Showtime
My Blackberry Enterprise Server Push Utility for the Lotus Notes Client, allows you to create Jobs for individual Channel, Message, and Browser Content Pushes, as well as allows you to delete Pushed Channel Icons from defined recipient devices.
Contact Information
Blogger, podcaster, writer, and geek Chris Toohey covers topics from application development to the latest must-have-gadgets.
dominoGuru.com on Facebook
Latest Updates
Products & Applications
Time Tracker
The idea is simple. At the start of your day - upon completion of your first task - create an entry highlighting what you did and whether you feel it was an efficient or inefficient use of your time. Based on several requests, you can also select the priority, apply categories, or even align your time against a project.
For Lotus Notes Client v8.0 and above, you can use the Time Tracker Widget to make this process even easier!
Zephyr
My Configuration-based Rich Text Mail Merge and Emailing Utility, Zephyr allows you to create rich, data-driven emails to support automated workflow - all via Microsoft Word Mail Merge-like architecture. Dear <firstname> allows you to personalize each email message not only to the individual recipient, but also to the individual application workflow event!
xCopy
xCopy is a simple configurable xCopy client for the Lotus Notes client. By creating and defining xCopy Profiles, you can batch process your file backup or remote upload jobs. With the addition of the xCopy sidebar widget, you can easily kick-off these jobs, and modify both the xCopy Profiles and xCopy itself.
Community & Resources
Lotus Technical Information & Education Community
The Lotus Technical Information & Education community is comprised of IBM, business partner, and customer subject matter experts who use product wikis, published articles, white papers, community blogs and the latest in social media to build and share high quality technical content.
OpenNTF.org - Open Source Community for Lotus Notes Domino
OpenNTF is devoted to enabling groups of individuals all over the world to collaborate on IBM Lotus Notes/Domino applications and release them as open source.
developerWorks Lotus : Wikis
Share your deployment experiences and best practices in our wikis and help IBM to create scenarios for successful deployments. Contribute to the community by collaborating on shared content and leverage the shared knowledge from that community.
Review: The new IBM Support Portal
01/26/2010 04:57:00 PM by Chris Toohey
IBM has just released the IBM Support Portal, and those who attended the Lotus Technical Information and Education January Community Meeting were treated to a quick demo of this newly updated service from IBM.
Overview
The IBM Support Portal allows you to customize the portal to meet your specific needs via selection of the IBM (and Lotus) products that you currently use. The goal here is a pretty basic, yet much needed one: to create a unified, centralized view of all technical support tools and information as well as information on hardware, software, and IBM services.
Pretty basic and expected functionality for any portal, but something that you might not notice at first pass: you don't need to be logged in to use this feature. Anonymous users are given preference cookies, so if the user returns to the IBM Support Portal from the same client, they can instantly see their product-specific support and education content.
Once the user logs in, via their IBM website User ID, they will be asked if they wish to include any products selected during Anonymous browsing should the IBM Support Portal recognize the preference cookies. Pretty slick, and a solid UX!
And once you've selected your products and services, and you've added module portlets to your page, you can choose which of your products are shown at any given time via the Lotus Notes 8.5.1 Calendar-like check/uncheck selectors. In this way, you can work as cluttered or uncluttered as you wish!
Content
The majority of the dashboard content available for the products (at least for the Lotus products like Lotus Notes and Domino) consist of links to online resources.
Tasks (think reason why you're on the Support Portal) are categorized in the following groups:
- Downloads
- Troubleshooting
- Documentation
- Forums & Communities
- Planning
- Installation
- Usage
- Open service request
- Site assistance
Each section highlights different content, which is context-sensitive to your Products selection. Planning, for example, gives you information on Product Support Lifecycles, the IBM Lotus Notes Domino 8.5.1 Upgrader's Cookbook, and even information on the Domino Configuration Tuner.
With inclusion of community-generated Wiki content, developerWorks articles, and more - this could be the go-to for IT Professionals that work with IBM products and services.
Conclusion
I was happy with what I saw in the demo, and really looking forward to seeing how this evolves. Of course, evolution follows adoption, so it's a matter of the target user community looking to this resource as their go-to online support channel.
A few things I didn't like - the AJAX-fueled UX was choppy. Product selections required reloading the entire page versus something more in-line.
I would recommend this service to the following people:
- Customers, consultants, and other IT professionals looking for aggregated online resources for IBM products and services.
- Your customers or coworkers who don't read blogs, listen to podcasts, or stay off the social networking grid.
- People who want to learn about the feature functionality of the products, or how to get more out of their IBM technology investments.
I would not recommend this service to the following people:
- Hippy geeks that are on a first-name basis with any of the engineering teams.
If you fall into that first category and not into the second, check out the IBM Support Portal!
And if you're interested in more information on the IBM Support Portal, check out this series of videos.
|
Unless otherwise stated, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. |
...With inclusion of community-generated Wiki content, developerWorks articles, and more... Can you elaborate on the "and more"? Is there other specific content you'd like to see that's not there?
@Scott:
Sure thing - and this is just off the top of my head:
But in truth, the comment was meant more as a "this could very well be the go-to resource" vs. what I think is the perceived "if only they included xyz, than it would be the go-to resource". This is why I like recording these editorials/reviews in podcast format - there's inflection in the tone that doesn't come across in the printed/read format.