wissel.net

My little graphic drew a bit of attention. Patrick seems to be particular interested in Project Management and Prototyping (which I labeled "Software Lifecyle" and "Features & Requests"). So I start off with Features & requests. I will focus on the initial gathering of features, not on the tracking and change management (that will be covered in "Software Lifecyle" at a later point in time. We all have seen this:

Since Notes and Domino is a rapid development environment asking the right question, the right way, at the right time to the right people is essential. Changing functionality gets exponentially more expensive with the implementation progress of your project. You should so a reality check in your environment: how long does the initial feature set on a new rollout survive before it is "amended until you can't recognize it anymore" (this is a fancy expression for saying: "Thrown away and rewritten").
Depending on the time and intended scope you have different courses of action. When you think big (both time and scope) it is very smart to use a tool like ideaJam to collect features and feedback. When you are closer to the users, getting them into a room (buy them lunch) and brainstorm ideas there. Very important: talk to the actual (or future) users. Talking to the IT guys doesn't cut it. Sometimes, especially when you are an external consultant, that is hard. Nevertheless insist on it. It will bite you later on. When you only listen your project is at risk too. You need to watch what your users are doing. Collect some work artefacts. Watch out for the stickers that go with paper based processes (and all the handwritten notes on the margin), they show where processes are incomplete or broken. Users might not be comfortable being watched what they do, so reassurance and dialog are critical. If you take notes without sharing what you noted down you create suspicion and risk to alienating a potential supporter.
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Posted by Stephan H Wissel At 9:28 PM, Category SYWTBADD | Permalink | Comments (1) |      

I was presenting on "Workforce 2.0" at the Brunei ICT Career Day. The event was organized by new newly formed InfoCom Federation of Brunei (IFB), the IT vendors industry association. I know the 2.0 memme is a bit overstretched, so I decided to present my case with a little tongue in cheek. In a nutshell: well trained talent is more mobile than ever, so attracting and retaining them requires enterprises (the 2.0 versions of course) to adopt to the work and collaboration style favored by them. They will blog and twitter about work and their customer interaction anyway, so providing them with the platform within makes that more valuable for their companies (Knowledge Management anyone). I got good questions from participants from AITI as well as the Prime Ministers Office: How do you "police" a Social Software environment against abuses: time wasted or even use against corporate interest. The example given was: If an IBM engineer uses the communities tool to gather a group of experts with the intention to jointly leave IBM and setup an independent, innovative and competing company. My reply to that: it happened before (SAP anyone?) even without these tools. Today IBM probably would have a close look and later buy the new company.
In the evening we had dinner with Bruneian customers and a good set of discussion items: How do you design a long term national development plan when the world is developing at "Internet speed"? Somehow inevitably the discussion later touched the topic of the recent Malaysian election, where the common understanding is, that bloggers played a big role in the mood swing that led to the heavy election losses of the current government. One of my Malaysian colleagues attributed the influence of the bloggers mainly to the failure of the Malaysian government to reach out to young voters and their failure to engage in dialogue to address the growing frustration about progress and inclusion (or the lack of) in Malaysian politics. As my mom always told me: you better listen!

Posted by Stephan H Wissel At 8:00 AM, Category Lotus Notes IBM / Lotus | Permalink | Comments (2) |      

Alan reported about it first. Our Business Partner Pentos AG is integrating Skype into Sametime and Lotus Notes. What started as a "simple" plug-in rapidly evolves into a fully integrated solution. Tim (the lead developer) shared a preview of the next iteration of the plug-in with me. It shows the Skype status wherever you have a Sametime enabled field. How kewl is that.

Posted by Stephan H Wissel At 8:00 AM, Category Lotus Notes | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

The good news: most of the skills that will help you to excel in Domino are generic and can be applied to any development environment.
The bad news: there is a lot of stuff to learn. I'm compiling a roadmap for (Domino) Developers wannabees taking a little broader approach. This is my first draft:

In the coming days and weeks I will discuss/fill each of this circles with details and recommended readings/training material. Feedback is highly appreciated.

Posted by Stephan H Wissel At 9:14 PM, Category Show-N-Tell Thursday | Permalink | Comments (8) |      

This week I had my second trip to China. Last time I went to Beijing in 2005 for an eGovernment conference. This time I was visiting customers in Shenzhen just across the border of Hong Kong. I spend a few days in Hong Kong with the Hong Kong Lotus team. Getting to Shenzhen from Hong Kong is easy. You get an MTR ticket (that's the local train/subway system) and it drops you directly at the border. Around noon there wasn't too much traffic and it took less then 30 minutes to clear the border.
First impression: A modern city on par with any western city. Spacious, clean and quite some flair. Entering a cab I was reminded: That isn't Hong Kong anymore. My driver didn't speak English. Luckily I picked up a wireless signal and showed him the Chinese web site of the Kempinski so he got where I wanted to go to. A call to my Chinese colleagues to confirm reassured him, that he was on the right track. Shenzhen is pretty big (my colleague claimed it is the second biggest city in China after Shanghai) but traffic was bearable.
We went for dinner in a local place, not one of the countless new fancy restaurant, but one where locals would go if they are hungry. My host and the dining place owner had good fun with me insisting to try stuff as local as possible. We had a nice sweet & sour fish, tofu and some spicy green vegetables. The leaves looked kind like tree leaves or stuff that grows on bushes. The combination of the fresh, slightly bitter green with a hot chilly vinegar dressing was very special, I liked it a lot.
The command of English was relatively limited and my colleague Damien from Lotus South China (who is a Hakka like my wife) had to translate quite a bit. After a while we found a good operation mode, where I would draw sketches on the white board, decorate them with technical keywords and sequence numbers. All IT people we met where eager to speak English and I guess they will improve very fast.
The industrial area our customers were in were huge and I practically saw the "birthplaces" of any gadget I could think of. The urban layout, while covering a huge area wasn't a suburban sprawl, but a clustered development with a lot of high rise buildings. This layout allows the implementation of efficient public transport. It looks like the city planners had a careful look at a lot of concepts to pick from.
There is much discussion on The rise of China. I think these are utterly missing the point. It is not the rise but merely the recovery of China. Why recovery and not rise? Well understanding China, from my point of view, includes looking at a longer time frame than the last 50 or so years. You need to look at the Chinese history as a whole, that would be 5000 years. In that period the great empire was formed, fell apart, shined and vanished multiple times. Until the 17th century China was *the* economic and military super power, a huge number of inventions and innovations like the compass, gun powder or rockets (in the form of fire works) originated from China. Looking inwards being busy with dynastic feuds China fell behind in the 19th and 20th century. Just a century later (and what are a few hundred years when your scale is 5000) China is on its way to claim that top spot back. When you look at not only the PRC, but at the Chinese at large including Taiwan, the Chinese in South East Asia (Singapore anyone) and European and Americans from Chinese decent, the Chinese are already there. And my sons can confirm one of the main reasons: "The Chinese mother is very demanding [about study results]".

Posted by Stephan H Wissel At 5:40 PM, Category Travel | Permalink | Comments (2) |      

It is all out there. Sometimes it is hard to find. Support has compiled various lists with "most wanted documents":

• Notes Client
• Lotus Domino Server
• Domino Web Access (DWA, also known as iNotes)
• Notes & Domino FAQ
• Notes & Domino Best Practices
• Blackberry & Domino 8
• AdminP FAQ
• Sametime FAQ
• Easy Sync Pro

Enjoy!

Bonus Track: The official history of Lotus Notes and the wiki version

Posted by Stephan H Wissel At 12:03 PM, Category Show-N-Tell Thursday | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

I had an iteresting discussion with a customer this week. They use Domino and dotNet for their web applications. Their decission criteria when to use what: if the data of the application needs to be fed into their data warehouse at a later point of time, they use dotNet since storage there typically ends up in an RDBMS. The biggest problem they face, in their own voice: "Our users are pretty spoiled from Domino. They expect days as turnaround time for applications. Using dotNet it takes at least three times longer."
So I asked why they don't use DECS to connect to the RDBMS. They could develop the application in Notes/Domino and once the app does what the user wants just add the tables in the RDBMS and link them up using DECS. They asked back if there is a way to generate the table or at least the create table statement from Domino directly. The short answer: Yes, you can, however you need to make decissions on datatypes and field length. The long answer: you need Domino Designer (for the Tools - DXL Utilities - Transformer ... menu) and a little XSLT stylesheet.

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Posted by Stephan H Wissel At 11:37 AM, Category Blog Show-N-Tell Thursday | Permalink | Comments (5) |      

OK it is going round. So here is my story. After National Service I went to law school in Würzburg and Frankfurt. To make some money I worked as intern in IBM 1985-86 in my specialty, the IBM /36. IBM introduced me to the all new PC / PC XT and PC AT. Very soon I worked as freelance consultant and trainer for  applications like IBM Displaywrite, Harvard Graphics and Lotus 1-2-3. In a gig with Sears I learned the @formula language on the fly (the manual, me and the midnight oil) as well as the secrets of monthly financial reporting (I had some experience since I did COBOL at the university).
So I got pretty good at teaching and programming 1-2-3. I also used the later Lotus Products like Symphony, Magellan and got really fond of Lotus Agenda.
When Lotus Notes 1.0 came out, I was curious and got exited, so I called Lotus and wanted to buy Notes licences. I've been told they would only talk with me 500 licences onwards. So I looked around in my office and asked back, what I should do with the other 497 licences, so the deal was off.
After Notes 2.0 came out, in 1992, I tried again, getting the same answer but with the remark, that a Lotus Business Partner could sell me less licences. So I looked around and at the end bought my first Notes licence from Haus Weilgut. They are still around and are the makers of the Lotus Notes MindMapping application Mindplan.
After working a few month with Weilgut's CRM solution curiosity got the better of me and I fired up designer (which was part of the Notes client then) and started to mess around with the forms and views of the applications. Pretty much everything I know about development I learned in self study and by picking any brain that came close enough. 1996 I started to work as freelance trainer for the Digicomp AG in Switzerland and got my CLI certification. Being a CLI in Germany Lotus Education started to take care of me and I got quite busy. 1997 I met Bob Balaban at the Lotus Advisor Magazine Conference in Phoenix, AZ. I got a hand signed copy of "Programming Domino 4.6 with Java" and consider Bob a friend since then. 1998 Credit Suisse did send me to Singapore and Hong Kong for a training project and I decided to stay. After a few steps I signed up with IBM in 2006 as Lotus Technology and Productivity Advisor (LTPA for short).
What's your story?

Posted by Stephan H. Wissel At 11:51 PM, Category Lotus Notes | Permalink | Comments (0) |      

Application performance in Notes and Domino can greatly vary depending on the number of views and the view selection formulas you use. When inheriting databases applications for maintainance there is no real easy way to get an overview what view selection formulas have been used. So I did write myself a function that creates a document with such an overview table.See the function below. To test it I simply copy it into an agent and call it for the current database.
Of course you could think of running it against multiple databases or altering the html with some Ajax stuff to make it sortable. Here is my test agent:

Option Public
Option Declare

Sub Initialize
	Dim s As New NotesSession
	Dim db As NotesDatabase
	Dim doc As NotesDocument
	
	Set db = s.CurrentDatabase
	Set doc = db.CreateDocument
	Call ReportViewSelectionFormulas(db, doc)
	Call doc.send(False,s.UserName)
	
End Sub

Update: Sorry folks, got the wrong code in the core functionsm fixed now. Enjoy!
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Posted by Stephan H Wissel At 2:39 AM, Category Show-N-Tell Thursday | Permalink | Comments (4) |      

There is quite some turmoil around the OOXML voting as an ISO standard. To me it looks like the law of unintended consequences in full swing. I think the irregularities need to be sorted out and processes need cleanup (Do they?). The whole mess seems like a warped failure of communication between an Anglo-Saxon and Continental European view of the world (this probably will warrant a longer post somewhen else). In short: In an Anglo-Saxon view anything that is not specifically outlawed is OK to do. For the children of the Code Civile adhering to the intend of law and morals have equal weight. While paying marketing $$$ is not formally bribery, using it as an incentive to get partners doing things they never intended to becomes borderline.
Anyway my position on OOXML: I'm in favor of OOXML becoming an ISO standard, but not as fasttrack. It must go through the due process (which might take a while). Eventually it would end as an extension to ODF where ODF is lacking, which would be a good thing. But also as an independent alternate standard it would be OK. Key anyway is: due process not cut corners fast tracking.

Posted by Stephan H Wissel At 11:01 AM, Category Software | Permalink | Comments (0) |