Category
Lotusphere 2006
1) Some Lotusphere observations from around the blogs
Axel on 1/24/2006 12:37:47 AM
The coverage is really quite good.
So far, my clear winner in the "most-informative-for-those-at-home"
category is Stephan H. Wissel. This man is born for conference blogging.
over
here
Category
Lotusphere 2006
The verdicts are out. My
session about DominoWebDAV
- Domino as a file system was attended by about 25 people, whereby 18 filled
and returned their session evaluation to IBM. I'm very pleased by the results:
| Quality of the material
| 94% Excellent - 06% Good
|
| Quality of the speaker
| 89% Excellent - 11% Good
|
| Use of Lotus products
| 67% Yes, 22% Undecided, 11% No
|
| Recommend update
| 100%
|
| Recommend speaker
| 100% |
18 Lotusphere attendees is not a statistical
relevant sample <g>, so I have to aim for a main session next year.
Category
Lotusphere 2006
What a show it was.
Yellow is the new
black! While the announcement
around Notes and Domino show a bright future for the product, I was mostly
exited about the Workplace Managed Client offerings. And again: Please
IBM give it a catchier name, Workplace Desktop as example. While other
platforms seem not to be used
to create the core
products of that company,
IBM is eating their own dog
food. They base their development
tools on RCP, Sametime 7.5 is an RCP application, the productivity tools
are, Lotus Notes Hanover and the Workplace Managed Client. Very impressive.
Time to get moving.
Nevertheless: the best of show were
the people. Great on stage, great in the breaks, great to talk and party
with. I finally was able to put real people behind the conversations and
Blogs I follow and participate for a while. In no particular order:
Jack
Dausman, Rob
Novak, Rob
Wunderlich, Bruce
Elgort, Volker
Weber, Richard
Schwarz, Ray
Bilky, Libby
the Notesgirl, Julian
Robichaux, Alan
Bell, Rocky
Oliver, Declan
Lynch, Ben
Langhinrichs,The
Turtle, Christopher
Byrne, Joe
Litton, the Penumbra
Group members, David
Ferris, Bill
Buchan, Thomas
Duff, Chris
Miller, Carl
Tyler, Ed
Brill, Paul
Mooney, Surjit
Chana and apologies
to all I missed out in this little list.
Category
Lotusphere 2006
It was my turn. The Sandpiper room in the
Swan hotel 5:45pm - I was nervous like an actor before his very first curtain.
I arrived 5:20 and already 20 people were waiting to hear what I had to
say. At 5:30 we were 30+ so I started the session. Since the BoF rooms
didn't provide audio visual equipment I didn't bore the attendees with
yet another powerpoint. I used the flip chart and my favourite very fat
markers. First I walked them thought the rational of what we tried to achieve:
a) Provide round-trip editing capabilities
for web based attachments
b) Let file oriented workers see Notes
documents (not just attachments) through the file system
c) Provide report capabilities against
Notes documents and views
After that I explained the extensions
webDAV incorporates compared to standard http and what you are in for when
you want to mix browser access and webDAV. (In short: unless you use our
webdav:// protocol you are in for a lot of support calls since users tend
to mix up click - for opening read only and right click/open with for read
write operation.
It seems that the webdavhelper tool
was of some interest too.
All in all I was quite happy about the
turnout and the interactivity of the session. So goal for next year: upgrade
myself from BoF to full session.
In case you have no idea what I'm talking
about in this post: head over to SourceForge and check
it out.
What I liked:
Good questions from the audience and
a nice confirmation, that we do something interesting.
What I didn't like:
Domino WebDAV is not as finished as
I wish, so there is a lot of work to catch up.
Category
Lotusphere 2006
Bob Balaban walked us through the perils
of coding Java locally and remote against a Domino server. In essence he
reminded us, that there is no silver bullet or magic bean. When deciding
how to code one must establish metrics for the task at hand to find the
fastest solution. One lesson learned: obtaining a local session is very
time consuming compared to keep a remote session open. However if your
operation is long, that might not matter.
Bob raised hope, that he might release
his famous
session manager as OpenSource.
What I liked:
Bob's presentation style is a ingenious
blend of deep technical understanding with a dry humor. He makes his points
crystal clear.
What I didn't like:
The insight, that I know less than I
wished for 
Category
Lotusphere 2006
Rob and Victor from SNAPS demonstrated
gold nuggets of tools to solve common problems. Their selection criteria:
- must solve a real problem
- must be usable in a different context
than the original purpose
- must have been developed already
- must not be for sale
The first tool was a all Java Image
resizing application done as a pure Java agent. Typical solutions require
external tools and are platform dependent. The Java agent runs in R6++
and isn't dependent on anything else.
The second tool is a fix for the web
native calendar views. Using CSS, XML and Ajax they fixed it with even
the ability to show multiple calendars merged into one. The calendar takes
care of timezones and pulls the time zone from the $preferences.nsf. All
updates are done in memory, so no refresh is needed.
The third tool is a Sametime Bot, that
changes its online status when new relevant content is added. So instead
of bombarding you with an email or an instant message, the bot simply goes
online. This is a very subtle way to notify a user of availability new
content.
Before the forth tool was shown Rob
teased it as the "Next level of Domino development". What they
showed was nothing less than editable views for the web. A pretty complete
solution for web views. Rob took us down to the memory lane how views evolved
on the web up to today before he presented the final solution. They separated
views data and presentation and added a drop in enhancement capabilities
for any ordinary Domino developer. The functionality is incredible feature
rich, so go check it out.
What I liked:
Real world code I can put to use. Pretty
good walk through focusing on the real relevant pieces of code.
What I didn't like:
Can't think of anything here, other
than I'd like to have more more more . Very cool session!
Category
Lotusphere 2006
After Sunday's introduction session into
the Workplace Designer I got more curious, so AD306 won over AD219. IBM
is pushing the JavaScript boundaries with Workplace Designer. JavaScript
is both used on the client and the server to provide rich interaction.
As mentioned
before it falls short in terms
of local (Ajax powered) interaction. However a quick glimse on 3.0 shows
that that will be fixed then.
The JavaScript object model on the server
is very rich. A context object provides JavaScript a wealth of information
about the session, the user, the document and other context information.
The presenters spend a good amount of time to explain where Workplace
Designer is similar to the Domino Designer and where they differ. The learning
curve for a Domino developer will be much smoother than going to J2EE.
What I liked:
Relative painless skill expansion for
Domino developers (Lifelong learning anybody?)
What I didn't like:
Painful to build Ajax enabled applications,
so a lot of page refreshes. I'm not sure if going all JavaScript is that
great. The quality of the debugger will show
Category
Lotusphere 2006
The session first walked through the
build in classes that allow design element access to show what you can
do and what you can't. Then they switched over to DXL and what you can
do there. The first example was to export images files. In DXL binary files
are Base64 encoded, so they used a NotesMimeEntry to create the byte stream.
Then they showed how to change database properties that are read only in
the object. This was followed by a demo of DXL round trip engineering.
As an interesting note, the presenters preferred JDOM over the DOM implementation
in Lotus Script.
What I liked:
Good practial tips.
What I didn't like:
I would like to see more code!
Category
Lotusphere 2006
After Snapps excellent session I wandered
a little around in the research and the meet the developers lab. There
I was "lured" by IBM staff into the usability lab. I did a test
drive of IBM's productivity tools. The tools are IBM's take on business
applications like text, presentation, spreadsheets and projects. Based
on OpenOffice the tools a good for the casual office users.
What intrigued me, was the attention
the researchers paid to detail and the way I interacted with their tool.
We discussed quite a number of features and hiccups on my way to create
a presentation. The researcher ended up with a full page of notes. A nice
experience -- half an hour of someone paying 100% attention to me
Category
Lotusphere 2006
The SNAPPS team walked us through the
highs and lows of Web services. Using a single source of web service from
Domino 7 they showed a number of clients that consume this service. I was
impressed. They started off with some online sites, that can be used to
test webservices, continued with a Lotus Notes Client, a MS Word document,
a portlet, a midlet in a mobile form and finally a Yahoo widget (the artist
formerly known as Konfabulator).
What I liked:
Clear examples, good to understand,
nice balanced view on what you can do and where the caveats are.
What I didn't like:
My list of things to learn just got
longer
Category
Lotusphere 2006
Jason Collier of CertFX was walking an
overflowing session room through the perils of the update exam. Most of
the IT exams are a different beast to tame, than your day to day business.
Jason managed to energize a tired crowd with his British style of humour
and his tendency to poke fun on everybody including himself. I'm feeling
much more confident, that I'll pass the exam on Wednesday, I signed up
for since I got a free voucher. Of course I won't depend on my luck alone
and spend time in the evening to go through the materials and the exam
preparation software.
What I liked:
Comprehensive overview what the exam
is all about, funny engaging presentation
What I didn't like:
Room to small, I had to sit outside
Category
Lotusphere 2006
Need some facelift for views and forms?
Lance Spellman and Dwight Wilbanks worked through some great stuff build
on Ajax and DHTM. They created an OpenSource toolkit named DFL: Domino
FaceLift Toolkit. The DFL approach is fully in line with the idea of non
obtrusive JavaScript. The killer feature: An agent reads the forms' DXL
and figures out the additional properties of fields like datatype and size.
The toolkit allows to facelift views
at well. You can get views that pretty much behave like notes views in
the notes client. You got Ajax driven actions, and fully scrollable views.
What I liked:
Cool piece of JavaScript to rapidly
facelift your applications. They also nicely explained where the strength
and tradeoffs of their approach.
What I didn't like:
I have to wait until later to start
getting my hands on the code.
Category
Lotusphere 2006
IBM has a hand to pick confusing names.
Would you buy a "managed client". Sounds like "software
with special needs". However when you look under the hood you will
find a sound concept and a rich API that allows to create cross-platform
applications. At the core of the WMC is the Eclipse RCP platform. IBM threw
in plug-ins that handle local storage, synchronization with the central
storage, collaborative APIs, security APIs and some development tools.
To prove, that this is not just a bunch of APIs from an ivory tower IBM
provides a number of sample application to serve as a reference and starting
point.
What I liked:
IBM made an effort to have the real
developers present their baby. You could see the pride they talked about
a number of their features. Also I like the general concept of blending
rich interaction with browser panels and the on- and off-line capabilities.
What I didn't like:
The presenters tried to give a very
complete picture of their platform, thus choosing a "flight level"
that was simply too high. They duly listed the capabilities of their API
falling short to show actual packages and classes, as well as sample code.
After Mike Rodin himself said in the opening session: "You guys love
to see code", it was a bit disappointing. I think I will head over
to the developer labs and see them in person to get a deeper dive into
RCP/WMC.
And: IBM --- please find a catchier
name. Some ideas: Workplace Desktop, Workplace Rich Client, Workplace Experience....
uhhm better ask a branding expert.
Category
Lotusphere 2006
Workplace Forms is the new kid on the block.
The session gave a good insight into the capabilities of the Workplace
Forms system. Being based on W3C's xForms it allows for structured, secure,
tamper free travelling form data. The system allows you to use different
clients to view form information: rich client, html browser or a wizard
interface. The forms are state-aware without being connected to a server,
so they are suitable to be processed disconnected. E.g. you can require
that a certain section must be filled in and digitally signed before the
subsequent section can be filled in. This rules are not coded in procedural
code but defined as part of the xForms instance.
Workplace Forms has created a rich interaction
model around the form instance. The Rich client offers support for PKI
signatures and Digital sign-pads. The presenter spend quite a while to
explain how Workplace Designer, Domino and Workplace Forms fit together.
Workplace Forms only provides the UI and Designer, but not persistence
storage. So you would want to use [insert your favourite storage system
here] to store forms data.
What I liked:
Open Standards based xForms implementation
with a rich interaction model support for security and signature in place.
What I didn't like:
Confusing naming: Workplace Forms actually
doesn't need Workplace to run. Pricing is kind of steep with 25,000 USD
per CPU + 170USD per Rich Client (Browser client are free). Express pricing
doesn't seem to be in sight.
Category
Lotusphere 2006
Good to see paper prototyping entering
the Lotus realm. Steve Caudill and Rusell Mullen introduced the low fidelity
way to weed out requirement errors and improve system design. After putting
the methodology into context they raved on about the virtues of fast turning
prototypes. They showed a video of a paper prototyping session. I liked
that a lot since I'm preaching fast prototyping for a long period of time
already.
Category
Lotusphere 2006
IBM Workplace is coming of age. Version
2.6 released just a few days ago seems to be the first one suitable to
do some real world application. At the core of Workplace designer is XML
and JavaScript. To make the transition from existing Domino skills easier
Workplace Designer provides a host of visual layout and @Formulas wrapped
into JavaScript.
What I liked:
All data in Workplace Designer is defined
in XML Schema. IBM did embrace this open standard instead of creating something
proprietary. The biggest advantage there is, that you can reuse industry
standard schemata and base
your Workplace applications on them. Why does that matter? First it shortens
the definition phase of your data format, since other people defined it
for you. Secondly it makes your application more portable between platforms
and customers.
Deployment in a development environment
is pretty easy and quite fast. While e.g. MyEclipseIde
offers a similar speed of deployment for J2EE Workplace designer also takes
care of the database and updates loss free the table structure.
What I didn't like:
There is a strict separation between
JavaScript that is running on the client and running on the server. In
reality that means, that in a lot of cases you send back the whole page
to refresh just a part of it. With all the buzz around Ajax for web applications,
this looks a little backward. But there is always the next version.
Deployment into development is pretty
manual, with the capability to loss free updating the database.
As usual YMMV.
Category
Lotusphere 2006
IBM last year acquired Pureedge,
and their xForms
application. It now is called IBM Workplace forms. Being build on an open
standard workplace forms looks like Domino on steroids. On steroids not
so much in terms of programmability, but in terms of data structure. Workplace
forms have XML schemata as their data model and thus support hierarchical
structured data. Data that would require multiple parent child relations
when build in a RDBMS.
What is so special about that: Using
xForms and open schemata (like UBL -- see previous ports) you can build
form processes that transient your corporate boundaries. Using XML
Signature and Encryption a
business document can travel between all parties involved with the relevant
sections being protected against alteration. This is a clear departure
from the redundancy free mental model towards a process and document centric
view of business processes. To add to the confusion: Workplace Forms and
Workplace Designer seem to have some overlap. The biggest differentiator:
Workplace Forms don't require Workplace to run, so they can "travel".
What I liked:
It's great to see IBM embracing forms
based on W3C's open standards
What I didn't like:
The integration scenario with Domino
was kind of blurry and there seems some internal competition between Workplace
and Workplace forms
Category
Lotusphere 2006
Rob
Novak delivered a track to
business partners about key selling points. Fuelled by a vast experience
Rob shared how you can design the sales cycle to be more successful. He
didn't deliver cheap tricks or shaky sales tactics, but honest experience
what worked and didn't work for his
company. One key message:
a sales process can only be successful when you offer solutions to their
real problems to the people who can make the buying decision.... and thousand
things more.
What I liked:
A honest presentation full of business
insights backed with a great reading list.
What I didn't like:
The session was only 75 minutes (like
all of them), Rob surly has insights to share for a whole day.
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