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MN Lotus Notes User Group Meeting

Matt Engstrom from IBM will present and discuss the Lotus Live offerings; Notes, iNotes, Meetings, Engage, etc. and any other tid-bits of knowledge and information he has to share with us.

Kroll Ontrack will demonstrate a message retention, archiving and legal hold/discovery solution designed for Lotus Notes.

Thank you Dave Olson from MN CPAs for hosting this meeting.

Once at the building, go into the doors of the taller of the two buildings and take the elevator to the sixth floor.

Attendance is always free but it's good to have an idea of how many will be attending, so please let know that you will be attending.

We will provide food and refreshment at our meeting as a result of funding received from last year's Midwest Area Lotus User group conference that we participated in. If you can get to Clevelend, Ohio, the 2010 MWLug conference is August 19 - 20th. To register go to mwlug.com

Please Email Tom with any topic suggestions for this meeting and future meetings. I would also like to hear from people that are willing to present about how their company uses IBM/Lotus technology.

Meeting Notes

We had 25 people attend the meeting representing over 10 companies

These notes were written by Tom Hillebrand as he observed the presentations.

Our host, Dave Olson began by presenting an overview of the Minnesota Society of CPA’s and how they use Lotus Notes and other Lotus technology. He also presented a comprehensive list of issues/questions he had for the group about his Lotus environment. A few important points that came out of the discussion were:

• Lotus Traveler 8.5.2, due to be released soon if it’s not already out, will not support the Android OS as expected, however IBM plans to have a release or Lotus Traveler that will run on a Linux Domino server by this fall and Android functionality by Q4.
• We wary of Lotus Notes/Domino 8.5.1 Fix Pack 4. Some users are reporting issues when opening an Email message in the preview pane and sometimes in full screen mode where the screen will be blank. Seems like a screen refresh issue of some sort after installing FP4. Some administrators have had difficulty upgrading their server to FP4 without uninstalling FP2 first.

Holli Head Konig, Messaging and Collaboration Leader with IBM, presented Lotus Live and discussed Cloud offerings with the group. Some of her points were:

• There are a lot of companies offering Cloud solutions for messaging, like Google and Micro$oft. IBM is the only offering that offers a “hybrid” solution where you can have some users on your on-premises Domino servers and some in Lotus Live.
• With LotusLive there is no “migration” of messaging needed. Other solutions require a time consuming and expensive “migration” to get your current messaging from your on-premises solution to The Cloud.
• IBM knows hosting, securing other companys' data, and has the rigorous policies around it. They have been ‘hosting’ company data for 30 years...it just wasn’t referred to as “Cloud Computing”.
• There is “Click-To-Cloud” functionality in a plug-in to the Lotus Notes client to support a hybrid solution where some users will be on the on-premises solution AND in the Cloud for other functionality you don’t have installed on-premises.
• There are solutions (apps) for you mobile devices that connect you to Lotus Live. Check out greenhouse.lotus.com/mobile for solutions like an on-line meeting client for your Blackberry or iPhone.
• You can get Lotus Symphony 3.3 beta which includes a new feature you can use in presentations called embedded video.
• In LotusLive there is a link to LotusLive Labs where IBM can post beta concepts and features that may or may not ever become offerings. It’s a playground for the adventurous. Holli specifically pointed out project Concord which allows for multi-editing of files in real-time.
• Project Vulcan is IBM’s direction that brings everything together into one place. This is a concept IBM has been working on for more than 10 years and they’re getting close to making this an offering. Maybe within the next couple years. What IBM is doing and their concepts blow any other offering out of the water. It should, they’ve been working on it forever.

• Can you define a “realm” of sorts so only authorized “companies” are part of your public LotusLive instead of “public” meaning any users that have a LotusLive account? This applies to features such as file sharing and contacts.
• Is there gateway functionality in LotusLive to allow IM with other IM services?

Ron Mattson and Team from Kroll OnTrack presented their messaging retention, archiving, discovery offering specifically for Lotus Notes/Domino. There was a lot of interest from the group and the presentation prompted a lot or questions. This topic is a current issue in many organizations. If you want to learn more about Kroll Ontrack’s solution, "Ontrack Compass", contact Ron Mattson at RMattson@krollontrack.com, (952) 949-4094, www.ontrackcompass.com

• Ontrack Compass is a solution that captures all Email in your organization, stores them in their native format on another server, indexes it and allows for eDiscovery.
• Works with and honors your Domino Directory for security or any other Lotus supported security mechanism like LDAP.
• Holds can be put on messages during discovery. The tool supports the very specific legal procedural requirements.
• This is also inherently an Archiving solution for Domino. Get the messages off your Domino server into this datastore where people still have access to search their archives.
• Highly configurable. When a message is “archived” according to archival and retention policies enforced with this tool, it can leave “stubs” in the user’s mail application. When they open the message it will retrieve the full-fidelity message from the archive.
• Retention policies enforce when messages are archived (pulled out of your Domino mail and put into the archive) and how long messages remain in the archive before permanent deletion.
• Retention policies can be much more than just date ranges; different policies can be applied that are keyword based also. i.e. Keep anything permanently that has the word “contract” in it. You can also throw out some messages right away based on keyword. i.e. "my kid's pictures" or "happy hour".
• The presenter demonstrated the discovery process and how it follows the very specific legal procedures for eDiscovery. He also showed how discovered messages can be ‘packaged’ back into an NSF file so they can be analyzed by the legal team with all their original fidelity.
• The Kroll Ontrack solution may include quite a bit of consulting to help you get your policies in place that are then enforced with this tool. They have been doing eDiscovery and other forensic analysis of computer systems for a long time.

• Holli would come back to discuss Project Vulcan with the group.
• Rick Carriveau is a certified Sametime 8.5 trainer. He would present Sametime 8.5 and how you can work with it. Can you get it all on one server? What are your options?
• How to give your Notes / Domino applications a face-lift and new functionality with XPages. Holli suggested checking in with Bruce Elgort’s group for a potential presentation.
• More about Lotus Traveler

As always please message with any comments or suggestions for the group. If you are interested in planning a meeting or helping manage the group please let me know.