I was just reading an article which was written by Nathan Winters about moving Microsoft Exchange 2007 to Microsoft Windows 2008 server.  I am not use to this sort of an exercise being such a complicated process, I guess that I take for granted the ease at which these things can be done with Lotus Domino server.

Here is one of the comments which Nathan had to say about moving Microsoft Exchange 2007 to Microsoft 2008 Server:

The only way is to perform a migration!

I have never attempted to do this, however due to my technical experience I would be expecting that this process would require a minimum of 1 days effort.  Not only that, but there would appear to be a lot which could go wrong in the process.

The only way that I would feel comfortable about moving Microsoft Exchange 2007 to Windows Server 2008, would be to do it on a virtualised server while talking snapshots all the way.  Ouch!

A word of advice – do not start this without doing a back-up and testing the back-up.  I would see a high possibility of needing to do a restore some time down the line.

For someone with reasonable experience of Microsoft Windows Server and Lotus Domino server, to move to a latter version of Microsoft Windows Server is not a major undertaking.  It would only be a 1 hour job along with the time that it takes to move user data such as email (provided that the OS is in place).

A lot of people are still running older versions of Microsoft Exchange for numerous reasons. These reasons often include the lack of ability to upgrade because of a lack of technical skills through to associated costs. Upgrading Microsoft Exchange is notoriously expensive and the upgrades usually involve a number of hidden costs.

Just the other day, I had a phone call from someone considering upgrading Microsoft Exchange to Lotus Notes. When I asked why, the responded by saying that the Microsoft Exchange upgrade was too expensive. This is something which not only larger businesses have to confront but it is really a deal breaker for small to medium sized businesses. Do you ever feel like you are being taken for a ride when it comes to the cost of computer equipment and software?

One of the most common questions people ask me is: “What are the on-going licensing costs?”

Today, people know full well that there is no such thing as a one off cost when it comes to technology. They know that they now need to ask questions which really translate to “Are there any hidden costs?”
This is a concern and something that needs to be considered when planning on upgrading to a new version of Microsoft Exchange.

There is an option to consider when upgrading Microsoft Exchange, and that is to consider other solutions like Lotus Domino Server or Lotus Notes. Just so that you understand, Lotus Domino Server is like Microsoft Exchange (it is the heart of the system) where as Lotus Notes is like Microsoft Outlook (as far as being the application that people use on their computer desktop).

Upgrading Microsoft Exchange to Lotus Domino Server is a reasonably straight forward process which will cost you some money up front, however, within a short period is likely to help you reduce costs. Yes, there are ongoing costs, just like any other system, however, these are not as significant as upgrading Microsoft Exchange to newer versions of Microsoft Exchange.

Over the next few days I am going to take you through some of the considerations which need to be given to ensure that you can upgrade from Microsoft Outlook to Lotus Notes or Lotus Domino server with peace of mind.

Here are the topics which I am going to cover:

1. Considerations
2. Why?
3. Upgrading Microsoft Exchange – How to get to Lotus Domino Server the easy way

Today, I upgraded Lotus Notes from 8.5.1 to 8.5.2 on my Apple MacBook.  I was looking forward to some of the new features such as being able to replicate multiple databases at once, however, there was a surprise which has made me really happy.

In the past I found Lotus Notes on the Apple Mac seemed to go crazy on memory and CPU usage (even though I tweaked the jvm properties file).  However, since upgrading to 8.5.2 it is a very different experience.  CPU usage is sitting below 6% (with other applications running) and there is plenty of memory just sitting there doing nothing.

This has meant that Lotus Notes is running a lot better, in fact, it would be the most responsive release that I have ever used even when I compare it to Lotus Notes on Windows or Linux.  Not only is Lotus Notes running better, but every other application is able to run a lot better because Lotus Notes is not hogging every resource it can get its hands on.

Once again, Lotus Notes seems to be gaining momentum here in New Zealand.  Yesterday I was able to sell Lotus Notes to a new customer.  Now I know what some of my readers are likely to say about this, but, this was a license only sale on my part.

The customer had someone internally who had Lotus Notes experience due to the ability to use the Lotus Notes designer client for free.  This has now meant that the company this person works for has adopted the technology based on the application which their employee built.

Rock on Lotus Notes!

About a year ago I read a blog post in which someone said that they had something (possibly a DLL) which could be installed onto a Lotus Domino Server to correct an issue with HTML formatting not looking the best when it had been sent out through SMTP on Domino.

At the time I think that they may have been offering it free of charge to other IBM business partners.  However, I have a client who requires this and I cannot remember who was offering it.  I am hoping that someone out there might be able to direct me to the right person.

Are you able to help?

Today, I attempted to migrate my blog to the Amazon cloud for the second time.  It would appear that Turnkey have a great process for doing this which includes backing up the data, building the new appliance and then restoring the data to the new appliance.

I only have one issue, that is that on the blog posts there are funny characters appearing like the following:

• –
• Â

Here is a screen shot which shows what I mean:

Is there an easy way to remove these funny characters?

Click here to view the embedded video.

One of my co-workers was joking with me about Lotus Notes today.  He was sarcastically telling me that “Lotus Notes can do everything”.  This is because he knows this is what I think!  And ………. he is jealous that he doesn’t have the awesome devine appointment of being a Lotus Guru.

I thought that I would rub it in a little bit.  When he left his office for the day I put up a poster in the window entitled “Lotus Knows how to do business in the cloud”.  The funny thing is that our office is “in the clouds”.

The other day I wrote a post about my plans to move the machine which hosts my blog to the Amazon EC2 cloud service.  After several hours of trying to do so, with limited success, I have aborted my plans.

This is not to say that it was not possible, however, I would say that it was not as easy as I thought it should have been.  However, I did learn a lot and I would expect that another attempt would be a lot more straight forward based on what I now know.

The thing that kept on going through my head was “if this was a Lotus Domino application it would be so easy to move things around”.  I am now starting to think about moving my blog from WordPress back to Lotus Domino Server. Only time will tell.

A few years ago the church I was attending at the time, decided to do Rick Warren’s study called “40 Days of Purpose”.  I told a friend of mine about it and he expressed some concerns which I thought were ridiculous.  However, within about 5 minutes of watching one of the video’s I got very concerned.

What I found was that Rick Warren sat there quoting scripture which was completely out of context.  This was very disturbing for me at the time as I felt that he was twisting the bible to match what he wanted to say.  However, it gets even worse than that, often he would choose just a few words out of a verse with a few …….’s on each side.

One of the things that I have noticed is that Rick Warren will use several translations of the bible, maybe up to 5 in one message.  He grabs verses from the translation which best fits his needs.  This would not be so much of an issue if the Scripture he was using was in context, but it’s not.  It just interests me that he has to pick and choose.

I have now sat through another 2 of his series; 40 Days of Community and 40 Days of Love.  I do not attend the weekly studies or do the daily readings, however, I do sit through the sermons and complete the handouts.  I look up every scripture which is referred to (and there are plenty), and I find that not even 50% are within context.

The sad thing is that a lot of people attend churches where Rick Warren’s 40 Days series are undertaken.  Most of these people just consume what they are being told without challenging it.  My view is that everything should be challenged.