Last couple of days from last week have been incredibly busy at work and didn’t give me much of a chance to go ahead and create a blog post over here. I guess that being featured on the corporate Intranet Web site to share your story on how you have moved away from e-mail can surely be a hit for various different folks! Well, that’s just what happened last week and still going on this week. Not to worry, I shall be blogging shortly on my take of what has happened last week as far as my new adventure of re-purposing e-mail is concerned.

However, for this blog post I just wanted to share one more thing towards what I call integration nirvana on the Mac! Yes, that is right, if not long ago I mentioned how I was actually quite happy with having Lotus Notes 8.5 Beta for the Mac up and running and how a few days later I managed to get working as well IBM’s Lotus Sametime 8 standalone on the Mac, here we go with the next achievement in that integration nirvana on the Mac!

Yes, that is right! That is a screen shot of my Lotus Notes 8.5 beta for the Mac, fully integrated with the embedded version of IBM’s Lotus Sametime 8 and all of that connected to through the main Messaging server we use at IBM. I know that for most folks this may sound like "Well, big deal! So what?", but to me, this surely confirms the commitment that I can now kiss good-bye my Windows environment and welcome the Mac as my new productivity tool to get the job done at work, just as effectively as I could have done it on Windows, or, better, said, ever so much more effectively!

And it works beautifully, too without hindering my machine to a haul whenever I have multiple applications open. In this case the MacBook Pro is rather happy to allow me to keep working without having to go through innumerous issues.

Next challenge? Getting Lotus Sametime Unyte to work on the Mac from a presenter’s perspective to do seamless screen / file sharing! Wooohooo! Full integration nirvana coming through!!

Tags: IBM, Lotus, Windows, Apple, Mac, MacBook Pro, Lotus Notes, Notes, Lotus Notes 8.5, Notes 8.5, Beta, Lotus Sametime, Sametime, Sametime 8, Productivity Tools, Knowledge Tools, Collaboration, Instant Messaging, Groupware, Social Software, Social Computing, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Collaboration Tools, e-mail, email

I am sure you would all remember how excited I was about making my full transition from my Windows notebook to my recently acquired MacBook Pro with the installation, and successful setup!, from the IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 Beta client for the Mac. So far things have been running pretty smooth and I can certainly confirm that the user experience is just from another world! It simply works! Well, to add further up into the excitement, here I am putting together this blog post where I am sharing what, to me, was the last collaboration tool I needed to have it in my Mac to completely move away from the Windows environment. And never come back! Yes, I am talking about IBM’s Lotus Sametime 8!

Up till not so long ago I was actually using Adium to connect to our internal Sametime server(s) and must confess that the user experience was not as good, probably because of how much I have gotten used to other Sametime related real-time collaboration tools, like Notesbuddy, IBM Community Tools and lately Sametime 7.5.1. The cons have been so numerous that all along it felt kind of crippled, blind, numb, so restricted, in short, such a sense of not getting the most out of it all.

So when today I had the chance to finally manage to connect my Lotus Sametime 8 to our internal Sametime server(s), I was just ecstatic! And big time!! I am back in business! And enjoying every minute of it with one IM client that expands further and beyond around the concept of Instant Messaging, real-time collaboration and social networking across teams and communities. I am sure that during the course of Lotusphere 2008 you had a chance to get some exposure on the huge buzz around what is happening in this space with Sametime 8. Well, not to worry, as time goes by, I am hoping to be able to blog some more about it so that you folks get a chance to see what I meant when I said, I am back in business!!

For now, here is a lovely screen shot I took today with Skitch (Whoooaaahhh, do I love this massive productivity tool quite a bit or what?!?!)  of Sametime 8 running quite happily on my MacBook Pro (Contact list not showing to protect the privacy from people, by the way, in case you are wondering why it is showing empty):

Rock on!!

Tags: IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Windows, Mac, MacBook Pro, Lotus, Lotus Notes 8, Notes 8.5, Notes 8.5 Beta, Lotus Sametime, Sametime, Sametime 8, Sametime 7.5.1, Adium, Notesbuddy, IBM Community Tools, ICT, Lotusphere2008, Skitch, Productivity Tools, Collaboration, Online Collaboration, Real-Time Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Software, Plugins, Eclipse

Remember when not long ago I created a blog post where I was mentioning that one of the things I was really looking forward to from the IBM Lotusphere 2008 event was getting my hands on the new Lotus Notes 8.5 Beta for the Mac? Well, things have moved on from the time where I was mentioning I was having a couple of issues with it and over the weekend I have just managed to fix them by simply doing a replace of the mail file template with the latest release of the v8 mail file template. And now… it works!!

Actually, it rocks, because, as you would be able to see from the screen shot, I have reached Inbox zero on top of it and it surely looks rather nice being able to play with a very solid release, even though it is still beta, and getting rid of all of the e-mail that may have come over the weekend. Oh, and at the same time check out some of the nifty features that are coming along, like the embedded RSS / Atom feed reader client that, although simplistic, it sees to be the only one keeping up with the heavy update of Web sites like Twitter.

W00t!! Yes, indeed, can you imagine? My mail box running hand in hand next to my Twitter feed? How cool is that? And that is just the beginning, because I am surely going to enjoy this beta release before we move into the next one. First, time now to explore all of the different capabilities, like installing plugins, hacking the Welcome / Home page, etc. etc.

Who said that Mondays couldn’t be fun? Well, mine is so far…

Tags: IBM, Lotus, Lotus Notes, Notes, Notes 8, Notes 8.5, Notes 8.5 Beta, Mac, MacBook Pro, Apple, Notes Client, Productivity Tools, Performance, Eclipse, Lotusphere, Lotusphere2008, Twitter, Syndication, Inbox Zero

Like I have mentioned in another blog post yesterday, this surely was one of the major announcements I was actually really looking forward to during the IBM Lotusphere event… And now that I am back at work, I am just this close to having it fully operational, and running pretty smooth, too, … on the Mac!!

Like someone I know would say … W00t!!!

(I can’t wait to have those issues sorted out and start using Notes 8.5 on the Mac running faster than anything I have seen so far, both on Windows and the Mac!!)

Tags: IBM, Lotus, Lotus Notes, Notes, Notes 8, Notes 8.5, Notes 8.5 Beta, Mac, MacBook Pro, Apple, Windows, Notes Client, Productivity Tools, Performance, Eclipse, Lotusphere, Lotusphere2008

What happens when you find out that your Internet connection has been down for two days in a row and with very little you can do about it to try to fix it? I guess some people would take a couple of days off, others would get some stuff done around the house and, finally, some others would be anxiously waiting for it to come back to life as soon as possible and therefore would keep playing around in front of their computers for hours and hours no end. Well, in my case it was different. Yes, that is right. The last couple of days my Internet connection has been down. Again. Something that I couldn’t do anything about, or so I was told. Since Saturday afternoon till Monday late noon I haven’t been able to do anything other than watching the magic screen hoping it would pop up a message when ready to go. But nothing came through till a few hours ago after two painful days without being connected. I guess you tend to appreciate what you have, when you don’t have it any longer, right?

Now this was happening right after I came back from holidays and it was probably the last thing I wanted to go through, specially contemplating the massive catchup I had to go through. Still, it happened. So after the massive catastrophe I’ve been experiencing with the loss of loads and loads of feed reading materials with Omea Pro, I thought about taking a much more proactive approach towards things and, finally, decided to venture into trying out what I think is one of the most impressive applications from the new Mac Leopard system: Time Machine.

You would remember how in the past I mentioned how I have successfully upgraded my MacBook Pro to Leopard in just a few simple-enough-to-follow steps. Ever since I did it I have been enjoying some of the really nifty new features put together, but I never thought I would be trying out Time Machine so soon. Yet with the huge mess I’ve just been through with Omea Pro I thought what a better way of getting things going with Time Machine today, now that I cannot really do much work without being connected to the Internet? WOW!! What an experience!!

During the Christmas holiday, I actually got two external hard drives as presents and after having moved all of the information away from my Windows machine, I thought I would engage further with the next challenge: making use of Time Machine on the Mac. Well, I am using the word challenge here, but must say that it has been everything but that! In just a few very easy to follow steps I have been able to put one of the hard drives to good use and start backing up my essential Mac files. And all of that within a matter of seconds!!

Then a couple of hours later to finish off doing all of the backups and before I knew it everything was ready to go!! As easy as that! I have now got all of my Windows and Mac stuff fully backed up with Time Machine and I surely feel much much better! Backing your stuff in real time should be as effective and efficient as this particular application does. And the way to navigate through it to find your stuff? Goodness! That is even better!!! I am surely loving it!

And now that I come to think about it, having lost over three years of Web feed readings may have been a good thing, after all, because thanks to that unfortunate incident I decided to take the plunge and start making use of Time Machine, way before I was even thinking about giving it a try. And so far it is looking incredibly better than whatever I would have expected in the past! Just brilliant! If backing up stuff from your computer was ever designed to be elegant, smart, graceful and effective then Time Machine is your solution! And without a single doubt!!

I just wished that such an option would have been available for my Windows notebook. Unfortunately, the two backups I had didn’t work and therefore lost it all. Hopefully, now that I got everything sorted out to work with Time Machine I may no longer be running into the different issues I’ve gone through the end of last year and beginning of this one.

If you haven’t tried out Time Machine just yet and you are using Leopard on a Mac, let me take this opportunity to encourage you all to get yourself an external hard drive and start making use of it. It will all just as easy as plug and play, select a couple of options and start backing up! Nothing else needed! Oh and all of that taking place in the background, while you may be working on something else, and without taking a huge amount of resources! Another big plus!! Once again, just getting stuff done! Because that’s how computers were designed to work in the first place, right? … And I am surely glad that someone has taken that task and provide us with an application that, if anything, is state of the art, unprecedented and a must-have at all costs. Just the way I want it: stuff that works! And beautifully!

Tags: Mac, Apple, MacBook Pro, MBP, Time Machine, Backup, Back up, Omea Pro, Productivity-Tips, Productivity-Tools, Effectiveness, Efficient, Elegance, Ease of Use, Smart, Beautiful Design

If you have been reading this particular blog for a while or if you are one of the folks who have asked me in the past to suggest or recommend an offline feed reader client, you would probably know that for a good couple of years I have always been saying that Omea Pro (From the folks over at JetBrains) was just it: all you needed to have, a powerful offline feed reader that would allow you to keep everything under control and without the hassle from some other clients. Well, that statement is just about to change and here is why. Something that happened during the holidays and which I may never recover from, although I am starting to think that it may well have been a good thing, after all. Who knows…

Anyway, it all started with making use of Adobe AIR to play around with a couple of Twitter clients: Snitter and Twhirl, which was causing some kind of weird white screen Windows crashes. Looks like Adobe AIR Beta 3 still produces those crashes on the Windows machine. And lo and behold one of those crashes, while I have been away on vacation, is the one that has caused me an enormous deal of trouble.

Yes, that is right. I thought, ok, Windows crashed again. No problem, used to it for a while now, I would re-restart and back to normal. Or so I thought. When trying to get Omea Pro back to life I got a nasty error that didn’t allow me to start up the application as normal. It was asking me if I would want to load the data from previous backups. I tried a couple of them I had from the past and to no avail either. I still couldn’t load it and slowly started to get worried about the whole thing.

I searched and searched all over the place for similar symptoms to the one I was experiencing and found nothing! I reported the problem in the Omea Pro forums nearly a month ago and not a single word! I contacted several folks from the support team and still nothing! I just couldn’t get Omea Pro started to get back to my archives and daily feed readings.

By then I was seriously doubting I would ever be back to normal with my favourite feed reader client. No response in the forums, nor from the support team, nothing I could do to fix it that I didn’t try out already. Yes, I know, plain desperate!!

Well, for those folks who may have been using Omea Pro for a while you would remember how it used to an application that you would have to pay some money for. Then after a while something happened and it became freeware and, supposingly, Open Source. And, unfortunately, that is where it went down hill, because from there onwards the lack of support and commitment to a great product has left it in shambles and without a clear guidance of where it will be heading. Perhaps the next step would be to kill it. Permanently. Forever.

I know that is not a good thing, nor a good signal for the thousands and thousands of people who are currently using it. But let’s face it, if you are in trouble, you are on your own. No support, no commitment to help out. Nothing. You and your machine hoping it will be fixed. But it won’t. That is just what happened to me in the last few weeks, while I was away during the holidays.

End result? Hummm, how can I say it? … I still cannot access Omea Pro, getting the same error messages, help is not coming any time soon from anywhere, not even from the people who supposingly fully support it. And to my increasing frustration, while all of this was happening, I realised that I would no longer be able to access over 100,000 articles from several hundred feeds over the course of the last three years that I have been accumulating! All of that is now… gone!!! For good! But that is not all of it.

One of the great features from Omea Pro was the fact that you could create various different annotations for each of the articles, so over the course of the last few months I developed the habit of drafting blog posts directly into Omea Pro which I could then paste into my favourite offline blogging clients and share across various different blogs, both internally and externally. Alas, that is also now gone!!! All of those drafts I had put together and which were going to hit my blogs at some point in time are now locked and cannot get them back! OUCH!!! That is exactly how I felt when I first realised about it!

By that time I was in full panic mode. Losing over 100,000 articles of feed readings is not pleasant at all, but losing the several dozens of drafts I had is just something I am not going to get back any time soon either! Double ouch!! So … fast forward to today, nearly a month afterwards. Still cannot access Omea Pro, lost the over 100,000 articles from all of my feeds from the last few years, lost as well all of the different drafts I had piled up over the course of months. Lost my faith in technology. For good. At least, till I can ever manage to get that data back, which is not looking good thus far, I must say.

Oh, and all of this happening as well with the several dozen feeds I have got for behind-the-firewall resources. So if anyone out there was hoping I would be sharing a particular blog post, both internal and external, on a particular blog entry from last year, I am afraid that is a thing of the past! It’s not going to happen. At least, not any time soon!

So is this the fate of freeware, Open Source? Can we rely on such applications where the support goes from being incredibly good to incredibly bad, or non-existent, in just a few weeks? I surely hope that this is not the case, but right now I feel like I have just lost three years of my Internet / Intranet history. Just like that! In a split second! And without remedy!!

And to think that I have been recommending Omea Pro all along as one of the best, if not the most powerful, of offline feed reader clients?!?! I think that this is going to change. And now! If you are one of the folks who I have been recommending this particular feed reader for some time, I guess that by now you may be worried about what might happen. Yes, you should be. I wouldn’t want any of you folks having to go through the same thing I have gone through in the last few weeks. Thus here I am, writing this blog post encouraging you all to start moving away from Omea Pro and as soon as you can. Because once you encounter a problem, you are on your own, with no further help, nor support and wishing you had changed whenever you had the chance.

My chance was when I moved to the MacBook Pro and started making heavy use of Vienna, which I really really like at the moment, and which has made my life easier back again. I mentioned I had the chance, because I wanted to migrate the stuff from Omea over to the Mac, but I didn’t do it fast enough and now I am facing the consequences. Never again, I tell you. So much so, that was the last drop that filled the glass for my final move away from Windows. Right after that happened I haven’t looked back! I haven’t even turned on any longer the Windows box. Perhaps wanted to save myself the grief of knowing the data is there, but cannot access it. Perhaps it was just the right move and start with a clean slate for 2008. No regrets. Who knows.

The thing is that I am surely never going to recommend Omea Pro any longer to anyone who may be asking for options. I know I lost three years of Web feed reading and several dozens of draft blog posts, so the last thing I would want to do is to send you through to the same hassle. No, I am not going to do that. If you are looking for a Windows based offline feed reader, I have been hearing lots of good feedback with regards to FeedDemon, which, by the way, is now available for free, and which I hope doesn’t go through the same situation that Omea Pro ended up in.

Oh, and if you are using a Mac, Vienna still rules.

Finally, one other thing you may want to do is to have a backup plan. I got myself two actually: BlogLines and Google Reader. Although right now I am not using either of them. Still prefer the Mac & Vienna experiences. And if you haven’t tried them out, by all means, go ahead and do that. You will see what I mean.

And with this long blog post (I really needed to get it out of my chest) I can certainly conclude that my full migration into the Mac environment is now completed. Yes, I know, it was a painful ending, a very painful ending, but … the future is bright and that is what matters.

Tags: JetBrains, Omea, Omea Pro, Syndication, Feed Reader, RSS, Atom, Windows, Adobe, Adobe AIR, Snitter, Twhirl, Twitter, Technology, Web, Internet History, Mac, MacBook Pro, MBP, Apple, Google Reader, BlogLines, Simplicity, Ease of Use, Productivity Tools, Vienna, Freeware, Open Source, Knowledge Snippets, Knowledge Tools, Information Tools, Productivity Tools, Support, Lack of Support, Commitment, Lack of Commitment