| Recent Blog Posts |
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Installing CR2 for IBM Connections 5
Tue, Feb 24th 2015 12:11p Gabriella
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IBM Docs 1.0.7 For Connections – Linux Not Required
Tue, Feb 24th 2015 11:23a Gabriella
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Engage UG In Ghent A Session And Rowdy Lunch
Thu, Feb 19th 2015 10:44a Gabriella
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Have Your Say – What Would You Like To See As A 2016 Event?
Mon, Feb 9th 2015 12:32p Gabriella
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IBM Connected Part 3 of 3 – What Do I Do Next?
Tue, Feb 3rd 2015 5:24a Gabriella
So ConnectED is over and the world has shifted a little bit more. Going into this year the work I had been doing since 1996 on Mail systems had dropped from about 70%+ of my tasks to about 20% and had been replaced with projects around security, SSO, Connections, Sametime and other related WebSphere / […] |
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IBM Connected Pt 2 of 3 – The Message
Sun, Feb 1st 2015 2:33p Gabriella
WARNING: This blog post uses the terms “Connect” “ConnectED” and “Lotusphere” interchangeably. I suggest you do your own internal translation as you read. So Connected is over and the sessions are done. I would say I found it one of the best in years. Certainly the content of the OGS and many of the other […] |
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IBM Connected Pt 1 of 3 – My Presentation Content
Sat, Jan 31st 2015 5:28p Gabriella
As I head home from Orlando I have a lot of things I want to share so it seemed best to split these into different blogs about different things. This one is just the content from my three presentations. I hope you found them useful if you came along and I hope you find these useful […] |
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A Conference Kind Of Year (Ch-ch-ch-changes)
Tue, Jan 20th 2015 4:20a Gabriella
As I come up for air having completed my presentations for ConnectED 2015, starting this weekend in Orlando, I am in a reflective mood. I have 3 presentations this year (plus two halves) and I’m really excited about the content. In fact I’m really excited about what I’ve been working on recently and I already […] |
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Connections File Sync For Mac (and Windows)
Mon, Jan 19th 2015 7:20a Gabriella
Last week IBM shipped the new Mac Desktop client for IBM Connections which is downloadable from Greenhouse. It fully supports the syncing of files for on premises Connections servers as well as Cloud servers. I have tested the File Sync features against one of my own servers as I’m very impressed. You must first […] |
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Finding A Workable DB2 Client
Tue, Jan 6th 2015 3:00a Gabriella
Let me be clear. DB2 10.x is the bane of my life. Unfortunately it’s also the default version for products like IBM Connections and Sametime. Prior to 10.x there was a GUI admin interface installed as part of the DB2 server which meant I could remote to a customer’s server and easily review data ,tables, schemas […] |
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Sparks Ideas – ConnectED 2015. What Inspires You?
Tue, Dec 23rd 2014 7:30a Gabriella
I’m delighted to confirm that Spark Ideas is back this year at ConnectED 2015. This is organised by Nerd Girls and the idea is that people speak for up to 6 minutes on our topic. This year’s topic is “Inspirations” so what we want to hear is about anything or anyone that has inspired you. […] |
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Connections 5 Customisations – Problems With Stylesheets
Tue, Dec 23rd 2014 6:20a Gabriella
This weekend we upgraded a site with heavy customisation from Connections 4.5 to Connections 5 CR1. Part of that migration was using the lc-migrate tool to export and import the artifacts and ensuring the customisations (customizations for any google searches!) were in place. All seemed to be fine for a couple of weeks but then […] |
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What’s Up With ConnectED 2015 And What I’m Up To…
Wed, Dec 10th 2014 7:40a Gabriella
So it’s nearly holiday time which means it’s nearly panic finishing sessions time for the great January Florida adventure. This year the conference is very different, more technical, smaller, modelled on the idea of a user group. There are plenty of things you know and love like the Best Practices track curated by Susan Bulloch […] |
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Lots of Good News This Morning
Thu, Oct 30th 2014 6:03a Gabriella
I woke up this morning to two pieces of great news.. firstly according to this blog , my session in the Best Practices track at ConnectED has been accepted. This session is focussed around all the work I’ve been doing with IBM Connections, helping customers choose from all the features and optional extras that are available […] |
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My Connections Migration Checklist
Wed, Oct 1st 2014 3:36p Gabriella
I’ve been doing a lot of Connections upgrades and migrations in the past few months and since I prefer to do a side-by-side upgrade there are lots of steps along the way to make sure the data is moved and upgraded from the existing servers to the new servers. The documentation on how to do this in the Knowledge Center is good but there’s a lot of jumping around all over the place between tasks and I have found it helpful for me to have a checklist to make sure I don’t miss a |
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Speaking at ConnectED 2015, the mysterious “track 6″
Fri, Sep 26th 2014 8:03a Gabriella
This year the new ConnectED conference introduces a brand new track under breakout sessions – Track 6 entitled “Beyond The Everyday”. The track is being put together by Christian Holsing and myself and it’s something very different we think has been missing from previous IBM conferences. Although it has replaced the Show and Tell track the two aren’t connected in any way and the “Beyond” sessions are regular (60 mins) session length. Best of all , |
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Getting Around Documentation Errors With Connections Scripts
Thu, Sep 18th 2014 9:03a Gabriella
I’ve been meaning to write this blog for a while. And by “a while” I mean since v4 of Connections. IBM supply a series of scripts with the Connections install that are found in the install directory under the folder connnections.sql. These scripts are used for a variety of things but most people will have to use them if migrating from an earlier version of Connections to a new one. The scripts are under the database type folder for each application so the scripts for th |
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One Dumb And Two Smart Things – Calling That A Win
Wed, Sep 17th 2014 4:03a Gabriella
Last night / yesterday afternoon I was building a Connections server (for an internal project) when I wiped out hours of work doing something dumb. I had spent some time downloading all the software and fixes to the server which was Windows 2008 R2 (because I have plenty of licensing for that) and then I installed DB2 and WAS and created the WAS profile. Next step was to run dbwizard.bat to create the databases but that’s where weird stuff started happening. The dumb bit had alread |
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IBM ConnectED 2014 Call For Abstracts – What Do Those Tracks Mean?
Tue, Sep 16th 2014 10:13a Gabriella
So the call for abstracts are out for ConnectED 2015 this coming January. For those of you who don’t know.. ConnectED is a very different beast that Lotusphere or even Connect prreviously. It’s intention is to be much more technical as well as smaller (encompassing the Swan only). Think of it more like a technical user group, more opportunity to learn and network.
Smaller also means fewer session slots available so you need to submit if you want to speak as soon as you can. Call |
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Adding External Users To Connections 5
Tue, Sep 16th 2014 9:13a Gabriella
Last week I did a presentation at Icon UK on the new Connections 5 feature that allows you to add external users into your Connections environment. To write the presentation I built my own environment multiple times using different techniques for adding external users and discovered some interesting stuff along the way. Since the presentation doesn’t have my commentary on it i’ll try and summarise that here
1. On page 6 are a list of things an external user can do according to IB |
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Sametime Availability for iOS 8
Mon, Sep 15th 2014 4:56p Gabriella
According to a new announcement from IBM, when Apple release iOS 8 this Wednesday (the 17th) the Sametime chat and meetings apps will not be supported.
IBM are working to update them in the App Store but if those apps are important to you, you should not upgrade to iOS 8 until they are updated. Tagged: Sametime, Techincal |
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WebSphere Things That Drive Me Insane – Pt..um.. 3
Thu, Sep 11th 2014 6:56a Gabriella
I actually like WebSphere. Honestly I do. But it really really does not like Domino and Domino is my first love (well 2nd love.. ccMail you’ll always be first in my heart). I have always run into problems configuring Domino within WebSphere mostly due to the fact that Domino LDAP isn’t always hierarchical the way every other LDAP is. Back in the original Sametime 8.5 days we couldn’t have users of ST who didn’t have hierarchical names and we used to have to fake a h |
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Icon UK Presentation – External Users in Connections 5
Thu, Sep 11th 2014 6:56a Gabriella
Today I am finishing my presentation for ICON UK on external users in Connections 5. There’s a lot to cover and I’m trying to run neither over or under time and pull off the goldilocks of presentations covering…
How external access works
What can external users do (and not do)
How your internal users interact with external users
Configuring external user access
Securing the perimeter
Implications and things to think about…
I’ll post the presentation here once I& |
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IHS Errors or WHY Won’t Connections SSL Work
Tue, Sep 9th 2014 10:26a Gabriella
It happens. Usually when I’m building a test server on a single box and i’m building in a hurry. I get everything configured and installed and take a brief stopover at IHS configuration on my way to completing security setup. I create my keyfile using ikeyman, I import my trusted root certificates from whichever CA I plan to use and I generate a personal certificate. I think it’s all working fine then I restart IHS and one of two things happen
1. IHS starts but only fo |
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The IBM Champion – Dilemma
Wed, Sep 3rd 2014 8:33a Gabriella
It’s IBM Champion nomination time once more. I’ve been extremely appreciative of being made a Champion in both 2013 and 2014 (since the program for Collaboration Services started) but each year it becomes a very stressful experience (not quite on a par with wondering if I’ll get to present in January but close).
The process works by someone nominating you using this URL on Greenhouse. Existing Champions reset each year so having been one before is no guarantee you will b |
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Access Denied – Me vs OS and WebSphere Security
Wed, Sep 3rd 2014 7:43a Gabriella
Today I went to apply a patch to a customer’s Sametime Proxy server. This is a server that’s been around for a few weeks. I’ve logged into the SSC countless times in that time. I launch Installation Manager (using “run as administrator”) and when it gets to the “sign on to SSC” part it fails saying it can’t connect. I check the logs in /users/myname/appdata/local/temp/SSCLogs and find the error saying it can’t resolve :9443/console/de |
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Connections 5 SPNEGO Confusion – Dogs & Cats Living Together!
Thu, Aug 28th 2014 9:23a Gabriella
I have been working on a PMR for Connections 5 trying to configure SPNEGO , foolishly as it turns out using the IBM Connections 5 Knowledge Center. I have just finished a 3hr screenshare with WebSphere security support who started the call asking why on earth I was configuring it the way I was. When I showed them the documentation on the Knowledge Center for configuring SPNEGO I was asked “why are the Connections team saying to do that, that will never work”. Imagine my joy ha |
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Anyone Fancy An Indispensbile Tool For Connections Migrations?
Tue, Aug 19th 2014 4:00a Gabriella
When working with Connections so much of the configuration is done in XML or properties files on the file system of the servers. That means, no matter how organised I try and be, I often find multiple copies of files each with different date/time stamps or even with different names (LotusConnections-Config.PreNewNode for example) for me to identify. This is especially true with the TDI syncing where I often end up creating multiple TDISol directories over the course of a deployment as custom |
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Champion Gift Finding A Good Home
Mon, Aug 18th 2014 5:20a Gabriella
Thanks to IBM my gifts for being an IBM Champion have arrived. This year we were given an amount to spend in the online store on various items like jackets and shirts and I chose to buy many of these hot and cold drinks containers which I can donate to charity. As well as keeping a set myself :-) They are very nicely made.
Tagged: Misc |
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Connections CCM Problems – Libraries not “quite” working
Fri, Aug 15th 2014 12:00p Gabriella
My 2nd PMR this week was for Connections and Content Manager. I had already installed FileNet in the test environment for this customer and the only difference between test and production was really the number of servers with CCM having its own dedicated VM. The install completed and I tested uploading files, editing files, clicking “like” etc and it all seemed OK so I handed it over to the customer.
Turns out there was a problem. No library , once created, could be edited. N |
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Sametime Audio and Video Problems
Fri, Aug 15th 2014 11:33a Gabriella
This week’s Sametime PMR was a problem with Audio / Video on a newly deployed infrastructure. This is a long blog but hopefully you’ll find it all useful. The installs all went fine and the peer to peer calling worked, which meant the clients were able to register with the proxy registrar. However multi user or meeting video was failing.
The first thing you need to know about ST Audio / Video is that there are several moving parts – in this instance all servers are instal |
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The IBM Support Overnight Mystery
Fri, Aug 15th 2014 4:00a Gabriella
Several days this week I have worked on a different PMR (two ST bugs one CCM more on later) with people from IBM support who have been helpful, informed and as curious about the problem as I was (or faking it really really well) . We’ve had screen shares, investigated the problem and left it at the end of day the as “escalate to L3 development”.
Then each morning I wake up to an overnight email from someone new saying they are in charge of the PMR but who has seemingly never s |
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Connections 5 Worksheet – In Case It’s Useful
Mon, Aug 11th 2014 7:50a Gabriella
The IBM wiki and now Knowledge Centre publish a worksheet you can use when installing Connections to help document your work. I have used this, or a version of this, when I’m doing installs but unfortunately although the wiki (4.5) version can be copied / pasted straight into Excel and retain its table format, the Knowledge Centre Connections 5 one here doesn’t format properly when I take it into a spreadsheet. Rather than spend time trying to work out how to fix it I c |
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Hello IBM Support – How Can I Confuse You?
Fri, Aug 8th 2014 7:50a Gabriella
It’s been a busy week of opening PMRs across various products and customers. The IBM PMR system has nuggets of hilarity in it if you just decide to go with the flow….This morning I needed to open a PMR for a customer in the US. My problem is that under my IBM registration I am listed as the admin or authority for several different customer numbers* but can only open a PMR for two of them. No idea why just those two. I also have , several times, opened a call and only had R |
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Sametime Trusted IPs – A Problem That Won’t Go Away
Wed, Jul 30th 2014 3:50p Gabriella
Every since Sametime 8.5.2 was released I have seen a continual problem with Sametime trusted ips that is still there in Sametime 9.0.1. The issue is that the trusted ips list (which tells the Community Server which server ips to accept connections from) is now entered into the Sametime System Console in WebSphere and not directly into the CommunityConnectivity document in stconfig.nsf. This means that since 8.5.2 the trusted ips in the Community Server configuration in WebSphere are t |
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Choose Your Installation Manager Carefully….
Thu, Jul 24th 2014 9:10a Gabriella
In both Sametime and Connections builds I have come across customers installing different versions of Installation Manager than that recommended or supplied with the product. The ST and Connections apps are both 32bit so although they will install under a 64bit version of Installation Manager, you will get a warning about it being 64bit. Don’t ignore that.
There’s no advantage to you choosing 64bit Installation Manager over 32bit on a 64bit platform and worse, since it manages all |
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Hidden Pre-Reqs for Sametime VMCU – Surprise!
Thu, Jul 24th 2014 9:00a Gabriella
Building out another Sametime environment this week and I hit a roadblock. Fortunately because I’m a control freak I always read along with the documentation when I do an install, no matter how many times I’ve done it before. I do this because it’s always possible IBM have updated their documentation since I last saw it…..and so I found, buried in the documentation here, on the install page of the VMCU.. under
Deploying -
Deploying Common Component -
Deploying Audio a |
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How To Resist Punching Windows 2012 In Its Smug Face
Fri, Jun 27th 2014 4:00a Gabriella
Windows 2012 surely comes from the deranged mind of a resentful Microsoft employee who then got the usability team drunk before releasing it to market. Much of the horror of 2012 was fixed in R2 so why don’t I just use that? Well sadly Sametime 9 does not officially support R2 as a platform only 2012. I’ve done plenty of ST installs since Sametime 9 shipped last Sept but funnily enough all of them on Linux or Windows 2008 R2. So what’s the problem? Let’s go through each o |
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When bad wasadmins go missing
Sun, Jun 22nd 2014 4:00p Gabriella
Working yesterday on deploying a new application in a test Connections environment I was logged into the ISC using wasadmin for hours. Eventually I finish my work and restart everything to test. I go to login to the deployment manager and no account will work, not wasadmin nor any of the LDAP administrative accounts set up. So what do I do? Well first I need to work out what’s going wrong and I check SystemOut.log when trying to login and see this error as a root cause
CWWIM2009E Th |
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Wrestling for Space
Sat, Jun 21st 2014 10:50a Gabriella
I like to build VMs for any customer projects I’m working on so the OS and environment will match theirs. That means I have between 8 – 10 VMs on my machine at any one time and with 500GB of disk I have to be careful of space. My usual size for a Windows 7 or Windows 8 VM is 30 – 40GB since they usually contain only the OS and some administrative tools like Putty, Winscp, Domino Administrator, Jexplorer, Softerra’s LDAP browser etc. Windows itself eats up more and m |
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Bye Bye Wikis – Hello Knowledge Center and Welcome Back PDFs
Wed, Jun 18th 2014 5:30a Gabriella
Just in time for the release of Connections 5 (on June 26th people – mark your diaries), the IBM documentation team are slow launching the new Knowledge Center that is replacing many of the existing Wikis and all of them going forwards with IBM generated content. (clap)(clap)(dance)(clap)(finger click)(more dance)
The Knowledge Center currently links back to the Wikis for some products (such as Connections 4.5) and has generated content for others (such as Sametime yay!). Eventual |
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The Curse Of The Maltese Falcon
Tue, May 27th 2014 4:01a Gabriella
All Tim wants for his birthday is a copy of the Maltese Falcon on ebook. Without DRM. For a book published in 1929 and famous worldwide you’d think that was possible. Every summer he re-reads all the Raymond Chandler books and most of Dashiell Hammett (who wrote Falcon) and since we’re travelling most of this summer he wanted an ebook copy.
This isn’t the first book this has happened with – getting non DRM copies of ebooks or even copies of books in digital form isn&# |
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Norway & ISBG
Mon, May 26th 2014 2:20p Gabriella
Last week I was in Norway at the ISBG conference in Larvik. You would know this if I hadn’t messed up publishing my blog entry talking about how much I was looking forward to going and what I was presenting on but I tried to set it to publish “in the future” and got the year wrong – so yeah.. I”m back!
At the bottom of this blog you’ll find links to my three presentations. Two of them are updates from ones I gave at Connect and the third is entirely new on h |
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Off to Norway for ISBG 2014
Thu, May 15th 2014 7:13a Gabriella
Next week I visit Norway for the ISBG Conference in Larvik. Last year was my first visit to both ISBG and Norway and I am very pleased to be invited back to enjoy both once more. Hopefully this time it won’t pour with rain and we’ve managed to create time to explore Oslo after the conference finishes. This year I am doing three sessions and of course joining in for the latest CSI - the CSI is a team / social /networking event where we have quizzes, puzzles and challenges to so |
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My Shameful Secret (well one of them)
Wed, May 14th 2014 5:00a Gabriella
It’s sad but true, I have reached well into my 5th decade (no! surely not.. you’re right, I don’t look it) and have never owned a bike or even learnt to ride one. For the past 4 years I’ve owned a recumbent exercise bike and cycle on that 6 – 10 miles a day but I’ve always wanted to ride a bike. Partly because we live less than 1/4 mile from one of the most beautiful parks in London – Bushy Park and partly because when I met Tim he was an avid cycler |
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How I Wrangled Control Back From My Browser
Mon, May 12th 2014 4:50a Gabriella
I’ll admit it, I’m a privacy freak. I limit what information I share publicly, I never give my actual date of birth, mother’s name, or correct answer to any question. I have dummy mail accounts set up for when sites want me to register and I VPN if I’m anywhere but at home. I think it’s important to be aware of what’s happening when you’re working in a browser, what happens when you leave tabs open and the degree to which you can and are tracked. |
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Connections .. um Next?
Thu, May 8th 2014 4:20p Gabriella
Next week on May 21st sees the launch of IBM Connections Next, coming 14 months after Connections 4.5. Initially it will be in IBM’s cloud only but by the end of June we will have software to install on site. That timeline matches IBM’s promise of end of Q2. This is a major release so everyone is under NDA until May 21st.
If you’re a Connections customer and you don’t have a test environment in place then you are going to want one to validate your customisation |
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One Of Those Faces….
Mon, May 5th 2014 2:30p Gabriella
Walking on Brighton seafront this weekend we came across the “Tight Modern” a tiny replica of the Tate Modern containing artworks by 60 disabled artists. Well worth a look but that’s not important right now…What is important is that as I came out , one of the guides stopped me and said:
“I know you don’t I?”
Well no, no she didn’t but I come across this all the time. It’s weird that people think they know me.. Not just “I might kno |
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Solving My Macbook Battery Problem
Thu, May 1st 2014 12:10a Gabriella
In the past few months I’ve been frustrated by my Macbook Air, which is less than a year old, constantly draining the battery when I leave it unplugged and on sleep. I often have work to do in the middle of the night or early morning so I’ll bring the fully charged laptop to bed, put it on sleep and set the alarm for 4am – then when I wake up and go to do work I discover the battery is almost completely drained.
I found a thread on the apple support forums from late last year |
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Connections DB Schemas
Mon, Apr 14th 2014 9:30a Gabriella
A fantastic visual representation of the key relationships in Connection database schemas by Mark Myers. None of this is documented by IBM publicly so this is entirely Mark’s effort to take apart and document. Some of us have tried it in pieces but this is by far the most comprehensive and useful attempt to document the underlying architecture I’ve seen.
Another one for the bookmarks…
http://www.stickfight.co.uk/blog/Connections-Db-Schema-Tip2-Finding-the-UserID Tagged: de |
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Adventures With CCM and Libraries
Thu, Apr 10th 2014 7:30a Gabriella
Recently I’ve run into all sorts of problems deploying CCM for a customer who is running multiple servers. In this case two of the biggest problems were down to the Filenet application server being different from the Connections application server so I’ll write them up here in case anyone else runs into the same thing.
Problem No.1 CreateObjectStore batch file fails with
“CC0050E CONTENT_FCA_ROOT_DOES_NOT_EXIST the root folder does not exist d:ibmconnectionsdatasharedccmR |
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Keeping On Top Of Sametime Fixes
Thu, Apr 10th 2014 6:10a Gabriella
Thanks to Jeffrey Miller @ IBM for posting a blog page with links to all the latest fixes for the Sametime components. He has offered to keep this up to date and I strongly suggest you bookmark the page (I did) to save trying to navigate through the hundreds of individual items on fix list and work out what supersedes what.
http://www.mymiller.name/wordpress/sametime/sametime-9-0-latest-published-versions/ Tagged: Sametime |
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Problems Deploying Sametime Policies – The Missing Link
Wed, Apr 2nd 2014 5:10a Gabriella
I’ve recently run into a problem deploying Sametime Community Server 9.0.1 at two new sites and on an existing 8.5.2 IFR1 site which I’m not 100% convinced is the same issue but as part of my troubleshooting I discovered a missing piece of policy behaviour that I”m finding extremely useful.
Prior to Sametime 9, policies were deployed on the Community Server and used the database stpolicy.nsf. That database no longer exists in v9 and later. In Sametime 8.5.2, if you didn&# |
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Get a load of these speakers…
Mon, Mar 10th 2014 4:30a Gabriella
I’m really excited by the breadth of world class speakers and moderators joining us at CSCEvent. Take a look below and visit our agenda. It’s only 2 weeks away and not only do you have us, LDC and these speakers but it’s being held at one of the most fun locations in London, The Soho Hotel (look at those seats!). There are still a few places left so please join us and register here
Tom Ball (Neardesk)
Steven Chapman (Trailfinders)
Alan Bell (Libertus Solutions)
Samu |
