BLUG meeting and a DAOS problem

Yesterday another meeting of the Belgium BELUX Lotus User Group (BLUG) took place in the IBM Forum in Brussels. It wasn’t a full day event, but I decided to drive the 220 km to the meeting.

There were two one hour sessions on the agenda. Joel Demay presented the new features that are coming with Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.2 and Roland Driesen talked about document management.

Again, the meeting was well organized with welcome coffee and a free bar. Theo had about 70 registrations. I’m not sure if all of them attended. But it is very impressive to see that so many people are interested in getting together for such a short meeting.

I was introduced to one customer as “the DAOS specialist”, which I’m not … He told me about an issue he had when activating DAOS on Domino for AIX.

When you enable DAOS by typing load convert -c -daos on mail\db.nsf for the very first time, no subdirectories are created in the DAOS repository and as a result, no files are transported to the repository. You have to manually create a subdir in the DAOS repository ( 0001 ) first.

After this, DAOS works as expected and new subdirs are created automatically.

BLUG: My presentation on DAOS

Here are the slides from my presentation on DAOS at the BLUG conference on 30-Mar-2010 in Brussels, Belgium.

Thanks to all who attended and gave feedback either by asking question or filling in the evaluations.

BLUG: Conference review

BLUG started for me on monday afternoon when driving from my office to Brussels.Took me about 3 hours for 250 kilometers. Arrived at the hotel at 7:00 pm where Theo and some of the conference speakers already sat at the bar and had a beer or two.

After I was introduced by Theo to Belgian beer, we went downstairs for the speaker’s briefing and a dinner. After more beer and a lot of conversation, Day 0 ended at 1:30 am.
The night was short but somehow I managed to move my body to the breakfast room at 6:30 am.

Later on, I put Tim Clark, Paul Withers and Martin Leyrer into my car and we drove to the IBM Forum Brussels. The first thing we saw was the yellow Lotus car in front of the building.

The conferenc started with a keynote speech from Alistair Rennie followed by Laurent Boes talking about the latest Lotusphere announcenents in complement to the OGS.

The breakout sessions started after a short coffee break. The forum staff did a great job in dividing one big room into 3 for the upcoming sessions. The technical staff was always available to fix minor problems or get the microphone to work properly.

All sessions were well attended. The developer track had 3 sessions in a row about XPages. The rooms was crowded; no surprise is that.

My session on DAOS went well, although I was a bit nervous because of the fact that I had never before spoken at an international conference.

Thanks to Theo for immediate response of what attendees said about my session.

The bar opened at 4 pm and Theo raffled sponsor’s giveaways. ( T-Shirts, books, umbrellas and even a license for a Ytria EZ suite).

Back at the hotel, we had at least 30 minutes to change clothes before we drove downtown Brussels. Beer, wine and great food were a perfect closing of a perfect day.

We celebrated Matt White’s 8th blogging anniversary. Don’t know what the waiter was thinking when we start singing “Happy blogging .. “.

Thanks again to Theo and the team ( IBMers and Non-IBMers )  for making this conference a great and successful event. It was also a pleasure to meet the other speakers.

BLUG: Only few seats left

Next week on 30-March-2010, BLUG starts. This FREE, one day event will take place in the IBM Forum, Bourgetlaan 42, Zaventem (Brussels).

According to an email I received yesterday, there are a few seats left. If you have not yet registered, go ahead and grab your seat … NOW!!

If you cannot make it to the conference, you can point your browser to www.blug.be/liveblogging to follow along. Live Blogging will start on Tuesday around 9.00h (CET).

I’ll be speaking at BLUG

Yesterady I received a mail from the organizers of the BLUG event on March, 30th in Brussels, Belgium that my session on DAOS has been approved.

Here is the session abstract:

Are your servers running out of disk space? Do you have more than one bit like attachment stored in your databases? Does a standard task like fixup lasts for ages or does your backup still runs during working hours? Do you have quota enabled and your users are asking for more space?
If you can answer one or more of these questions with YES, than this session is for you.
Maximize the disk space savings provided by Domino Attachment and Object Service (DAOS) and ensure that your environment is properly configured for best performance with this feature. Save more space by simply enable design and document compression. Make sure that your attachments use best compression too. Reduce network bandwidth when replicating databases between servers and enhance the quota but not use more disk space.
Target audience is administrators or decision makers who want to know more about some older but not yet used space savers and especially about DAOS.

The event is a FREE one day event.

Jump over to the BLUG website for more information about speakers and sessions.

The venue is near the airport and hotels are available at reasonable rates. Register today!!

Did I already mention that it is F R E E ?