As you all know, or should know, IBM will discontinue its cloud offering for Mail and Connections in July 2020. This has raised a lot of questions from customers and partners about what to do, where and how to migrate, etc..
Today HCL hosted a webinar where they explained their strategy to address this concerns.
Mail: There are 2 type of customers, those with a hybrid environment and those with a service only environment. For the first, migration is easy. Just replicate locally the data from the cloud, then replicate it back to your selected cloud provider, or on premise if you decide to move there. For the second HCL is still evaluating options on how to do that.
Connections: HCL has identified three ( for now, others will arrive) partners that have been appointed MSP ( managed service partner ). Those partners will offer a Connections in cloud solution similar to what we have now with IBM. They are Belsoft in Switzerland, ISW in Australia and Prominic in USA Those partners will be provided with a Multi-tenant Connections code, so they will be able to provide the service for multiple customers at the same time. The options for migrations depend on your destination of choice: If you move to a MSP hosted solution for Connections, then IBM and HCL have developed tools to extract the data from the IBM cloud and put it in the MSP environment. If you move to a private cloud or on-premises solution, you have to do the data extraction and import using the public APIs. You can ask to some BP who is familiar with the APIs to help you. I also know some BP are preparing a tool to extract and import the data. We have to wait for some news in this area
Back from holidays a nice news. I have been selected as HCL Master
The HCL Master program is the new HCL branded initiative to recognize individuals that go the extra mile in advocating the HCL Collaboration products. This is the official definition Masters are HCL ambassadors (not employees) and their commitment to sharing their expertise has a huge impact on the HCL community – whether they are blogging, writing books, speaking, running workshops, creating tutorials and classes, offering support in forums, or organizing and contributing to local events – they help make HCL’s mission of making technology play nice, possible. HCL Masters are eager to bring their technical expertise to new audiences both in person and online around the world.
There are also the HCL Grandmasters, who are the former IBM Lifetime Champions.
I am honored to have been elected to join such a group of extraordinary professionals and I will do my best to deserve this.
In the collaboration community, a.k.a yellowverse, the need for step-by-step product guides, installation, tuning, etc… has always been present, not because the official documentation is bad, but because if you follow it, you have to jump from a place to another in order to finish the installation of a product. See for example the installation of Connections where the Knowledge Base tells you “install DB2” and points you to the DB2 KB, then “install WAS” and points you to the WAS KB, and so on.
In the past those kind of guides have been produced, but only because an individual, an IBMer or a community member, felt the need for that and wrote the guide; there are several examples for Connections, Sametime, Docs, … The problem is that those guides were spread in several different places and either you knew where to find it or it was very difficult to do so.
In recent times there has been discussions about this topic between community members and HCL, and we told them that this kind of guides is really needed and asked for help in producing those documents
OpenNTF has decided to take the lead on this topic and provide a place where to store all the community-produced guides. The process is this: one or more people write the guide, submit it to HCL for review and once gotten the HCL approval the guide will be published in the OpenNTF Wiki.
The first guide is available: Installing Domino on Docker, written by Daniel Nashed and Thomas Hampel and curated by me. You can find it here Watch that space because other guides will be published there.
If anyone in the community wants to contribute, or already has produced something, get in touch with me or Graham Acres of OpenNTF and we will help you in the publication of the guide.
In Connections 6 CR5 there is the possibility of changing the owner of one or more files. To do that you need to build a list of file IDs and put it in a text file that then will be used by the wsadmin command to change ownership of those files.
The problem is to find a quick way to get the list of all the files owned by a user. Here is a quick way to do that. Thanks to Adam Gartenberg for the tip.
Step 1: Log in to Connections through a browser as an admin Step 2: Get the user id of the user’s files for which you would like to transfer ownership. You can do this by going to the user’s profile, the id will be in the URL of the page, for example you’ll get a url that looks like this: http://yourserver.yourcompany.com/profiles/html/profileView.do?userid=8c266840-f6df-1032-9a76-d02a14283ea9#&tabinst=Updates Step 3: Use this API call, substitute the UUID for the user who’s files you want to transfer for the string and type that into the address control in the browser http://yourserver.yourcompany.com/files/basic/api/userlibrary/8c266840-f6df-1032-9a76-d02a14283ea9/feed?ps=500 In the above URL snippet, that will get you a feed of the first page of 500 files. If there are less than 500 files, it will get you all of the files, if there are more than 500 files, you will need to run it for each multiple of 500 files there are in the user’s library, where you will have to increment the page parameter for each successive page, note the default page number is 1, so if there are less than 501 files, you can omit the page number parameter. So you may have to run this a number of times depending on the number of files in the user’s library. And if you must, create a new file for each page. Step 4: Save the feed file and as I mentioned add an .xml extension. The feed file comes back in a less than readable and easily parseable form (using Linux command line tools that is).
Now, since I am on Windows I do not have natively the Linux command line tools, so I installed a Ubuntu bash shell in Windows ( see here for how to do that https://itsfoss.com/install-bash-on-windows/ ). You have then to install tidy on that. I issued the following commands sudo apt update then sudo apt install tidy
Step 5: Now in the Linux shell type this command: tidy -xml library-feed-page-1.xml | grep “<td:uuid>” | tr -d ” ” | tr ‘\>’ ‘ \>’ | tr ‘\<\/’ ‘ \<\/’ | awk ‘{print $2}’ | tee just-the-ids.txt
you will get as result a text file called just-the-ids.txt that contains the list of all the files owned by the user you selected before
You can find it on Passport Advantage with the P/N CJ5A1ML
This first version contains the IBM Sametime Community Server V10.0 Windows (32 bit only) , as it was for Sametime 9, in a couple of weeks should ship a new version with the Community server 10 64 bit
