some research around social publishing after being triggered during a speedmeeting with the IT manager of large Dutch newspaper about new business models and changing world about advertising and new media. Questions i had after this meeting where ; 'what does that mean for publishers?', 'what does that mean, new media?', 'how do we facilitate people to deal with new ways of publishing?'.


He triggered me on the fact that newspapers are confronted with new business models because of the upcoming free newspapers and up coming investments in new media advertising instead paper advertisement. It's not up to me to tell the world what his new business model will be, but for sure i now know this will change and this will impact his business but also his organization and therefore the IT facilities.

We also know that more and more communities arise from initiatives and that several brands start using communities as their social(media)marketing tool to get in closer contact with their customers, building their image, combine social and internet media with people's private and professional life. We now know what happens to peoples social life, we know about the next generation, we know about the fact that 'internet is a right' like electricity is and we know the impact of Hyves, Facebook and Linkedin by now.

But how do companies organize around these facts, what happens to your organization if you create a business model around communities ?

First of all an example on how we use social publishing
This year a group of IBM business partners in the Netherlands started a new initiative and marketing campaign called Lotus Loves People, together with IBM, for the promotion of Lotus software. These 25 to 30 partners formed a small community with smilar thoughts, passion, issues and business goals. This campaign is starting now (oct 2009) and going live during the LUG2009 event. We use some tooling (Lotuslive) to share our ideas, thoughts and documents so we kind of created a virtual organization. Now we are building a website and we though of making this a blog, so everybody can contribute, we also created a shared twitter account (LotusLoves) and share little movies, YouTube style, on the website.

This sounds nothing new...right?
Well, this is rather new fashioned for organizations publishing information with larger groups of people instead of just having one PR responsible bringing one voice into the world.

Should we not use this in-company first?
Brilliant idea, i think we should start using in-company social media and facilitate social publishing and since we focus in bringing Lotus Connections to the market we started building some functionality that gives users the possibility to easily write and publish information while still really publishing the information to large groups of employees like they are used before.

What we did

• Created a community;
• We created a blog from the community, this way all community members can author the blog;
• We created the feed from the blog (that is easy in Lotus
• We Built a homepage widget listing new blog items just like a new feed or Intranet news section
• We built a widget for the 'Update' page;
• For techies: we use jQuery in the Widget.

What will happen to corporate email?

One of the things i question myself is what will happen to email, in corporate usage, through the coming years, what are your thoughts?

My thought at this moment is that email will stay in business but that we will use more collaboration tools in the future. Tools that help make you more productive, tool that keep more information then just a message close together and possibly interactive in their relation. The first next generation tools like Google Wave, Lotus Connections, Sharepoint 2010 and so on show you how this might evolve, knowing that video and 3D will be the next generation after this one. Email will move to the cloud, will be 5$ per mailbox per 1TB per month in the next 5 years and might even be isolated from the next generation collaboration and voice systems.

We now see a new generation of employees starting to use more and more social networking tools and the generation after that seems not to even have email accounts anymore but using facebook or hyves (dutch facebook version). This generation will also expect earlier generations to communicate this way. Will that happen? Will 'we' be forced to work that way?

What will happen to corporate email, will we keep hosting it within company premises, will we bring it all to the cloud, will IBM, Google and Microsoft be the big players or will it be Amazon or the telco's taking over this marked. Afterall, they own large datacenters and should be able to afford the connectivity.

Gartners hypecycle for emerging technologies does not mention specific items around corporate email, though web2.0 and blogging are part of the cycle. Interesting is that in other Gartner reports they say Social Software is climbing onto the Top 10 of strategic technologies.
I guess these guys made their minds up rather clear giving the fact that it is stated above BI technology being very hot at this very moment.