Getting Back Into This Blog After Winning an Emmy

Provocative headline eh? Well the answer is yes, I did find out that I was part of an Emmy award winning broadcast this past weekend. I don't get a statue, but I can get a plaque and/or certificate. It would be kind of funny to introduce myself as an Emmy-award winning Notes Developer/Admin, but only if I let my ego get in the way, And I would never do that, would I?:-)

But back to the more important stuff. It has been about 100 days since my job was eliminated, and I have been trying to stay busy while looking for full-time work. I have completed a couple of projects that are keeping us afloat financially for now:

Ye Olde Domino Mail template Customization

I have been working with a customer with the customization of the IBM Lotus Notes Mail database template to flag messages for migration to a document archiving system. The coding work is about 99% done, but we are in a holding pattern. The third-party archiving solution we are trying to integrate with has been a performance dog that users will never use at current speeds. So until the vendor addresses this issue, the code cannot be rolled out for final testing.

And of course one of the network administrators at the client site learned a valuable lesson: Do NOT decide to move files on a System I integrated file system (IFS) during the day, and if you must move data, do NOT move the IBM Lotus Domino data directory. It is a testament to the rock-solid engineering of the System I that Domino did not crash when he did this. It just timed out on people.

ACT! for Notes Hell

I have tweeted before about being in an ACT! for Notes piece of hell, working with one of the worst user-interfaces imaginable, and undocumented, hidden back-end code. This had a big impact on a project involving the migration of ACT! for Notes Databases from 27 or so individual CRM databases into 13 new databases. This was a huge challenge because of messy data issues (i.e. inconsistency, missing data, incomplete records). In order to get things clean and make future migrations much less painful, I worked with the customer to re-engineer the data management process.

One of the big issues early on was that the customer had to get the correct server installed. They had a messaging server installed, but were licensed for Enterprise. The customer remedied this over a weekend so that we could leverage Domino Enterprise Connectivity Services (DECS) to pull data from J.D. Edwards. Using this and a combination of agents, all customer data now comes from J.D. Edwards, including changes.

The sales force can no longer create customer profile records in the individual databases. By using the agents, we make sure the information is correct and pass down a unique key that becomes associated with the Customer profile and any children documents. This will ensure that future data migrations will be automated and near immediate.



I also just finished a 35-hour on-line class from the Defense Acquisition University. It is actually pretty interesting, and I will post more on that later.

Tags: J.D. Edwards, IBM Lotus Domino, IBM Lotus Notes, Domino Enterprise Connectivity Services (DECS), Act! for Notes