Afterwards, we had some interesting questions and discussions about how to use TDI.  There are so many different ways you can use this product, and when you get a bunch of nerds together to formulate some solutions – the sky’s the limit!

Here’s our slide deck.  Be sure to drop either Tom or myself an email if you have a question about TDI. We’ll do our best to point you in the right direction!

I had no issue with coming up with the topic which was “Two Women, Two Countries, and how a decision can shape a generation.”  I knew I wanted to talk about my family’s history, but when I realized I only had six minutes or less to do so — panic set in!

I wrote at least six versions of the session.  Each time, carving out narrative and timing myself as I read the story out loud making sure I hit the six minute mark. What follows is  the final written version.  I wish I had thought to prepare note cards (like Mitch Cohen had been wise to do) as it might have helped me be sure to hit all the highlights.  I certainly now have even more admiration for the TED speakers and for my fellow Spark speakers.

Here’s the final version:

This is a story about two brave women – Marie Ory and Franziska.  Each facing a decision that would impact not only themselves and their families, but as I discovered – their decisions made more than a century ago impacted me!

Imagine for a moment.  The year is 1846.  The country: France.  Imagine that you’re a widow with 9 children from the ages of 26 to 5 years.  You’ve recently found out that the land you own – upon which you depend may be taken from you by the French government? What would you do you do?

The year is 1907.  The country: Austria/Hungary (or what is now part of Poland).  Imagine that you’re a wife with two small children aged 9 and 7 and recently your 5 year old twin sons were killed in a fire.  You haven’t seen your husband in 4 years because he has been working in the United States. While he’s been away it has become increasingly difficult to find food and live on the money you make as a cook.  What would you do?

These two women actually existed.  They are my French great, great, great, great grandmother and my Polish great grandmother. Ten years ago on the occasion of my father’s 70^th birthday, I thought I would do some research of our family tree.  I knew that part of my family had arrived through Ellis Island.  And I knew that my mother’s family was primarily French and German and had arrived in the mid 1840s or 1850s.  But even so I was unprepared for what I found.

The story continues with my French grandmother Marie Ory selling all their belongings and property.  She and the children set forth on a week’s long carriage journey from their home for the port of LeHavre, France.  They board the ship TALMA in December for a 60 day trip across the Atlantic to New Orleans.  Mind you – remember the year is 1848!  Thankfully, they arrive safely in New Orleans.  Then begin the journey by boat up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to Southern Indiana where she eventually purchases land for $700.  This land is known as Clover Valley.  My mother is descended from her son Jean Jules.

My Polish grandmother Franziska decides that she must leave for the United States to be with her husband in Pennsylvania. Word from him only comes via letter which she has to have her neighbor read to her as she does not read or write.  She decides due to the political situation, that she cannot wait any longer to attempt the journey to the United States.  She and her two children travel from Glatowice to Antwerp where they depart for the US on the Finland – a steamer – traveling in third class.  They arrive at Ellis Island on September 17, 1907.  My father is descended from her youngest daughter Josephine.

When I learned out more about their journey – the miles of difficult travel to reach their port of department and then only to face an ocean journey, to a new country – all I could think was wow!

I was awestruck by their stories!  I wanted to find out more about them, about who they were as women.  How could they be so brave?  I wondered, could I do what they did if faced with the same situation? Could I sell my belongings, my house, step away from friends and move somewhere completely foreign for the safety of myself and my family?

I wondered -  do all decisions impact future generations.  If I make a decision today, will there be a ripple effect four or five or further generations down the road.  I paused to think about how their decisions impacted future generations.  For example, any American descendent in the US with the Pinaire family tree link is related to Marie Ory and one of her children.  My father’s mother would not have been born if Franciska  had not arrived in the US.  And even bigger yet as far as I’m concerned…I WOULD NOT BE HERE if they had not taken their respective journeys!

So why and how they inspire me? Because they were decision makers – uncommon for  women at the time.  But like women today they made sacrifices for their families.  Now that I have this history, of when I’m faced with a decision of my own, I try to think of them and wonder “ok what would the grandmothers do.”  It is a reminder that decisions impact future generation as well that what we do in our daily lives, no matter how insignificant it may seem at the time, it may have a “ripple effect” – even if the ripples are invisible at the time. To me this emphasizes that we should try to take advantage of opportunities to grow or change or challenge ourselves – not only for our own personal well being, but perhaps as our legacy.

Do you have similar stories in your family’s history that can serve as a touchstone for your daily life? If you don’t, make your own life story as these women did.  Set forth a plan for a “life journey.”  You never know who you might inspire!

At the BoF for this session, someone mentioned that they noticed that everyone was  listening to the speaker rather than doing the normal geek thing during this session – which is to engage their mobile device, check schedules, etc.   I think the listening aspect is wonderful!  I hope this is a track we Nerd Girls will revisit next year.  :-)

As I was reading Tom Duff’s post last night. I realized that in many ways my own life situation is similar. Lotusphere attendance for me may be a thing of the past. But as many people have said, “never say never.” My life has taught me that over and over again!

But because of the uncertainty about the future it was a different sort of Lotusphere. I was excited to see some of the new shiny “toys” demoed in the OGS. And in past Lotuspheres I would have been have been immediately thinking of how I could implement that in our environment.

Instead I would have to say that they most important items I’m going home with are: inspiration, the importance of friendship and community, and the importance of your life’s journey. Those three themes seemed to repeat over and over whether it was in the solidarity of friends/colleagues who attended Gab Davis and Andrew Pollack’s Security session for #OccupyPelican or the truly inspiring talks in the Nerd Girl Spark Session. And finally after spending an day with a friend whom I hadn’t seen in in years, and after listening to her life story and how cancer affected her, I was overwhelmed by how the threads of the week all came together.

I shared Mitch Cohen’s Spark Session (Get Cancer Get Social) with her. And she pointed out that in some ways women with breast cancer today are fortunate not only because of the progress in curing the disease but because of the internet and the online communities and information sources – these were not available to her when she was diagnosed. It reminded me of Dr. Burns discussed in the OGS how he and his team were able to share their experiences with pediatric hospitals all over the world – through the internet. How wonderful that we as technologists might have a tiny part of being able to help save someone’s life as we push to make the collaboration software technology to run faster and better and in more creative ways.

So no matter what you took home from this year’s Lotusphere, I hope that you are as inspired as I am to connect with colleagues, to explore new technologies, to push ourselves to see how we might help others and most of all have fun in the process!

Best wishes for a sucessful year ahead!

Hello Orlando!  That’s what I’ll be saying in a brief five days.  Lotusphere 2012 will be my thirteenth Lotusphere.  And already Lotusphere is looking to be another fun and busy week – get those gadgets, social apps, and comfy walking shoes ready!

 I am fortunate to be speaking again this year.  I’ll discuss planning and preparing for a move to the cloud in BP202: Cloud Chasing 101: Planning and preparing for your move to Cloud Collaboration:

• Cloud computing and cloud collaboration systems. You’ve heard all about them. Is the cloud still the way to go? How do you prepare for a cloud move and is it the best option for your environment? And how can you mitigate the potential “whirlwind” of change this may cause in your company? In this session, Marie discusses all aspects of planning for the cloud including directories, authentication, migration, staffing, e-discovery, archiving, mobile support, and hybrid clouds. She shares some real life experiences and describes how you can manage a cloud migration like you would any other email migration project while minimizing the impact to your company. Marie also describes the advantages of setting up a pilot program and how to evaluate products like IBM LotusLive. Leave the session with your own checklist for weathering the change to this new and exciting environment.
• Monday, January 16, 11:00-12:00PM, South Hemisphere III

 Tom Duff and I will be talking about our favorite “free” product – Tivoli Directory Integrator in BP201: Assemble ‘n Go: Integrate Data and Directories with IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator: 

• Join us as we explore how Tivoli Directory Integrator (TDI) can be used to integrate your IBM Lotus Domino or IBM Connections environment to external data directories like Active Directory. Watch as we step through several scenarios for using TDI assembly lines to create users, update profiles, synch user data or update data in Domino, Connections, or in external data sources. We cover the basics for setting up TDI as well as connecting it to your environment. Learn how to use simple and complex data transformation and TDI connectors to automate processes for creating, updating, or deleting data elements in the Domino Directory, Connections, Domino databases, or third party sources. Get the resources to begin creating assembly lines immediately in your own environment as an administrator or developer. So why not start leveraging the best ‘free’ tool you’ve never heard about?
• Tuesday, January 17 4:45-5:45 PM, Swan Mockingbird 1&2.

I will also be joining the Nerd Girls for their new NERD101: Spark Ideas, featured by the Nerd Girls.  You’ll also find me at the Nerd Girl BoF, the Great Geek Challenge, and Gurupalooza.

To resolve the issue, set Internet Explorer or Firefox as Window’s default browser.   In some cases these registry keys may need to be manually changed to point to the iexplore.exe (with the path information:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\http\shell\open\command\
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\https\shell\open\command\

HKCU\Software\Classes\http\shell\open\command\
HKCU\Software\Classes\https\shell\open\command\

This issue has also been seen with Firefox 4 and 5.  If FireFox was set as the default browser and then back to IE, the keys are not updated so Notes will still use IE.

If you do change the registry settings, the user workstation may need to be restarted for them to take effect.  Be sure to take a registry backup prior to making any changes.

Upon investigation, I found this wiki article.  Adding the following property to the data\traveler\cfg\NTSConfig.xml file

addresses this issue and does not affect lookups for any other device (Android, etc.).  Be sure to test this out first before modifying this in your production environment!

After contacting IBM Support, they were notified that this is an existing SPR (CTSI8MLMDR).   One suggested work around if you want to set a default iNotes format is to use a Mail Settings policy to assign a User UI mode.  See the screen shot below for a suggested configuration:

One good bit of news I don’t want you to miss – is the entitlement for Tivoli Directory Integrator!  If you were keeping up, there were some licensing changes in 8.5.2 that limited the version of TDI and what types of data you could move with an assembly line.

However, that’s all changed with 8.5.3.  Check out the licensing info regarding what product entitlement included with your license of a Domino Enterprise Server.

Having been on both sides of the fence so to speak – both as a customer who wasn’t connected to the “yellowverse” per se and as someone who now has a network of peers who are business partners and leaders in the Lotus community, I can see how the average customer may be totally confused by what they read here.

 There are headlines posted here prior to product release date that allude to features or entitlements.  And these postings are such that the tone implies the author is privy to information that hasn’t been posted publicly yet and that they speak as an expert.  

This is exactly what concerns me.  What is the point of signing a non-disclosure agreement and agreeing to be a business partner or a beta participant if you’re going to disclose confidential material?  Yes, I understand that at a point during a beta program, participants are encouraged to blog about their experience with the product.  But this goes beyond that.  How is the average customer supposed to discern what is fact and what is fiction?

Perhaps it comes down to ethics.  What is the motivation for blogging?  Do we as bloggers on Planet Lotus  post to draw attention to our ourselves, our companies or services? Or do we blog to relay what we consider to be important information?  Or are we blogging for the “betterment of the community”?

And if you’ve been paying attention to the latest announcements by Amazon regarding their new Kindle Tablet, it seems this same sort of behavior happens in other “communities” other than just this one.  Bloomberg scooped info on the Kindle prior to the announcement. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-28/amazon-unveils-199-kindle-fire-tablet.html

https://twitter.com/#!/johnbiggs/status/119049154872885249
https://twitter.com/#!/robinwauters/status/119045084099518464

At one point I blogged about what headlines would make blog post go “hot” on PlanetLotus.  And perhaps my headline got your attention as well!  Some of those same suggestions still seem to be true.  As readers we’re naturally drawn to a sensational heading or title.  We can’t help it!

Perhaps my point in writing this is just a call out for bloggers to remember that what we write is public, searchable and printable.  And that we should fact check before we hit publish.

When you’re writing for a technical audience, be it a white paper, article, or book, here are some things to keep in mind:

• Know your audience – senior management or users?
• Know your material – and give credit where credit is due.  If you’re presenting your own material be sure to say so, but also if your writing includes information from someone else be sure to give that person recognition.
• Be specific and minimize use of acronyms – not everyone knows them.
• If you blog (and you should), treat it as a constant advertisement for your skills in writing. That may be how you receive your first writing assignment.
• Make liberal use of your spelling and grammar checker.
• Focus on positive ideas.
• Don’t try to be overly funny in your writing. It may not transfer over well to other cultures.
• Read!  Pay attention to trends, content, writing styles.  You’ll learn a lot from other writers!
• Pick up and read some basic books on writing:
  • The Elements of Style by Strunk and White
  • The Elements of International English Style by Edmond H. Weiss
  • Rules for Writers by Diana Hacker
  • Practice some of the basic errors that catch writers: its/it’s, their/they’re/there, theirs/there’s.
• Start writing and contributing NOW:
  • Blogs (yours or guest authoring)
  • Lotus wikis
  • Technical newsletters (DeveloperWorks, LotusUserGroup.org, technical publications)
  • Contact industry publications and ask about freelance policies
  • Start small and work your way up.  Don’t expect your first writing effort to result in a book.

If you’re thinking about submitting a proposal for a technical book or article some items to include are: 

• Topic Summary
• Description
• A “sell line” – why would someone want to buy this book?
• Sales features – would you include code or additional download?
• Style/approach
• Chapter outline – probably one of the most important steps, this should be very detailed!
• Page counts – Yes page counts – publishers like to have an idea as to how long the book will be to gauge their publishing costs.
• Schedule – how long do you think it will take you to write?
• Related titles – what other titles are available that may compete?
• Target audience
• Market information – are you writing about a specific product, if so what is the market for the product and is a book necessary.
• Trends
• Author information – include your credentials! What makes you the expert to write the book!
• Promotion – some ideas for promoting the book.
• Reviewers – suggest some names for the publisher.  Don’t assume they have a pool of reviewers, especially for niche products.

Writing is not easy, but it is one of the most fulfilling things you can do!  So start scribbling and who knows where it might take you!