Teamstudio Voices

Tags: Lotusphere 2010 Announcements

I am very excited to let you know that we will be demonstrating Teamstudio Voyager, a new solution that enables Lotus Notes developers to build BlackBerry applications using the familiar Domino Designer client.

Here is a screen shot of the development environment.





Here is a screen shot of what a (simple) application might look like on the BlackBerry.





Full menu integration, clean layout, ease of use, everything you would expect from a native BlackBerry application.

The product won’t be available until later this year, but I would love to have you all come by and get a quick demo of the product. So come visit us at stand 428/429 at Lotusphere.

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 9:04 AM | Location: Beverly, MA | Permalink | Comments (1) |      

Tags: Personal

As many of you know, one of our colleagues and friends at Teamstudio, Andrew Fentiman, was in the Territorial Army and was recently deployed to Afghanistan. It is with deep sadness that we have to announce that Andrew was killed during active service on Sunday November 15th 2009.

We were absolutely devastated to have lost Andrew. We would like to express our deepest sympathy to his family and friends. Andrew was a remarkable young man who will be missed by all of us here at Teamstudio. He had a fantastic sense of humor and it was a pleasure to work with him.

We are grateful for the time that we got to share with Andrew.

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 6:57 PM | Location: Beverly, MA | Permalink | Comments (5) |      

Tags: Community
As a marketing person, I often hear how we need to avoid the word enterprise when describing Teamstudio products or services. The word is an overused marketing phrase that has lost most (all?) meaning to most IT professionals. But a quick read of the Computerworld Web site might indicate otherwise.

Gmail’s recent outage early this month must have been extremely frustrating for their customers as this outage applied to both the free version and the Google Apps email Service. This isn’t the first outage either. If you recall, there were widespread crashes back in February and then again in May of this year.

Maybe the use of enterprise when describing Lotus Notes, products from Teamstudio and others has a place after all.

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 6:14 AM | Location: Beverly, MA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Tags: Good Practice
Years ago, most companies operated a help desk to assist computer users when they had problems with their hardware or software. (Frequently they didn’t’ know the difference.) The help desk was staffed with entry level employees and given no tools to help them with their job. Through no fault of their own, they earned the nickname “helpless desk”.

Today the term Service Desk is used in place of Help Desk. At least part of the motivation for this change is to avoid the negative reputation of the help desk. But the difference is more than semantics. These really are different things.

Help Desk

• Incident management
• Maintenance of asset inventory
• Separate from the business
• Create and maintain knowledge of applications, etc.
• Possibly provide self-help capabilities such as a knowledgebase
• The may have a technology-based service level agreement (SLA)

Service Desk

• Includes everything that is part of a help desk
• Integrated into the business
• Responsible for incident management, problem management, change management and configuration management
• Business-oriented SLA
• Operating Level Agreements (OLA – How the Service Desk will work with its internal support partners.)

Which one do you have? Both desks have a place. One is not necessarily right and the other wrong. However in setting proper expectations among your users, you should call it what it is. Members of the Help Desk and Service Desk organizations have a hard enough job without getting set up for failure.

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 10:12 AM | Location: Beverly, MA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Tags: Teamstudio Products

Teamstudio has recently announced a new contest soliciting the very best Teamstudio tool tips. Tens of dollars in cash and prizes (Just kidding about the cash actually.) can be had by sending in your best tool tip for any Teamstudio tool.

So what qualifies as a good tool tip? Well it could be anything. For example, you might have found a clever way to use one of our products in a context that makes it easier, faster, etc. Or you might have found a use for one of our tools that might not have been it's original purpose. For example the low tack adhesive used on Post-it Notes was not invented for that purpose. In fact, Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M discovered this adhesive by accident. It wasn't until 5 years later that one of his colleagues, Art Fry, came up with the idea of using it to anchor his bookmark in his hymnbook.

Okay, maybe we won't discover the next Post-it Notes idea here, but I'm sure there are a lot of clever ways you are using our products that we never thought of. Let us know. Send them in. Besides the great prizes, you will also have an opportunity to participate in a Teamstudio Tool Time showing off some of these incredible tool tips.

For more information about the Teamstudio Tool Tip Contest, please click on the Tool Tips Contest Flyer link. I can't wait to see what you come up with!

8kgevfp9s2

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 3:23 PM | Location: Beverly, MA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Tags: Hobbies Personal

I can see from the article below that Michael Wenn is having some great triathlon success with an early win. Congratulations Michael!

http://www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk/sport/Triathlon-Wenn-wins-novice-event.5350712.jp

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 11:15 AM | Location: Beverly, MA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Tags: Fun

Teamstudio recently conducted a survey, just for fun, where we asked a variety of questions from length of commute to when we would come out of this recession. It was fun to do with some interesting results. If you participated in the survey, thanks very much. If not, you might still enjoy the results posted below.

Since we were curious to see what differences might exist between Lotus Notes Developers and Admins, (and in my case, Managers and C-Level executives), I grouped those of you who are either and Admin/Manager or a Developer/Manager as either Admin or Developer. I also group Managers and C-Level executives into a single category. For those of you who are a Developer/Admin, I left you alone. Finally, we did not have anyone who described their role as "Procurement" respond to the survey, so I left them off. We had 107 people respond to the survey.

There were some interesting and in some cases, unexpected results. The results are included here as an Excel spreadsheet. Some of the highlights (at least for me) are as follows:

        - There seems to be more optimism about when the recession would end than what I expected to see, although Admins are a bit more optimistic than Developers. However neither group is as pessimistic as Managers and C-Level executives.
        - All agree that Internet surfing is the biggest waste of work time, with Admins and Developers having almost identical results.
        - Admins on average get less sleep (I could have guessed that ) and less exercise. (I guess they are busy chasing their end users and developers around work all day.)
        - Developers are (apparently) willing to drive further to get to work.
        - All groups prefer coffee as their caffeinated beverage of choice, but Admins felt more strongly about it. Surprisingly, NO ONE completing the survey selected an Energy Drink such as Red Bull.
        - More than 25% of Admins don't have time to read. Those who do prefer novels followed by Science Fiction. Developers also prefer novels followed by nonfiction.

I hope you enjoy reviewing the results from this survey. Please let me know if you have any follow up questions. I am happy to do my best to answer them.

Scott

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 9:16 AM | Location: Beverly, MA | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Tags: Lotus Notes Developers Admins

Having recently come back from Admin/Developer 2009 in Boston, I was struck again by the differences between Notes Developers and Admins. Now a lot of what is said (and presented) is all in good fun, a lot of it is said with tongue in cheek, and some of it is pure and simple honesty. At least the opinion is.

Here is a survey that will tell us for sure if Developers and Admins really are different. The survey only takes a minute to complete, I think you will enjoy completing it, and I will share the results with you after the survey closes.

Thanks in advance for your participation.

Scott

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 2:49 PM | Location: Beverly, MA USA | Permalink | Comments (2) |