Collaboration Factory

Imtech ICT IS 2011 Insights

2011-10-24T23:56:00.000+02:00

What does 'Social Media in Business' mean when you are still in school?!

2011-06-12T19:05:00.000+02:00

Social Media in Business

View more presentations from Edwin Kanis.

Social software in global companies - Imtech ICT (DNUG preza)

2011-05-21T13:06:00.000+02:00

Social software in global companies - Imtech ICT

View more presentations from Edwin Kanis.

Imtech ICT helps people connect!

2011-05-09T16:32:00.002+02:00

Imtech ICT is one of Europe’s leading information and communications technology providers, with approximately 3,000 employees working at subsidiaries in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the UK. Imtech offers a wide range of solutions and services for clients of all sizes.

“We had a situation where most subsidiaries had their own systems and methods for finding people, but there wasn’t a standardized solution at group level. As the world of ICT becomes more and more globalized, we realized that we needed to be able to respond more effectively to international needs”, explains Jan-Willem Sigtermans, Director of Human Resources at Imtech.

Imtech ICT’s subsidiaries operate as independent business units, but the company wanted to ensure that each subsidiary could benefit from the others’ skills and knowledge.

Jan-Willem Sigtermans says; “For example, if a client in Belgium has an unusual requirement and an Imtech consultant in Austria is the only person with the expertise to fulfill that requirement, the Imtech Belgium team needs to know about it”.

Identifying business opportunities
Jan-Willem Sigtermans adds: “We also realized that many other organizations must be in a similar situation, which presented an exciting opportunity. If we could develop a solution for our own business, we might be able to turn it into a product and sell it to our clients too. With this outcome in mind, we decided to design the solution to be as flexible as possible – so that it would not only meet our own specific needs, but also be adaptable to other situations”.

Business Benefits

Enables users to quickly find colleagues
who have the skills required for specific projects, helping to win new business from clients.
Provides collaboration tools such as blogs, wikis and forums to help users discuss issues and share knowledge.
Minimizes training requirements by integrating seamlessly with groupware solutions such as Microsoft Outlook and IBM Lotus Notes®.
Maximizes flexibility – the solution can be easily extended with widgets and web services, runs on a variety of platforms, and can also be delivered via a softwareas-a-service model.

The Imtech ICT team evaluated several software products as a foundation for the new solution, and chose IBM® Lotus® Connections.

“We are an IBM Premier Business Partner, so we have a good relationship with IBM – but we also work closely with several other large software vendors, and we looked at their solutions too”, comments Jan-Willem Sigtermans. “We selected Lotus Connections because it has a very open architecture and is easy to integrate with other systems, The solution is compatible with a wide range of operating systems, so it can easily fit in with our clients’ existing infrastructure. In fact, if
clients want, we can even deliver it via a software-as-a-service model, so they don’t need to worry about the infrastructure at all!”

Supporting knowledge-sharing and collaboration
Imtech ICT’s solution, known as C3, provides a number of important features that are designed to support knowledge-sharing and collaboration.

“The most important thing is to connect people with each other” explains Jan-Willem Sigtermans. “If knowledge only exists in the head of a single employee, it is practically useless from a business perspective – particularly if nobody else knows that the person has that knowledge. The C3 solution gives each employee a unique profile where they can list their qualifications, areas of expertise and employment history. Other employees can then search for this information and locate colleagues who have the skills they need. They can then communicate via phone, email, instant message or online collaboration tools such as blogs, wikis and discussion forums – it’s just a matter of a few mouse- clicks.”

Going viral
Within Imtech ICT, the solution has been adopted very rapidly, especially amongst the technical employees – over 90 percent of them populated their profiles within a few weeks of the go-live.“We ran some internal marketing campaigns to promote C3, but the interesting thing was that the solution quickly went viral,” says Jan-Willem Sigtermans. “Employees who signed up saw immediate benefits from the new communities that were created – it gave them an easy way to interact both professionally and socially with colleagues in different countries. As a result, they began sending invitations to their other colleagues to persuade them to sign up as well".

Supporting sales
As well as providing tools to help the technical experts collaborate, the solution is also popular with Imtech ICT’s sales teams. If they are sending a proposal to a potential client, they need to know where the relevant technical resources are located and find out whether they will be available to work on the project.“On one occasion, a client needed help with a specific problem that was not part of our standard solution portfolio”, comments Jan-Willem Sigtermans. “But by searching C3, we found that one of our employees had relevant experience from a previous job, and they were able to help the client. As a result, we won a deal that normally we wouldn’t even have bid for.”

Meeting the needs of a new generation
Finally, the solution fits in with the social networking trends that are becoming an ever more important aspect of daily life.“Today’s graduates and young professionals have grown up with MySpace and Facebook, and they want to use the same methods of interaction in the workplace” explains Jan-Willem Sigtermans. “It makes us more attractive as an employer, and it also helps new employees fit into the organization and find their way around more quickly. Successful collaboration no longer depends on building up a professional network over many years – C3 can provide a much more dynamic model that doesn’t rely on traditional hierarchies”.

Available now!
Following the success of C3 within Imtech ICT, the company has now added the solution to its product portfolio, and has already implemented it for several of its clients.

“Many of our clients want to run C3 on their own servers, but we also offer a very attractive pricing model for the solution via a software-as-a-service model”, concludes Jan-Willem Sigtermans. “In this case, the solution runs in the cloud, and companies subscribe to a monthly or annual fee per user. Thanks to the extreme flexibility of the platform, we can deliver it in almost any form our clients require”.

“Successful collaboration no longer depends on building up a professional network over many years – C3 can provide a much more dynamic model that doesn’t rely on traditional hierarchies”
— Jan-Willem Sigtermans, Director of Human Resources.
Contact:

FRITZ & MACZIOL GmbH (Germany)
Imtech ICT Integrated Solutions (Netherlands)

C3 is a product of Imtech ICT.

See also: Lotus Germany

Migrating to the cloud, bring it on.

2011-03-27T21:59:00.001+02:00

Since two years we see nothing else than cloud cloud cloud in magazines, blogs, presentations and cloud events popping-up like mushrooms all over the place.

But who and how many of you have been migrating his email or collaboration environment to the cloud, who is integrating his business systems with cloud based services creating a hybrid model?

Are we just talking or is something actually happening?

Over the last months we (Imtech ICT) have been working on several cloud migrations and integrations. We think migrating data to the cloud might be very useful, depending on the business case, but integrating cloud services with on-premise systems is key for most of the organizations.

What we did around cloud services;

One example we worked on for a large insurance company during 2010 and now again in 2011 is the integrations of Salesforce.com with on premise business systems connected by an ESB (IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus) serving several business units in multiple countries with reporting data.

Another example is the migration of 5.200 email accounts for a international company to a cloud based email service (Microsoft BPOS) where we built the a fully automated email and archive migration street with the tools from BinaryTree where also archives are automatically migrated into the cloud.

Something is happening!

These are just 2 finalized examples showing that something is actually happening and you should know that the request for cloud based services coming from the market is growing and I we are really close of supporting multiple customers with cloud service integration, CRM online, Email online and collaboration online.

Bring it on!

Social media hit the workfloor, empower yourself!

2011-02-27T01:05:00.007+01:00

This is a social experiment trying to write an article with 'the crowd' through social media.

I will update the text coming in from responses on this blog and twitter messages directed to @ekanis. The title is a fact, we need 200 to 300 words in english. Let the games begin!

================================================================
Article

Social media is the next generation way of communication which consumes e-mail as an commodity.

A time and place indepedent way of communication, cross person/company, beyond functions/roles to improve knowledge and results.

stop projects (and departements) instead facilitate communities. Projects emerge. Skilled people sign up. Innovation rises.

Just some thoughts....

It's about recognizing that by sharing ideas and information your ideas become even better.

It's about recognizing that by sharing information and ideas those ideas have more chances of being realized.

It's about empowering people to be creative, create and share ideas AND take responsibility.

It's about taking responsibility for indiviual and team actions.

It's about shared success!

It's about an adapted reward system that not only focuses on ROI but also on less measurable things like generation and sharing of ideas, empowerment and teamplay; both at a team and individual level.

Social Media Communities only works efficient if you share your knowledge without limitations. As long as you keep thinking "should I share this knowledge, because if I do other people can make money with this knowledge, and in that case I am not" you are still not effective.

I notice that it is a very difficult to make this change for many people. But if you want to be succesfull with social media you need to change your attitude.

Other people have changed, and they become the hero's of the new social media communities out there.

================================================================
Changes
27-02 13:50 changed title - Ronald Velten
27-02 13:55 pieces text - Jurjen vd Broeck
27-02 15:24 text - Johannes Schuitemaker
27-02 15:24 text - Erik Vos
27-02 18:05 text - jacob Hoeflaken

IBM exeptional Work and Web experience

2011-02-01T07:28:00.001+01:00

During the Lotus here opening session you generally expect new announcements, products and roadmaps but for the most people this didn't seem to happen today.

I had the same experience, but there is vision!

After some more thoughts about exceptional work experiences, web experiences, get social and do business (all the buzz words) i see there is vision. Not yet a complete roadmap and even just the beginning of a change in products, but enough future vision to built a roadmap

Let me explain what I think is so interesting.

1) Systems, Process, People!

Several years ago we spend all out IT budgets on IT systems, hardware and ERP where key elements of information systems, then business processes where hot and now we see the people component kicking in fast, it’s a mind shift next generation thing, but it’s there!

2) Portalize activities

After building all those IT silo’s (ERP, Messaging, Documents, Datawarehouse, Procurement, HR etc….) we thought of building portals to create user dashboards for more efficient and smarter work.

Then, just about 2 years ago we where confronted with LinkedIn, Facebook, feeds, micro blogging, blogs and many other social components consuming lots of time and now we even build them behind the firewall in corporate environments using activities and discussions.

So how do we solve this time consuming and focus killing social monster? We built a ‘reverse portal’ consolidating all social activities into one ‘activity feed’ (presented today).

3) Social Capital

I think IBM today defines the future from here towards a more mature social software model that makes social components (PEOPLE) the center of future business by integrating silo’s, portals and activity feeds into the exceptional web experience translated for me towards Social Capital. Social capital is the added value of social software towards business systems, tools and processes.

IBM recognized this and now starts creating more business value with social software by injecting their product portfolio with social components (Business Analytics, Intelligence, Commerce, Development, Messaging etc). Seems like a logical start!

Note to IBM: please line-up the user centric product UI’s to make the integration and user experience seamless!!

I have been working on the Social Capital concept before and now see the value to finalize my presentations in this area, I guess I should go and work on the concept quickly.

Lotus Award: Delivering an Integrated Collaboration Solution.

2011-01-18T23:27:00.002+01:00

So now it’s time to be proud to announce Imtech ICT as an 2011 Lotus Award Winner (#LS11) in the category ‘Delivering an Integrated Collaboration Solution’ as stated on IBM’s website under the Imtech company name Fritz & Macziol.

Personally i am proud to share the award being part of the passionate team delivering some of the concepts (C3), solutions and references for this years recognition and love to receive it at LotuSphere 2011.

Award category

This category focuses on exceptional web, work and/or cloud experiences which deliver value to an organization. Those experiences should empower people and organizations to Connect, Collaborate and Innovate, taking full advantage of their collective knowledge to achieve improved business outcomes. It must be successfully deployed at a customer site and demonstrate clear Return On Investment (ROI). Special consideration will be given to solutions that drive quantifiable improvements in business performance, those that have enabled a competitive win, and/or those that leverage Web 2.0 capabilities.

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/awards2011/

Imtech ICT

Fritz & Macziol group (Germany) is part of the Imtech ICT group (EU) and part of Imtech NV working closely through the EU Social Software Competence Center with Imtech ICT Integrated Solutions (Netherlands) and Imtech ICT UK, Belgium and Austria on collaboration solutions for customers in Europe.

The solution

Knowledge Accelerator C3 (Contacts, Connect, Communities) an innovative collaboration solution for social business, is the winner of the 2011 Lotus Award for the Delivering an Integrated Collaboration Solution category.

FRITZ & MACZIOL Software has captured the spirit of the IBM Lotus value proposition, by leveraging the powerful Lotus portfolio to create a value-added collaboration solution. The Knowledge Accelerator provides companies with capabilities to collaborate internally, within the company, and externally with its customers, taking social collaboration to the next level of driving business results. Integrating mail, instant messaging, web conferencing, document sharing, and other operational functions within a social framework, the Knowledge Accelerator delivers an open, scalable, mobile solution with multilingual capabilities. This provides business value and global competitiveness to small and medium and large-scale customers, alike. Some of the key business values include operational efficiencies, knowledge and expertise retention, improved customer access to information, and an overall improved customer experience.

Leveraging IBM Lotus Connections, Lotus Sametime, Lotus Quickr™, Lotus Notes, and Lotus Traveler, the solution is open and operable in the cloud, across various messaging platforms.

FRITZ & MACZIOL's solution exemplifies the innovation possible and encouraged, with the market-leading offerings Lotus provides for integration and collaboration.”

I love it when a plan comes together!

Links to earlier posts.

Ps. remember that this is just a personal blog.

Virtual coffee machine is worth its weight in gold

2010-12-28T12:44:00.001+01:00

Alistair Rennie, General Manager of Lotus Software & WebSphere Portal of the IBM Software Group

Tweeting, real-time virtual meetings…our means of communication are expanding and society is demanding better products at a rapidly increasing pace. ‘Companies can satisfy this demand if they work together and obtain the relevant information in time,’ says Alistair Rennie, General Manager of Lotus Software & WebSphere Portal of the IBM Software Group. ‘The key to success is having smart social software to regulate the data flow.’

The prompt production of better products requires innovation and investment in research. ‘Research staff need a place where they can find background information, exchange experiences and find inspiration for the invention of new applications,’ says Rennie, who’s been General Manager since January 2010. ‘Social networks are becoming increasingly important. You can compare them with virtual coffee machines where people get together to exchange knowledge, initiate a new partnership and garner support and expertise from people across the globe.’

Indispensable link

The social software that makes this communication possible has in recent years evolved from an experiment to an indispensable link in our daily lives. Rennie: ‘We’ve developed a number of tools, applications and plug-ins to connect with people all over the world, to converse with them, to become acquainted with different corporate cultures and to cooperate with colleagues, partners and customers in a fast, easier and more efficient manner.’

Sensory overload

Technological developments have resulted in our becoming bombarded with information at increasing speeds and quantities. How can we protect our senses from sensory overload? ‘The same technology does it for us,’ explains Rennie. ‘It is true that an employee usually receives more e-mails per day than he can process. It creates the need for software that will collect all the information in an effective manner. Software that not only ensures that you can make use of all sorts of communication resources such as the internet, e-mail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other online connections, but intelligent programs with which you can simultaneously structure your own internet environment with personalized applications. So you choose what you want to receive. Because the software is intelligent, you receive only relevant newsletters, your mobile phone only displays news updates that are of interest to you and you only allow alerts from a group of contacts selected by you.’

The right attention

All information from business applications such as financial details or reports, e-mails and social software come together on the user’s homepage. Its strength is contained in the fact that the user can perform tasks and respond to e-mails or other content directly from the information on his homepage. ‘It’s all about giving the right attention to the right person at the right moment.’ Rennie gives an example: ‘I receive an e-mail from a stranger. What tone should I take? When should I respond? Should I respond at all? I do a search and find his photo, his profile and his current physical location. I see he’s French. I type a reply in English on my mobile phone and an instant translating tool sends him the message in French. I can also send this e-mail to a forum straight away. Or, I can opt for a text chat, a voice chat or a video chat.’

Living documents

‘Communication is a rapidly evolving phenomenon. It requires constant adapting of your way of working and how you think about projects,’ explains Rennie. ‘My children, who are barely in their teens, find it insane that people would still create documents that contain only text and static images. They say it shows you haven’t progressed much since the invention of the typewriter. They find it quite normal to create documents in which they incorporate text, illustrations, audio and video fragments and chats. Moreover, people from all corners of the earth can work on these documents at the same time. They become living documents. You can of course apply this principle when organizing a videoconference where the financial results of the various continents are compared and discussed in a live setting.’

Cloud Computing

The way in which we consume information technology is also changing, according to Rennie. ‘More and more companies are moving away from investing in their own server park, hardware and software and the relevant expertise. Instead, employees download the applications they need from the internet and only pay for the services that they actually use. This prevents inefficient use of computers as well as wasted energy and storage or cooling capacity. It saves costs and spares the environment.’

Close ties between IBM and Imtech

Imtech aims to fulfill a technological, strategic role in Europe in the heart of the primary and secondary processes of its customers. That is why Imtech has been in partnership with IBM for many years. Imtech collaborates with IBM to develop innovative solutions in the field of social software, web portals and integration. The two organizations both firmly believe that complementary competencies produce appealing total solutions. In April of this year, Imtech ICT Integrated Solutions joined forces with IBM to organize the annual LotuSphere Comes To You road show, where Alistair Rennie presented his keynote. ‘Cooperation is a precondition for growth,’ according to Rennie. ‘And Lotus is the number one platform for cooperation within and between organizations.’

Note: this exclusive interview is published in the ‘Imtechnology magazine’ for 10.000 Imtech customers and relations in co-operation with Alistair and his team.

Lieve klanten en business partners.

2010-12-28T10:55:00.001+01:00

Bedankt voor het vertrouwen, de samenwerking, het plezier, de uitdaging en daarbij ook de opdrachten gedurende het jaar 2010.

Wij zijn trots op het feit dat we samen met jullie mogen werken aan slimme ICT oplossingen en kijken met veel plezier en passie uit naar 2011.

Imtech ICT launches Social Software platform

2010-12-07T22:38:00.001+01:00

Imtech ICT, European service provider for IT services, launches its new social software collaboration platform for 1.700 employees across Europe. The platform is about to support the expansion, sales, focus and business development strategy towards 2015.

Director of Imtech ICT Europe, Tijn van Dommelen, presented his roadmap towards 2015 during the companies strategy update early November and mentioned social software and cloud technology as the front-end innovators for its business solutions. As said; social software is implemented within Imtech ICT to strengthen the ICT division and support group synergy towards growth over the coming years.

‘C3’ is the new social software platform that gives all employees the ability to easily search and find people, expertise, locations and phone numbers. The additional ability to share documents, start a discussion, open a wiki, create tasks or publish a blog gives power to the users and is a full user centric social intranet (web 2.0) solution.

After a cross-division pilot earlier this year the ICT division recognized the power and capabilities of social software and decided to deploy. The technology chosen is out-of-the-box IBM Lotus Connections with only minor adjustments like UI changes and a password reset tool and required just a couple of days custom development time.

Two already existing smaller Lotus Connections platforms (600 + 100 users) are consolidated into the new platform. Since Imtech ICT is premium IBM business partner and deploying same technology for its customers we have the expertise and were able to built, deploy and migrate quickly and focus on the promotion and user adoption process.

Within three month the C3 platform was fully up-and-running and we expect it to grow and adopt fast over the coming months.

My expectations are huge!

Social software brings Business Intelligence alive

2010-11-13T22:48:00.000+01:00

Gedurende de laatste weken heb ik veel discussies gehad met mensen over de inzet van Social software binnen bedrijven en vooral ook wat de volgende stap is in de ontwikkeling van Social Software, weet jij het?

Ik weet het natuurlijk ook niet zo 123 maar een ding is me wel bijgebleven en dat is een zinnetje in een van Gartners artikelen over de top 10 aandachtspunten voor elke IT manager in 2011.

Quote: "Gartner predicts that by 2016, social technologies will be integrated with most business applications. Companies should bring together their social CRM, internal communications and collaboration, and public social site initiatives into a coordinated strategy."

Natuurlijk is dat een logische volgende stap. Toeval blijkt dat na het lezen hiervan ineens de eerste berichten komen van IBM dat zij haar social software suite Lotus Connections gaat inzetten in combinatie met haar BI suite Cognos 10. Daarmee is niet alleen integratie een feit maar ook het volledige recht om beide tools te gebruiken onder een enkele licentie, en daarmee bedoel ik out-of-the-box! Web2.0 komt steeds mer richting de business en kunnen we eindelijk stoppen met downloaden van bestanden en attachen aan email om samen te werken.

Eindelijk eindelijk is het dan zover dat leveranciers social media inzetten in 'business applicaties'. Lijkt mij dat de manier waarop dit is gedaan evengoed is te realiseren in andere applicaties als CRM, ERP of Commerce.

Wat is er dan gedaan in deze combinatie?
Vanuit je Cognos workplace kan je nu direct o.a. Lotus Connections Activities aanroepen om direct een worlflow of todo activiteit te starten zodat je hetgeen je heb opgemerkt direct ter discussie kan stellen of als probleem kan beleggen. Dit zorgt eindelijk voor een mooie verbinding tussen proces (structuur) en mensen (creativiteit en als je het mij vraagt begint dit echt te lijken op slimmer werken.

Wat heb ik nodig?
De gehele Lotus Connections suite is als entitlement te gebruiken onder Cognos 10. Dit geeft voor beide platformen een enorme waarde boost t.o.v het huidige model en naast de vele andere voordelen ook nog eens een mooie reden tot het asap upgraden.

Wat een geluk!
Laten wij nou een ernorme dosis kennis van beide platformen in huis hebben en het leuke van het meedoen in allerlei beta projecten en aanwezig zijn op de grotere conferenties als de IOD is dat je ook lekker snel aan de slag kunt met dit soort nieuwe combinaties. Dus wij zijn inmiddels bezig deze combinatie te ontdekken en werken meerdere opties uit (zoals hosted ets) om onze klanten zo snel mogelijk te kunnen helpen want het is zonde deze waarde propositie lang te laten liggen, nietwaar?

EU Social Software Competence Center

2010-10-16T22:44:00.001+02:00

IMTECH ICT starts European Competence Center for Social Software as a strategic part of it’s business in Germany, Belgium, Austria, United Kingdom and The Netherlands.

No this is not an official press release but just a regular blog item, why…..because i just can do using social software like blogging :-)

But nevertheless the headline is correct, over several countries we are starting up a business strategy line for Social Software & Collaboration in order to stimulate collaboration, exchange resources and knowledge, business and product development.

We think Social Software is still in an early phase, or in the beginning of the Gartner Hype Cycle, and we expect it to grow over the coming years towards a more mature situation of collaborative business use for BtoB and BtoC activities.

We see Social Software as our little puppy, we adapted it, we fell in love with it and therefore we now help it grow to be one of our best friends for the next decade or so.

Oh yeah, eat your own dog-food is what they say…..we are currently implementing a Social Software solution over Europe for 1.700 employees and actively implementing NWOW (New Way of Work) for several businesses starting now.

Bring it on, SHARED SUCCESS

Goed samenwerken is knap lastig

2010-05-24T12:56:00.001+02:00

Steeds meer organisaties komen erachter dat samenwerken misschien wel een betere optie is dan alles zelf ondernemen of onder een dak brengen. Samenwerken geeft je meer flexibiliteit, meer kennis, meer inzicht maar misschien ook wel meer problemen?

Vanzelfsprekend?

Samenwerken is echt niet eenvoudig en mag ook niet als vanzelfsprekend worden gezien, het is net als in een relatie, je moet er beide veel tijd en energie in stoppen om het te laten werken. Het begin is eenvoudig, maar in de jaren daarna moet je bouwen, elkaar helpen, elkaar op nieuwe inzichten brengen, trouw je haal en breng plicht uitvoeren (afwachten is geen optie) en niet te vergeten business voor elkaar generenen. Dan pas ben je echte partners. Maar hoe gaan we dat nou eigenlijk vormgeven?

Samenwerken met mensen die op een ander locatie aanwezig zijn is al niet eenvoudig, laat staan aan de andere kant van de wereld. De laatste jaren heb ik gezien dat het meest belangrijke is dat je zichtbaar voor elkaar bent en daarin kunnen een aantal ICT middelen je natuurlijk helpen, maar het belangrijkste is dat je je best doet om zichtbaar te zijn en ook om hiervoor open te staan. Elke partnership op zijn eigen manier; online, telefonisch, face-to-face het gaat om de attitude.

Kortom, bedenk en bespreek met je partners wat belangrijk en wat gewenst is voor je allerlei tools en middelen gaat installeren. Trouwens, is het echt wel nodig om allerlei tools te installeren of zijn er ook andere manieren om een team goed te laten functioneren? Vorige jaar heb ik eens een presentatie gegeven over teamwork in een van onze salesmeetings. Na een reeks slides van het Nederlandse Volleybal team, het Dames Hockey team, The A-team, Teenage Ninja Turtles, Charlies Angels en zo nog een hele reeks was het toch best lastig om te definieren al deze groepen gemeen hadden. Juist….succes…..en teamwork.

Informatie ophalen

Factor4 kan hierbij helpen, dit is een methode om o.a. op dit vlak informatie uit een organisatie te krijgen. Dit helpt de informatie manager keuzes te maken en een beleid cq visie te creeren voor de komende jaren. Imtech doet dit vaker kan hierbij helpen.

Dit is een reponse op het artikel in de computable van 21-05-2010: Samenwerken is knap lastig

Serie ‘Het nieuwe werken’: 1st steps

2010-04-21T23:15:00.001+02:00

Luister, ontwikkel een 1.3.5. visie en begin vooral klein.

Luisteren

Luister naar de behoefte organisatie en medewerkers, dit is van grote waarde voor het creeren van een werkomgeving waar ieder individu goed kan presteren. Ja, dit kan voor ieder anders zijn, de key is dan ook het bieden van KEUZE.

Ga er maar vanuit dat je niet voor mensen kan beslissen, dat eenheidsworsten niet meer bestaan en dat je binnen de kaders van je bedrijfvoering (security, cultuur) een omgeving dient te creeren welke flexibel is en keuze geeft aan medewerkers met verschillende kernwaarden, werkwijzen en een divers palet aan culturele achtergrond.

Imtech ICT kan hierbij helpen en maakt gebruik van een methode (FACTOR4 index) om informatie uit de organisatie te halen en te analyseren.

“De Factor 4 Index is ontwikkeld om zichtbaar te maken waar binnen de organisatie dingen goed gaan en waar het verbeterpotentieel zit. Dit inzicht brengt de dialoog op gang, veroorzaakt beweging en geeft richting aan verbeterprojecten”

Hier een mooi voorbeeld van het resultaat in spiderweb vorm.

Ontwikkel een Visie

Na het onderzoek kan er gewerkt worden aan een visie waar de organisatie 1 jaar, 3 jaar en 5 jaar van hier wil staan rondom Inspiratie, Cultuur, Organisatie en Technologie. Belangrijk is dat deze door het management volledig gedragen gaat worden, Onvoorwaardelijk!

Leg de visie vast, creeer een lijst met kernwaarden, gebruik deze waarden in je interne communicatie en laat met regelmaat de roadmap zien om dialoog aan te gaan en voortgang te meten.

Maak dit vooral ook visueel, laat een storyboard ontwikkelen of zorg voor een set ‘jip-en-janneke’ beelden waaruit iederen begrijpt wat de verandering gaan zal brengen. Hierbij een voorbeeld:

Begin klein

Ik gaf eerder al aan dat we een reis beginnen, visie en uitvoering kan je altijd bijstellen, accepteer dat dit ook zal gebeuren want er kan altijd een aswolk onverwachts roet in het eten gooien.

Zie het als het beklimmen van een berg en zet eerst je basiskamp om vervolgens naar het volgende kamp af te reizen. Daar aangekomen analseren, vooruit denken en voorbereiden. Risico…JA…wilde actie…NEE.

Start ook vooral met de quick wins welke uit het onderzoek naar voren komen, het spiderweb laat goed zien op welk vlak deze zich bevinden.

Klinkt allemaal logisch………….toch?

Serie ‘Het nieuwe werken’: onze visie

Serie ‘Het nieuwe werken’: Connect

Serie ‘Het nieuwe werken’: Socialize

Serie ‘Het nieuwe werken’: Integrate

2010-04-18T18:45:00.001+02:00

Het combineren van bestaande informatie en functionaliteit om zo nieuwe functionaliteit en inzichten te creëren.

Slimmer omgaan met informatiestromen zorgt voor een beter inzicht en efficiente huishouding, her-gebruik van data en real-time data zijn daarbij belangrijke onderdelen voor nu en de toekomst.

De basis

De basis van integratie is altijd een gedegen (business) proces analyse die gevolgd wordt door proces management met als doel om innovatie, flexibiliteit en verdere integratie in te zetten om organisaties effectiever en efficiënter te laten opereren.

De uitvoering

Aan de ‘achterkant’ dienen organisaties informatie op een slimme manier te combineren richting gebruikers of andere systemen in de keten waarbij service orientatie (Service bus, ETL, webservices, translation services), real-time services en connectivity een belangrijke rol hebben rondom de gewenste oplossingen.

Aan de ‘voorkant’ gaat het om informatie geïntegreerd aanbieden op basis van personalisatie en tevens individualisatie door gebruik te maken van nieuwe technieken volgens bestaande en Web 2.0 technieken en samengestelde applicaties (mash-up).

De laag die zorgt voor de verbinding tussen de ‘voorkant’ en de ‘achterkant’ draagt de intelligentie om nieuwe inzichten te creeren zoals business intelligence (BI) en business process management (BPM).

Ingewikkeld?

Klinkt ingewikkeld? Komt erop neer dat er richting de gebruiker juist eenvoud nodig is, al die complexe systemen moeten we zo inrichten dat het voor de gebruikers (medewerkers, klanten, leveranciers) eenvoudig en vanuit een oogopslag te gebruiken is en het lieft zo visueel mogelijk.

Een mooi en praktisch voorbeeld van zo’n mash-up (samensmelting) is bijvoorbeeld http://casper.frontier.nl/ al zou er op moment van schrijven geen vliegtuig te zien mogen zijn ivm de aswolk vanuit IJsland.

Visuals worden steeds belangrijker, en grappig genoeg nu ik erover nadenk, heb ik ongeveer een jaar geleden voor het laatst een full blown Word document geschreven. Sindsdien gebruik ik vooral een presentatievorm en ook die worden steeds meer visueel (story telling).

De laatste serie na Connect, Socialize, Integrate gaat over het zetten van een eerste stap, waar begin je nou met je reis om te ontdekken van voor jouw organisatie 'Het Nieuwe Werken’ betekend…….

Serie ‘Het nieuwe werken’: onze visie

Serie ‘Het nieuwe werken’: Connect

Serie ‘Het nieuwe werken’: Socialize

2010-04-12T23:57:00.001+02:00

Het delen van kennis, contacten en vaardigheden op basis van sociale open netwerken.

De generatie ‘digital natives’ wil intuïtieve systemen gebruiken zonder technische zorg en met een zelfsturend karakter waarin inhoud en informatie vrij gedeeld kunnen worden op basis van persoonlijke verantwoordelijkheid. Hier staat het delen van kennis, contact maken en profileren voorop, daarvoor zijn natuurlijk wel middelen nodig om dit mogelijk te maken.

Als organisatie zorg je ervoor dat applicaties aan deze kenmerken voldoen en professionals en kenniswerkers de mogelijkheid geeft diverse manieren van samenwerken en communicatie te gebruiken zodanig dat afhankelijkheid van tijd en locatie worden geëlimineerd en volledig past in het concept ‘Het Nieuwe Werken’.

Social gaat veel verder dan alleen hyves, linkedin en facebook. Daar waar mensen samen werken aan een doel is al functionaliteit gewenst om samen te werken en elkaar goed te kunnen bereiken. Denk eens aan nieuwe mogelijkheden in ‘e-commerce’ toepassingen, in servicedesk tooling of wat dacht je van virtuele werelden in combinatie met software ontwikkeling of projectmeetings?

Het gebruik van business applicaties in combinatie met virtuele projectruimten, profiling, wiki’s, blogs, (instant)messaging, Voip en communities alsmede de integratie met bestaande systemen als LinkedIn en Facebook of een al bestaand informatieportaal (Intranet) zorgt voor een interactieve omgeving waar professionals graag mee werken en welke innovatie en een actieve bijdrage aan de organisatie stimuleren.

‘Social’ is steeds vaak de enabler van een innovatieve organisatie en zorgt voor trots, samenhang en awareness van het samen business doen. Dat willen we toch allemaal….business doen?!

Serie ‘Het nieuwe werken’: onze visie

Serie ‘Het nieuwe werken’: Connect

2010-04-10T15:06:00.001+02:00

Het bij elkaar brengen van mens, proces en applicatie

De mens

Connect gaat over samenwerken en het samenbrengen van professionals, klanten, leveranciers en systemen om zodoende eenvoud en optimalisatie te realiseren. Het maken van keuze’s en het realiseren dat je niet overal sterk in kan zijn zorgt ervoor dat partnering van steeds groter belang gaat worden.

Connect staat voor de relatie business en IT waarin steeds meer de I van informatie in plaats van de T van technologie de boventoon voert. Informatie komt vanuit ‘de business’ en IT dient daarop aan te sluiten, de rol van informatiemanager is dan ook sterk in opmars.

Het proces

Draag als organisatie zorg voor je primaire bedrijfsprocessen en zorg de informatiestromen binnen deze processen goed ondersteund worden door de IT omgeving. Primaire processen voor elk bedrijf; zoals inkoop, facturatie, salarissen dienen een vaste waarde binnen een bedrijf te zijn. Dit zorgt voor rust en eenvoud hebben wij de afgelopen 20 jaar samen ondervonden. De volgende stap is het her-gebruiken van deze processen en de infomatie binnen deze processen door meer te koppelen met mensen……en systemen slimmer te gebruiken.

De Applicatie

Connect staat ook voor het gebruik van software welke open is opgezet en opgebouwd uit componenten met mogelijkheden om systemen van andere vendors aan te kunnen spreken en te (her)gebruiken zodat vraagstukken rondom bijv. ketenintegratie en integraal klantbeeld beter worden beantwoord. Het gebruik van applicaties en functies van verschillende systemen resulteert uiteindelijk in een omgeving die we voor de gebruiker als één presenteren.

Serie ‘Het nieuwe werken’: onze visie

2010-04-05T23:14:00.001+02:00

De wereld van het werken is onderhevig aan onomkeerbare ontwikkelingen zoals globalisering en de evolutie van de arbeidsmarkt. Het Nieuwe Werken schept hierbij ruimte voor inspiratie, innovatie en nieuwe organisatie vormen waarin technology een belangrijke rol speelt.

Imtech ICT is overtuigd van de toegevoegde waarde van technology voor de toekomst van meer open en dynamische organisaties.

Het Nieuwe Werken gaat wat mij betreft niet alleen over hippe meubels, mooie mobieltjes en carbon footprint maar vooral ook over het optimaliseren van je productielijnen, de integratie met klanten en leveranciers (ketenintegratie), een integraal security beleid (van deur tot dossier in een ziekenhuis), versnellen van je time-to-market (voorlopen op de concurrentie), stimuleren van innovatie en het betrekken van medewerkers bij de organisatie.

Of kan je je als organisatie perimenteren om hiermee te wachten en gaat de HNW hype binnenkort wel voorbij?

Werken gaat vooral over mensen, overigens niet alleen over de ‘voorkant’ van je organisatie, maar over het totaal proces waarbij mensen zijn betrokken of waar je mensen juist op een andere manier wilt betrekken en inzetten dan voorheen.

Het is van belang om nu al te starten met nadenken hoe je in de toekomst technology kan inzetten om mensen, processen en systemen met elkaar te verbinden.

Dit lijkt allemaal soms al relatief moeilijk voor sales, management en kantoorpersoneel (kennis werkers) maar dit is nog redelijk te overzien gezien hier al veel over is geschreven en er zijn diverse consulting organisaties en goeroes die u goed kunnen helpen hierbij.

Maar hoe werkt dit nou voor productiemedewerkers, chauffeurs, ziekenhuispersoneel of studenten?

Ook hier zit nl. de waarde vooral in de mensen! Imtech ICT kan dit goed uitleggen aan de hand van de thema’s Connect, Socialize en Integrate welke vaak afzonderlijk gezien worden maar feitelijk elkaar versterken mits gebruikt in de juiste combinatie.

Ik zal Connect, Socialize, Integrate als thema’s toelichten in de volgende blog items in een kleine serie de komende dagen.

Alistair Rennie supports Imtech ICT, europe’s largest partner.

2010-04-03T00:08:00.003+02:00

IBM worldwide VP Lotus and Portal software ‘Alistair Rennie’ explained the Lotus strategy and future collaboration approach to 60 customers on our LCTY 2010 session and confirmed support of the extensive partnership with Imtech ICT.

During pre-conference conversation we discussed our partnership and concluded that Imtech ICT might be the biggest IBM software partner in Europe. We are, and for sure i am, proud to have achieved this over the past couple of years.

Allthough Imtech is now 150 years old the ICT division is rather a new player in this perspective. With leading ICT and consulting companies in the UK, Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and Austria for the software brands Tivoli, WebSphere, Lotus, Information Management, Rational, Cognos we deliver IBM solutions, services and licenses to our customers with drive and passion. We will continue to invest in customer satisfaction, new technologies and strong partners and IBM is part of the success.

We would like to thank Alistair Rennie and Douglas Green (BeNeLux Lotus leader) for supporting in this event and in business.

Narrowcaster solution for Lotus Connections and SharePoint.

2010-03-23T22:37:00.001+01:00

Social software and Intranet within companies is growing, we digitalize and publish information more and more. Information and office workers are very common to access the Intranet every day looking for news, blogging and they maybe even micro blog on their laptops, netbooks and mobile phones.

But what about your factory workers?

Factory workers usually do not use email or at least not very regular, often there is no Intranet access and newsletters are distributed on leaflets or posted on a wall where nobody knows when it’s posted and if it is still valid. Besides the timing, they totally miss the dynamic information flow from your Intranet, your social network or public networks like twitter whilst younger employees are used adapt this information in their private time using hyves, facebook etc.

Narrowcasting can involve your factory workers!

Imtech ICT Integrated Solutions presents a narrowcaster solution ‘casting’ content from several web resources and feeds and connect to IBM Lotus Connections or Microsoft SharePoint to show information from your corporate intranet, extranet or CMS.

The narrowcaster (client) is fully browser based using Silverlight technology and therefore just needs a simple processing unit with a browser attached to a large monitor or widescreen TV and can be easily configured for several sources.

Besides publishing company information we also created a similar solution for publishing other information sources like climate control, system measurements (water, oil etc) and warnings en publish this information in central or dedicated area’s in the building.

Real-life picture of active caster:

Why Notes & Domino 8.5 rocks

2010-02-14T22:39:00.003+01:00

I just found this new customer testimonial video on the website of Ed Brill, this video very simply tells you why you should use Notes and Domino 8.5 or at least upgrade to this version.

No further comments on this blog post, just take the 3 minutes to listen to these guys in the video, in fact, i could have told you the same story.

Drempelvrij sites bouwen

2010-02-14T20:14:00.003+01:00

Websites bouwen op basis van het waarmerk 'drempelvrij' is al een hele opgave maar om dat ook nog eens te doen in een content management systeem wat daarvoor op het eerste oog niet direct geschikt is zou toch wel een hele prestatie zijn. Imtech ICT bouwde wel drempelvrij sites met Microsoft Sharepoint.

De Stichting Waarmerk drempelvrij.nl heeft als doelstelling de toegankelijkheid van Nederlandse websites te bevorderen voor iedereen, inclusief mensen met een functiebeperking en senioren. Hiervoor is een transparante regeling met logo's en heldere normen opgezet die door de Stichting beheerd wordt. Dit is natuurlijk een enorm goed punt met de steeds grijzer wordende bevolking in Nederland terwijl we aan de andere kant steeds meer digitaliseren en services via Internet aanbieden. Als je een overheidsorganisatie bent in Nederland dan dient de website al voor eind 2010 aan de Webrichtlijnen te voldoen. Dit is afgesproken in het Nationaal Uitvoerings Programma Dienstverlening en e-Overheid (NUP).

De afgelopen weken heb ik kennis gemaakt met Microsoft Sharepoint en bent ik met name onder de indruk geraakt van de manier waarop de professionals van Imtech ICT Integrated Solutions, voorheen Velocity, sites kunnen bouwen op basis van de drempelvrij standaarden en dit blijkbaar als een van de weinige partijen in Nederland ook echt goed kan. Dit is inmiddels bewezen met een aantal referenties en een gewonnen prijs (2008) met de ontwerpwedstrijd ‘Rock my website’, die door Microsoft en Stichting Waarmerk drempelvrij.nl was uitgeschreven.

Imtech ICT heeft een compliancy toolkit ontwikkeld waarmee eenvoudig, eenduidig en snel drempelvrij sites gebouwd kunnen worden met Sharepoint, meer uitleg over deze toolkit kan je vinden op de weblog van een van de medewerkers alsmede meer informate over de methode die gebruikt is met Sharepoint 2007.

Meer informatie en een referentie leaflet kan je vinden op de website.

Referenties:

Do clouds fill your horizon?

2009-12-24T00:21:00.002+01:00

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?

2009-12-07T23:26:00.003+01:00

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

2009-11-07T09:02:00.014+01:00

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

2009-10-21T10:56:00.020+02:00

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?

2009-10-14T22:59:00.004+02:00

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.

WOOT: Connect and Socialize is here with Connections 2.5

2009-08-29T10:43:00.016+02:00

This week Lotus Connections 2.5 has gone to a gold status and is available for download. This release the most wanted Lotus release ever, after a longtime beta program we can now finally deploy internally and for customers and we are working on that as we speak!

Internal
Since 1,5yrs we now use Lotus Connections at Eniac Essentials, mainly for sharing knowledge between engineers, sales and management, but also for experiencing the product in order to give a rock solid advice to our customers. Besides that, we built some widgets that give you some more insight or add extra functionality. i wrote about widgets a couple of times before. The deployment is a success, we even invented a new internal term saying 'RTFB' meaning 'read the F***ng blog' when someone missed important published info. We even gave it a name 'EELCO' 'and send out announcements of his birth.

Customers
Finally we can now deploy 2.5 at our customers premises starting immediately, with this blog i will give you some insight how we plan to deploy and start using social software within a company with many locations and businesses and is an international player.

1) First of all we started with a Technical design, we skipped the functional design while it is an out-of-the-box product. We decided to review functionality during the pilot.

2) We started giving presentations and built a small website for the in-company promotion of the product and post the youtube videos and Lotus presentations.

3) We decided to start a pilot with around 150 users from different businesses and locations. The pilot groups gets extra attention in support, in preparations and we use promo material like posters and invitations for the pilot. What we also did is give it a brand name, in this case C3. (Connect, Contact, Communities)

We will not rebrand the UI in this stage, we know this is very well possible but we choose to fully focus on usage and flexibility.

4) The infrastructure is set-up as a three server combo where we have a webserver, a database server and an application server. This must be able to handle a couple of hundred users. After the pilot we consider deploying more servers or using more redundancy. We connect to Domino and possible multiple Active directories to enable around 10.000 users to login.

5) Once the installation and configuration has been done (shortly from now) we will head on with the first pilot deployments and user sessions about the use of social software, the goals and a user experience demo. We will not limit the amount of users, since social software must also grow by itself.

6) Next is that during the pilot we talk to the usergroups about functionality and the need for using widgets to connect to public systems (google gadgets) or internal back-end systems like calendars or maybe even Navision or Sharepoint for projects data.

7) We tend send out hints and tips during the pilot group, built a FAQ on the website and we intend to transfer this into connections itself using the forum of wiki combined with a widget on the homepage to filter the content required for a FAQ.

8) After 2 month we will evaluate the growth, functionality and technical deployment with the pilot group and shared service center doing the hosting of C3.

Why using Lotus Connections and not Sharepoint or Quickr?
To be honest, both product are available and being used within this company but both do not cover the social capabilities you wish for. The profiles function of Connections is one of the most wanted features, the ability to search and find collegues and knowledge quickly is getting more and more important, besides, people use it in the internet everyday right?!

Sharepoint and Quickr are strong around documents and publishing, maybe even to facilitate a community or host a wiki, but these parts are as integrated as Connections shows you. Maybe future releases do, but for the moment, Connections is running ahead on expertise search, people search, tagging, openness and integration with other system. For sure C3 will integrate with these products going both sides, yes....we can do that!!

Lotus Connections is your Social Intranet solution

2009-08-06T11:39:00.002+02:00

Most companies have an intranet implementation and most of the intranet I saw in the past are based around content management or document management. Content was rather static, just some authors and editors on corporate level publishing information and pushing this into the organization. I am sure you all ran into discussions where your communications department asks why you do not contribute or even read the intranet, and where people answer ‘there is nothing new, or interesting’. So why maintaining a static intranet and run into these discussions every now and then??

Luckily the HR department got involved more and more and the self-service intranet came up, this is a way to pull your employees into your intranet since they cannot go on leave before performing a leave request on the intranet. I think this is a good thing and Portal like intranets can be of good benefit for your company. Though, it is still rather static and based on publication.

Then document centric intranet solutions came into the market, lots of intranet solutions based on Sharepoint, starting from a document publishing perspective and added functionality for collaboration through teamsites and forum like functionality en more through webparts. Great! Now your intranet is starting to get alive and kicking!

The four pillars of Intranet solutions

The next generation intranet solutions are fully based on social software where the entry point of the solution is always around the person or professional and his social network. Adding social software components your intranet makes the solution fully alive, your users instantly generate content, instantly people start working together and suddenly your intranet will be used by at least 70% of your employees at free will :-)

IBM Lotus Connections can help you starting your social intranet as an out-of-the-box solution where truckloads of standard functionality are instantly available. Think about blogs, wiki’s, tagging, people finder, bookmarking and sharing activities. Adding additional functionality through widgets is rather easy and makes your Lotus Connections solution even more powerful. Widgets can be built quickly and can contain HR information, corporate messages, project references, expertise location, schedule information and just about anything you can imagine for your intranet solution.

Here are some examples of widgets we are building as example or maybe to add to your social intranet solution!

Eniac Essentials also created an offering to start with Lotus Connections '30 days to socialize' where a full implementation is done around an approach where fixed price, promotion and awareness are key factors. Check it out! (dutch only).

Use Notes applications on iPhone with xPages

2009-08-02T12:39:00.008+02:00

I think a Lotus Notes CRM was the first application my company ever built and sold, in fact, we still do since this is a very solid application and customers using Lotus Notes can provide CRM functionality to their users rather quickly against reasonable costs.

Over the years we upgraded the system with several new features and also now, using Notes and Domino 8.5, one of our developers (Boudewijn) used some new technology called xPages to push our CRM system to mobile devices like the Apple iPhone, but in fact, any mobile device or any we browser will show you just about the same results. Yes, also your Blackberry!

Boudwijn built an xPages framework that hooks into our CRM application and give you several possibilities to access the CRM. From a web browser, from a mobile phone, through a Widget in Notes 8.5 or even a widget in Lotus Connections or in fact any browser application like Sharepoint of Websphere Portal. How is that?!

Here are some screenshots on the apple iPhone, or iPod in this case;

You will see about the same in your web browser, and i used my Nokia browser to test it with about the same results. Some adjustments in the UI because it used the device it's own standard for backgrounds etc.

Here is also an example of the widget i posted earlier, we use it in our Notes 8.5 sidebar and in Lotus Connections to quickly find customer contacts and phone numbers.

xPages is a new technology in Notes and Domino 8.5 of which is used from JSF, Java Server Faces, an international Java standard to built user interfaces and very much used by our WebSphere developers. Lotus succeeded to built this into the new Notes designer to generate even more power for rapid application development. I am not saying that it is much easier that regular Notes development, it's just another way and when educated, it's fast!

As you can see it's really a powerfull feature that might bring a lot of changed into rapid application development and even though you might not use Lotus Notes as a email platform, you might consider using it as a development platform for web application development. We are not talking about weeks of development, we are talking some days of development and testing all together!! We are planning to do so anyway!

Lotus Notes going cool......

2009-07-17T21:11:00.009+02:00

It seems for ages that Lotus Notes is around, and so does the interface, that is what i hear from customers all around the country. Terms like 'old fashioned' or 'aged' or even 'weird' come from users just finding out what the power of Lotus Notes is. But, if they experience the product this way it must be so true!?

The last weeks i had some more focus on Lotus Connection doing some demo's and talking about possibilities as a social intranet platform with great possibilities for quick applications, having a great interface, being an open plaform and integrating in other tools. One of those tools is....Lotus Notes! Also since this week i downloaded the beta of Lotus Notes 8.5.1 and since two days i am experiencing several cool things where Lotus Notes and Connections integrate and really show good value for me, as a power user of both these platforms. Let me show you to cool stuff.

Connections integration

The main Lotus Connections purpose is to find people, using the profiles module you can, also the user can maintain his profile by himself link you can in Linkedin or facebook. Would it not be great if Lotus Sametime give you the business card for the profiles module? Here you are.

Also you see another integration with Lotus Connections on the bottom of the card giving you direct access to the modules information. Same integration is with all the sametime awareness icons and even with 'type ahead' creating a new memo.

Sure, Lotus Notes 8.x has the 'Activities' widget in the sidebar, we all know about that right?

But also there is search integration for finding people, expertise just about anything you want in Lotus Connections (and google, yahoo, your email etc) with direct access to these information.

What we also did is make some widgets that can be using in Lotus Notes and Lotus Connections in order to give users the possiblility, and option, to use both platforms by choise. We even built a simple email widget in Lotus Connections. Why? Because this is so simple by using the 'Ultra Light' interface.

How cool is that?

Google Calendar integration
Since Lotus Notes 8.5 you are able to integrate your Google Calendar, or in fact any other Calendar, within your Lotus Notes Calendar.
How...just a couple of clicks. And no, it's not an import (can do also) but direct access integration. After configuration the Google Calendar data shows as an overlay in your own Schedule. Now your private, home, team or kids calendar is always directly available for you.

Applications
What about the possibility for some applications that end-users can built by just some clicks. Have you seen the the Linkedin sidebar Widget? You can just drag-and-drop the file from the Linkedin webpage into your sidebar, what a little while and it works. How cool is that?

Also developers are able to built faster application functionality with nicer things, some call it 2.0, but for me it's just nicer. Here are some examples;

Our new CRM system has some controls to past email into, very usable and to be honest...it looks great also.

Another CRM option, built with xPages, is a widget being used in Lotus Connections, the Notes sidebar and available for your mobile.

It's clear that Lotus Notes is ready for all web 2.0 you want, i am really really sure that the power of building applications fast, easy and cost efficient is still applicable and maybe even mabe better then ever before. No other platform gives you the ability to do this so fast!

Check you these links to see some more functionality or cool interface:

Social software makes ERP shine

2009-07-03T13:51:00.006+02:00

Last week i gave a presentation to an ERP (ENIAC-BS) usergroup community about Social software from the IBM stack; this is not about email, but about people working together in relation to each other and their business in a creative process.

Although my presentation about networking, finding people, the next generation employees, access anywhere and anytime and the fact that social software and 'the new way of work' or 'employee 2.0' was not new to all attendees (just for some) they responded rather 'cold' on this part of the presentation while showing more response when talking about more concrete solutions like CRM and the purpose of Quickr.

To late...?
Just after the presentation i realized that ERP users are used to work in a very structured way, after all companies use their ERP systems to structure their business processes, and that social software might just be the opposite of what they do now. What is the value for them after my presentation?

One of the items in my presentation was an article from the computable 'ERP is Dead', a quote from Jan Baan (Baan \ Cordis), of which i strongly disagree. My opinion is that we need ERP systems or any other system to create structure and manage our core processes without any disruption, failures or uncertainties. But, i also think that we can use new technologies to re-use data from these systems and bring it to the users, customers and partners in order to integrate our business processes with 3th parties and with PEOPLE.

PEOPLE
You know, PEOPLE, those creatures being very creative and eager to make thing bigger and better then even before. Yesterday on the 'discovery channel' there was a program about technological revolution and why new technologies go that fast at the moment. Their statement was simple, 92% of engineers, architects and scientists live now!! Wow.....should we not use that fact and do something with those people, instead of mainly maintaining processes, and be a little more creative?

Conclusion
After these couple of statements i might say that the message to this community is to maintain their current investments with great proud and operational excellence, but also start thinking about bringing forward their business processes to the user and even think of giving more control to the users.

The final real message is the other way around....don't be a sitting duck but give yourself to power to present yourself, share ideas, bring forward your expertise and value and make yourself king of your workplace.

Social software (also BI and BPM) can make your ERP shine, without processes and structure you can never maintain your business, but you can use your investments to be even more productive, creative and accelerate innovation. Think about that for the near future....

Remember: 'you cannot innovate alone!'

Lotus Notes & Domino Consolidation

2009-06-25T23:51:00.005+02:00

Earlier this year i built an presentation about consolidation of Lotus Notes and Domino infrastructures and how the current hardware and software is easily able to facilitate consolidations without large investments. My earlier post (the one with the pizza boxes) is a very good example of cost effective consolidation.

So here is the presentation i did for IBM and a customer to show something about the process and possibilities where we did an additional workshop and calculations for a new infrastructure design going from 35 servers to 2 machines (4 mail servers) on a central location. Truth is...we are awaiting for the final budget to execute.

In the near future i will also blog about some calculations you need to make before you finalize your consolidation design. Over the years we created a complex but very useful spreadsheet to calculate IOPS vs Storage size vs Back-up vs the Number of servers. Trust me when i say that storage is going to be your bottleneck if you do not calculate and plan your roadmap. Did you calculate Blackberry usage...indexes.. NO...please take good care of your SAN or you will suffer from terrible response times!

Lotus mobility experiences in the past months

2009-06-16T11:01:00.005+02:00

During the last years and months we played a lot with several tools and products for Lotus Notes mobility aka email on your mobile. Some of these tools have surprised me and some have disappointed me a little bit, here is a short overview of my experiences so far.

Blackberry
Oh yeah, Blackberry for Lotus Domino is the most robust, configurable, stable and secure product for pushing email to your pda or phone, there is no doubt about it. Although using Nokia devices (E series) with blackberry connect we had quite some problems and a lot of maintenance for me personally this has always worked fine and it still does for me. Most users stepped over to Blackberry devices, in this case the Bold or Storm, where the Bold (the one with keyboard) gets most positive results.

Though Blackberry is rather expensive in server licenses, a dedicated server, provider subscription and device it seems to be the best choice in functionality and performance at all times. We installed and support several environments, most of them running rather stable.

We think users will be very happy using Blackberry for email and for other applications, like Lotus Connections or Lotus Sametime this is your best choice. Please get in contact if you have any questions on server configuration, requirements, maintenance and performance. We or our partner GPXS are most likely able to help you.

Lotus Traveler
Lotus announced traveler for Domino 8.x last year and we tested the product in different environments. The server that hosts traveler (DMZ) needs to run Domino 8 but your mailservers may still be Domino 7.0.2 or so. We experienced traveler, for Windows mobile phones, so far as an easy to maintain and set-up product with simple but accurate working with email, tasks, contacts and calendar (nothing else!!) using push technology. This means, the product is for free, you just need a Domino server, and it fully integrates in your Domino infrastructure.

For iPhone and Nokia users there is also good news, the 8.5 Domino Web Access (DWA) product is now native accessable for iPhone devices and Nokia just announced to ship their E7x devices with traveler out-of-the-box. How cool is that?!

One of my team members wrote an article on SearchDomino.com about installation and configuration, check it out. Traveler is a good choice, cheap and simple, but not as good as Blackberry :-)

mNotes and many others
From my perspective, all other tools are nice to have tooling but rather expensive, need high maintenance or are just not always working as expected. Not saying these tools are not worth their money, but personally i would choose between Blackberry or Traveler.

Conclusion
Rather simple conclusion in this case, i think i don't have to repeat it again. But don't let you bother with my personal experiences, just get in contact if you need and assistance.

Events
Earlier this year we did a little event, on our LCTY session, about Traveler and Blackberry and we will do an event again later this year together with GPXS around Lotus Connections and Blackberry.

During the writing i found an interesting post about Blackberry versus Windows Mobile saying the cost for Blackberry maintenance are half the costs of Windows mobile maintenance. Check here (dutch only)

Running 32.000 Domino users redundant on 6 pizza boxes

2009-06-15T15:05:00.016+02:00

Question: can you run 32.000 users on 6 pizza boxes in a fully redundant infrastructure?

Answer: YES you can, and here is how!

A Lotus Domino customer came to us and said they want to move from the iSeries platform to Linux since this is going to be their future standard server platform. They asked me is it is possible to built a cost effective Domino on Linux environment hosting al least 32.000 users but scale for 40.000 users where 90% of the are webmail users.

Design
After the design phase working and puzzeling together with Daniel Nashed and Marzel Laning for Eniac Essentials we came up with a fully redundant design over 2 locations with minimum hardware being 6 x HP DL380 with 16GB RAM and 1 x dualcore and connected to a SAN on both locations.

We figured out that we can use the hardware really efficient when using 64bit OS (SLES) and partition Domino multiple times per machine. Then we puzzeled a fail-over schema where in case of 1 machine fail-over all the Domino servers fail-over to their cluster members all on different machines on the other location.
We used Domino 7.0.2 for the first production delivery.

This is how the environment looks like in schema;

I gave the Domino servers some colors so you can see that when a physical machine must fail-over, the Domino servers fail-over to 3 different machines spreading extra load.

Then the hardest part is the SAN and Storage configuration and performance of the SAN required so so much users. We used all the available best practises separating data from translog, the right blocksizes and very important....we kept the filesystems below 500GB per data directory. Since we use clustering each Domino server has 2 times the data, we used links (on linux level, not Domino) to add an extra filesystem appearing as a folder. (see picture below)

Then, last but not least, we needed a proxy configuration to handle so many users and handle the the SSL load for the Domino servers. We set-up the IBM HTTP server (IHS) with the WAS plugin in a fail-over situation since other, existing products, did not work as we expected them to work.

Pilot and performance testing
We did some really intensive performance tests and with up to 8.000 concurrent users and still the servers stayed online, performance went down, SAN had huge I/O wait, but Domino handled really well at that moment. (we have the report if you really want to see this). We measured the number of users, the I/O wait, the webmail response (with jMeter) and a whole lot of other figures and stats.

So we went back to the storage experts and figured out how to configure the SAN for better performance, these are so much details that we can almost write a redpaper for that, just get in contact if you need some details.

Conclusion
Now this environment is running for almost a year now and doing really well. This is a nice example of a really cost effective and simple environment serving group of users. I think we proved that this can be done, a great challenge with good results!

What's next
Next phase is to start using archiving and DAOS for storage reductions, we expect to reduce about 35% of data after using DAOS estimator, therefore we must upgrade to Domino 8.5. Also we started implementing Sametime and Lotus Traveler, both now running but must be deployed towards larger groups of users.

Widgets for Lotus Connections

2009-06-15T13:52:00.010+02:00

Widgets is the keyword for the future of development around Lotus Notes and Connections functionality. Widgets give the ability to users to choose how their workplace is organized and show different sources of information related to each other. Typically, widgets re-use existing information and show related content or integrate content on the class.

We made huge investments in getting to know the technology behind widgets and built some examples, pre-fabrics, to deploy at future customer solutions. Here is an introduction to our Widget Factory process.

What are widgets?
Widgets are small web application with which simple and frequent tasks can be performed or which provide quick and easy access to some piece of information. These kind of applications are not only supported by platforms such as Lotus Notes and WebSphere Portal, but are also seen as an important strategic feature.

With the rise of iGoogle, Netvibes and the Windows Vista sidebar, widgets have become a generally known concept and are very re-usable when set-up as a (web)service, feed or open API.

The Widget Factory
We started the Widget Factory some week ago, at first this was a dedicated assignment, for some of our developers, to create at least 6 widgets where at least 2 widgets must e cross-platform for Notes, Connections and Portal.

Quickly the team created their first widgets, no downloads, pure development in RSA using jQuery and webservices to connect to any back-end. I am not a developers, so please get in contact with our developers is you nee to know how to do so.

Now, a couple of week later, we created your first set of widget and we will publish these in a widget catalog in the future. Most of the development is done in Lotus Connections since we love this platform and would really want to push apps to this platform.

The Widgets
Right now, we provide six widgets in the catalog. New widgets are under development, and new and innovative ideas on which kind of widgets should be developed next are always welcome.

The following widgets are ready for deployment at our customers’ site:

CRM contacts. Based on our own CRM product, this widget targets the need to quickly access contact information, regardless of the platform one is currently using. Using type ahead functions, this widget allows fast and effective searching of the CRM database. This widget is available for WebSphere Portal, Lotus Notes and Lotus Connections. And due to the service oriented setup of this widget, it can be easily enhanced to connect to another CRM provider.

Profiles Calendar. Tightly tied in the Profiles functionality of Lotus Connections, this widget shows a calendar and all meetings that day of a person next to his or her profile. image

Poll. This widget allows organizations to quickly put up a poll to ask its employees for their opinion.image

Bulletin Board. This widget allows organizations to inform its employees throughout all platforms used by it. image

Quickr Places. This widget shows an overview of all Quickr places which can be navigated, providing links to the documents in Quickr itself. image

Holidays. Based on the holiday application Eniac uses internally as part of a HRM application, this allows employees to see an overview of the amount of days they took off this year, the amount still left and also provides functionality to request a new holiday. image

All widgets are based in services, it should not matter wether the CRM of HRM applications is Lotus Notes or any other platform delivering the feed or service. We are currently working on some new widgets, we have plenty of idea's, like a widget for salesforce.com or an turnover\profit widget etc....please stay tuned for more news later on.

A sneak peak of our email widget:

By producing a number of widgets which can be used out of the box, we make WebSphere Portal, Lotus Notes and Connections even more interesting. This all combined under the name Essentials Widget Catalog. With these six widgets, Eniac Essentials has started the development of its library with small applictions and functionality targeted at leveraging the power of the platforms (and investments) at our customers.

Earlier information about our widgets can be found on the Blog post from Luiz Benitez here!

Reduce Domino storage using DAOS

2009-06-14T15:17:00.012+02:00

For a customer Eniac Essentials was requested to reduce the storage of their Lotus Domino servers, this action was performed with success.

Here is the real-life story of DAOSifying far over 4TB of email data storage.

Situation

Lotus Notes and Webmail users: 7.000 in Benelux
Primary mailservers running Domino 7: 4 (2 clusters)
Archive servers running Domino8.5: 2 (1 for each cluster)
Storage and data: All servers have 2 TB of Data LUN on SAN
Data growth: Mail data grows roughly 10 GB per day (no quota allowed)
Operating system: Windows 2003/64 with 4 GB of RAM
DAOS data storage: same LUN as the Data (will be moved to separate disk)
DAOS style: agressively set at 256 KB

DAOS: Domino Attachment and Object Store

Since all storage systems where full with data the customer was not able so archive anymore, so we upgraded the Archive servers to Domino 8.5 and started using DAOS and compression.

Current status
This is what happend so far......the processes are still running since we choose to control per directory going step by step.

Arch01 50% DAOSIFIED
Arch02 25% DAOSIFIED

Data reduction actions

Start compression of Design
Data and recompress attachments to LZ1, on subset of the Archived files and then enable them with DAOS

What happened
We where able to reduce the storage on the archive servers with around 750GB in total, this cleared the way to archive mailservers again an perform the same DAOS action again on newly archived files and added storage making 400GB of space in the mailservers.

Arch01 uses 950 GB for NSF data and 325 GB for DAOS, while the logical size of all NSF files is 1,7 TB
Arch02 uses 1430 GB for NSF data and 275 GB for DAOS, while the logical size of all NSF files is 2,0 TB

Since we now use DAOS we can change our back-up strategy, total back time is reduced with several hours in total.

The numbers are not 100% correct but they are really close, we should have measured a bit more closely. Since the storage keeps growing and we continue archiving and DAOS'ifying this is a moving target at the moment.

Conclusion
It's hard to calculate exacly how much is reduced but it show significant impact in reduction of storage and back-up time.