FIGURE A


Lotus, Notes and a cow with lobster ears. DominoPower trip reports bring you it all! Roll over picture for a larger image.

Imagine Lotusphere for 300 attendees. Imagine the speakers from Lotusphere addressing an audience of 30 instead of 300. Imagine being able to ask the Notes Goddess herself, Susan Bulloch, all those silly questions you have. Imagine a "Meet the Experts" session where there aren't 20 people lined up waiting to talk to the same person. And imagine being able to ask the VP of Development for Lotus to add a feature to Notes and Domino for you.

Now there is a downside. The conference doesn't have a set date, one year it might be in May and the next it might be in November. This year it was in June. Though there is generally a bookstore offering technical subjects, there are no vendor booths offering free T-shirts to replenish your wardrobe. And, since Disney doesn't have a park in Boston, socializing is done at a restaurant instead.

How else is the PSS different? There are 3,000 users at my site while the company has a total of 15,000 users. Some might consider this a substantial user base but some companies represented at the Premium Support Seminar have over 100,000 users and hundreds of servers spread around the world.

What have I learned by attending these conferences? Last year I got software to help translate NSD files into something a mere admin can begin to understand. It's helped me solve several odd problems from users. I got a chance to try out Workplace Services Express under the watchful eyes of the developers and helped find a bug in the software. I was able to discuss how transaction logging might affect backups with field service engineers who specialize in the subject. We still haven't decided how to go forward, but I have more information than before.

This year, several of us helped test the instructions in a whitepaper titled "Using Smart Upgrade for Notes 7" by trying to follow the directions. Besides some typos, a few big errors, the kind that made our installations fail, were discovered before the paper was posted. Then I learned something about how TIM (Tivoli Identity Manager) and TAM (Tivoli Access Manager) work with LDAP. I even learned a little about the enormous undertaking known as SAP and how it integrates with various other software products. Then Alan Lepofsky showed us some of the less familiar features of the Notes client. Check his website, at http://www.AlanLepofsky.net, for useful tips and tricks, including a way to create SuDoKu puzzles.