Slate

1. A Sabbatical for 4 months.
2. Completely owning my new Home. (Yet to finish with full payment :)
3. Certification in IBM DB2 and upgrade on Lotus Cert.
4. Marriage (Must do :)

What fruits I will get of my cravings great?
How do I know the end of the fate?
The flower buds need a blooming today,
Who can now wait for breeze of next day?

from Armaghan-i-Hijaz by Dr. Muhammad Iqbal

My Two cents for a noble cause :)

Make a switch to Firefox browser and experience a hassel free (spyware/adwares) web experience. The browser is worth trying using. Its much light to use, and features like tab browsing, pop-up blocks and protection from viruses are enough of a reason for a change from Internet Explorer. And Firefox is able to render almost all the websites like IE. I haven't looked back to IE since last so many months with Firefox.

So download and start using FireFox.

Just finished with Jeffery Deaver's thriller "The Empty Chair", coming from the same author of "The Bone Collector" which also has a Hollywood movie. The book is very well-written with plots and sub-plots around the character The Insect Boy, though it seems the end was hurriedly written having a very flimsy climax. Okay, I am not a great (or even a good) critic, but all in all its a good book to read.

I am back to Bombay, and enjoying a short break from my work. Spent whole day today meeting up friends and catching up on happenings here. The project is still on and will be taking 2 more months to finish, so I will be in Dubai again around 4th Feb. Till then you wont be hearing a lot from me.

Discussions on Corporate Email Solutions are mostly hogged by Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange. And rightfully, as these are the market leaders in this segment of Business Application Solutions. These companies provide a variety of Server and client softwares for the Messaging requirements. Domino Server from IBM/Lotus and Exchange from Microsoft are the servers which manages mail boxes and everything in providing secure, reliable services of sending and receiving emails for the end-users. End-Users can use client software like Lotus Notes or MS Outlook to access their emails and make service request to the servers. With the advent of web and the web-browsers coming as a universal tool, these companies also launched thin-client Interfaces to access emails services. Lotus has recently released v2 of Lotus Workplace, which is a web-browser based product catering to Office Collaboration. Lotus Workplace Messaging is the Email component of this product.

Though they provide a real good Interface for a web-application, productivity wise they are not as fast as Rich Client Email software like Lotus Notes, or Outlook. But are these the constraints of a web-browser? I guess not. With the launch of GMail from Google, it is clear that the web-browsers do provides mechanism to develop Rich Interface even in their present state. Google’s GMail is 100% browser client and uses extensively XML and DOM parsers for creating a user interface which is fast, friendly and simple. All these years we have been used to the Inboxes of Hotmail, and Yahoo, and pretty much the same way of how Emails are managed and viewed. GMail had set a new benchmark for all the other service providers. Its User Interface is just not same. And also it provides a very unique Emailing experience which presently is not countered by any of the other providers.

GMail is still not into the Corporate Segment, but its worth considering this aspect of Google releasing a corporate edition of GMail. The other service provider did tried targeting Corporate Mail-boxes, but could not make much breakthrough. This is not due to Corporate Customers as not open for third-party hosted email services, but primarily because Corporate mail-boxes requires managing thousands of mails per user and the interface of these Services was inherently not suitable. But the product ‘GMail’ is being built and tested by thousands of users for free, primarily for managing 1000s of mails in a single mail-box and of course with size going up to 1GB per mail-box : )

The hosted model for Business Application is being there for sometime now, and with the maturity of this Industry, the concerns on Data Security among Corporate Customers is also diminishing with the day-by-day achieved confidence on the service providers. A hosted service from Google would immediately attract SMB Companies, firstly as this segment can trust brand Google’s Infrastructure for reliability and security, and secondly as they would tend to trade-off these concern with other benefits on Cost-Saving, Quick deployment, and almost negligible to zero-cost on Infrastructure management.

Damien Katz has posted this story on his experience at Iris Associates when working on the Formula Engine for Lotus Notes.

This is a well written post, and also an insight on how this amazing macro language had been rewritten for Release 6 of Lotus.

He had also posted a follow-up to this article on the comments received.

This link is to an interesting article forwarded to me by my friend and colleague of past, Ashish Sidapara. The article 'Advice for Computer Science College Students' is from Joel. Joel had written extensively and I like his articles on Software Design. The writing is simple and very practical. Which ofcourse are from his personal experience in running and developing Software Products.

On Ashish, it seems he is reading a lot these days, as I keep getting new posts/links from him. He has always been very active on various Lotus Notes Forums including Lotus Developer Domain (notes.net) where he uses the screen name LoNo Developer.

I got some Invites from GMail, which I can send out to anyone who want to open a GMail account. So any blogspirit user, let me know If you need one. But Invites are limited, so first-come-first serve basis. Don't forget to mention your email on which you want me to send your Invite. And yeah, It would be good if its a non-Hotmail account, as it seems Hotmail is blocking Gmail Invites.

But apart from 1GB space for mail box, the whole Interface is very unqiue and speedy way of using & managing large number of mails. Some features of GMail that are really worth mentioning are the way Contacts are managed, Email Search, Spell check, type ahead in TO, CC Fields, and the list goes on.