IBM’s ITSO sails on… Long live the ITSO!

For some months now, I’ve been writing a lot of articles for Australia-based iTWire rather than here, and think that it;s about time I linked across to them for you.

Here are two articles about IBM’s International Technical Support Organization, (ITSO), with which I had a close working relationship during my career at IBM Australia.

Big Blue sees Red -- Celebrating 40 years of IBM international technical support
Thursday, 25 September 2008

IBM recently celebrated the 40th anniversary of its international technical support organization, ITSO, and has committed to continue producing its core product, free IBM Redbooks, which these days are downloaded in the tens of millions.

IBM's Jackie Olson explains ITSO mission and services (iTWire podcast)
Tuesday, 07 October 2008

Jackie Olson, program director of IBM's International Technical Support Organization (ITSO) and Authoring Services, tells us in this iTWire podcast with Tony Austin about the ITSO's numerous products and services, plus its benefits to IBM customers, IBM business partners, other parts of IBM, and the general IT community.

See all my articles, including podcasts ...
A Meaningful Look at Desktop and Enterprise Computing

Have some fun with a challenge or two that I've devised!
Go visit the iTWire TechWords Interactive Crosswords section.

CAPTURE Version 2.2 released (30th October 2008)

CAPTURE version 2.2.00 is now available for download from either http://asiapac.com.au/CAPTURE_Download.htm(or its mirror at http://notestracker.com/CAPTURE_Download.htm ).

From the same page, you also can download the built-in "Help Using This Database" document as a separate PDF, if this is more convenient for you to read outside the Notes environment.

CAPTURE stands for "Customer And Project Tracking with Usage Reporting Extensions" and is a completely free Lotus Notes CRM application -- with Asia/Pacific Computer Services' NotesTracker^TM incorporated so that you can track and audit usage of the documents in a CAPTURE database.

Apart from a few very minor changes, the main functional improvement added is the ability to specify (for each CAPTURE database replica) the three headings that appear at the top of each page.

This is shown in the following illustration. Click on it to open a larger image (on a new page).

This was requested by a CAPTURE user as a means of applying “branding” to a CAPTURE database.

And the best news is that it is still a FREE application. So download and enjoy!

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Having NotesTracker capabilities built in is a unique feature, possibly not found in any other CRM application. For example, you can see who updated the sales forecast figure for your customer Acme Widgets, and when they did it, or who deleted a Contact from the database.

Another option is to keep open the RSS-style "Breaking News" view so as to see database actions appear automatically as soon as they occur (in the case of events on remote Domino servers, as soon as then next replication cycle occurs for the database).

You can purchase the NotesTracker toolkit to add powerful features activity tracking and compliance management to the design of your own IBM Lotus Notes/Domino database applications.

SDMS version 4.4.01 released (28 October 2008)

Version 4.4.01 of SDMS, the Simple Document Management System for IBM Lotus Notes and DOmino, was released today with NotesTrackerB built in, Tuesday 28 October 2008 -- and of course it’s free, as ever.

When v4.4.00 was released, I inadvertently reset its default access level so that it was no longer Manager. This meant that, as delivered, you could not do things such as changing the database’s title, unless you knew that you could bypass this problem by making a local copy and select not to copy the access control list.

In version 4.4.01 the default for the ACL has been reset to Manager.

This should make it easier for you again to start off using SDMS “out of the box” (without suffering the abovementioned access level problem).