Footy Tipping 2007!!!!

ISW has just launched their AFL Footy Tipping competition for 2007. Built on Domino off course. Check it out and win an iPod!

http://www.footytipps.com.au/domino/tipping/ISW2007.nsf/pgISW?OpenPage

Big news!!!

Well Jayne and I had a wonderful long weekend and we have some big news. On Sunday afternoon I managed to get up the courage to ask Jayne to marry me and the answer was "Yes"!!!! So I am very excited to tell the world that Jayne and I are now engaged to be married. I will be heading out this afternoon with my new fiancee to try and find a ring to make it all official. 

You have to love that out of the box experience!

Well I received a brand new IBM/Lenovo R61p laptop the other day and it is just great.

2 Ghz Core 2 Duo Processor with 2 GB of RAM (upgradable to 4GB), 100 GB, 15.4 Inch wide screen etc etc. All up it is a very nice machine. The out of the box experience has been very smooth. Rather than clutter the machine with software that isn't required IBM/Lenovo are really good at keeping it to a limited number of useful applications within the ThinkVantage range of tools. As a result there was no need to reformat the machine and rebuild it without the rubbish. The only item that isn't really essential that came installed is Google Desktop. I havn't used it before but I am going to leave it and see if it is useful. The other item that seems handy is DiskKeeper lite which seems to work well for defragging the machine however to be really useful I may purchase the upgrade to the Pro version so it can run on a schedule in the background.

I spent a day or so migrating across all of my applications which I have listed here:

Applications	Utilities	Others
IBM Lotus Notes 7.0.2	mNotes	Snood (For my additive gaming)
MindJet MindManager	Tivoli CDP (for backup)	Bejewelled (for more addictive gaming)
IBM Sametime 7.5.1	5 Clicks (neat screen capture tool)
Firefox	Cisco VPN
MS Office 2003	Ultimate Zip
MS Project	Telstra NextG PCMCIA Card Software (for mobile internet)
MS Visio	Logitech Media Centre
Quickbooks Premier	PDF Creator
VMWare Server Console	UltraEdit
Google Earth	UltraVNC
Workplace Forms Viewer 2.6	Citrix Client
Workplace Forms Designer 2.6	Ultramon (used to manage multiple screens)
Microsoft Groove Virtual Office
iTunes
Adobe CS2
Skype
Address-IT
IVR-Xpress Visual Builder
Microsoft IE 7

I think that is about it. All up the new machine is great and I am very pleased with the performance etc. The main application that I noticed a difference with was Groove. I had all but given up on Groove because it seemed to hog a lot of resources however I thought I would try again. I was pleased to see that i hardly noticed when it started and it happily runs in the background. So I guess the extra processing power makes all the difference! 

Sametime 7.5.1

Sametime moved ahead in leaps and bounds in 2006 and it is good to see this is going to continue in 2007. I know that our organisation is leveraging Sametime 7.5 in many ways and it has now become a core part of our everyday toolset. Some neat new features coming on Sametime 7.5.1 announced at Lotusphere:

• Tabbed Chats - How many time do you have 3-4 open chat sessions on the fly. Starts to crowd your screen eh! Well Sametime 7.5.1 has the answer. Tabbed Chats. As you can see from the screenshot you can now consolidate all chat sessions into once window with a convenient photo of each person. Or if you don't use photos it just lists the people on each tab. I will be interested to see how it managed 3+way chat sessions but I think it is a great idea.

• Peer to Peer Video - With Sametime 7.5 we had voice capabilities. Well now there is also Peer to Peer video. There was a great demo of this in the Lotusphere Opening General Session that showed you can have videos of 2 or more people in the conference as well as videos of devices on the network. It just groups the video images at the bottom of the Sametime client. Neat!
  
  
  • Integration with 3rd party vendors - There were a number of 3rd party integrations show such as integration with Cisco kit where you can instantiate phone calls direct from the Sametime client. While we don't have this kind of back end equipment in place I am sure this will be great for large enterprises.



WebSphere Portal Express 6.0

A Lotusphere announcement that I missed (thanks Dave) was WebSphere Portal Express 6.0. We have looked at previous versions of Websphere Portal for a number of our clients in Australia in the past however as most of the Australian market is SMB it really was too big. We looked at Workplace Services Express however it didn't quite have the flexibility of the full Portal. So with the announcement of WebSphere Portal Express 6.0 it is great to see IBM continual commitment to the SMB space.

We have already been using IBM Lotus Component Designer (Previously Workplace Designer I think) and it really is a great tool for us Domino developers to move into the Portal space. Maybe a good project for me would be to integrate Workplace Forms with WebSphere Portal Express 6.0!!