January 12th, 2012
Take my Job - Please!
For those of you headed down to Lotusphere, please come learn my job. I'm serious. My courageous and foolish colleague Todd Bailey agreed to help me with a Show'n'Tell session on troubleshooting calendars. For 2 hours on Monday, right after the OGS, we will both Tell and Show you how we do our job. You'll get an entire slide deck with instructions on troubleshooting, tools and their usage and best practices. You've asked for it, well here it is. Get there early for a seat!
But first, if you're around on Sunday, stop by and see Jess Stratton and me tell you How Stuff Works - Domino Style. This year, even faster and better. For 2 hours, learn the inner workings of many of the processes you use every day. We're speaking twice, and we know some of you will be watching football (Giants vs Packers at 4:30 PM), but show up at the early session if you can.
SHOW101 Ace Time Detective -Developing Expert skills in Calendar Troubleshooting
Speakers: Todd J. Bailey, Susan Bulloch
SW Osprey 1-2 - Monday 10:30 AM - 12:15 PM
JMP103 "How Stuff Works" – IBM Lotus Domino Style!
Speakers: Susan Bulloch , Jess Stratton
DL S. Hemisphere I - Sunday 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM
Repeats: SW Pelican 1-2 - Sunday 04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
I'm really looking forward to this Lotusphere, so come see me - and learn my job!
October 24th, 2011
Of Lotusphere Sessions and Speakers
It's that time again. Time for many of you to think about making that step this year and going out on stage at Lotusphere. Time to see if your idea is one of the ones selected - and you get to know that feeling of panic when if does.
I will be the track manager for the Best Practices track again this year. This is the track for you community speakers (non-IBMers) to bring your real world scenarios and show how you made our technologies work for your customers. Dense, technical stuff delivered without making your attendees fall asleep. A tall order...
"Community speakers" are consultants, customers, bloggers, people whose livelihood depend on IBM and IBM software. They shine in the Jumpstart and ShowNTell tracks as well as the BP tracks. IBMers do not typically speak in the BP track unless they happen to be going to Lotusphere anyway.
For speaker hopefuls: Your abstract sells. We have to go through a lot of them. Tell me what you're going to offer the attendees that makes it worth their trip. Tell me crisply. Attendees like technical information delivered in interesting ways. Gabriella Davis has a great blog entry about how to create a session abstract here. Read it, seriously - now. Bring your best game.
This year, the submission form is a little different. The abstract box is limited to 1000 characters - that's not a lot, but there are 3 other blocks - what your attendees will learn - that are 350 characters each. Write your abstract to sell the take homes in that 3 block session. You'll need the extra space in the abstract block to add the names of other speakers if you plan to use more than one speaker. Create a speaker profile for each speaker if they aren't already in the database (you can search for existing profiles). There is no way to add more than one speaker to the form, so there's been some confusion, but we don't want to limit your creativity. Use the space creatively to tell what each speaker can add - we may need to negotiate wording or other details later if you're chosen, but that happens every year.
Lastly, I will be around if you have questions. Ask me. On twitter I am notesgoddess. I have gmail using firstname.lastname at gmail.com. Work is first_last at us.ibm.com. I’m on LotusLive Sametime and usually on Bleedyellow. On Skype, I’m the only me in the US and there’s a picture of a 2 year old me up there. I was cute. The bottom line is - if you have a question and can’t find me online somewhere, turn in your Geek cred - you won’t be needing it.
Ok 2 weeks. Game on. Send em in.
October 16th, 2011
Learn Notes C&S - in Barcelona or online
Once again this year, I'm fortunate enough to be speaking for the View in Europe. Next month, I'll be in Barcelona at AdminEurope. I hear there's an Xpages seminar also for you developer types!. Would love to see you there if you're able to come. If you can't make it, check out the article that I wrote here: http://bit.ly/oFuSjq . It's C&S tips and yes, you'll need a subscription to read the whole thing. You could come to Barcelona and see the tips live if its easier to get travel expenses than subscription approval. I hope to be seeing some of you soon.
August 20th, 2011
Hanging up the Rolling Bag
I’ve been working in a new role at IBM for a little over a month. After a being on the road or on call pretty much every day for over 2 years, I basically broke down - blew a gasket - called in crazy. Travel for work sucks. Stress got to me, and I requested something different.
One good thing about working in a large corporation is that sometimes there’s a magical set of circumstances that let good things happen. At about the same time, several other people in the support group expressed a desire for change and in a move worthy of Major League baseball, four of us were traded to different departments and all landed in jobs we could do as well, or better than the ones we left.
So what am I doing? Still support - just not road support. and no surprise - the group I’m in supports C&S. So as a few of you have found out, when you open a PMR, sometimes it will be me who calls you back. I’ll be doing that - solving PMRs, answering questions, but also producing more documentation. Which I expect you to read before calling by the way!
So what do I get out of this? I traded freedom for a phone shift - but predictable hours - my day starts and ends on a schedule. Its a LOT of work - especially in the summer - lots of calls per person - and some seriously weird problems. My team mates are rock solid - I’ve worked with them for over a year already, so they know me and I know them. We work together on your issues. I get to specialize in something I already know well. I’ll still have to learn the new products and technology, so I’m keeping my edge with Traveler, Connections and LotusLive. I don’t HAVE to do that, but I want to.
I’ll still speak at conferences - The View has invited me to Barcelona in November with a few others - and I’m grateful for the opportunity and the chance to see my European friends and maybe even some family there. I’m hoping to be involved in helping to plan Lotusphere again this year - and its not to early to be planning your presentations for that. (You’re welcome - I needed to make you nervous already.)
I have lots of other things on my list also - like move this blog to Wordpress, write some for fun, travel for fun, get more rest, and get more exercise.
I’ve worked for IBM since 2000, and for all but 3 years or so, I’ve been in full time travel jobs. I need a break. I’m getting too old for it. I am grateful to my mangers at IBM that helped make this possible. And I am excited about the new opportunity and my brain and body have both relaxed. So don’t forget - Get Social, do Business and all that, and get cracking on your Lotusphere ideas.
April 7th, 2011
Get Social, Do Business - How do I do that?
So before, I mentioned that I'd be back asking for help with my job - and here I am. As I said before, we (IBM employees) are being asked to Get Social and Do Business. What's really happening is a lot of discussion about what that means. One discussion I was in recently included "How do we MAKE people use Connections?" I very quickly gave the opinion that attempts to force the use of social software would result in shutting down participation - does anybody else share that opinion?
So how is IBM to do this and what exactly does it look like when we've done it? Goodness knows we've gathered up enough business analytics companies to be able to measure it all, but what to measure? Here's where you come in.
The way I figure it, my job in IBM Support is to help customers with software. Since I'm in the
Those of you who know me know that I will pretty much respond to any ping on Sametime, Skype (the more active route of pinging) or email. I respond to business partners and customers alike and do so without 'credit' from my management, because its who I am. In the past, Ed or Mary Beth or I have responded directly to customers who posted blog entries on our sites or on YOUR websites and solved problems or answered questions. Again, this doesn't get seen by management, but it does solve your problem.
Is this what IBM has to do in order to be social and do business. Are blogs still relevant? Quite a few IBMers have tried blogging and after a few entries, the sites died. Do we wait for you to contact us or complain? How do we get proactive with using 'social"?
Interestingly enough, I got this link in a Skype chat this morning (Thanks Marie) - "How IBM Uses Twitter for Marketing". Awesome! I went to the IBM Intranet to get a link so I could encourage my work friends to sign up and use twitter and guess what? There's nothing - anywhere on the Intranet about this. I searched several different ways and got nothing - so somebody somewhere in IBM has declared this, but the message delivery is spotty at best. And I'm not sure I want IBM to follow my tweets, ya know?
So, I'm encouraging ideas - How do I (and my colleagues) Get Social and Do Business and better yet, how to I do it in a way that my management writes pretty things on my review next year and gives me tons of money in raises and bonuses? (Okay, that last part is far fetched, but it just flowed).
Talk to me.
March 10th, 2011
Get Social, Do Business Part 1 - Living in Two Worlds
Well, the Big Dog has come to play in the world of ‘social’. Welcome to all the people from my employer, IBM who are this year being challenged to “Get Social, Do Business”. To my friends who created the social world of the Yellow Bubble (largely Business Partners and staunch defenders of the faith inside companies) here are my friends and colleagues - IBM - please be gentle as they learn the ropes.
Many of you know that I’ve been blogging for some time. It started out because Richard Schwartz said once at Lotusphere: “Where are all the wimmin?” Because almost all of the early bloggers were men. I decided to blog about Notes Admin and other stuff, and if you read through my archives, there’s as much ‘other stuff’ there as there is anything technical. Frankly the explosion of blogs and wikis and decent search engines makes anything technical I publish sort of duplicate work.
But there’s something else. I live in 2 worlds - Certainly I’m a ‘blogger’ - one of the weirdos of the Internets who thinks anybody cares what I say, but also as an IBMer I’ve been writing official developerWorks articles for many years . Now this new toy called a wiki allows me to post stuff ‘officially’ that is interesting and helpful (like the C&S Schema) without going through Blue Tape (which is what I call the processes that all big corporations use to slow everything down). So now I can basically post stuff to an official product wiki that I would have posted to my blog in the past and it becomes part of the ‘official’ product knowledge for the people who follow in our career paths (or historians after the product is dead, depending on whom you choose to believe). And here’s the thing - purely selfishly, I get ‘credit’ for posting to the wikis and dW that I really don’t get posting to my own blog.
It is in my personal financial career interests to continue posting as part of official product support team. And those who know me know that I will continue because I am not stupid. Yet, I’m a bubble person, I’m a yellow bleeder, I hang out with the bloggers and business partners at conferences because I know more of you and you have incriminating photos. You scare my Blue brethren and many of them don’t know you exist. (Sorry, but its true). We’ll discuss PlanetLotus in a later blog post as I teach my colleagues about you.
So now here come this horde of strangers wanting to get all friendly and do stuff and have no idea of the mores and rules of the swamp we live in. It’s not Facebook - and that’s as social as most IBMer have gotten in their personal lives - we bloggers do tweet - most of us, most don’t use Connections for our socialness and frankly the largest communities I’m in are Skype communities. It’s going to be a challenge living with the new kids who are barging in all ready to ‘be Social’. We are indeed being exhorted to do so by our management - and I will ask you to help me with an assignment I’ve been given soon.
But friends, they’re here. Finally. IBM ‘gets it’. What they get is that the world that’s out here - where we live is where THEY should be, because WE made it worthwhile. Like young puppies, their huge paws will step on things and they’ll track hair and dirt all over the beanbags and sofas and they’ll change names of things you love and you’ll get mad. Property values will rise. But - IBM is celebrating its 100th year. I don’t always agree with management direction or choices, but I believe they’ll be here for more years than I need to work, because even if they don’t innovate always - as with geographically challenged coworker Watson, they’re moving - the elephant is taking dancing lessons.
So give my clumsy, awkward, mom and dad-like, country bumpkin or Harvard educated IBM dorks a break. Let them try their hands at this ‘social’ stuff. We may get a few new friends.
More soon - I need ideas!
January 26th, 2011
Living The Dream
Everybody remembers the first time right? The first time I attended Lotusphere, I had changed careers, was working for a bank where I was expected to take a lead role in moving from mainframe mail to Lotus Notes, I had bluffed my way into the job and needed to quickly learn what i needed to do. I made attending Lotusphere a condition of accepting a permanent position and there I sat in the OGS. I honestly couldn’t tell you who the OGS guest speaker was - nor can I really tell you who was onstage much at all. But the energy of the show was amazing.
I watched the speakers from Lotus - they had passion. they loved what they did . You could almost touch it. I watched a guy named Rob Slapikoff on stage. He was confident and passionate, funny and scary smart. Somewhere I thought, “That must be amazing to be up there and do that.” I also saw Gary Devendorf and Bob Balaban and many others speak that year. All were incredible.
Notes 4.6 was the new release that year. I attended sessions at every time slot, took dozens of pages of notes, got fabulous ideas. I went to parties, I rode rides, I took in the whole experience. I went back home and got to work building an email system that is currently running at version 8.5. Along the way, I felt the pull to work for the place with passion and fun and energy. I even dreamed of being on stage. If only....maybe....nah, probably not, but its a dream. I’m too old for that.
Flash forward to now. Life has happened. In 2000, not really long after my 2nd Lotusphere, I was hired by Lotus (yes, it says that on my letter). I was in Field Support, and went went to Lotusphere as a staffer a couple of years later. Later, I conned my friend Kathleen into joining the team I was on and we had the audacity to submit a session for speaking at Lotuphere and were picked. We were on stage for 2 hours for a jumpstart and went on to do many presentations in every Lotusphere since. We had fun, we got good grades. We loved what we did even when we were exhausted and overwhelmed. We even got to one of the big rooms one year - the type I’d seen Slapikoff in. We were terrified and excited and to this day I can hardly believe it - the room was nearly packed.
This year I was privileged to work in the planning of the show as a track manager. It’s hard unpaid work with long hours. Yet I love it. I will do it again if they let me. I read the blogs, I hear the negative, but I also see the passion. The ‘yellow bubble’ is a near cult-like experience, full of fans and cynics alike, George Carlin often quoted that cynics were disappointed idealists, and I truly believe that. But the passion is what drives me - the energy and the dream.
Several years ago, Maestro Benjamin Zander challenged us all to live our lives with passion. He also had a room that contained some of the most cynical, die hard geeks crying and singing Ode to Joy in German - loud!
This year, on Sunday afternoon at 1:30, in the Dolphin Hemisphere S, you’ll see me near the stage getting ready to present with my friend Bruce Kahn, then later that day with my friend Jess Stratton and later in the week with Francie Tanner. I’ll be miked up and pacing the aisles or behind the stage walking and muttering - that’s adrenaline - stage fright, even passion. I pace and chat and mutter to tamp it down to the level where I don’t freak out. Because when they lower the music and raise the lights and that spotlight shows ME on stage at Lotusphere 2011, I’m truly living a dream.
Come live it with me!
See you in Orlando! Safe travels, everyone.
January 11th, 2011
Hosting GURUpalooza at Lotusphere 2011
Yes, OK - I know what you're thinking. What is GURUpalooza? Isn't the nerdfest called Lotusphere a GURUpalooza all week? Well, yes and no. There are gurus and near-gurus running all over the place there. Some are IBMers, some are not. Some get up on stage, some hide in the labs and wait for you to find them. But for the past several years, GURUpalooza has been a place where attendees and speakers alike show up to try and stump some experts. It features NON-IBM speakers from the Best Practice, Jump Start and Show n Tell tracks.
These GURUs are people who work with the Lotus products, who come onsite for you as consultants and integrators and repair crews. They don't write the code, but they know how to extend it, to make it work better and generally make your work life easier.
Enough though - this crowd doesn't need encouragement - they are NOT shy, they don't need praise and they will hurt each other to get onstage to answer your questions. The answers they give can be interesting. They are not afraid to give opinions that we IBMers might not give. Its a 'must see' session.
This year, I've been the Track Manager for the Best Practices track. (Frankly its a lot harder than I thought it would be, but that's another post). My civilian counterpart and traditional host, Rocky Oliver can't make it to Lotusphere this year, so he left me an incredible responsibility - that of Host, moderator, zookeeper and chief stage manager for GURUpalooza 2011, the sequel. I want to invite all the attendees who aren't attending other sessions to trundle over to the Swan for the spectacle,
Date: Thursday, Feb 3
Time: 10:00 AM
Place: Swan 5-10
Link: GURUpalooza
You've gotten an email from me if you're expected onstage - either your speaker letter or an email this week. For GURUs who didn't qualify this year to sit onstage, I invite you to sit on or near the front row in the bullpen . If the panel is stumped, I will call on the bullpen to answer.
I promise nothing other than great answers, great fun and really good take home information. Use your Lotusphere session database to add this to your already crowded schedule!
September 30th, 2010
Notes C&S Schema Update
If you've ever tried to program around the calendar in Lotus Notes, you've probably run across the calendar schema. It lists the fields and forms and has definitions. Well, I came up with the bright idea to put it up in the wiki to make it easier to find and easier to update. It has taken some time to get it all up there, but the Lotus Notes C&S schema is finally online here:
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ddwiki.nsf/dx/cs_schema_toc
There are also some awesome explanations of how stuff works in the C&S workflow - complete with pictures - so even if you're not a developer, go look through it.
Many, many thanks to Joy Freeman for posting and organizing this. Bruce Kahn and Nathan Barry are the brains over in dev who put the latest info in there. I simply add it to the right places.
Here's how we make this thing work. As you know, with a wiki, anybody can post. You can make changes to this stuff - but as mentioned above, I have some braniacs who know what they're doing who provide the content, so it would be best to ask first. And here's how that happens. If you see errors or need something added, follow the instructions at the TOC page there, send mail to ndinfo@us.ibm.com with C&S Schema in the subject line. I will get your email in my inbox and will either fix/add or route the request. I really want to make this accessible and useful.
Oh - and anybody who wants to post sample code out there, that would be good too!
To all the frustrated developers out there: cheers!
Susan
June 19th, 2010
A Good Week
Every now and then it happens at work. You have A Good Week. I had one this week.
My current job involves travel. Most of my 11 years at Lotus/IBM have been spent working road jobs, some by choice, this last one as the result of a reorganization a couple of years ago. In the past, I might go onsite to teach, help with system planning, or now and then for emergencies of some sort. It was a fun job for a while, but the travel, especially after 2001 was/is brutal and I just got burned out and moved to a desk. As I told my manager then when I left that job, "I love this work, I hate the job."
The current job puts me on site with customers almost exclusively when something is wrong. The calls usually come at the last minute, some days the same day you need to get on the plane. This makes the job uniquely stressful for me and for my colleagues in the same group and our teammates in the worldwide groups. On the worst days, you walk in with a Big Blue target on your back and you take the bullets and try to fix things and you stay there as long as you need to - sometimes weeks. Sometime you win, sometimes you lose - you get jaded. You go home a wreck. On the best days, you are seen as Mighty Mouse, "Here I come to save the day!", and you walk in, fix things and walk out an average of 3-4 days later. All else is in between.
Hotels look the same, airports blend together and all airports are awful. You remember customer's faces and forget their names. You see them later and stumble, stammer and try not to look stupid. The best your brain can come up with is: Customer - nice one, or Customer - mean one. You go to places you've never heard of and you go to boring places and now and then you get to go to New York City and visit friends every night. Mostly, its a lonely existence with a lot of late hours working in hotel rooms because you have nothing else to do, you eat the same food everywhere. You call home for comfort. Those with kids sometimes miss birthdays and events - although to our collective credit, most push back now on this kind of stuff. Everybody with a significant other gets hammered on the home front because they too are lonely, left to handle things and want your attention and focus when you get home - at the exact time you want to simply walk into your house, find a quiet place and get your legs back under you.
Every now and then you have what's classified as a Good Week. I had one this week. I walked into a customer who needed some help, but who wasn't sinking. They recognized me from my speaking gigs at Lotusphere and for the View conferences. They liked my sessions and were (I think) glad to see me. Best of all I was able to pull together what they needed using my resources and friends and get most of their issues handled and left them in a better place. I will write up a report with more detailed stuff later. But the place and the people were great. The hotel (a Hilton) was outstanding - they had a bathrobe laid out on my bed when I checked in (how nice!) and there was fresh fruit, cheese and crackers in my room (that just never happens in these days of corporate cutbacks.) The hotel had a walking track out back and the weather was fantastic.
The guys at the customer site (#nerdgirl ratio 7:1) were all super nice, very competent, just a little over whelmed. One guy in particular pushed me to get out to a local Asian restaurant with him for a quick lunch one day instead of the usual eat-at-your-desk normal days I have on the road. His reason? "I'm worried about you being lonely and eating by yourself all the time when you travel." It was seriously all I could do to not bust out in tears. Of course I went out for lunch. One joke that these fellows kept making was that they didn't want to go onto my slides for how NOT to do things in Domino. I told them that Paul Mooney does those, and they didn't rate on a worst practices scale - at all.
Also this week I got an individual shout out from my manager on our internal quarterly virtual meeting held by our director for my ability to stay upright for 11 years on this job, for completing my Master's Degree this month while doing it, and for helping out with training our internal groups. It was an unexpected pat on the back, nothing more and much appreciated. It doesn't take much to make me happy sometimes.
My job is what it is and I'll make the best of it. I love helping, I love fixing, I freaking hate airports. I got a pat on the back - that helps. I met some really nice and kind people whose names and faces I will NOT forget. I walked into an Apple store down the road that had a 16G iPad in stock and did NOT buy it and my credit cards thanked me. I caught a standby seat on an earlier flight and got home 3 hours before expected and managed to make it out to hear some live music last night. Thanks to the people and the things that made this week an official Good Week.
