This position will be primarily responsible for all technical aspects of Lotus Notes application development and application support.  The person in this position will work with other departments in the company and the Manager of Web Development to develop and maintain the technical specifications and all appropriate applications in Lotus Notes.  The position may also include development work in other programming languages.

Job Functions:

Functions include developing the technical specifications and implementing the appropriate code to support Lotus Notes development. The person will assist in troubleshooting and debugging issues with existing and developed systems.  This position will maintain all applications so that they function on the most current version of Lotus Notes client and server.  They will maintain proper security and programming best practices when building applications.

Basic Qualifications:

• BS in Computer Science or equivalent experience.
• Minimum 1 year work experience with development for Lotus Notes client and Lotus/Domino on the web.
• Minimum 1 year work experience in web-enabling existing and future Lotus Notes applications.
• Minimum 1 year work experience in developing workflow applications in Lotus/Domino.
• Minimum 1 year work experience with Domino Designer
• In-depth knowledge and work experience in relevant technical areas such as LotusScript, Formula Language, Java, Javascript, D/HTML, CSS and DB2.
• Knowledge of Lotus/Domino development for mobile devices.
• Knowledge of Notes security model.
• Knowledge and experience in the following: PHP, ASP, XML, VBScript, SQL/Other DBMS.
• Design and development skills working with applications in versions 6, 7 and 8 of Domino.
• Solid understanding of Internet technologies: HTTP, FTP, security and encryption on the Internet, basic networking concepts, etc.

Additional Qualifications:

• Must have good analytical skills, excellent communication skills at all organizational levels.
• Must show initiative, be self motivated and have a willingness to learn.
• Have the ability to work as part of a team and independently.
• Must posses a valid driver’s license.

Working Conditions:

• Physical requirements include finger dexterity, viewing a computer screen, detailed work at close distances, and sitting for prolonged periods of time.
• Office environment with occasional evening and weekend hours.
• Sporadic local and out of town travel.

Hershey Entertainment & Resorts is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer

TO APPLY: Please visit HersheyJobs.com to apply on-line or contact Mary Faris at Msfaris@hersheypa.com for more information. We offer Medical, Dental, Vision, 401K, Profit Sharing, Competitive Salary, and MORE!

Sometimes, the recruiters are really nice and you just want to help them find a good person.  Which is why the job above is posted here.  Can you imagine how much weight could be gained with all that chocolate around?

Betsy Thiede pinged me last night via BleedYellow asking if I knew anyone looking for a developer job.  Her company, CISC, is looking for a Sr Domino Developer to work on site in the Springfield, Va area.  To get more information, check out the full posting of the requirement.  Note:  ability to obtain a Secret Clearance is required!

I got this email from a recruiter today and almost spit soda all over my laptop:

Dear Mr. Burgess,

Per your request please see blow job description for the Sr. Programmer
position with Xxxxxxxx Xxxxxx.  Please let me know if you have any
questions.  I would appreciate if you could please send me your updated
resume in MS Word format and the best time to reach you for a telephone
interview.

Now that's the kind of fringe benefit that will keep me working at the office for long hours.  That is, as long as I am the recipient and not the person expected to perform said description.

At a previous position, I had a co-worker who was always dealing with some kind of emergency request or crisis that had to be taken care of right away. No matter what time of the day or what else she had planned to do. She never learned one of my cardinal rules: A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part. She was always in a frenzied state and was always at wit's end. I was constantly after her to learn to say No when confronted with yet another emergency request. By doing her job in this manner, she was inviting her user community to ignore proper planning and causing herself more grief than was necessary.

Sean Gallagher has a term for this: IT-codependence.

There's a fine line between being "agile" and being an enabler of a dysfunctional business model. You're agile if you've got a process that incorporates flexibility and plans for "ship early and often" approaches to problem-solving. You're an enabler if you constantly have to go back and fix implementations you rushed to make business deadlines so that they'll scale or to integrate them into your architecture so you can support them...or if you don't have the time to do either of those because of more rapidly emerging business requirements.

It is a tough habit to break, but one that will make every one's life better and will produce better results and stronger solutions. If you find yourself in such a situation, biting the bullet and saying No might be a scary proposition, but anticipation of the pain is always worse than the pain itself. Who knows, you might even gain some respect for standing up for yourself.

I ran across a blog entry entitled How to Prevent a Bozo Explosion and just had to check it out.  First, there is a list of tell-tale signs that an explosion is occurring at your company.

6. Your HR department requires an MBA degree for any position; it also requires five to ten years work experience in an industry that is only four years old

I would like to add to that the requirement to add every acronym possible to job opening skills lists.  I have worked in a number of companies that have had more than one list items occurring.  Then the author goes on to tell you what should be done to prevent explosions from happening in your cubicle.

Look beyond the resume. The goal of hiring is building a team of great employees. One proxy for a great employee is a relevant educational or work background. However, the perceived “right” educational background and work experience are not sufficient conditions for excellence. Hiring a bozo with the “right” resume can drag down other employees and increase the probability of hiring more bozos. Not hiring a great person because she lacks the “right” resume is not as harmful but is a mistake too.

I can't emphasize the point above too stringently.  It doesn't matter how talented a team you have assembled if they can't get along.  And just because someone's resume looks phenomenal doesn't mean that they actually are good at the job you are hiring them for.  The intangibles that you can learn in a face to face interview tell you more than what a bunch of words on a piece of paper will.

The first thing that struck me was their definition of an outage.

Any downtime of e-mail services counts against availability goals, even if not caused by Exchange.

Over the last several months, seven percent of total Exchange downtime has been for planned Exchange upgrades. Six percent of Exchange downtime has been due to other Exchange-specific issues. The rest of the downtime—87 percent—was caused by issues outside Exchange.

I really liked the emphasis they place on writing meaningful and measurable SLAs. The 3 pronged dashboard approach of measuring messaging availability (Mailbox availability, Mail delivery time, and Email Client Availability) is straight-forward and can be used in any messaging environment. Pay close attention to the guidelines for creating meaningful SLAs and the review progress sections as they contain good information that you will be able to use immediately. Their insights into what 24x7x365 really means will give you and your management something to think about. I was a little surprised that their SLAs for historical mail restores is 2 days, but that's life in a SCOS world. Probably the best idea I saw was that one single person is responsible for each measurement's reporting and must investigate any deviations from the norm. SLAs and metrics always work better when you have defined responsibilities for measuring them.

The architecture of the Exchange 2003 servers was very interesting to me. For most of the mail infrastructure, Microsoft is using a 7 node Windows server cluster to host 20 Exchange mail databases (mail stores) with approximately 200 users per database. The average mailbox size limit is 200 MB so the mail stores average about 4,000 users/40 GB of storage per virtual server. What is not listed is the number of virtual Exchange servers are hosted on each server cluster. Without that information, it is unclear how much horsepower is needed per user and, therefore, impossible to make an accurate comparison to what I have worked with in Domino. In addition, I found their reasoning behind implementing clustering to be a little self serving.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of using Windows Server 2003 clustering on current enterprise-class hardware is not its failover capabilities but rather its management flexibility and the effect that has on planned downtime. Finding ways to reduce planned downtime can contribute even more to increasing availability than increasing your ability to cope with unplanned downtime.

Clustering contributes significantly to reducing planned downtime, because an Exchange virtual server is not tied to a single Windows host, but can be moved from one cluster node to another when software updates or hardware maintenance is necessary. This does not completely eliminate planned downtime, because a few minutes may be required to move Exchange services between cluster nodes. However, Exchange services do not have to be down for the entire duration of planned installations, reboots, and hardware replacements.

What's even worse as far as I am concerned is the level of expertise needed to get exchange running on a Windows Server cluster.

Installing a single Exchange server is straightforward, especially with the step-by-step guidance of the new Deployment Tools in Exchange Server 2003. Nonetheless, deploying a supportable Exchange system in a worldwide or enterprise environment requires significant expertise. The interaction of Exchange with Active Directory requires attention and thoughtfulness of design. Comprehensive Microsoft deployment guides and white papers can assist system architects in designing and building an effective Exchange system.

The true difference between the way Lotus does clustering and the way Microsoft sells it is illustrated in their typhoon example. Whereas a Domino administrator would have just put a cluster member in a different data center in case of a similar issue in the future, the MS team decided to move the entire Exchange cluster because the data center wasn't able to meet their needs. Talk about high maintenance!!!

via Peter de Haas

In case you are unaware of how native Notes mail encryption works, here is an excerpt from the Domino 6 Administration Help Database:

How outgoing Notes mail encryption works

1. The sender sends an outgoing message and selects the Encrypt option.
2. Notes generates a random encryption key and encrypts the message with it.
3. Notes encrypts the random encryption key with the recipient's public key and appends the new key to the message. The recipient's public key must be stored in either a Domino Directory or LDAP directory that a user can access or in the sender's Personal Address Book.
4. If the encrypted message is addressed to multiple recipients, the message is encrypted only once with one random key, and the random key is encrypted using the public key of each recipient.
5. When the recipient attempts to open the encrypted message, the user's mail application attempts to decrypt the random key, using the recipient's private key. If this is successful, the random key decrypts the message.
6. If decryption is successful, the recipient can read the message. If decryption is unsuccessful, the user receives a message indicating that the decryption failed and the mail application does not allow the user to access the message.

A message that Notes has previously encrypted for its recipients is not re-encrypted with the certified public key of the specified Journal user. As a result, when depositing encrypted messages in the Mail Journaling database, Domino preserves the original encryption, so that the message content cannot be decrypted with the ID of the designated Mail Journaling user, unless, of course, that user was included in the original recipient list. A Mail Journaling user who was not on the recipient list can view header information only.

Experts see IM as foundation for new-age apps

Andrew Wolff, an IM Planet speaker and vice president of products for DYS Analytics Inc. in Wellesley, Mass., said a number of enterprise-oriented IM products already allow disparate users to collaborate or Web surf.

And that's just the beginning. IM is also the perfect "launching pad" for any number of other enterprise applications, like sales force automation and employee training, said speaker Matthew Smith, chief operating officer and co-founder of LiveOffice Corp. in Torrance, Calif.

Face-off: Instant messaging in the enterprise

Against IM: So, is instant messaging worth the price? No way. Whether you pay the price financially, by purchasing an expensive enterprise IM system, or pay the price security-wise, because your employees are using unauthorized IM clients that don't have enterprise-class protections -- perhaps instead of your expensive enterprise IM system -- you're not getting much value in return. Instead, I have a suggestion: Let them use e-mail.

[...]

For IM: With proper care, planning and management, IM can improve productivity and make communication easier. Like all network applications, the potential for employee misuse and abuse exists. But, with the proper safeguards, IM will make employees so much more productive, they'll soon wonder how they ever survived without it.

Instant messaging creates security headaches for enterprises

"IM took a guerilla pathway into the enterprise and onto the network," said Kailash Ambwani, the CEO of Foster City, Calif.-based IM solutions vendor FaceTime. "It's not like it grew in an orderly fashion that was controlled by the IT managers."