BES Professional & Domino 8.5 

We have a number of clients still using BES Professional and they want to upgrade to Domino 8.5. BlackBerry Technical Support Services have the following response:

"Thank you for contacting BlackBerry Customer Support. We are pleased to assist you.

The highest version of Lotus Domino supported with BlackBerry Professional Software version 4.1.4B is 8.0.1. There are currently no plans to provide additional support for Domino 8.5 for use with BlackBerry Professional Software. The highest version of Domino currently supported is 8.5.0, when used in conjunction with BlackBerry Enterprise Server version 5.0"

So, you either need to upgrade or remain as is. Some considerations for an upgrade:

• BES Professional was aimed at the small business market and was approved to sit on a production mail server
• BES requires a dedicated server so this will cause a few issue with the migration as the Domino server name may change
• There are some issues with a migration and upgrade so you may consider setting using a new BES management database and then using the transporter tools to manage user moves
• Check your hardware specification against BES 5.0 requirements
• Plan your upgrade/migration properly - best spend more time on the planning than the execution - will save lots of time in the long run and minimise the issue you may have

Comments (0)
Jaime Alcorn November 30th, 2009 14:45:00

Cloud conversations can have silver linings 

We recently had a meeting with a customer to talk about the future of their mail systems - half the company are on Domino and the rest on various Exchange systems (not integrated).

"The Cloud" was flagged as an area of interest because fundamentally the business want to shift away from the cost and overhead of maintaining their various distributed thick client mail systems, and free up time and money to focus on real business issues. The key point for me in the conversation was that in contemplating "The Cloud" as a solution, what they were in fact saying was that they had made the mental shift to say that mail can be a commodity that is primarily browser based.

Once we make that leap the world's your oyster. What does it matter which specific vendor / product you end up with, as long as the system provides the functionality and service that the business requires at an acceptable price level?
With the acceptance of "The Cloud" we are able to discuss centralised hosted/managed solutions (private cloud), switching from "everyone has a client" to browser access + web enabled applications whilst still retaining the flexibility of local clients for specific roles.

While some will end up in a LotusLive/Google/Microsoft cloud solution, a lot of organisations will opt for the "private cloud" approach. They will have their systems centralised, managed and effectively outsourced whilst retain a level of control over where their data is held and who/how/when it  can be accessed and modified.

So, far from being a "game killer" the Cloud can actually open up new opportunities and provide the catalyst for customers to consider new approaches to traditional solutions. As for our customer, we are looking to work with them on identifying their business requirements first and then help them select the correct solution.

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Peter Smith November 21st, 2009 22:05:10

DAOS and clusters in 8.5.1 

I was reading through DAOS information to work out how best to restore Quickr documents (that live in DAOS enabled places) and stumbled across this gem from an IBM Engineering open mic call. The question was around TSM but the answer was really interesing..

"A: Clustermates are independent with DAOS configured per server. One of the benefits of the 8.5.1 release is to have the servers participate in DAOS. You do not need any special software to do a production backup in these circumstances. Back up the .nsf using the normal TSM and then back up the .nlo DAOS files (treating them as flat files).

On 8.5.1, there are some new features that save bandwidth. For example, if two servers are running DAOS and you want to send an attachment from one to another, DAOS first checks to see if the attachment is already there. If so, there is no need to send it twice. If all servers in a cluster have DAOS and a new message comes in that you've already seen, DAOS does a reference count to check."

Not quite a single DAOS store but great that it intelligently checks to see if it exists already.

Comments (1)
Peter Smith November 3rd, 2009 13:42:08