A few months ago, OpenNTF started testing the waters of moving our Slack community over to Discord. The immediate impetus for this was the message-history limitation of our Slack account: on the free tier, we were losing old messages, but upgrading a community of our size to a paid tier would be cost-prohibitive.
Once we started looking into using Discord, we found that it offered much more for us than just avoiding history loss. Discord quickly proved itself a much-better match for our community, with better community controls, better voice/video chat with screen sharing, and just generally a more community-focused approach.
Joining
Since it’s gone so smoothly in a “soft launch”, we think it’s ready to invite everyone more openly. To join our Discord community, visit:
Almost all blog posts about the announcements made by HCL at the Engage conference have reported that the naming of the products will change. No more numbers but names, so the next releases of Domino will be named after rivers : Danube, then Thames then Rio Grande.
Geography is definitely the theme, so for those who did not attend the Sametime related sessions the news is that also Sametime next versions will have a geographical theme. Instead of rivers they will be named after mountain ranges, the first one will be Eifel ( a mountain range in Germany ), then Lorenzo ( Argentina ) then Petros ( Ukraine ).
Connections releases will have tree names, beginning with Cedar
I have the weird feeling that this decision of getting rid of numbers and switch to names is not completely unrelated to the fact that the next version of Domino and Sametime would have been 13 and we all know that in the USA that number is not exactly considered a lucky one 🙂 . But maybe I am overthinking….. or not ? 😉
I had an engagement recently where I had to install Connections 7 plus Component Pack and Huddo Boards.
The story of the Connections and Component Pack installation has been interesting, the customer decided to change the domain name from something like company.local to a proper domain like company.org after the installation was done; too long for this post but if you meet me at some event and want to know the details, ask me.
I have never installed Huddo Boards before, so that was an interesting challenge, and I managed to perform the installation successfully thanks to my friends and fellow HCL Ambassadors Urs Meli (Belsoft) and Wannes Rams (ISW). Their help has been really invaluable.
There are a couple of steps that gave me some problems so I will explain what I did to solve them following Urs suggestions, maybe it can be useful if you want to install Huddo Boards.
The version of Huddo Boards that ships with Connections is not the latest one, so I followed the instructions to install the most recent one from the Huddo docker repository on Dockerhub. Here are the instructions
If you want to do that, there is a setting that is not outlined in the documentation; you have to put this the boards-cp.yml : useDockerHub: true
Put it in the minio: section like this
Another issue was that the ImageTag setting was not working for me. It is used to get a specific version of Huddo Boards from their repo but when I set it I could not pull the images locally. The solution is not use that setting, because if it’s not specified, then the installation will pull the latest version of Huddo Boards. To do this comment the ImageTag setting in boards-cp.yml like this
I have the honor and the pleasure of helping the Sametime Wizard himself, Tony Payne of HCL, in the delivery of the “Sametime Deployment” workshop that will be on Monday, May 23 at 15.30 .
Walk the walk with us to setup your own ST deployment. We will show you a full installation from start to finish: Community server, Proxy server and Meeting server. We’ll cover Best practices and Troubleshooting, Network architecture, Solving network issues with STUN/TURN, Customizing Meetings and more.
If you want to join us, the link for the registration is here
Theo Heselmans has communicated today that Engage 2022 is still planned. He decided to move onward the date, originally was scheduled for the end of March now the new dates are May 23-25.
I do really hope that the COVID situation will get better, and it always has going towards the late spring / summer, so I am confident that we will have the chance to meet again in person at a great event. Engage is the new Lotusphere.
I submitted a session, if it gets accepted I will make a post about the details.
In November OpenNTF will host a webinar dedicated to you, the members of our community!
November OpenNTF Webinar – Gurupalooza!
Got a question about Domino, Notes, Sametime or Connections? Come ask the gurus! We have gathered the brightest minds to take your questions about development and administration. You can ask ahead of time at https://openntf.org/Internal/guru.nsf or ask live in our webinar.
Are you a guru and want to be on the panel? We welcome all gurus to join in and help take questions. Just go to https://openntf.org/Internal/guru.nsf to volunteer.
This webinar will be held on Thursday, November 18, 2021 at 11:00 AM to 12:30 (EST – New York Time) 16:00 to 17:00 (GMT – London) 17:00 to 18:00 (CET – Rome)
I started this blog on Oct 23 2015, 6 years ago. I started it because, as I said in my first post sometimes during my work I discover something, or I stumble in a bit of information that I believe can be interesting for other people that work in the same field and want to share it.
I have statistics for my blog starting from 2017 and I decided to have a look at where my readers come from. This is the list of the countries
I am a bit surprised that Germany is #1. I blog in English, so seeing USA and UK in the top is not surprising, as is not a surprise to see Italy there, after all that’s my country. But honestly I would have never thought to have Germany as the country with most visitors. India makes sense at 5th place, HCL is an Indian company and I know some of the people working there read my blog.
What amazes me is that I have readers from countries I would have never expected. I am not an expert, so as far as I know there’s a chance that some hits comes from bots, or appear to come from a country while the reader is actually not there, though I doubt someone uses Tor to read my blog 🙂
In any case I was surprised to see the number countries listed. If the hits really come from there I wonder how a person from one of those countries got to know my blog.
Yesterday I gave a session at CollabSphere 2021 on installing a complete Sametime system, chat + meetings.
If you are interested the video is available here until the end of November. But if you want a faster way to learn what I showed, rather than watching 45 minutes of me talking you should go here and grab the great presentation that my fellow HCL Ambassador Ales Lichtenberg created. Though that one is for 11.5, the installation is the same for 11.6 so is a very good step-by-step guide you can use if you want to install Sametime Meeting on Docker.
Those who followed my session will remember that I challenged the Demo Gods and did a live demo rather than a presentation, knowing full well that you should never do that, because Murphy’s Law applies and so something will surely go wrong 🙂
For me the the hiccup was at the end; the installation of Community server was OK, and I could show it working, the Meeting server installed correctly but when I showed how to connect to it, the browser gave me an error. Obviously I tested that setup at least five times before the event and it always worked……
I did not disable the local firewall on my Linux box. For a demo you should always do that (easier than configuring it properly) and this could have been the cause, but after the event I tried again and got the same error.
Guess what it was ? When I fired up my VM with the Linux box, it changed IP address!!!! I did not set manually a static IP, but left the default automatic, so while it used the same address 192.168.1.91 in all the tests that I did, the day I did the live demo it changed to 192.168.1.93 🙁 Obviously I had the .91 address in my host file so is not a surprise that I got a connection error.
Note to self: always use fixed IP addresses in demo systems.
Apologies to those who followed my session for this silly mistake.
