Symetrik Domino Consulting

A few weeks ago, I posted about the fact that I had been laid off.

I live in Hong Kong and Domino/Lotus jobs don’t seem to be prevalent here at the moment.

In the meantime, I’ve taken time to “re-charge” my batteries and spend time with family and catch up on some todos around the house that had been procrastinated on for some time.

Now that I’ve got some time to focus, I have decided to learn PHP. I have thought about it for a very long time, but have never made the time to do it.

I figure that I’m excellent with server and infrastructure management and the tools to manage the infrastructure, excellent with Domino management and support, but lacking in any programming areas.

I do tend to do freelance work on the side, away from the corporate environment that are usually LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) type projects. This entails usually setting up a Drupal site, or similar open source PHP web application and hacking the CSS and theme to get it looking right.

I am familiar with working “around” PHP, but not a master at writing or even editing it.

I’ve starting looking into the online resources that are available and it looks like there are some really good free resources, both tutorials and video tutorials.

I’m just wondering if there is anyone out there that can give any good starting advice for someone that is more of an all around IT management person and is used to mostly keeping servers, up, configured, and running that does not really have any programming concepts experience.

Also, I’ve started looking at the Zend Framework for PHP. I’m wondering if that really is a standard for developing PHP applications.

One thing I’m wondering is why you would not use the Zend Framework? It seems like a no brainer to use it especially if you were developing something from scratch.

You may have known about this for some time, but i’ve just discovered the PocketMac for Blackberry software that is available from RIM.

I was helping a friend backup/synch his contacts on his Blackberry Pearl yesterday and we were just about to purchase and download the Missing Synch, but a Google search yielded the PocketMac for Blackberry software, and the update, which are both available here.

It works very well, and the default configuration is to synch your contacts with the Mac OS X address book, you calendar entries and tasks with your iCal calendar.

It was simple to configure (actually I didn’t have to change anything), simple to use, and FREE.

kudos to RIM for this. I might actually consider buying a personal Blackberry now versus a iPhone or other smartphone.

I’ve been in the market for a smartphone, but many of them (non iPhone or Blackberry) don’t easily synch with the Mac’s. This makes the choice for a Blackberry much easier for me.

I’m wondering how I missed the release of this though?

I knew it was inevitable, but I’ve been laid off on grounds of “cost cutting – due to economic crisis.”

As a result, I won’t be continuing my “Migrating to Exchange – One Domino Admin’s tell all journey” series.

I hope it was informative to those out there that haven’t had the chance to work with Exchange, but have heard all the hype over the past few years.

Here is my summary:

• Microsoft is not the best solution, but it does integrate well with it’s other products (desktop, email, document management, proxy servers, firewalls, security). You can have an end-to-end solution. There are obviously downsides to putting all of your eggs in one basket, but it has to be said.
• Microsoft Sales team promises alot that they can’t deliver.
• If you use Microsoft Engineering team to implement what the Microsoft Sales team has sold you, you will get proof positive on the previous point. Even the Engineering team will admit that they’ve oversold you.
• If you are going to migrate to Microsoft, get a 3rd party independent consulting company to implement it for you or at least help with managing the project.
• When migrating to Microsoft, keep an eye on the cost of additional hardware, the cost of SQL server licenses, and the cost of bandwidth upgrades which will be inevitable and make sure and factor in those extra costs. You won’t have a server for server comparison between your existing products and Microsoft. You may be able to use virtual machines for some of your systems, but some of the systems require physical hardware and/or cannot exist on the same box as other servers.
• Single Copy Storage that Microsoft has touted for Exchange is a myth (for lack of a better word) and Microsoft Engineering is actually recommending against factoring it in as a disk saving attribute when doing capacity planning. Single Copy Storage is only valid across each Exchange Store (database) on an Exchange server, and typically, you will have several Exchange Stores on each server – so the benefit is minimal.
• Only a certain number of mailboxes can exist on an exchange server and those mailboxes must be split amongst different Exchange Stores (databases). There is recommended limit to how many stores you put on each Exchange server. It’s actually quite a bit more complicated than the Domino database model and Domino’s DAOS (which is server wide).
• I can’t stress enough how much more bandwidth you will need compared to a Domino infrastructure.
• There were many things that I felt Microsoft did much better than Domino, such as the Calendaring and Scheduling, but I won’t get into that here.

…..and yes, I am interested in contract work, please contact me at the link on the navigation menu (upper right).

This was originally drafted on March 31st, 2009 and I’m just now getting to publishing it.

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I sat in on an Office Communications Server 2007 design discussion and here are a few points that we covered that I felt noteworthy.

The client must have Microsoft Office Communicator installed. I guess this must be different from Microsoft MSN client and Microsoft Windows Live client.

As part of the unified communications concept, you have “One number” which means that a user can be contacted on different devices/numbers at the one number. Sort of like smart routing.

3rd party Internet awareness with AOL/Yahoo must be subscribed to a service from Microsoft

Exchange 2007 server Unified Messaging role – can route phone calls, read your email to you over the phone, read your voicemail to you over the phone, etc. I believe alot of PBX and other hardware dependencies must be in place for this to be a reality.

OCS 2007 archiving role…can act as instant messaging journaling. Archiving can be journaled by Symantec Enterprise Vault. The benefit of this is that e-discovery for legal can take place in one technology for a particular query instead of having to use Facetime archiving search tool for e-discovery of IM history.

I first Drafted this on March 18th, 2009 after a meeting with Microsoft Design Engineers and I’m just getting to publishing it. Only a few factoid type bits of information is included and the final number of servers that we’ll need to implement compared with the existing number of Domino servers.

I apologize in advance for the vagueness.

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If you have 2003 outlook clients, you must have public folders server to provide free/busy time services to outlook 2003 clients.

Outlook 2007 can connect directly to mailbox servers over MAPI

However, all other types of connections or clients, need to connect through the Client Access Server (CAS) server which routes us through to the Mailbox server for every transaction.

Every messages must go through a hub transport server, even if two mailboxes are on the same mailbox server.
This is generally to achieve journaling better.

Before Domino servers 38 including 3 BES servers (15 sites) after Exchange user servers 105 (14 sites)