Lotus Rock Star

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I'm really happy to report that Lotus Connections 2.0 went live on Friday. Good timing - I need it for a client, and for Collaboration University. However I was hoping for a quick download during lunch. Guess I'll be having a nap afterwards - I forgot my Melatonin anyway...





P.S. That speed is jumping around between 130 and 200 kb/sec...and it's not me, I have 10 MB fiber. Guess a lot of people are interested in "Connecting".

P.P.S. While it's still a monster, I do appreciate having this be labeled nicely and packaged together. My Portal installs of past years were a little...cryptic. Any product that needs bloggers to post the guide on how to download and extract the product needs work.

Posted by Rob Novak At 12:29 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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Be prepared for some serious learning from serious instructors...



Don't forget that your kit...



Remember that over here, we mix religion with everything...



And I mean everything...



Yes folks it's over...but the photos are just starting to leak out of my camera, which is filled with 350 of the finest moments at ILUG 2008! I'm back in the US tomorrow and will - after enjoying a sleep-in on Father's Day - be posting more of the best moments from ILUG. I'm happy to have been part of ILUG, and thrilled to have been one of the Green Shirt Brigade.

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:01 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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Even while packing for ILUG next week, I can't help but to announce with as much hooplah as I can muster in this small space that Collaboration University 2008 registration has opened today. With a brand new website sprucing up the joint, we're all excited to begin the summer-long journey towards another successful and excellent conference on Lotus Quickr and Sametime. We're even adding some Lotus Connections content focused on integration and APIs.

I alluded in a previous posting to some changes this year, and suppose it's time to let them be known.

New Look
As you can see from the new website and comparing it to the Internet Archive, we've taken on a fresh new look - something you can expect to see throughout the Collaboration University experience. We're using Dojo, a lot more pretty pictures (from our own cameras!), and a lot less text.

New Digs
First and foremost, we're moving from Kansas City to Chicago - already mentioned that, but it's worth a repeat. Second, the venues are NOT hotels. What this means for our attendees is that they'll have a choice of hotels, many within walking distance, in two cities with excellent transportation! It also means the rooms will not be so cold, and the projectors will probably work all the time

In Chicago we'll be at the IBM Innovation Center, located on the Chicago River a few blocks from Michigan Avenue. I have visited the building twice this year, and folks it is a great place to have the size and type of conference we produce. In two weeks I'll be in London visiting our venue there, IBM South Bank. Just a few blocks from Waterloo station, Marriott County Hall, the London Eye, and accessible from all over central London. Our dates (both start on a Monday and run through Wednesday):

Chicago: September 8-10, 2008
London: September 15-17, 2008

Many thanks to Ed Brill for assisting with the introduction at the IBM Innovation Center, and of course to our co-producing partners The Turtle Partnership in London, and Darren Adams from IBM for assisting with the London venue.

New Content
Let's see, since last July's conference we've seen two releases of Quickr, two releases of Sametime, an entire new product with Sametime Advanced, the Webdialogs acquisition which became Sametime Unyte, two point releases of Lotus Connections (with a massive 2.0 release coming any week now)...there's a lot to talk about, isn't there? While we will cover the "basics" to some degree, you can count on the content being fresh, new versions and old covered, and we'll be delving into Connections for several sessions  - enough to satisfy everyone's need for new technical information.

New Workshop Concept - Like, Real Life
For our workshops this year (Wednesday afternoon post-con), we're trying something different. We're going to give you a month's experience in 3 hours! The workshop will focus on Quickr Domino development and administration. Developers will go to one room and work on an application - with significant help - for 90 minutes, while the admins will start with a "bare bones" install of Quickr and apply best practices security settings, modify LDAP, configure notes.ini and qpconfig.xml, and set up MSSO. Next, each developer will pair up with an admin to deploy the application and test it. If that's not real-life enough, your resident business client (me) will request a critical change in the application so everyone - developers and admins alike - can learn what choices you have to make when deploying changes to a production Quickr environment.

Homework & Prerequisites
So every time there's a conference, there is always a mixed bag of experience levels showing up at the door. It's the nature of the beast. With so much packed into a 3-day schedule, our approach has been to start with more basic topics and ramp up quickly. That means the first few sessions could be too basic for experienced attendees (though I've never been told that it's not challenging enough by the end of the day). So we're planing to release some basic sessions electronically to attendees in August as pre-conference "level set", for those who would like a head start. Totally optional, but those who go through them get 3-4 more sessions! The main benefit is that we can all start faster and get into more complex topics on the first day.

So please go have a look around the Collaboration University website, and register early! As you might expect, there are early registration discounts, and as a "thank you" to past attendees, an Alumni discount.

Now, back to packing! Dublin here I come...

Posted by Rob Novak At 4:19 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (6)

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Make sure you reply to the confirmation email you'll receive from ILUG today, if you're a registered attendee! It lets the organizing team know that indeed, you'll be coming. Please don't let us down - so many people are going to great lengths to make this the biggest, most successful user group meeting ever held! So one more time:

Posted by Rob Novak At 10:45 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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The SNAPPS Quickr Templates for Quickr 8.1 were all posted Tuesday morning, and have been tested by people who found them (like 200 of you, thanks to other bloggers catching on within an hour!). Then I re-posted them this morning without full text indices, as it appears at least one index was corrupted. Not a huge issue, but they didn't need to be there anyway. So far, only 5 or 6 people have reported issues. Some have been definitely configuration issues, following all of the doc, etc. Some are issues that are new with Quickr 8.1 - we have at least one SPR open due to what we found, and another Quickr bug we haven't traced all the way yet.

So far, so good. There are some important concepts to note, they're in the doc but to outline:
*Upgrading placetypes is not trivial, but is necessary if you're moving up from Quickr 8.0 or 8.0.0.2.
*We achieved our 100% common source code goal for compatibility with 8.0, 8.0.0.2, and 8.1.
*If you're new to the SNAPPS Quickr Templates, sign the databases and placebots as directed. The most common problem is unsigned design. If you don't know what this means or don't have the access on your server to do so, ask your Administrator to do the signing.

Will post more information soon folks. Enjoy...

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:49 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (9)

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I'd like to say that the past five weeks have been a social experiment. Or perhaps that I'd been on vacation. But both are far from the truth. In real life, I've been heads down working on new projects, flying around the country for client visits (DC, Chicago, Milwaukee), writing a stack of proposals, introducing a new team to Quickr and Sametime, and dealing with several support issues for two major clients. In other words, swamped.

So while I won't apologize (I never really understood why people feel guilt for not blogging) I will just say "I'm back", and will have a lot to say the rest of the year, starting today. I'll also say thank you to the few folks who emailed me ("Are you OK?" emails started coming two weeks ago) and my CEO coach Barbara, who phoned me up yesterday to make sure I wasn't sick, depressed or gone missing.

So many of you are expecting some commentary about Quickr 8.1 which shipped a few days before my last blog posting, and having experienced it for a hundred hours or so I'll have a lot to say in the coming weeks - good, bad and technical.  ILUG is coming up (just booked my hotel...late!), CU registration is around the corner, and I foresee a major release coming from Lotus in the next couple months. A lot of material for the blog...

Thanks and I'll be back later today. News!

Posted by Rob Novak At 12:43 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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UPDATE: As Steve points out in comments, this works with iPods made prior to July 2007, with the 35mm jack at the top.

I recently read a blog entry (nobody you know) that lamented the fact that you had to buy a fancy shmancy Apple device to watch your iPod videos on TV. Well two things were wrong with this.

One is, there are plenty of third party docks that let you do this. I own the Apple branded one, and also the DLO Home Dock Deluxe. Both stink. Neither one works well, and both have unstable and quirky remotes.

The second thing wrong with this is the little-known fact (I assume little-known, as there's not much published on it) that you can in fact use plain old RGB cables like those pictured here to play your iPod video on any TV with inputs. I travel with these cables, and many TVs in both the US and Europe have RGB inputs. I've even found them in about 75% of hotel TVs. Sometimes they are blocked (you can't get the input to switch to it), sometimes the remote lets you switch, sometimes you just have to tune to a particular station.

So how to? First, acquire the cable. It will look like this photo on the output end, and have a single jack on the end that plugs into your iPod. You can get this at any electronics store, department store with an electronics section, or in the US at the hardware, pharmacy, grocery, or massage parlor. Seriously, they're easy to find. Next, here's the trick, NONE of the cables goes into the same color on the TV set. For some inexplicable reason (not really, the reason is that Apple wants you to buy their docks!) Apple sends the video signal over the Red cable. Following is the correct pairing when you plug into the TV:

Plug RED to input YELLOW
Plug YELLOW to input WHITE
Plug WHITE to input RED

Next, in video setup on the iPod, select the correct settings for your location. PAL and NTSC are the TV options...in the US, use NTSC, in Europe use PAL. I always tell the iPod to ask me if the TV is connected.

Voila, a low-cost, very portable solution to watching your iPod videos on TV while you travel. I even use this at home when I get mad at the stupid remotes. Enjoy...

Posted by Rob Novak At 6:30 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (4)

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As I alluded to yesterday, last week I was in Washington, DC. Three days of work and a weekend of sightseeing with Liz and her family was the plan. I've been working with my client there for 16 months, having made four trips to Washington and one to Key West as part of our initial scope.

But this trip ended with an invitation somewhere special. As a complete surprise to me, my client had arranged for a private tour for us on Sunday, March 30.

This took us places we never thought we'd visit in our lifetimes. And it wasn't led by a tour guide, but rather a member of "management". We were able to take a few photos along the way...

Needless to say, this completely reinforces my ideas about working with the kind of clients I do. Yes - I did set foot in "the office". What a day.

Posted by Rob Novak At 1:28 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (4)

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As much as I love my MacBook Pro, losing a drive to physical crash is maddening. It happened to me in the beginning of December - on the road, the night before three days of client meetings. Then the replacement drive (ordered by my Apple store in KC) arrived a few days later, they replaced it, could not convert data, so I had a clean new machine. I reinstalled my Time Machine backup in an hour and was back in business. Stuff happens.

Stuff keeps happening. Last week in DC, the same exact thing happened on the night I arrived for a 6-day trip. Different hotel, different city, same client (so I've conveniently blamed them). Physical hard disk crash, total loss. This time I was able to visit an Apple store in DC. They verified it was toast, which allowed me to call the KC store and get a disk on order for when I returned. They also set up an appointment for me over the phone, which their answering system says they cannot do, but given my inability to visit the website to schedule it, they took pity on me. So the third drive arrived yesterday, I hooked up to Time Machine, restored...but this time something was missing. My entire VM of Windows XP. Everything I'd done since December in Windows was gone. I have an idea why - I had just converted to using TM over wireless - but need to test the theory. And keep one in reserve at the office just in case.

Fortunately, I kept my Sony up to date. So at the moment, while the Mac is doing a disk surface scan as a precaution, I'm producing a new VM from the Sony to transfer over. Should take about 3 hours for 60 GB. I'll be missing some files, but for the most part I had been saving anything critical over to the Mac's folders anyway, working in Windows only when absolutely necessary. That is less and less, but Domino Designer, Administrator, a few utilities and two customer VPNs still require me to load it up.

The shine has worn off my Mac experience a bit, but let me tell you - if this had happened to the Sony a year ago, I'd still be toast.

And even though losing a laptop even for a couple days is pretty much hell, what happened Sunday made up for it all. Another post, later today. As soon as my Mac is whole again.

Posted by Rob Novak At 10:46 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (7)

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Feeling like giving today. So I posted AnyPlace Designer 7 to the QuickrTemplates.com site just now. AnyPlace Designer 7 is a Dreamweaver Extension for custom QuickPlace theme creation and previewing that takes away the labor-intensive process of placing QuickPlace Skin Components in your HTML code. It lets you render the page preview outside QuickPlace, so no more uploading themes 30 times to get it right.

AnyPlace Designer 7 works with QuickPlace 3, 6.5.1, and 7, and works with Quickr 8 with limitations. Quickr 8 introduced several new skin components and broke out actions into priority actions and other actions, and 8 and 8.1 have vastly different themes and classes. So it will work to an extent with Quickr 8 but then you'll need to tweak by hand to achieve a complete theme. We will develop a version for Quickr 8.1 when time allows and post it to the site. Anyone who downloads version 7 will receive a notification when this is the case.

AnyPlace Designer 7 was a $400 commercial product, and is now free software with a $99 support option. Enjoy!

Posted by Rob Novak At 2:06 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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Back in January, I announced that we intended to take our commercial products for QuickPlace/Quickr, update them, remove license code, and make them free. What I didn't know at the time was how much work that really is, and that we'd be hit with new projects in early February with no end in sight. So while my intent was well-meaning, execution on this has taken a back burner to our clients' priorities and projects.

That said, last night we (which as you know is the executive's way of saying 90% Viktor, 10% me) completed the recoding and repackaging of SNAPPS AnyPlace SiteMap as a free license. In case you haven't been introduced to AnyPlace SiteMap, it is a completely intuitive, security-aware remote control for your QuickPlace and Quickr sites. With a Windows Explorer-like navigation, it reduces the number of clicks and screen redraws significantly (by about 90%), making your users more productive and lowering bandwidth requirements for QuickPlace/Quickr. It's a big hit as it benefits every user in the organization. And it works with QuickPlace 2.08 through Quickr 8.1.

As a commercial product, AnyPlace SiteMap sold for $2,000 plus $400 maintenance per year. Now it's free, no keys to unlock, and you can optionally buy support for $299. We can also customize it for you as a project, just contact me. I should note - this is free software, not open source. The distinction is important as they both have the same effect on your budget, but there is a license and intellectual property (very well) protected in our free AnyPlace software.

I delivered the first copy to a colleague in Miami last night. Here's what he said:

"For background, I received a request from one of our place managers a few days ago asking if I could provide her with a site map utility.  I started researching what was available and discovered your tool, that fact that you are now releasing it as a free utility is guaranteed to generate some business for Snapps!  This could not have happened at a more opportune time!

Best of all it required ZERO IT resources to implement, which is consistent with the concept of Quickplace/Quickr's Self Service model.  It also demonstrates the awesome power of QP forms!

[...] You are the MAN! Please give my BEST regards to "Developer Extraordinaire" Viktor as well! I can't thank you guys enough!!!!! "

We have decided to use the QuickrTemplates.com website to manage delivery of the AnyPlace products. The storage mechanism is already in place, and we can easily track downloads. This is also where we'll offer support. And before I forget, big thanks to Martin Vereecken for the new banner design!

More good stuff coming soon, folks. Enjoy the SiteMap.

Posted by Rob Novak At 10:00 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (11)

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As Ed writes, the IBM channel announcement for Quickr 8.1 has been posted. A "refreshed" UI, a few extra dabs of Web 1.99 in places where it really needed it (member management - you're gonna love it), and a whole slew of new class names for theme developers to learn. Here's the official line:

IBM Lotus Quickr 8.1 is team software that helps you access and share information and project materials that you need to get the job done, and to make better, more informed decisions. Lotus Quickr Standard provides many new features to enhance the user experience and simplify administration, including:

    * Streamlined browser interface leveraging Web 2.0 technology
    * New Lotus Quickr connector for Lotus Notes 8.0.1 using the side-shelf capability
    * New Lotus Quickr connector for Lotus Symphony
    * New Lotus Quickr connector for Microsoft Outlook
    * Personal file sharing (also available separately as Lotus Quickr Entry)
    * Enhanced administrative tools and user interface
    * Integration with Lotus Connections profiles

SNAPPS has been hard at work on the limited releases ("betas" of a different name) and provided a lot of feedback to development in the past two months. Some has been folded in, some not, some is a matter of opinion...so we'll see on the 28th if opinion makes any difference

Posted by Rob Novak At 9:03 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (10)

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But today, I had the pleasure of presenting to the Pacific User Group (PUG!) with about 40 participants in a Sametime Unyte meeting and 5-10 in a conference room in San Francisco. Thanks to Holli Konig from IBM for setting it up.

I chose to present four of the SNAPPS templates for Quickr to illustrate different concepts:
> Dojo for UI and data management (QSurvey),
> Domino application integration (QContacts),
> UI excellence and Connections integration (QActivities), and
> Application combinations (QSite)

Then I moved on to demonstrate AnyPlace SiteMap for Quickr, about to be released as a free license. I'll probably put together a flash demo of that one this week.

Anyway - in case you love pugs too, you're really going to enjoy this!

Posted by Rob Novak At 6:51 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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Greetings from sunny Florida

In the past week I've received two questions from IBMers working with clients on either the blog template in Quickr 8, or implementing QSite. Both had the same issue - when you change to a legacy theme or try to apply a custom theme, the "blog stuff" doesn't show up. Fortunately I already had a canned response, so I thought I would share it here. Note that this is not limited to the blog, some other templates have similar "injection" features.

If you want to use another theme, it must have specifically named divs in order for the code to insert the blog-specific elements. The legacy themes don't have these elements, so customer themes are required.

A development requirement was to create the blog template (and qblog inside qsite) without modifying the standard Quickr 8.0 theme.  There are three scripts that insert code into specific places in the theme (without modifying the theme itself).  For instance, look here at the QBlog Preferences Form:

if(!h_isBeingEdited){
                try{
                        var oDiv = dojo.byId("BlogWidgets");
                        var oTable = dojo.byId("Table7");
                        if(oTable){
                                dojo.dom.insertBefore(oDiv, oTable);
                        }else{
                                //This is to account for version 8.0.0.2
                                oTable = dojo.byId("Table4");
                                dojo.dom.insertAfter(oDiv, oTable);
                        }
                        oDiv.style.display = "";
                }catch(e){}
        }

It will work fine with a custom theme, as long as the custom theme has divs called Table7 or Table4, in the places where you would want the blog widgets (calendar and links) to go.  Same with the RSS link which is replaced.

There are several other places in the templates where we had to "inject" or replace standard theme code.

And keep in mind - all this changes with the upcoming release. We're working on it!

Posted by Rob Novak At 8:42 AM Location Tampa, Florida | Permalink | Comments (4)

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And a reminder to pay attention to little details like MSSO configurations...sorry to those few people who couldn't get in this morning before I got here. You're all good now that I remembered to add the new server to the web configuration MSSO document and replicate it around.

As we bumped past 33,000 downloads today, I was prepping more content while Jerald polishes the template subscription wizard.

AnyPlace Designer for prior versions is ready to go, and I've decided to post a couple Quickr themes as well. Now don't use these themes with the templates themselves as they're not as interchangeable as that, but one of the new themes is slick and streamlined and even improves Quickr performance by roughly 30% while the other is "IBM" themed, so you sales folks can brand your places.

We almost have AnyPlace Sitemap ready, just needs the JavaScript file to run through the scrubber again. Alas, Viktor took the day off today and Monday (his 40th birthday by the way!) so we have a little longer wait for that one. Speaking of Viktor, I'd like to congratulate him on his 8 year anniversary working for SNAPPS, just yesterday! That's right, 8 years. A long time in this industry...20% of his life...wow when you say it that way it's either impressive or depressing, depending on whether he likes his job

OK back to the site. Grand unveiling of all this cool stuff coming soon...

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:31 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Hey folks, especially sleepy Americans (like me), registration for the Irish Lotus User Group meeting in Dublin June 4-6 officially opened two hours ago!  Better get moving if you want a spot--even though the venue is three times the size as 2007, we're expecting a "sell-out" shortly.  Well if you can sell out a FREE event that is.  Mr. Paul Mooney has laid out the rules and regs for registration...if you want to go, you must register.  Doesn't matter if you're a sponsor. Doesn't matter if you're an organizer (Liz and I have the pleasure to be lending a hand this year - editorial skills from her, and mostly moral support from me but still). Doesn't matter if you're Ed flippin' Brill, you have to register. So do it. If you're an American and think you might like a nice trip to Ireland with no conference cost and reasonable accommodations, this is the time to register.

Now to a personal matter. You may recall (especially if you were there) that I have a soft spot in my heart for this conference. I love it so much because I get to do things I could never get away with at Lotusphere, the magazine conferences, not even Collaboration University--and you'd think I could do what I want there. No, ILUG is the place where in 2006 after perhaps 300 sessions in other venues, I finally got to have a session called "Free Beer". I always wanted to have a session called "Free Beer". So in 2006 I brought a few Heinekens over from Amsterdam, where I had just been with a client. In 2007, "Free Beer II - Guinness's Revenge" was, uh, well received.

Why is this a personal matter? Well Wild Bill Buchan, completely unprovoked, seems to have issued a not-so-well-veiled personal challenge over on his "let-everyone-know-registration-is-open-cause-Paul-said-so" blog entry today (we all have one of those). Buried at the end of his bullet points:

DONT expect Rob Novak to buy a Guinness for EVERYONE in his session again this year, as the room seats 500 people, and even a man of his caliber would have difficulty covering that bar bill.

This seems like a challenge to me. What's a man with a reputation like mine to do? Let's just say I'm still working on the session title.

Stay tuned. And keep an eye on the right side in coming weeks as I begin preparations for ILUG 2008...

Posted by Rob Novak At 8:56 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (3)

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I'll stick to some easier-to-digest technical and business topics for a while

I'll start with the status of my pre-Lotusphere posting on support options for the SNAPPS Quickr Templates, since I've received several emails on the topic (Subject: "When! When, when!").  In the coming week there will be several changes to the website.  For starters, we're adding a group blog and documentation wiki.  The blog will let us communicate updates and new features in a more streamlined fashion - so when you see it there, just grab the feed.  We'll also be starting to feature some success stories both from IBMers and customers using the templates in their organization.  The wiki will be a consolidation of release notes, technical tips, source code instructions, and whatever else we feel merits documentation.

Next we'll be bringing our support options online - incident-based support for the free versions, and an entirely new codestream of templates for subscription versions.  The subscription versions will have unlimited technical support, new features, and guaranteed compatibility (or a new version) with the shipping version of Quickr within 30 days of EGA.  Enterprises requiring support will find one of these two options valuable, and it will allow us to continue to develop, support and add to the templates. The subscription quote wizard is almost ready for prime time.  Subscription units are between $1 and $2 per user per template per year, with QSite at a premium.

Finally, we're going to add our free AnyPlace line of products to the site, giving us a streamlined download facility.  We will also be posting some utilities and free custom themes there, and are considering moving our QuickPlace 7 QBlog, QWiki, and QDoc downloads there.

To support all of this internal activity, we have brought up a new server and are identifying the appropriate templates for the blog and wiki. Probably BlogSphere and DominoWiki - open source makes sense - but I'm taking a vote of the guys who are going to have to write the most.

Last but not least on the support front, we have launched an enterprise support offering for Quickr customers. Most valuable to companies new to Quickr or without professional Domino administration, we have two levels of support contracts - and options to enhance it to include European business hours.  More on this later, and on the SNAPPS website soon.

Posted by Rob Novak At 2:51 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (3)

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The terms "collaboration" and "collaboration software" have been applied quite liberally to many kinds of technology, causing confusion in the market about what really constitutes collaboration technology.  Early technology based on email, document sharing, instant messaging, decision support or workflow, it is still likely to be described as having collaborative capabilities, and may have been enhanced to deliver some collaboration capabilities.  Document sharing is one area that has seen extension after extension into collaborative systems.  Systems that "bring the right information to the right people at the right time", enable business-rules processing for hierarchical structures, and draw individuals into conversation around central topics are first-generation collaboration systems as well.  As a natural progression, some collaboration systems have simply extended the personal productivity tools and concepts of the 80s to small predefined working groups.  Some of these document-sharing-centric systems are still in the market, being improved, and incorporating newer technologies.  The need for this first generation of collaboration technology is not expected to decrease with time.

An evolution of thinking around collaboration in and across workplaces took place in the 2000-2006 timeframe, when more advanced second-generation systems for team collaboration began to be integrated with the earlier models, and to be released stand-alone.  The concept of "contextual collaboration" became popular in portal and web-based document and application systems.  This concept turned "my work" systems into "our work" systems by recognizing and putting software constructs around the idea that people working together on projects were more effective and innovative than the individual contributors.  Enabling a team (again, predefined) with tools like instant messaging or screen/application sharing - in the context of the work at hand - helped foster that innovation and effectiveness.  New collaboration tools that enable web-based workflow, content management, instant meetings, and expertise location were built and began to be integrated into common applications.  This second generation is entering a stage of maturity in the market and its tools are being used in many global enterprises.

A more recent and increasingly common set of collaboration technologies centers around social networking or social software.  Originally introduced in the consumer market, its concepts and benefits are becoming very popular in industry.  The basic idea of social software is that people may or may not organize themselves as teams, so the software - this is a critical capability for the category - should be able to draw conclusions and recommend working relationships from the work product, ideas, patterns and writings of people.  Then when those people have the ability to "find" each other and begin to collaborate on work, they can add in the first- and second-generation collaboration tools discussed above for immediate, sometimes instant, benefit.  Some common uses of social software include socially-enhanced person profiles (think of this as a business card / directory hybrid with more information about the person), tracking bookmarks in data stores (if 75 people bookmark something in my field, it might be interesting), communities, blogs, wikis, and vertical offerings.  The third generation is in its infancy and enjoying a rapid adoption rate, largely because its genesis is in the consumer sector and with a new generation of knowledge workers.  Business is harnessing social software more slowly, as it has with everything but email, but in the next few years we will see more rapid adoption of social software in business as its benefits are realized and become more easily identifiable.

With the advent of "Web 2.0" techniques such as tagging, social software enables people to "connect the dots" between their work and the work and interests of others, and helps to identify opportunities for collaboration.  For instance, if a user of a social network identifies a subject or work product of interest, that user can then see who else is interested in that work, identify who has done or worked on similar topics, and with whom they have worked.  Social software makes multi-node connections between people, their work, and others possible in a short time.  Depending on the complexity of the software and level of adoption, social software can very rapidly provide a framework for "bringing the right people to the right information at the right time".

Obviously all three generations of collaboration software have enormous impact on and benefit for today's global knowledge workers.  Application models, frameworks and patterns have emerged with each major introduction and evolution in thinking on collaboration.  However in the never-ending need to prove innovation, often we have seen product introductions that showcase only the emerging technology, leaving the core capabilities of "older generation" technology behind.  Software companies would be well advised to maintain those capabilities through features and open APIs so developers and user can benefit from new technology while maintaining a comfort level with their more familiar toolsets.  When the fourth generation of collaboration technology hits - and it won't be long - smart companies will introduce their innovations while delivering capabilities across the entire spectrum of collaborative software.

Copyright 2008 Rob Novak. All Rights Reserved.

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:23 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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It's been about 6 months since we switched from a T-1 line to a 10/10 fiber channel.  Our hosting customers and websites are now limited mostly by disk I/O and SSL encoding/decoding and not bandwidth:



Note the time - 1:15 PM Central time, when a lot of the business world in this time zone checks email and starts surfing again.

The the same test from home, where I have RoadRunner Cable with the speed booster package du jour.  As you can see the download speed is comparable but uploads are (predictably) throttled:



Now I ask - why is it that a company of my size has a fiber channel and major hotels and even some mid-sized businesses still limp by on T-1 or ASDL?  I'll tell you why - on the corporate side, broadband contracts are notoriously penalizing, even while broadband technology expands every 6 months.  The average length T-1 service contract is 3 years.  And hotel IT departments with a few exceptions are notorious for providing the absolute minimum bandwidth and making massive profits on geeks who pay $10 US to $30 us for 24 hours of access.  I have 7 times the capacity of most hotels I've stayed in - and could actually provide service to all six buildings in my complex if I so desired - for the same as I was paying for a T-1 just 5 years ago.  And that's what I was paying for 128kbps ISDN when I started SNAPPS.

Times change - hotels and mid-sized companies need to make sure they keep up by pressuring broadband companies to provide expandable bandwidth.  I can temporarily (for a month at a time, with 1 day's notice) burst to 100 or even !GB fiber if I want.  You should be building that kind of flexibility into your connections.

Posted by Rob Novak At 9:32 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (3)

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In case you missed the earlier mention, Troy Reimer at SNAPPS created and donated - to JSON.org and OpenNTF.org - LotusScript class libraries for reading and writing JSON for all kinds of data notes.  

He gives a more detailed explanation on what it's all about and a concrete example here in a guest column on Viktor Krantz's blog.   Pay special attention...

...I didn't say it before, but the JSONArray and JSONObject classes also have the ToJSON method. This allows round-tripping of the JSON string. JSON string comes in, is parsed into LotusScript objects using JSONReader, those objects are modified using the JSONArray or JSONObject methods, and finally the resulting object is converted back to a JSON string using the ToJSON method.

This makes for some pretty powerful stuff - enjoy the example and explanation...

Posted by Rob Novak At 1:53 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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That's right alumni and friends, installations seven and eight (can't believe it but it's true) of the highly focused, expert-led Collaboration University are being announced today.  Right here, right now.  Once again we're focused on IBM Lotus Quickr and Sametime, and we'll even be throwing in sessions on Lotus Connections, showing you how to integrate with the rest of the collaboration stack.

In just a few short years, Collaboration University has become one of the premier events in our industry by focusing each event on a selection of collaboration technologies, covering both administration and development with industry experts, and introducing the concept of rapid, progressive immersion to maximize your training value.

So our big news this year is that we're moving to the "big city" - our US location is going to be in Chicago!  Mark your calendars for September 8-10.  And of course, we're repeating CU the following week - again in London, September 15-17 - at an all-new location.  More information on locations (very cool locations I might add - think "not a hotel"!) and hotel selections will be posted to the website over the next couple weeks.

In 2006 and 2007 we collected your feedback and while you were very complimentary, we managed to think up some improvements for this year.  For instance, we'll be assigning each attendee some "homework" over the summer - a group of introductory sessions that we'll deliver in advance to bring you up to speed.  By doing this, we can start at a slightly more complex topic level on day one, and you can fit in 4-5 more sessions than our time together will allow.  That's just one improvement in a list we're working on - so keep an eye on the blogs, be sure to visit the website and enter your info to be notified when registration opens.  And just a note of thanks to all our alumni and speaker customers for your support - we'll be recognizing that in the registration process this year!

For the 4,000 of you already on my mailing list...don't worry, you'll hear about it plenty  And yes, I'll throw in some news and technical tips to make the reading worth your time.

Posted by Rob Novak At 12:43 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (6)

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Just took a peek at the combination of application and source code downloads at QuickrTemplates.com and wow, another 1,000 in the past 10 days!  Very cool that people are finding them so valuable.  Looks like about 50% are downloading source files to add new capabilities to their own Quickr places - or to learn from the code.

We're going to be adding new features and new code to the site in the near future.  You can expect to see some changes in February, just as soon as our work on the Quickr products is done to make them downloadable - they'll be over on the same site along with a new blog, a documentation wiki, and new support options.

We're also starting some testing with Quickr 8.1 - which we know will break some functionality - so keep checking here and on QuickrTemplates.com for updates after the 8.1 release scheduled for next month.

Posted by Rob Novak At 12:25 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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I've had the privilege of speaking at ILUG a couple times and am very much looking forward to a third this June 4-6.  As you may know this year the event is shaping up to be bigger than ever - 450+ attendees for three days, from at least 20 countries.  It's more of an International Lotus User Group that just so happens to be in Ireland!

As a user group, ILUG is a not-for-profit operation that in fact doesn't even charge for attending.  It is supported by an amazing group of people, random acts of kindness, and sponsorships from (mostly) Lotus ISVs.  Last year, in addition to speaking there I swung some marketing funds for Collaboration University (I know, I know, location and dates announcement coming Tuesday...) to ILUG.  Not only did were there great benefits of being a sponsor - materials, a quick pitch, etc., but we also got to stand around looking quite dapper one day.  We were boothless (what are we going to do, stand there and convince you to come to yet another conference three months later?) but most definitely not babeless!

Now there are several different and new options for ILUG sponsors this year, which Mr Mooney has posted here.  I encourage anyone whose marketing plan includes getting in front of loads of Lotus faithful for days at a time to pitch in and sponsor!

Of course, you need no further incentive to actually attend ILUG than the list of speakers and topics that are already lining up, but in case you missed it last year, there's one session with a few fringe benefits...

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:34 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Big news today - congratulations to Binary Tree on their newest employee, that's right, Bob Balaban has accepted a position with them as Vice President of Research and Development.  Bob's second stint at IBM these last several years has made a difference for all of us in different ways and has helped the Lotus product line in ways we will see for years to come.  Congratulations Bob and as well to the folks at Binary Tree on a great hire.

Oh - and yes, the food fight was staged, as Bob explains...

Posted by Rob Novak At 12:40 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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To steal a post from Viktor while I was gone...
Troy Reimer at SNAPPS has created LotusScript classes for parsing and creating JSON text. These classes are contained within five script libraries. There is a JSONReader and a JSONWriter class together with some wrapper classes including JSONArray and JSONObject. The JSONWriter class is really cool. You can pass it basically anything Notes data related and let it create the JSON for you. This is really handy for passing a NotesDocumentCollection to the class and let it return perfect JSON to the browser or whatever called it.

This class provides two ways of outputing JSON text. The first is to pass an array, list, NotesDocument, NotesDocumentCollection, NotesView, NotesViewEntryCollection, or NotesViewEntry to the ToJSON method. This will render the object as JSON. If the object is a type of view object, the output will be taken from the column values. The output data is basically the same as the properties/values of NotesViewEntry. If the object is a document, its output follows the NotesDocument properties/values.

Troy has wrapped the code in a Notes database and the download can be found here. A link to this download is now visible at JSON.org and it's been uploaded to and documented at OpenNTF.org

Now the back story. Troy developed the JSONReader class while we were busy developing templates for Quickr, thinking we would need it to do some of the processing. We had to write it from scratch, which is why we didn't just use an earlier open source one that had been on OpenNtf.org for a while. Turns out we didn't need it, but that it and a Writer class would be quite useful in Domino development later on. So he kept working on it part time, adding wrappers, adding objects, "polishing the apple" so to speak. When it was finished, after a lot of testing, we decided it should simply be donated as open source. We hope you find it useful!

Posted by Rob Novak At 5:33 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (5)

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I've just returned from my annual post-Lotusphere family visit to Naples, Florida - with a stop in Ft Lauderdale to visit Dan Singleton of Assurant.  Dan's a wonderful guy who has been in our industry a very long time, and he showed Liz and I a wonderful time at dinner Tuesday night, along with another couple from Norway.

So what happens when I'm gone?  Well nobody cleaned my desk and we'll have a chat about that later, but Viktor did manage to write a series of short articles on viktr.com about the sessions we SNAPPS guys delivered at Lotusphere.  Before Lotusphere, we kept pretty quiet about BP212 - The Great Code Giveaway - so much so that even the track manager didn't know the real content of our session.  People tend to assume our session has something to do with Quickr (wonder why?) but it couldn't be further from the truth - this session for seven years has been 100% Domino and integration goodness.  Viktor and I delivered this one twice, both to packed rooms, totalling something like 1000 attendees.  It was once again a great time and fun to show off the 400-500 hours we put into Lotusphere each year.  People (especially other Business Partners) think we're crazy for doing that, but with our value-based practice we can do it as long as customers partake of our services from February through November!  Hint, hint, customers, that's tomorrow...

So in case you weren't in our session or not in Orlando...Viktor and I demonstrated several innovations with Dojo and Domino integration, and integration between Domino web applications and Lotus Connections.  Among the highlights:

Demo #1: Simple Dojo integration into form controls
Demo #2: Multi-database applications using a common front end through Dojo HTML retrieval
Demo #3-11: The Big Deal: Viktor has created a Domino view grid control and view store, to replace Domino's own view rendering in many situations, with just a few lines of code in many cases

This final bit was 50% of the demo time, with 9 progressive demos including a simple grid, design options, multi-row column headers (read that again real slow and think about it...!), multiple view grids on a page, and various selection functions.  In the final demo, Viktor showed a multiple-grid page with click functions that controlled a second grid, and integrated with the public Greenhouse Connections server for rich Profiles data.  And it all worked flawlessly on PCs and Macs.

He's been writing up methods and tips on viktr.com in my absence - so I suggest you go there for a good technical deep dive into The Great Code Giveaway!  If we're lucky, we'll see you next year, that is if those customers keep us busy starting tomorrow...

Posted by Rob Novak At 12:15 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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ID501 at Lotusphere was packed and required a repeat...and the entire SNAPPS team was locked out because it was filled as we arrived!

The sessions Viktor, Troy and Jerald gave on Quickr development and themes were filled.

The pedestal was always busy, as was the stand in the developer's lab.

The Quickr Birds-of-a-Feather was standing room only - I stood behind the bar.

All this seems to bode well.

Posted by Rob Novak At 9:24 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (4)

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I made a small change to the card based on new info...don't forget to download and print!  Print lots, hand them out, the more the merrier!

I'll be printing some and leaving them around the Dolphin tonight...

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:37 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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That's right folks, taking a cue from the IBM commercial itself, and a great time at Macworld where it's become a tradition, I've created your very own Lotusphere Keynote Bingo card!  For those of you unfamilar with the concept, Keynote Bingo is a game whereby common phrases, buzzwords, rumors, onscreen clues and new features are placed on a Bingo card.  As the Keynote (Opening General Session or OGS in Lotusphere land) progresses, you simply check off the items that really do happen.  If you find yourself in the lucky position of having a straight line of five, simply yell out "BINGO!".

Of course I'm not advocating interrupting an important speech.  And of course if you're escorted from the Dolphin, I won't refund your money.  But let's have some fun.

I'm not considering anything on the card as a foregone conclusion nor do I have prior knowledge of anything on the card.  I've just seen them all, heard rumors, and have my own guesses.

For best results, download and print the PDF!  If you can't for some reason, simply print this graphic - and enjoy!

Lotusphere 2008 Keynote Bingo!

Posted by Rob Novak At 2:17 AM Location San Francisco, CA | Permalink | Comments (8)

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Those of you who have seen Eddie Murphy's brilliant performance in the dinner table scenes in the remake of The Nutty Professor recall "Hercules, Hercules, Hercules!".  Now replace it with "Lotusphere, Lotusphere, Lotusphere!" in your mind and you know how I usually feel (and act - it's embarassing) the Friday before.  But here I sit on Monday night - Tuesday morning to be precise - with the same buzz.  Why?  It's a double-whammy.  I'm leaving first thing in the morning for San Francisco where Liz will work and I will roam around MacWorld first.  That's right, MacWorld.  The creative, vegetarian conference equivalent of Lotusphere, and I even have a MacBook Pro to be an honorable guest.  (No offense intended friends - for what it's worth I don't eat meat.)

So I'm leaving for Lotusphere tomorrow, with a stop at a little 50,000 user conference on the west coast.  The best part?  I get to see all the cool gadgets on the MacWorld Expo floor first hand.  The worst part?  Liz wants to let me know what she wants for her birthday after the MacWorld keynote.  It's Tuesday, her birthday is Thursday.

Oh well, no rest for me on Wednesday.

Posted by Rob Novak At 12:29 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Update March 19: Still working on these. After Lotusphere, all our good intentions to do this in February were dashed by a slew of client projects with tight deadlines. So hang on, we're still doing this, just not sure exactly when. -Rob

January 14, 2008 - Overland Park, KS
In a surprise announcement, SNAPPS (Strategic Net Applications, Inc.) today outlined plans to convert its entire AnyPlace™ line of products for IBM Lotus Quickr and its predecessor, IBM Lotus QuickPlace, to free licenses. The products have been in the market as paid licenses for between three and six years and have been successful in that time. The products are designed enhance the experience and productivity with IBM Lotus Quickr and QuickPlace for developers, administrators and end users. They are listed below with their previous pricing levels including maintenance:

• AnyPlace™ Designer, a Dreamweaver extension to ease development of custom themes ($600/developer) FREE
• AnyPlace™ SiteMap, a floating control panel for simple navigation of a specific place ($2,400/server) FREE
• AnyPlace™ ServerMap, a floating control panel similar to SiteMap, but for an entire server with favorite places, admin controls and grouping ($4,800/server) FREE
• AnyPlace™ Administrator, the flagship product in the line that provides a complete web-based admin client for QuickPlace and Quickr server administrators ($1,790/server) FREE

Each of the products works with multiple versions of QuickPlace and already works with Quickr 8. In addition, several updates are being made to the products to allow deeper integration with Qucikr 8; those enhancements will be completed in Q1 2008. The free version of each of the four products will be downloadable from the SNAPPS Quickr Templates site (QuickrTemplates.com) in mid-February, once SNAPPS' software developers have removed the license key code and completed the Quickr 8 updates. AnyPlace Designer, which does not require a license key, is available now upon request.

The move to free licenses was prompted by the success of the SNAPPS Quickr Templates under the free software model, and a choice by SNAPPS to sacrifice license fees for a greater presence in Quickr deployments. "Our products, especially AnyPlace Administrator, have been an entry point for many enterprise customers who have then become high-value consulting or development clients.", explained Rob Novak, President of SNAPPS. "Making the AnyPlace products free brings down the price barrier to realizing the value of these powerful tools, while expanding the reach of the SNAPPS name throughout IBM's Lotus Quickr customer enterprises. Our goal is to expand the use of these products by 50 times their level as paid licenses. It's about giving back, and it's about ubiquity."

The four products are detailed on the SNAPPS website under "Solutions", and have trial versions available. Users are encouraged to wait for the updated, free versions available in mid-February for new or updated deployments. The free licenses will have optional paid support with pricing to be determined. Current licensees of the paid products will continue to receive support and maintenance until their renewal date, when they wil be converted to free versions and support renewal.

SNAPPS is the official IBM Design Partner for Lotus Quickr and has been working with enterprises on customization, deployment, architecture and product development since 1997. For mroe information about SNAPPS or this annoucement, please contact SNAPPS at info@snapps.com.

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:15 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (17)

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January 14, 2008 - Overland Park, KS
SNAPPS (Strategic Net Applications, Inc.), the official Design Partner for IBM Lotus Quickr and author of 11 value-added free templates for Quickr, announced today the immediate availability of fully supported subscription versions of the template applications for as little as $1 per user, in addition to new support options for the free versions. Support for the free versions has been available in public forums on an as-available basis for six months, and that level of support will continue at no charge. For those requiring more assistance with setup, customization, or diagnosing issues, SNAPPS now offers support incident packs for the free versions for $199 (one incident) or $499 (three incidents). For companies deploying the SNAPPS Quickr Templates in production at an enterprise level, SNAPPS now offers subscription versions of the templates for as little as $1 per user.

A subscription entitles the subscribing company to benefits usually associated with fully paid licenses - for a fraction of the price - including:

• Unlimited technical support, a helpdesk and escalation system
• A new blog, wiki and documentation site combined with the template website
• Guaranteed first release with new features, and a feature request mechanism
• Guaranteed compatibility with new IBM Lotus Quickr versions within 30 days of their release

Subscription pricing is between $1 and $2 per user, per application, per year depending on the number of subscription units purchased. Custom subscription options are available for modified or combined templates, and QSite is priced at 2x the normal subscription price (QSite includes 10 applications in one).

"We've been thrilled with the excellent feedback from Quickr users who are deploying the templates we wrote for the Quickr 8 launch last June", explained Rob Novak, President of SNAPPS. "with almost 2,000 registrants downloading 30,000 application and source code kits, there are many companies deploying these applications into production who need enterprise-grade support options. We want them - the customers and the templates - around as long as possible, and the subscription model will allow us to continually improve and support these applications."

A quotation system will be deployed to the template website in early February. In the meantime, to receive a quote for subscription units, please contact SNAPPS . Include the number of licensed Quickr users and a list of the templates for subscription.

The SNAPPS Quickr Templates are Web 2.0-enabled applications for project management, innovation, collaborative presentation management and eight other valuable business areas. Developed with input and support from the community SNAPPS and IBM, the templates are available free of charge at http://QuickrTemplates.com. Quickr, Lotus and IBM are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines, Inc. SNAPPS is a trademark of Strategic Net Applications, Inc. All rights reserved.

Posted by Rob Novak At 9:22 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Collaboration University 2008 - with announcements coming after Lotusphere - is proud to be a sponsor of this year's Certified Unofficial Lotusphere T-shirt, lovingly known as the C.U.L.T. shirt.  Andrew Pollack has done an amazing job arranging for this year's shirts, which cost him and all the sponsors more than a few dubloons!  For an update see the wiki here.  We're putting together the plans for shirt distribution, since neither SNAPPS nor Collab U is on the showroom floor (we don't like standing).  More on this next week, but keep an eye out for the shirts and some booty wrapped in one of them!

Posted by Rob Novak At 2:17 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Well once again, Lotusphere is just days away. You might be a newbie, or you might be a Lotusphere veteran. Either way, you can use this guide to help you get to know some of the friendly faces you're likely to meet this year. Coincidentally, they are the same friendly faces you're likely to meet at any other software or technology conference. You may even remember some of them from last Lotusphere. They are the 13 universal icons of the tech conference world. Why 13? Because it's my 13th Lotusphere. The "Lucky One". Enjoy!

The Corporate Line Marketing Session Guy - He's young, handsome, smart and articulate, and the only subject he knows is his product. Everything reminds him of it. The thought of his product delights and invigorates him. Often a speaker and marketing-oriented session presenter (secretly when talking to IBMers he calls his session a "pitch"), he is the darling of the corporate overlords. His favorite IBM mid-management marketing phrases work their way into everyday conversation - which is why his wife and kids are doing fine, but that's just "a statement in time". Secretly you get to make fun of him because he still calls Lotus products by their names from 2005, which as we know means he's two names behind, because he doesn't refresh the presentation deck. Poor guy.		The New Solo Consultant Guy - This is the guy who will follow you around most of the week, convinced that there's some synergy between your company and his - you know, his "123 Maple Lane, Suite 2" company. He'll sit next to you when he can find you in sessions, and constantly whisper how "that's something we can really use!" in his proposed collaboration. He'll set up meetings with people you don't care about, promise that they have budgets and power. At Kimonos, he'll seek you out and butt into your conversation with an IBM exec so he can help you. You want to kill him by Tuesday morning. Beware of his requests to borrow money. If you sit with him long enough, you deserve it.
The Drunk Conventioneer - Nobody recognizes him, but the stories will persist. He might even be left over from the conference at the Dolphin last week. Most of his friends are people he sees once a year at Lotusphere. He has been known to upgrade his room to a suite and tend bar the entire week. Most of the stories told in later years will be connected with him somehow, including the one about the former Iris employee now living in Vegas. He is a central figure in any incidents that involve hotel security ("Have a Magical Evening!"), police, or angry residents from the vacation suites. Like the jock who peaked in high school, the Drunk Conventioneer peaks once a year at the end of January.		The Hot Sales Girl - This poor woman is plagued 24 hours a day by guys with "sales questions" or "issues they want to raise (uh huh)" or - anything. Can she make an onsite sales call next week? No? Well, I'll be in your town next month - maybe we could get together. For the Hot Sales Girl, the week of the conference would be a good time to schedule that root canal, or maternity leave, or anything that could get her out of it. Recognize her by the V formation of developers following her around. Just developers. Admins know they don't have a chance.
The Opening General Session Energy Guy - He's the best thing that - you think - has happened to Lotus since R3, yet he came out of nowhere like the guy who flew down from the Swan in 1996. His degree of excitement hasn't been seen this side of a 1993 Hanson concert, yet you can't quite reconcile his "kicking ass more sexy-ness-ness" speech with the fact that the last guy in that job disappeared without a trace. You're pretty sure he is an actor and is trying to make you forget the demo that crashed with his guarana induced yet infectious energy level. Beware running into this guy at Kimonos unless you really like to sing. Ladies, he's taken. Or gay. Probaby both, he has sooooo much energy!		The Live-Blogging Podcasting Press-Wannabe Guy - At first you are flattered by the request for 3 minutes with - YOU! Then you realize that this guy is podcasting 84 times during Lotusphere, has set up a studio near the Dolphin Rotunda, and is personally skipping all but the opening and closing sessions, which he will liveblog shorthand up to his blog in unintelligible prose for the less fortunate to read. His goal in life is to wear out your RSS reader and take up as much room as possible on your iPod, crowding out that last episode of Heroes you really wanted to see. This guy was definitely a middle child.
The Nerdy Foreign Guy - He's quiet, friendly, unassuming, and doesn't know anybody else in the country so he needs you to be his friend. He engages you in long conversations in broken English, and you're never quite sure what the subject is, or what he wants from you. It's not quite clear what country he's from, but you think you hear "stahn" half the time. He's got some products that you may be interested in (how did he get away from the booth so long???), but none of the documentation is in English yet. At night at Kimonos, Nerdy Foreign Guy can always be found at one of the tables with others of his ilk - usually separated from everyone else by an empty table or two. You wonder if his rendition of Rhinestone Cowboy during karaoke might actually kill someone.		The Famous Geek - Tickets for his rockstar sessions are scalped outside the Swan at high prices. The Famous Geek is a major draw, both among fellow geeks who worship him, and among regular attendees who have heard his name so often that they have to see what all the fuss is about. Generally his pants don't fit very well, and he has a disdain for shaving, but he's always entertaining. He's often hard to find at the conference when he's not on stage; no doubt hiding from all the autograph hounds.
The SharePoint Bigot IT Guy - He wants nothing to do with your toy Mac or Linux machine, and collaboration is for wussies. He's a Microsoft certified engineer all the way, and he'll stand for no tomfoolery. The only reason he's here is that his management made him come. If you're experiencing any kind of a problem or you have a question, it's your fault for not following strict Microsoft security guidelines, and published Best Practices. Since nobody actually does all of those things, nothing is ever his fault. Despite his permanent Get Out of Jail Free card, the SharePoint Bigot IT Guy never seems to be very happy. Maybe it's because he secretly yearns to be like Drunk Conventioneer Guy.		The Grand Old Dame of Collaboration - For years she has been a fixture in the community. Everyone has read her books and articles, sat in her sessions, or secretly blessed her at some point over the past decade. You'd think she'd have made a ton of money over the years, but still she's never gotten around to getting a half decent outside life. Or hiring a decorator for her office. Or getting herself fixed up at the salon, or buying new clothes. Probably what you see is just a front: when out of her customers' eyes, she drives a Ferrari and lives in a classy neighborhood where she's quite the playgirl.
The Educational / Government / Non-Profit Attendee - At first she is heavily courted by all the consultants, at least until they hear the words "educational", "government", or "non-profit". At that point they scurry away like roaches when the light comes on. The showroom and IBM salespeople love her, however, since she always buys about ten thousand volume licenses. She received her Lotusphere registration through a lengthy three year process that involved numerous purchase orders, vouchers, budget reviews, administrative approvals, and check requests. She'll be reimbursed for her room in FY 2012.		The Hot Hotel Employee - Though technically not a conference attendee, the Hot Hotel Employee - typically at Kimono's - always manages to have a dramatic and lasting effect, and stories are told for many years to come. You can overhear guys talking about what days she works and what her hours are. She gets to listen to the same crappy pickup lines from the same geeks night after night - and let's not even get into the bad singing at karaoke. She doesn't mind this one bit. When you count up her tip income for the week, she's made more money than anyone else at the entire conference. Including me.
Number 13: The Lucky Guy - An icon in the Lotusphere community, even though nobody really remembers who he works for. The Lucky Guy can be seen between sessions with his Hot Wife, the Hot Sales Girl or the Hot Hotel Employee, or by the Wednesday party, all three. He met his wife at Lotusphere, and she's so cool she hangs out with the other Hots. He is curiously devoid of a badge most of the time - leading first-timers to believe he could be a hotel employee himself, or perhaps just a vacationer, but the truth is that for him, a badge is just not necessary. You see him at the closing session, in the second row, surrounded by an entourage. He already has an advance copy of Notes 10.5, has his room comped and never, ever waits in line for lunch. He owns this conference. He's the Lucky Guy.

--by Rob Novak, with thanks to my friend in the obviously more creative Apple industry, Brian Dunning

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:06 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (10)

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Just a quick note to all you travelers, that the US Department of Transportation has implemented some new (January 1, 2008) rules regarding spare lithium batteries - computer, camera, video, etc. equipment.  A list of the new rules (such as, you may NOT pack spare batteries in your checked luggage) is here.  They have also published tips for travel with batteries and a how-to guide for securing loose battery connections for safe travel.

Posted by Rob Novak At 6:34 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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I know - blogteasing is just so...2007.  But I'm just a week away from a two pre-Lotusphere announcements that require me to update three websites, write press releases and even change the company a bit.  We're pretty excited and working around the clock.

Each of the announcements will impact our Lotus business - and the community will see one of the changes I'm making as a welcome addition, and the other as a big surprise. IBM, business partners, and Lotus software customers will all see great, immediate benefits from what we're doing.

Best of all, I'm saving a third announcement for the Tuesday after Lotusphere...but if you see me there, I might spill the beans

Posted by Rob Novak At 8:44 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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Rob: You mean like they asked for on the Domino beta call yesterday?
Viktor: Yep
Rob: And it took how long?
Viktor: About a half hour. It's already there, you just have to know how to find it.

Posted by Rob Novak At 6:15 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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As you might imagine, I am often asked for advice out of the blue by people I don't know, especially about QuickPlace or Quickr.  This tells me two things - one, that I've done a decent job over the past eight years of associating with the product, and two, that I need to write more newsletters.  Especially now that there are several thousand interested Quickr folks out there!  

Back to my story.  You see, I don't subscribe to the mid-90s IT heydey "no free consulting" mantra that I occasionally hear some of my contemporaries hanging onto.  I believe that you have to provide value from the first interaction - whether that is through a blog, newsletter, website, free code, or sales call.  So, while I can't respond to every request (meaning, please don't send me your nsd files and don't ask me to architect a global solution via email), occasionally I receive a request that's so polite, innocent and unobtrusive that I feel compelled to help out even though I know nothing will come of it for the company.

Yesterday was one of those days.  I received a request from a Notes developer in the Czech Republic.  He had been struggling with how to create a fairly complex system in Quickr, and was new to it.  While I couldn't design the entire system on the fly for him, I did give his approach some thought and constructed a reply - that I thought I'd post here.

Well the basic approach looks right although there are - like Notes or Domino - always options to make it easier to use.  Some things to keep in mind:

1. You can create your own back-end views for Quickr just like Domino, then use them for Ajax calls and categorization and "restrict to category" operations.  Useful for associating documents that are not in a true response hierarchy.
2. Your approval process can be different than the basic workflow options available in Quickr.  Placebots and controlling documents/forms can be used to build your own.  See the templates for examples of a custom workflow engine.
3. You can set a field to place your documents onto the calendar - it is not necessary to use the calendar view to get things on it.
4. Remember that Quickr is not a true scheduling system - you have to do the work yourself if you are going to check availability of resources as part of the application.
5. Design for the greatest ease of use for the approving managers.  Consider the possibility of creating a management console where they can approve multiple requests at once instead of sending them only to single requests via email, that gets frustrating.
6. Have fun.  Quickr development is like Notes/Domino, just similar at a higher level.  Meaning - design for intuitive use, don't forget that there are Domino elements you can use, and don't feel constrained by the simplicity of the initial development shell (HTML & Javascript forms, folders, etc.).  The best Domino applications use Notes databases as containers for innovative uses of the data store and don't stick to the core design elements.

Hope this helps!

What the exercise made me realize is that getting beyond the basics with Quickr is still hard for pure Notes or Domino heritage developers, and understanding the Domino-ness of it all is hard for great web developers.  Some would say too hard for either.  But by using the constructs available to us under the covers - like good Domino developers often do - we can build really excellent Quickr applications that leverage the core Quickr services like member management and security...stuff we don't have to worry about too much.

Have a look at the source files for the SNAPPS Quickr Templates.  It's HTML, Javascript, and hooks into every kind of core Domino construct - views, folders, documents, the DOM, databases, field values and types, and agents.  Stuff you know, stuff you use to create great Domino applications.  It just takes a little leap to get from there to a great Quickr application.

Posted by Rob Novak At 9:18 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (5)

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"Even the Notes client can't do that"
"I wonder if that works on a Mac..."
"Whoa."

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:20 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (5)

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As if my productivity the day after Christmas weren't low enough, I've spent 4 hours coercing Notes to uninstall and reinstall. Back to nlnotes for a while.  Argh.

Posted by Rob Novak At 4:14 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Recently, Mac Guidera of IBM asked SNAPPS to help design an integrated Quickr system for use by IBM and Mid-Market Executives. In addition to the very important topic of branding, Mac's executives wanted a custom Welcome page that draws attention to recent content, lets a nontechnical manager create professional-looking announcements, and provides for integration with external sources like YouTube for richer presentation.

In addition to the custom Welcome page, the real challenge on this project was seamless integration with Lotus Connections using the REST API. Specifically, Mac wanted us to present users with Profiles content instead of the Quickr Member list, which is a simple list of people, email and phone numbers. And, it had to be dynamic - if the Quickr place manager added a new member, they should show up in the Profiles list automatically.

Viktor spent several weeks perfecting the techniques to make all this happen, and it's now implemented at IBM. He used Dojo (of course!) for the XHRs, without having to add anything to the server - since Quickr already ships with Dojo installed, he simply used what was there to make the Ajax calls and create the rich text areas.

This is a great example of integrated Quickr & Connections, and shows how a few moderately complex customizations can produce a great collaborative business application. I've annotated the slide show of screenshots with some comments - enjoy!

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:59 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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Just a quick update - with Quickr version 8.0.0.2 there were two changes to the standard Quickr theme that broke the blog component inside QSite.  We just found these today, and Troy fixed it and posted a new QSite over on QuickrTemplates.com.

The first change we made was to the css file that helps lay out the extra blog stuff - calendar, links and history.  The links and history went a little wonky off to the right, so Troy fixed the div.  Actually, the problem exists in the standard Blog template now, so we're sending our fix off to IBM - expect to see it in a hotfix soon.

The second fix was to the Blog Preferences form that is where you land - the list of blog entries.  When we went there in QSite, the calendar, links and history were...just...gone.  Turns out that IBM changed the theme and where a div was called "Table7" in Quickr 8.0,  it was now "Table4".  We use code in the form to "inject" HTML after the proper div - a technique that really lets you mess with Quickr in cool ways - but the place we had been injecting it no longer existed.  So, Troy put in a fix for the form that checks for both div names, and works with either one (hence it's compatible with 8.0 and 8.0.0.2).

Posted by Rob Novak At 5:19 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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"People are never going to look at Domino views the same way again."

Posted by Rob Novak At 6:00 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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I'm pleased to introduce (using the latest version of Lightbox) a little high-impact pro-bono project we've done for IBM to support BDD (Business Development Day) at Lotusphere 2008. If you're an IBM Business Partner, you know that BDDay is a very valuable pre-conference day full of business and product sessions designed to help partners succeed. I've been fortunate to be a part of BDDay sessions for four years myself, and have attended for several years prior.

But one thing partners have never had was a central location for the BDDay sessions - to download, review in advance or share with their teams. They have been available, but only from the speakers directly. As you can imagine, that can get a bit logistically challenging when you have 1,500 partners attending 30+ sessions!

Well this year, IBM called and asked for some ideas on how to use Quickr for this distribution. I thought - how about more than just a repository? So after throwing out some ideas on how to make it more collaborative, Troy Reimer (SNAPPS Quickr guru) went to work. He finished in a week or so, and very soon IBM will roll out the BDDay Quickr - designed by SNAPPS - with some interesting features.

A nice landing page will have information about BDDay, a schedule, and the keynote speaker's bio. Then, there will be views of presenters and presentations. The presenter view shows names, photos, and some contact info. The presentations pull in presenter data with Ajax calls to populate the photo, bio, and contact info. Kada Sigl and Andy Cussen, BDDay track managers, will be loading the presenters and presentations in advance. Then it gets fun.

When IBM rolls out the Quickr place to BDDay registered attendees, they will receive access to the place with the presentations. They can be downloaded, of course...but also, attendees can ask questions about the slides or content in advance. When a question/comment is registered, the attendee has the option to subscribe to the presentation's comment thread. Any time a comment or question is left, the presenter automatically receives an email with a link - and if the attendee has subscribed, they also receive an email. The notifications have the effect of drawing interested parties into the conversation. A side benefit is that if a question or comment points out a topic that should really be covered, the speaker has time to add some content before going onstage in January. Finally, the Quickr will remain available after Lotusphere for a limited time, so attendees can download the presentations they want, and continue to provide feedback.

I've prepared a slide show illustrating some of the screens in the BDDay Quickr system. Expect to see more of this type of simple, high-impact Quickr application from the SNAPPS team soon.

Tomorrow: Integrating Quickr and Lotus Connections...

Posted by Rob Novak At 4:55 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (5)

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You have to have a long history to get away with this - we'll see if Viktor and I do...!

Posted by Rob Novak At 12:11 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (4)

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What have these guys been doing?  We've been pretty quiet over here in Kansas, but not because there isn't a lot going on.  In the coming days I'll introduce two new Quickr applications we've developed - one for use by business partners at Lotusphere, and another for use by IBM with customers.  There are components of each that I may be able to give you next month - a notification subscription model, a form that aggregates information from underlying folders onto the home page, and possibly a cool little integration with the Connections server, specifically Profiles (the brain child of Mac Guidera).  Stay tuned...

Posted by Rob Novak At 4:38 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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Not that we have a vested interest , but someone recently reported that they had an issue with Swedish characters in a few of the SNAPPS Quickr templates.  Actually, there probably were problems with some other templates, and other Domino applications that use more advanced XHR, JSON and Dojo techniques.

We traced this particular problem to a server setting - not the code but a default setting on the Domino server document on a Quickr server.  The Character Set section starts out like you see below - with different character sets for all kinds of international characters.



By simply changing the first field "Use UTF-8 for Output" to "Yes", it solved the problem with Swedish and other characters.  According to Wikipedia:

It (UTF-8) is able to represent any character in the Unicode standard, yet the initial encoding of byte codes and character assignments for UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII. For these reasons, it is steadily becoming the preferred encoding for e-mail, web pages, and other places where characters are stored or streamed.

So my question is, why isn't it on by default on a US English Domino server? With more web interactions being global in nature, why not support as many character sets as possible with the default configuration?  I'd love to hear from some IBMers on this, as it's not my area of expertise.

Posted by Rob Novak At 12:29 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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When you get an idea to start a company, I suppose you could call that "The Start".  Or, when you register for a tax ID number.  Perhaps your first sale, or when you lock in that domain name.  For some, it could be the day you quit your salaried job (Jan 8).  So for SNAPPS, the range for what we call our anniversary is somewhere from September 1997 and January 1998.  

The closest I could nail it down to on paper was this Monday, December 3, when snapps.com was registered.  But other fun things with friends were happening Monday, so I decided to wait.  After all, DNS propagation in 1997 probably took two days.

So I'm pleased and proud (mostly the latter) that SNAPPS (real name - Strategic Net Applications, Inc.) is 10 years old.  Statistically, about 6% of small businesses see their 10th anniversary.  To be certain, we've seen ups and downs (do NOT ask me about 2001 or late 2005 unless you have bought me 3- no, 4 - drinks), but have experienced success with a wonderful and loyal team and generally have had a happy period of growth and continued involvement with Lotus software.  Our recent expansion into nontraditional consulting areas, events like Collaboration University, and new markets has also given us the freedom to contribute back to the Lotus community in more ways than usual - free templates, more and more code for Lotusphere, free help for IBM sales folks, and involvement in community projects.

At our annual holiday party in a couple weeks, we'll spend time with the 23 members of the SNAPPS family - that's five of us, our spouses, and 13 munchkins.  We also hit some new targets this year, so it should be a great time of celebration and shared success.

Big thanks and congratulations to Viktor (8 years), Melissa (6 years) ,Troy (5 years) and Jerald (4.5 years) for helping to make SNAPPS what it is today!

Posted by Rob Novak At 12:28 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (10)

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I promise that even though our Lotusphere session "The Great Code Giveaway: Beyond Cool" will blow you away, we're not crazy enough to think it's the next generation of anything...this...optimistic...

ENJOY

Posted by Rob Novak At 4:43 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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Wishing the best to my good friends Paul Mooney and Warren Elsmore the day after their public announcement of the acquisition of BE Systems by Blue Wave Technology.  The resulting company is an excellent testimonial to the long-term viability of Lotus software in the European market.  

Ah, many an evening in KC, London, Boston and Dublin has ended with Warren shouting "You're not the boss of me!".  Now he is, Warren.  Payback.

P.S. Sorry guys - I meant to do something yesterday - but alas poor Mac was under the weather.

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:38 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Over at Bruce Elgort's blog he's introduced Idea Jam, which is now out of beta!

With over 450 ideas submitted, 1,400 comments and 9,000 votes cast, Idea Jam has been taken out of beta and is now available to the IBM Lotus Community. While the current Idea Jam site is geared towards Lotus developers there are plans to make a site available specifically for Notes "end users." IBM and other companies are also currently piloting Idea Jam based sites and the momentum is building for the Elguji Ideas development team to make the product commercially available sooner rather than later.

Way to go Bruce, Gayle, Matt, Sean, Kelly and Mark...!

Posted by Rob Novak At 2:58 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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In a matchup planned for 11 months, we expect 80,000 fans packing Arrowhead stadium and another 20,000 in the parking lot - in the snow that started falling early this morning.  This is the biggest football game ever for Kansas, and the biggest sporting event of any kind ever for Missouri (KU has a few basketball championship banners hanging in Allen Field House).  The winning QB can likely expect a call to come to NYC for the Heisman Trophy ceremony (doesn't mean he'll win, but as they say, it's nice to be invited).

As for me, thank goodness for HDTV. Oh, and knock those rankings up one as LSU lost in overtime last night.  Ohio State is back in the hunt as well, as LSU will certainly drop below #5.

Gotta love gameday!

Posted by Rob Novak At 9:54 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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Not that I didn't want to say something about our sessions, I just wanted to get it right. The sexy part.

So once again, I'm honored to be invited to speak at Lotusphere, and promise to deliver a lot of value in each session. We were fortunate enough to end up with four between me and my team at SNAPPS - one of them a Hands-On session, which will be new for us. Viktor and Troy will also give you a look under the covers of the SNAPPS templates for Quickr. I have an hour in store for IBM Business Partners on the topic of complex sales, including some new "controversial" material. And then there's our favorite session, The Great Code Giveaway, which was a great hit the last couple years and is - get this - in its seventh Lotusphere, but brand new each year! So for full details, here's what we have in store and will be working on throughout December and January:

Posted by Rob Novak At 1:00 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Sorry to anyone who came to this entry expecting something cool about the industry, Quickr, Lotusphere (yes I'll be there with bells on and sessions, another post coming!)

Yesterday I decided to end the weekend with a couple hours of fishing at my favorite little local lake - more of a pond - right here in Overland Park, Kansas.  I've caught catfish, crappie, and largemouth bass there quite successfully for a year now, and they're still biting even in November.  My son Sean and I had been fishing perhaps 20 minutes when a commotion about 50 yards away caught our attention.  A fellow in his seventies, with family in tow, had something "big", and was struggling mightily.

In all, this struggle lasted nearly an hour.  He had hooked a giant carp in the tail, causing the fight to last even longer as the fish was successfully swimming away instead of side to side.  In the end, Ishmael's grandson and I were able to bring the fish ashore, measure and weigh it (though grandpa wanted to bash it with his cane by this point, the conservationist in us prevailed).  The scale broke at 49 lbs., and the fish was 45 inches long.  It was easily ten years old at that size and possibly the largest freshwater fish I've ever seen in the wild.  The rush of excitement among his family was fun to watch - though there was a little too much yelling - and he has some great camera-phone pictures to show his friends.  My favorite was the one of his 5-year-old grandson lying on the ground, just a few inches longer than the fish.

We returned the weary monster to its home and it left slowly, prepared to fight another day.

You can't make this stuff up.

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:30 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (5)

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Today I returned from a strategy workshop with more to read.  Seven books more, plus a CD set (already ripped to iTunes), plus three more books that were recommended, and two more that'll help me prepare for Lotusphere.  Oh, and two more very dense books that are research materials for a new client.

I can read relatively fast, but I'm in awe of the Duff and wish I could borrow his skills just for a week!

Posted by Rob Novak At 4:41 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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A quick note to those 1,300+ who have downloaded SNAPPS templates...

We are continuing to test all features of the templates on Quickr 8.0.0.2, expecting it will take about another week.  There were some core code changes in 8.0.0.2 that we know have modified the behavior of (aka broken) some features in some of the templates.  

One specific issue we are tracking is a new javascript wrapper of links in edit mode that causes some buttons that call Dojo modal windows to trigger Quickr's "Do you want to save a draft of this document" message -- then fail.  We found this in QSurvey, and know that several other places will be affected.

In the meantime, if you have deployed the templates to production (or Quickr's equivalent), please do not deploy 8.0.0.2 to production until we have worked around the core code change(s) and posted updates (we are doing this as a service to the Quickr community - it's still free...).

Thanks for your patience while we finish the testing.

Posted by Rob Novak At 9:26 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (3)

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A 2-thousandths-of-a-point release, to be sure, but I am expecting considerable performance improvements as it was a major focus of the fixpack release.  This is a full install release, so back up.  I'll be posting some performance test results this week as we do several upgrade scenarios and test all of the templates as well.

Those of you who have downloaded templates, expect an email from me soon regarding:

1. Performance tests
2. Quickr 8.0.0.2 compatibility and any updates required
3. A combined template, movie and instructions

Posted by Rob Novak At 1:07 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (6)

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I'm leaving for Chicago in a few minutes and will be working from a couple hotels for the next three days - a Hilton near Midway then the Fairmont at Aon Center.  I'm also taking the opportunity to attend the Lotus Collaboration Summit at The Field Museum tomorrow - a one day event with both business and technical sessions.  If you have a chance and are in Chicago, I encourage you to attend.  You can still register online...  I'm going as an attendee not a sponsoring Business Partner so I encourage you to spend time with the local partners.  However, come over and say hello!

I'm also visiting a long-time valued customer for a few hours on Wednesday, and going to dinner with them at Mulan, one of my favorite Chicago restaurants.

Wednesday morning, I'm planning to visit a few hotels and have a look at their meeting rooms.  It's just a thing I do these days.

Posted by Rob Novak At 12:22 PM Location Mid-Air | Permalink | Comments (1)

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I was thrilled to be home last weekend, with no major travel plans for a few weeks...which perfectly explains why I'm in Washington, DC today, Chicago next week then Boston and Providence for five days at the end of the month.  Maybe November will be quieter...

The good news is that two of the three trips are all about adding value for my own customers.  Four conferences in a row had me neglecting them (sorry everyone!).  Now the rest of the year is dedicated to helping clients, taking a few mini-breaks, and putting out some more of those videos.  I'm also planning an expanded newsletter to cover more Lotus topics as we approach Lotusphere 2008.

Going offline for a while, into deep dark places where even BlackBerry doesn't reach

Posted by Rob Novak At 6:58 AM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Is it just a little weird that we saw this ad on the Microsoft site today?

Posted by Rob Novak At 2:28 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (6)

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Wow, this is a hard blog entry to write. I personally never thought it would happen. But people change, and so do companies.

You may know that I've been on the road much of the summer - four Collaboration University conferences, Advisor, GCPC, client engagements, and more. In this time out of the office, I've had the opportunity to reflect on the kind of work we do, the impact we're making, and the ways we communicate. I've also been able to grant a lot of autonomy and freedom to the staff back at the office (when they were not with me), a somewhat liberating exercise. And, we have found new ways to communicate about our projects, about clients, and about work in general.

But even with the success of this year (our best year ever, and there's still 3 months left), we have all felt that there was something missing. It was as if we were a one-trick pony, but with so much more talent and so much more to offer. So we decided to try something new, and it really got us hooked.

Last week I was in Miami in pretty much a typhoon. Viktor joined me and Liz there for the Advisor conference, and told me what had gone on back at the office the previous week (when I had been in Boston, wishing for a laundromat). Apparently, Jerald, one of the other senior consultants, had come in to the office alone one day, and was greeted by a new occupant of the office - a spider.

The spider, staring him down across the hallway, was 3" long, had eight eyes and fangs the size of my first laptop. It was a wolf spider, one of the largest spiders in North America besides the turantula. He captured it, did some research, placed it in a container designed for such things, and started feeding it a steady diet of crickets, which it would run down and devour, leaving nothing but tentacles.

So - to recap - we found a massive, hairy, evil monster that can cause pain and most definitely fear in most human beings, especially around the office. So naturally, we named it SharePoint. Here is an actual photo of the beast, taken just this weekend.

Sadly this week, we're going to kick SharePoint out. Turns out it's too expensive to keep feeding it, and it really needs a bigger box (probably more than one) and more attention than anybody originally thought. It keeps getting bigger and bigger, and we're honestly getting more afraid of it every day.

Had you going, didn't I?

And yes, you can have my Quickr when you can pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:36 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (21)

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I've just given my final Advisor Summit session on using the Quickr templates to create your own application - either putting two or more of them together, or adding new features to your own Quickr site.  I decided at the last minute to pretty much throw away the slides and instead write an application onstage.  It was pretty cool!  I added both the enhanced tasks from QProject and business card style contact management from QContacts in about 45 minutes, including a lot of explanation.  It's probably a 30 minute exercise without the talking.

So it got me thinking, would this make a good tutorial movie?  Let me know if you'd like me to do one - I have sound working now on my VM and can probably do it in the next week or two.  I'd probably speed up the boring or repetitive bits.

Posted by Rob Novak At 1:18 PM Location Miami, FL | Permalink | Comments (8)

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Two weeks of Collaboration University - and again a big thanks to everyone who helped make it great - I have a single day of reflection and catching up in my hotel room in Boston.  As if two major events weren't enough for the month, the next two weeks are booked as well.  The IBM Lotus Global Customer Partnership Council, or GCPC, kicks off tomorrow morning here in Boston.  SNAPPS is a member, so I'll be attending the whole thing and I have a presentation on Wednesday as well.    This week is a time for Lotus to listen in on the concerns and strategies of their largest customers, a meeting that helps them to fine tune their own development, marketing, and strategic plans.  I really look forward to seeing the GCPC members again.

Then after a quick stop in Naples, it's off to Miami for the Advisor Summit.  Viktor Krantz will be joining me there to deliver six session on Quickr, Ajax, CSS, Dojo, and more. Advisor is always a good show (bias noted), and Miami should be a bit of a change from KC, London, and Boston.

Speaking of reflection, I just have to point out that I found the content and sentiment of Alan Lepofsky's recent blog entry very moving and, hopefully, prescient.

One more thing - in case you missed it, SNAPPS is hiring.

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:49 PM Location Boston, MA | Permalink | Comments (2)

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This morning on a whim, I started installing Symphony at 8:22, knowing full well I was delivering a session at 8:30. Well the Symphony install finished in time, and as I had created the presentation in the Notes 8 Presentation editor and edited it in OpenOffice Impress, it loaded and ran just fine in Symphony. Little wonder that I wanted to do this for John Head's session that I was repeating here in London - about the productivity editors and OpenOffice automation. Tomorrow during the "Best of CU" I'll also show off Ben Langhinrich's new efforts with OpenSesame.

Symphony installed fine, ran fine, and only has a few little curiosities so far. One of these is the icon, which appears to be a Notes 7 icon - a little hard to look at with the nice Notes 8 icon when you alt-tab. Carl has pointed out a longstanding bug in OO and Symphony, though I've not worked out why anyone would do what he describes, other than to force a crash. I did have a little trouble running a demo, but as it turns out I had all three OO derivatives open at the same time..probably not a great idea when demoing OO automation.

Overall, the user experience was pretty good, and attendees seemed pleased at the use of Symphony. I will be happy when the mystical "you can see where this is going" comments turn into what really will happen - that IBM's contribution to OpenOffice.org will result in a new improved Symphony and embedded editors in Notes 8.

Posted by Rob Novak At 5:31 AM Location London, England | Permalink | Comments (3)

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Just this afternoon (London time), the Quickr Templates download site hit 1,000 registrations and 15,200 downloads of templates and source code.  And we're really happy to report that initial issues have been minimal, and the 1.03 fixes to a few of the templates that were posted 3 weeks ago have all but eliminated problem reports in the Quickr forums.  Quality stats:

10 weeks of availability
1,006 people registered
11,000 applications downloaded
38 individuals reporting issues that were addressed by configuration advice from the SNAPPS team
13 individuals reporting issues requiring bug fixes
1 outstanding platform port (QPhotos on AIX/iSeries, figured it out)
10 outstanding feature requests
0 outstanding bugs (I know, this is a magnet for a bug report)

Congratulations to the development team at SNAPPS for creating a quality experience for Lotus customers...

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:27 AM Location London, England | Permalink | Comments (2)

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This is my first attempt to listen and type at the same time - so bear with me.  I'll be publishing again every 15 minutes...

Most of you know Kevin is VP, Messaging and Collaboration, having taken over Ken Bisconti's position a few weeks ago.

Note: Some of this is paraphrased.  Link to press release (thanks Daniel): http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/22325.wss

Kevin (presenting in the Symphony editors on a Linux Notes client on Red Hat):
While yesterday was a huge day for Lotus, I'd like to start with the overall news of Lotus hitting or exceeding the industry expectations this year.

We made a lot of commitments this January - and it was gratifying to have met them all, and receive positive feedback.  We've shipped everything we said we would.  Reviews of Notes 8 have been excellent - favorites are from Mike Heck, contributing editor of the InfoWorld Test Center (who said Notes was easier to use compared to MS Outlook) and from Ephriam Schwartz, editor at large at InfoWorld - "IBM may be in the unprecedented position of getting a second chance at knocking off long-time market leader Microsoft Outlook."

New role will include marketing, and it is good to be in a very strong position.

IDC's comprehensive market report - Notes gained. This is significant as it's an indication of a change in attitude in the market.

Notes 8: a whole new class of applications being developed by business partners.  Showing a composite app from Japan (5 panels, graphs). The Japanese BP community is very active and embraces Notes.  The app he shows came from a non-Notes shop, more of a portal shop, who is now using CA to bring their apps to Notes.

Another example from Totvs in Brazil, showing an ERP system in the Notes side shelf integrated with the editors...Bob helped build it...

Major point - applications you never thought of as notes applications, can now be.   You can now "break the mold" of what you think Notes does.

In Japan, several large companies have already implemented CAs in Notes 8....Ricoh, Fujitsu for example.

Posted by Rob Novak At 10:11 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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Today Ed Brill blogged about the IBM press release, picked up the The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, of the return of the brand Lotus Symphony! This is a major announcement and big strategic move for IBM, re-entering the office desktop productivity space and challenging Microsoft on several fronts. The reaction to the announcement will play out during the day today - after all, it's not quite 6 AM on the east coast - but I am personally very pleased that IBM's weight has been thrown behind OpenOffice - first last week with a commitment of development resources, now with the release of Lotus Symphony.

I'd encourage you to download Lotus Symphony and have a look around http://symphony.lotus.com - especially if you're in an organization where you have not had the ability to use Notes 8 yet and haven't seen the Productivity Editors.  They have served as a very nice Office replacement for my company and for our conference presentations for months now!

Someone, in fact, has already been hard at work on Wikipedia...check the last line...!

Posted by Rob Novak At 4:45 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Yesterday we headed off for London's installment of Collaboration University for Notes & Domino 8 after a successful first run in Kansas City.  With what seems to be the usual with United - a 3 hour delay - six of us finally made it here, have refreshed and are hitting the laptops once again.  Poor Gab and Tim, their flight was scrapped in Chicago so yet another lovely overnight for them.

As we stood in the Kansas City airport, after a thorough shakedown by TSA who couldn't quite see through my electronics superstore in a bag, I started counting.  It was amusing to all of us that in my laptop bag, I had 1.46 TB of storage.  TB = Terabytes, or 1,000 Gigabytes.

Times do change...

Posted by Rob Novak At 10:50 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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It took some time to come to this decision...my last hire was over 4 1/2 years ago!  But the company has enjoyed a sustained period of significant growth and interest in our high-end services, so it's time to supplement the team with new talent.  I'm looking (first) for a developer who can come on board and be immediately productive with Lotus software, with a variety of web and Lotus-centric skills covering:

• LotusScript
• Java (Eclipse focus and experience a plus)
• JavaScript, XML, JSON
• UI design excellent skills
• Domino, Sametime, Quickr, and Connections (next year) skills
• Application architecture and design
• Analytical skills including requirements gathering and project management
• Excellent writing skills

There are a few more attributes of the perfect candidate that would certainly be in your favor:

• Excellent customer relationship skills
• Demonstrable speed and quality orientation
• History including business development
• Training/instruction experience
• Current involvement in the Lotus community
• Speaking skills a plus

The person I hire first will likely have intermediate or better (3+ years experience) technical skills, in order to immediately support our project backlog and jumpstart new business as it becomes available.  You will become a member of one of the "elite' teams (all with 15 years' experience) in the Lotus community and after a short period enjoy full benefits.  

To give you an idea of what it's like to work here, the longest tenure is 7.5 years (Viktor), two of my employees were once my instructors, and Melissa, my Vice President, works from home three days a week.  It's a family atmosphere with great bonds and dedication among the team.  We travel internationally, present at conferences and user groups, and have large global companies as our clients.  We do not bill hourly (I have a particular disdain for the concept!), but work towards the greatest value possible for our clients.  I travel 100+ days per year so immediate integration into the team at the office is critical.

If this describes you - and you are willing to join a demanding and focused team - apply (see The Rules).  We're collecting resumes in September, and will schedule phone/in person interviews when we have returned from the upcoming conference season.

The Rules

1. If you know me (as in, we have lunch, see each other often, are friends, etc...) send me your resume directly - "rnovak at snapps dot com".  
2. If you don't know me (as in, maybe you've seen me speak or vice-versa, or we met at Lotusphere 11 years ago, or you just read my blog, etc), but feel you're qualified given the above, send it to "working at snapps dot com".  It will be reviewed by my team and then me!
3. If you don't know me given the definition above, and you sent it to me directly, it'll be "recycled".

That's it -  will be posting the position of Software Project Specialist on the corporate site soon.  Just giving the blog readers a little heads up.  This may not be the only new hire this year...

Posted by Rob Novak At 5:54 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (3)

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Here's a link to the agenda we've put together for Collaboration University for Lotus Notes & Domino 8.  Gab, Tim, Warren, John, Ed, Mary Beth, Troy, Viktor and Bob are all on their way, the hotel is prepped, and we have a great agenda planned.  We tweaked it as late as yesterday to include some new materials that just became available.  And having installed and moved three Domino 8 servers last night - including BES, production mail (and this website!) and a development server with DB2, I have a few slides to add myself!

If you're in the area and would like to join us for the two opening sessions by Ed Brill and Mary Beth Raven, simply contact me for a Keynote pass.  Just be sure to do so by the end of the day Saturday so we can have extra seating arranged - we're doing CU in a U-shape setup in Kansas City to encourage participation and interaction.  Of course if you'd like to join us for the entire conference, that can still be arranged.  Either register online or contact me if you have any logistics questions or need to make arrangements.

CU in Kansas City next week!

Posted by Rob Novak At 6:38 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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So Viktor and I are scratching our heads again, with tomorrow's Lotusphere 2008 abstract deadline looming.  Last year we were accepted for a session and introduced Domino integration with several open source toolkits - Prototype, script.aculo.us, backbase, mootools, a few other small ones and of course Dojo.  I coded 7 different ways to make your views sexy, and Viktor re-vamped the Domino calendar with Dojo to make it interactive and responsive.  The session seemed to work well, it got good reviews and people are still downloading the code.

Now we're pretty set on two other submissions, my updated complex sales talk for business partners and a new submission for Troy and Viktor on extending and customizing the Quickr templates.  But this one always presents a challenge.  If we're lucky enough to get it accepted, we will dedicate between $50,000-$100,000 in development effort, spend much of December and January on it, and give it all away.  So as you can imagine, we take it pretty seriously.  At the moment we're considering a few options, one of which is building something cool for each pillar (Domino, Sametime, Quickr and Connections).  But I'd like to reach the more mainstream Domino crowd that usually comes to our session, so keeping it 100% Domino and extensible is also appealing.

So my query to you is this - what would you like to see and take home?  Email me if you'd like, or post a comment here...clock is ticking...

Posted by Rob Novak At 7:18 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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So I was planning something like this, but hoped someone with a little more talent could do it. Left to my own devices, I apparently can put hats on sticks. No sunglasses this time, and it's nowhere near as cool as Volker envisioned for me (he suggested a Lambourghini backdrop...I couldn't get the connection...

It didn't turn out too bad, the colors seem to work with the slide background nicely. Alrighty, back to work.

Posted by Rob Novak At 7:07 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Chris Blatnick will be joining IBM in a couple weeks...an excellent choice, and while I hope someday he gets into product development, this is a great step in the right direction.  Please Chris, keep up the blogging!

"Starting on the 17th, I will officially be a Senior IT Specialist at IBM!!! I couldn't think of a better place to continue in the ways of the Lotus evangelist and now I've kind of "put my money where my mouth is". I'm joining the Lotus Technical Sales team here in the Cleveland/Pittsburgh area. In that role, I'll be doing pre-sales work, lots of presentations, proof-of-concept projects, etc. It's a bit of a different path than the one I've been on, but it should be an excellent opportunity for growth. My favorite part of the job has always been interacting with customers, so I can't wait to get started!"

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:28 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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Europe already knows...slowing me down!

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:13 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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What do you think?

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:34 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Happy to announce that John Head of PSC Group in Chicago will be joining us in Kansas City for Collaboration University for Lotus Notes and Domino 8.  John's company is a Design Partner for Lotus Notes 8 and has significant expertise with Notes integration with office suites - SmartSuite, Microsoft Office, and OpenOffice.  It is this last point of integration and the fact that OO-based editors are part of Lotus Notes 8.0 that makes John's participation in Collaboration University so interesting.  We're very happy to welcome PSC Systems as the fourth IBM Business Partner, rounding out the partner-driven event.  PSC Group joins BE Systems of Edinburgh, The Turtle Partnership of London and SNAPPS of Kansas City.

John will be presenting on the bundled Lotus Documents, Lotus Spreadsheets, and Lotus Presentations editors - everything from how they are best used to how to include them in mashups to programming and integration options.  He will also be available for attendees to discuss other Notes 8 integration questions.

Here's a little more about John:
John D. Head is the Framework Manager at PSC Group, LLC, based in Schaumburg, IL. John has worked with Lotus technologies since 1992. He first began with Lotus Ami Pro 2.0. Subsequently, he has done custom development for Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, Lotus Productivity Editors, and Lotus SmartSuite with Lotus Notes providing custom development, administration, and training for numerous clients. John specializes in and is the recognized resource in the Lotus Business Partner community for automation of desktop applications from within Lotus Notes. He is an active Design Partner for the IBM Lotus Notes and Domino product. John is talented at transitioning Customer Business Processes into Applications. He is an active speaker at events such as Lotusphere, Collaboration University, and Lotus Advisor conferences. John is currently working with companies to take social networking concepts and implement and embrace them inside their organizations. John's blog is located at www.johndavidhead.com.

PSC Group is a Premier IBM Business Partner and won both a Lotus Award and IBM Beacon Award in 2007. PSC is active within the Lotus community by hosting many of the IBM blogs, such as edbrill.com, alanlepofsky.net, and adamgartenberg.com

Posted by Rob Novak At 5:01 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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Congratulations IBM!

Ed Brill and Mary Beth Raven broke the channel announcement on their blogs this morning - and to think I have just been hitting "refresh" on the Partnerworld download site.  Old school I suppose.  Reminds me of what was possibly the first released Domino server add-in installed (version 1.1, mine) outside IBM, on June 4, 1996.  Hit refresh on notes.net over and over, and you might be first.  Same with Domino R5 on March 30, 1999, mine was running about 45 minutes after it was posted....because I had a blazing 128kps ISDN line at the time.  And I had the distinction of logging the first ever support call for R5 on March 31, 1999 at 8 AM EST when the support line opened.

So by now you've figured I have a thing for upgrading fast.  It's true, I'm not ashamed, and I have a company small enough to do that.  I do not envy the company that has a year-long rollout plan for version upgrades, nor do I believe that it couldn't be done faster, but that's another blog posting.  Today is about Notes and Domino 8!  Friday should be a busy day for customer and business partners worldwide, I know it will be for a certain group of partners putting together Collaboration University for Notes & Domino 8...the first technical conference on the new release.  Both Ed and Mary Beth will be present, as well as other notable IBMers Bob Balaban and Kevin Cavanaugh, who just took Ken Bisconti's position at Lotus.  Hope you can join up.

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:25 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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It was just missing something. The Collaboration University session list and workshops looked great already, but when we sat down to review them this week there was just a small hole in the schedule.  We couldn't put our fingers on it.  Then we realized, once we looked up from our little screens, that it wasn't our fingers but rather our thumbs that needed attention.  So by popular demand - even if it's just ours - we have added "BlackBerry Development: Mobilizing Lotus Notes and Domino 8" to the agenda for Collaboration University in September.

New on the speaker roster for this topic is Tim Davis, a Director at The Turtle Partnership in London.  Tim has worked on BlackBerry development for Domino for several years now, some examples including producing a BlackBerry-enabled notes.ini reference and mobilizing the sessions database from Lotusphere 2007!  He will share some tricks and tips on making your own Domino applications shine on the BlackBerry, and take you through an application step by step.

We're thrilled to have Tim available for CU and I for one look forward to this new session.  Of course the rest of the conference, Tim will be available to take all your questions on Domino and BlackBerry development!

Posted by Rob Novak At 8:16 AM Location Orlando, Florida | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Well sort of...sorry if any of you got excited with the title, but I'm working on Notes 8 Beta 3 (is it today??? tomorrow???  8 on 8/8 would be cool, huh?) on my new MacBook Pro (17", 1920x1200, 4 GB RAM, 250 GB HD) using the just-released-Monday VMWare Fusion.  With Unity mode, I can launch Notes, Designer, Administrator right into (what appears as) Mac OSX, I can share folders, launch other VMs including WebSphere if I ever felt like it, and make it a relatively seamless experience.  There's a little jitter as the mouse moves from one OS to the other, but I'll get used to it.  The notebook certainly has the power to run them simultaneously.

This is going to make presenting interesting...for Collaboration University for Notes & Domino 8 (hurry up...hotel rates are about to expire!) and Advisor Summit, I'll be using the Mac on stage for the first time.  I purchased Keynote and plan to deliver the opening welcome and perhaps a session at CU and Advisor with it.  I can't wait, because if you've ever seen my presentations you know I like to add a little pizzazz.  In the past that has entailed add-ins for PowerPoint, with keynote it's just built in.

Posted by Rob Novak At 7:28 AM Location Naples. Florida (Vacation...yeah right) | Permalink | Comments (5)

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In addition to the great IBM lineup we have for Collaboration University for Notes & Domino 8, we're really lucky to have another great admin-focused speaker joining the CU team for September in both Kansas City and London!  Warren Elsmore is the Technical Directory for BE Systems, another long-time IBM Business Partner.  Warren will cover these topics, in addition to the "Best of CU" session at the end:

• Controlling and Managing SMTP Mail
• Deployment Considerations and Choices: Notes Standard (Eclipse), Basic Clients, or Both?
• Designing and Applying Policies
• Preparing for and Using Server-Managed Provisioning

Warren and his wonderful wife Kitty were kind enough to come to the Collaboration University for Quickr and Sametime event in London last month, providing us with some special lighting and professional sound equipment.  We're thrilled to have Warren join up with CU in a more official capacity and see this as a major benefit for attendees. Warren has consistently received great reviews on his sessions at other venues, and always provides great value for attendees.

Welcome Warren and Kitty to CU!

Posted by Rob Novak At 6:00 PM Location Naples, Florida (Vacation...yeah right) | Permalink | Comments (0)

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In case you missed the first admittedly subtle announcement in April, Collaboration University has a second event this year!  CU is the first major technical training event to follow the release of Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0, expected in the next few days.  Once again, IBM Business Partners have teamed up to deliver a focused, technical event at just the right time, and in just the right places.

Today, I'm pleased to announce that once again IBM is helping out with some incredible talent for both technical speakers and the keynote addresses.  Ed Brill will deliver the keynote address September 10 in Kansas City, while Kevin Cavanaugh, Vice President of Lotus Notes and Domino Development, will deliver the keynote address in London on September 19!  We are very happy to have them as our guests and excited to hear from them about the state of the market and future directions for Lotus Software.

Speaking of the future, we are also announcing today the addition of Mary Beth Raven, Ph.D. and Bob Balaban as guest speakers for Collaboration University!  All of the speakers and sessions are now posted at http://www.CollaborationUniversity.com.  Here is a list of the planned sessions.  Remember, these are all focused on ND8...

• New Administration Features: Database Redirection, DDM, Web Administration, Adminp Features, Agent Manager, Server Fast Restart and More
• Clustering for Notes and HTTP: Infrastructure, Behavior and Changes
• Mail Management Enhancements: OOO, Message Recall and Mail Policies
• Directories, Directory Assistance and LDAP in Domino 8.0
• Security Options and Enhancements: Rollover Keys, Password Locking and More
• Using Domino with DB2 - Finally!
• Controlling and Managing SMTP Mail
• Deployment Considerations and Choices: Notes Standard (Eclipse), Basic Clients, or Both?
• Designing and Applying Policies
• Preparing for and Using Server-Managed Provisioning
• What's New in ND8 "Languages" - LotusScript, Java, Formulas
• JSON and XML - Real Life Applications in Domino 8.0
• Composite Applications: Notes Composite Applications
• Composite Applications with Lotus Component Designer 6
• Web Services in Domino 8.0
• Eclipse Plug-in Development for Lotus Notes 8.0
• UI consistency - Give your old Notes Applications a Facelift for Notes 8.0
• RSS feeds in the Notes and Domino 8.0 - Producing and Reading
• Notes 8.0 Productivity Editors - Use and Programmability
• Integration Points - Activities, RSS, Sametime and More
• In Theory...Bob Balaban on Programmability
• Lotus Notes 8.0: From Project to Product, and the Future

Last but not least, as this is a partner-driven event, the CU team welcomes three partners and seven speakers this time around: SNAPPS, The Turtle Partnership, and BE Systems.  With hundreds of installs and many years experience testing, developing, supporting and speaking on Lotus Notes and Domino releases, this team will be sure to deliver a highly focused educational experience for your Lotus Notes and Domino 8 plans, whether they start this month or next year.

Now is the best time to register - hotel rates may go up next week, and we're just five and six weeks away from CU.  Also be sure to take advantage of one of the optional post-conference workshops - these were a hit during the July event and you leave with a significant hands-on experience.

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:14 AM Location Naples, Florida ("Vacation" - yeah right!) | Permalink | Comments (0)

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I just checked and the Lotus Quickr Templates site (http://QuickrTemplates.com) hit 503 registrations about an hour ago, representing 46 countries all over the world, and over 5,000 downloads of individual templates. As it was all posted on the evening of July 16th, that's 12 business days. And I haven't even done a newsletter yet! I'll do that tomorrow or Friday, just before I go on vacation, so the guys can deal with it when the server falls over...he he!

For anyone who downloaded prior to this week, we just posted 1.0.1 versions for several templates that use workflow. If you have a new Lotus Quickr server, you might want these - there was a bug in the original ones when you didn't have the \quickplace\ directory. We had written the workflow engine before knowing that the new \lotusquickr\ directory was going to ship with new installations. Also fixed are some iSeries issues, a missing source file and a couple miscellaneous issues. And just in case you were an early adopter, we did post QSite a week later...go check it out.

Speaking of checking it out, another interesting stastic: 9,041 views of the Lotus Quickr Template flash demos (listed on the right) tells me that these applications are really interesting to the collaboration world - old QuickPlace customers and new Lotus Quickr customers alike. It's really refreshing to see this kind of interest.

Posted by Rob Novak At 6:55 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (4)

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Having spent some time with a client the past few days working on performance improvement in a QuickPlace 7 cluster, I have a few pearls of wisdom to share.  I have to first attribute a lot of this to my colleague Gab Davis of The Turtle Partnership, who came along and has been doing the real heavy lifting on setting up DDM and statistics reporting for future monitoring.

For starters, assume you have a big QuickPlace environment all based on the same templates/PlaceTypes.  Like, a thousand or more places big.  What are the types of things that can make an environment like this perform badly?  Lots of anything that touches each place, right?

So what are these things?

1. Scheduled PlaceBots.  Nasty little guys that are susceptible to server settings, take time to invoke, and generally start to fail when you have a few hundred and other stuff is going on.  You are much better off going with centralized, aggregating agents in a Domino database.  Fortunately for this client, we had designed the Placetypes and this was already the case.
2. Indexing.  Make sure you are running multiple Updater tasks if you have multiple processors.  Processors +1 is a good guideline, maybe one less if you're running dual core.
3. Understand notes.ini settings for UPDATE_SUPPRESSION_TIME and (the dreaded) UPDATE_SUPPRESSION_LIMIT.  The first one you can use to increase the time between processing of deferred queue processing, so the multi-database full text indices in QuickPlace won't start tripping over each other.  The second, which may occasionally be added to a Domino server for testing or troubleshooting, limits the deferred queue.  It should not be in a notes.ini of a large QuickPlace system.  It KILLS performance.
4. In clusters, stuff replicates.  But a standard QuickPlace notes.ini setting, the one added to ServerTasksAt3 called "qptool placecatalog -push -a" does one thing - it updates the stastics in the placecatalog server.  Sounds harmless enough, but in doing so it locks and unlocks each place as it runs.  Doing this causes three documents to be touched on each place in two seconds...so tens of thousands of cluster replication calls are made, taking quite possibly a long, long time.  Take it out.  If you want stats someday, run it manually.

There are a lot more tips on clustered QuickPlace/Quickr servers that I'll post in the future.  These are just a few I came upon recently...and now this client has a well-performing QuickPlace cluster with 15,000 databases...with just a couple days' analysis and quick fixes.

All of the above (except #4) actually applies to Domino databases.  Next time I blog about performance, I'll ask Gab to give us a lesson in DDM and Statistics collection...!

Posted by Rob Novak At 4:26 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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"Introducing Rob 4.0", as Mike Smith of The Turtle Partnership so adeptly quipped on Friday at the closing session of Collaboration University in London.  

I indeed turned 40 on Saturday, an event only slightly overshadowed by some book that was a big deal -- in London anyway.  The team at CU presented me with a monstrous chocolate cake that was easily dispatched by at least 40 delegates who hadn't had breakfast.  This plus a bottle of Champagne and some hilarious fun gifts (a Christmas ornament bobblehead leprechaun serving a Guinness, you get the idea) and a lovely British sterling silver money clip were all cooked up by the wonderful team including Liz, Gab, Tim, Mike, Chris, Carl, Warren, Kitty, Paul and others.

We checked into The Petersham in Richmond for the weekend, then Liz took me to Ronnie Scott's on Saturday for an awesome jazz set featuring David Sanborn.  All in all, a great weekend.  Next it's off to Rotterdam via car (and chunnel) to visit an important client this week, then back to London for one more weekend, then (finally!) home.

In case you're wondering, yes, we bought the book...

Posted by Rob Novak At 5:01 AM Location Richmond, England | Permalink | Comments (5)

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http://live.collaborationuniversity.com

Gab Davis, Carl Tyler, Troy Reimer, Jerald Mahurin, Chris Miller, Viktor Krantz, and Rob Novak each deliver their best 10 minutes from Collaboration University!

Posted by Rob Novak At 5:02 AM Location London, England | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Great day in London - and quite a depth of sessions after Ken and Marc Pagnier did the keynote and an introduction to Lotus Quickr.  In Kansas City there was a definite affinity for Sametime or Lotus Quickr for most of the attendees (and evenly split).  But here in London there seem to be more environments with people responsible for both Sametime and Lotus Quickr.  What this means is that for some sessions, it's split evenly while for others it's 90/10!

I've met a lot of interesting people and have started collecting feedback and questions for tomorrow.  Hot topics are the new features like connectors in Lotus Quickr, trying to understand the differences between the Domino and Portal versions, and loads of specific issues.  Some examples:

1. The connectors for Lotus Quickr apparently have a problem with Norwegian characters in the user DNs
2. Quickr requires a direct connection to a Sametime server for integration, doesn't support reverse proxy. Companies with Sametime clusters have issues with second logins from the Connect client.
3. Domino LDAP - is it safe to standardize?  It's easy, fine to work with but damn if Lotus Connections just shipped with support only for Tivoli and Active Directory. It's coming but when?
4. Internet Sites documents - for the love of all that is good and decent, isn't it about time both Lotus Quickr for Domino and Sametime supported them?

OK that last one was mine.  Well mostly - the question came up as did a hack, but it's also really time for this to be addressed.

Now whilst you might think we're in a complaint session here there is actually a lot of excellent training and learning going on, problems being solved during breaks, code being downloaded, and even a beer or two after hours.  All part of the higher education experience.

Posted by Rob Novak At 6:18 AM Location London, England | Permalink | Comments (1)

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http://live.CollaborationUniversity.com

Update: Great webcast - and we'll post the replay soon!

Posted by Rob Novak At 2:38 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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As with last week's keynote with Mike Rhodin, we're broadcasting Ken Bisconti's keynote this morning live from London's Radisson Edwardian Marlborough!  Join us for the webcast at http://live.collaborationuniversity.com at 8:15 GMT for a quick intro by yours truly, Ken's keynote address, and Marc Pagnier introducing Lotus Quickr using places on both the Domino and Portal platforms.  I'd say "see you there", but you'll see me instead...!

We'll also be posting a merged slides-video playback when Carl Tyler has a chance to work his magic with Camtasia...so sleep in, America.

Posted by Rob Novak At 12:33 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Ha, gotcha with the title.  They're ready!  First off, all 11 demos I previously posted here are in a convenient list on the right.  Be sure to share these with your users...while I've written a "Quick Start" page on each template to get you started, there's nothing like seeing it in action to help learn a new application.  I'll be adding some more as will Viktor on the technical side, explaining how QEngine works, how the files in qcommon work, and how some of the discreet elements tie together to build an application.

It's been nearly four months since IBM said "go" on the Lotus Quickr template project that you've read so much about here and on the Domino blogs. Today after an exhausting but very rewarding development cycle, we get to say "go" too.  Code was complete June 29 (as promised to IBM), testing on Lotus Quickr GA was July 2-6, last week was CU and finishing the download system, and this weekend we put the final touches on and did a limited test with IBMers.  Then yesterday we knocked out one last bug in the download system after flying to London for CU again this week.

So after all that we're happy to announce that the SNAPPS templates for Lotus Quickr are ready for you.  Make absolutely sure you get the documentation, read it, and install and sign the prerequisite files.  Then go have some fun!

http://QuickrTemplates.com

Posted by Rob Novak At 2:35 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (5)

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Three great pieces of news for CU next week:

• A 2-day surge in registrations has actually allowed the London CU event to grow a little larger than the one in the US!  We're going to pack in the opening session a bit, but don't worry, the speakers may be standing room only...
• We will webcast TWO sessions live in London, both the opening keynote (hopefully including Satwik's Quickr demos) and the closing session, "The Best of CU!" where each speaker either reviews all of their content or gives their best 10 minutes again.
• Last but not least, IBM is sending two Vice Presidents to CU in London!  Ken Bisconti, VP of Messaging and Collaboration, IBM Software Group and Bruce Morris, VP of Unified Communications and Collaboration will both be sharing the vision and plans for the future for Lotus software.  I for one am excited to be working with Ken and Bruce as well as Marc Pagnier and Satwik once again.

There are still some seats available - Carl may have to stand (he's good at that) and your badge might be scrawled in crayon but what the heck - go on and register!

Update: Yep Carl's right the first link is private but check him out standing here and then here!

Posted by Rob Novak At 4:41 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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The week has been a blur - with Collaboration University in Kansas City going off spectacularly, and a rapid turnaround for next week in London, I haven't had much time to blog.  But I can hardly refrain when we get feedback on a partner-driven effort like this, an email received from a 2-time CU grad just 30 minutes after the conference ended:

"If my company wasn't able or willing to send me I would use my own money and my own time to come to this conference. "

The week was pretty special for all of us. With a great venue, a lot of great and interesting people using Sametime and QuickPlace or Quickr, the support of IBM, the list goes on.  The sessions were in-depth and people loved the focus and community feeling that imparted.  We tried some experiments - a live webcast of Mike Rhodin's keynote, roundtable sessions, and post-con workshops.  The webcast went off great for Mike's whole speech, then had some issues at the streaming company as Satwik started his Quickr demos.  But it was great anyway.  Thanks Chris for this great photo of the SNAPPS guys with Mike Rhodin and Satwik doing our tech-check on Monday morning.

The roundtable session, a little like speedgeeking but with 10-12 minutes instead of 5, was a hit.  And in the workshops, we did some pretty cool stuff - one room created a Quickr application from scratch on a server we provided, while another room started with two servers and (add magic dust) ended up with an 11-server infrastructure under Single Sign-On with a WebSphere LTPA token, including building their own servers and adding either Sametime or Quickr (their choice).  The running joke there was that you'd pay a consulting shop about $200k and wait six months for this, and this room of admins did it in 2.5 hours on laptops!

Cool. Just got this:

"Carving out several days to be away from the office is a big sacrifice. The CU payoff is richer sessions - less fluff and less time wasted waiting for the next things."

and this:

"Three days of intense knowledge transfer. My head hurts, but in a good way."

So, I guess I'll bring more Ibuprofen to London. We got a lot of great suggestions too, with most of them being variations on the theme "I want more".  From more workshops to repeats to more time with the speakers, they are all good ideas that we'll consider for next time.

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:19 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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We've been enjoying a great opening keynote session by Mike Rhodin, and are just switching to Satwik's Lotus Quickr overview. The video and sound are quite good, although the projection screen isn't picking up due to a glare.

Join us for another half hour over at http://live.collaborationuniversity.com ... Update: Well that took a hit...! The general session maxed out the stream...

Posted by Rob Novak At 9:30 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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So Chris Miller has come up with some pretty nifty technical solutions to allow us to do a live webcast of Mike Rhodin's keynote next Monday morning!  Now this won't be a super-professional broadcast job (after all, we are software geeks) but it certainly should be worth a look...!  I've been chatting with Mike and his team about the keynote and we're going to see a few new things this week.  For one, Mike wants to do some of his own demos.  Satwik is writing a brilliant scenario for the use of Lotus Quickr, and I have worked out a way to keep my opening comments to 15 minutes (the biggest surprise of all if you know me...).

If it all works out, we are planning to webcast Ken Bisconti's keynote in London, and one complete session to be announced next week.

So tune into http://live.collaborationuniversity.com on Monday, July 9 at 8:00 AM Central time US.  Right now it's pointed to the main site, but at that time it will cut to the live feed.  First you'll hear music, then I'll be on at 8:15 and Mike takes the stage at 8:30.  CU online!

Oh and by the way, in case you've been on the fence, there are exactly two seats left in the room.  They'll be in the back, but if you care to join us that would be great.  London still has plenty of room, we booked a large space there!

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:28 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Well folks it's been a pleasure creating these eleven shows for you, and I have to say I'm more than a little excited about this one, since it's been kept very quiet and nondescript. This demo will introduce you to QSite, the last template we completed on Friday, June 29th.

Now this is where I usually ramble on about the features and functions, their applicability to a business situation, and how wonderful your life is going to be as soon as we have the download database all ready. But to do so here would just detract from the big kahuna surprise we have in store for you with QSite. It's been kept such a secret that my team and Satwik were the only ones who "really" knew what was coming...

So instead of reading, I'm going to ask you to go straight over to the QSite demo!

Now I know these entries will get lost in my blog so I'm creating a list pane over on the right as an easy reference. You'll see it soon. As well, I will be making movies of the underlying features like the QEngine, workflow engine, and flexible views. So keep coming back.

See you at Collaboration University!

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:21 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (7)

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On the home stretch, folks! This is the tenth of eleven demos of the new Lotus Quickr Templates. In QActivities, we have strived for a combination of an approachable, professional user interface and a base level of integration with Lotus Connections. Specifically, QActivities integrates with the Activities server, allowing the user to add any page in the Lotus Quickr place to an activity on the Activities server. This becomes very powerful when combined with the Lotus Notes 8 client and the embedded Activities sidebar. You can add a Quickr page to an activitiy, see it immediately in your Notes client, and launch the Quickr page form the context of the activity. Simple but very cool and effective and dare-I-say-it-again contextual collaboration.

In addition to a refreshed UI accomplished almost entirely with CSS - hence much faster - we've added some great features to Lotus Quickr like a list of the last 10 updated documents, a member list that searches for documents created by the member when clicked, and a nice little tab with place statistics!

This one's very visual so I'll stop typing. Let me know what you think of the QActivities demo!

Just a side note - we are delivering QActivities with not one but two custom themes. The second one is scoped to look like an Activity, the one in the demo takes on the UI of the entire Connections server. You choose!

Posted by Rob Novak At 7:59 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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We're getting into some eye candy and heavy Dojo work with this one folks! For my ninth demo, we'll have a look at QContacts, the contact management application for Lotus Quickr. Contacts? Why would you need that when you have a member list? Good question, easy answer. You need more information than the member record can supply, or the project contact isn't a member of the place, or you need to share role-specific information about this contact with the team. There's nothing more frustrating than having an out-of-date, incomplete, or low-confidence contact list. QContacts help to solve these problems, centralizing contact information while automating much of the work involved in maintaining it.

The use case is simple. You're running a project using Lotus Quickr, and you want to maintain a contact list with more comprehensive information than is available in the member list (which is, in fact, mostly for authorization). You also don't want to re-enter information from the member list, and it makes no sense to duplicate information available about a contact that may be a member of another place, or not a member of a place at all. QContacts consists of a single form for the Lotus Quickr place, and a Domino database to coordinate, automate, and consolidate contact data. It lets you add information about people that can be shared across places including all pertinent addressing information, personal contact information, a photo, and place-specific comments that are kept in context even if the contact is a member of multiple contact lists.

Viktor has done some significant Dojo work on this template, including a method to use a true Domino form and make it look 100% integrated with the Lotus Quickr place - even though it's part of another database. Also, we've added type-ahead search for contacts, Ajax submit of new contacts, cool rollover tooltips (business cards), and more. Jerald wrote the engine for QContacts that gathers all member records from the Lotus Quickr places (contacts1.nsf databases) and does a relational-style add/change based on the email address as a key, each night, to pick up new membership and clean up contact lists. It does this without destroying any of the supplemental information such as address, photo, etc. and can also be run on demand to start things off.

An amazing benefit of QContacts is the simplicity of its implementation in the Quickr place, and its portability. Only one single custom form must be uploaded into a place in order for this feature to work in any place! We're delivering the place and the code, so you can either use our place or simply implement it in your own.

Enough of me explaining, go have a look at the QContacts demo.

Don't forget - ask questions and make comments here...

Posted by Rob Novak At 1:04 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (3)

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For the eighth Lotus Quickr Template demo, you'll see QIssues, an all-purpose issues management and lifecycle tracking application. I say "all-purpose" because you can use QIssues for pretty much any type of project-related data collection you can imagine. Whether you run IT projects, marketing campaigns, six-sigma efforts, or more ongoing efforts like software development, QIssues gives you a powerful way to define the data you want to collect, collect and analyze it, and send issues through a workflow that you can define.

Similar in feel to QSurvey, the form creation process is very simple. A floating window lets you build questions for your issue form and submit them to build the form. There are a couple new types of questions not found in QSurvey, a member list and date control. Once the questions are built, you can move them around, define a layout (1, 2, 3 columns or a wizard) and - this is key - decide right at the form what kind of workflow to put submissions through. And of course, using the workflow engine we've bundled with several templates, you can define that workflow yourself.

Unlike survey responses, issues submitted with one of these forms are visible and editable - we want to be able to address the issue, send it through a workflow or notification scheme, and eventually "Close" the issue. Also, on the issue forms themselves, they are smart enough to know if you decide mid-way to add new fields or move fields, and will generate smart reports based on the original (hidden) ID of each question and not its position.

I'm confident you will find many uses for QIssues, probably way mor than I've thought of! So go have a look at the QIssues demo.

Don't forget - ask questions and make comments here...

Posted by Rob Novak At 12:34 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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For the seventh Lotus Quickr Template demo, you'll see QMeeting, an organizational and planning aid for complex meetings. Not the 2-hour staff meeting or the 90-minute group conference call, those are better handled with your Notes Mail and Quickr's native group calendar, respectively. The meetings that benefit most from QMeeting are those that make you tear your hair out - multiple agenda items, planned breaks, different people responsible for each agenda item, multiple electronic resources (attachments), and a timeline to keep. Examples of such meetings? Shareholder's meetings. Conference tracks. Corporate retreats. Financial reviews. The big ones!

QMeeting lets you distribute responsibility for agenda items to individuals, or lets you manage agenda items as discrete elements as a proxy for an outsider, or even create them on the fly. Agenda items are the building blocks of complex meetings, and each can have its own "Owner", resources, rich text, and set of appropriate attachments. So if John is in charge of Finance, let John manage the agenda item for the financial report!

The meeting manager - a person who puts together the meeting agenda - can then easily assemble an electronic meeting agenda that automatically computes time slots, adds breaks and lunches, and even includes online meetings. If someone hasn't completed their agenda item, it can be added easily. Once the meeting agenda is built, it has direct links to each agenda item, and (this is cool) direct links to each attachment. This document becomes the easy access point for all meeting participants. In practical use, it can be projected and run by a person when the meeting is live in person, and used online when the meeting is managed via teleconference or Sametime. It becomes a nice adjunct to online meetings by storing all meeting "artifacts" in one place.

So let's go have a look at the QMeeting demo.

Don't forget - ask questions and make comments here...

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:04 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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My sixth Lotus Quickr Template demo introduces QAnnounce, designed to help with the management of the lifecycle of corporate communications. QAnnounce lets you put structure around the creation, edit, approval and archive process for any kind of "official" communication. The form is fairly simple, with the kind of metadata fields you would expect - a distribution date, a field to track the disposition of the document, and (something new) a field to track comments as each edit is made, and display them in an audit trail along with the name of the person making the edit, the disposition at the time, and the date and time the edit was made. Of course, we've included some flexible views to let you categorize the communications by disposition or category.

So go have a look at the QAnnounce demo - I've made a minor format change to the recordings that I hope you'll enjoy.

P.S. All the demos are done - so check back today for the postings! Don't forget to ask questions and make comments here.

Posted by Rob Novak At 8:51 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (3)

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At exactly 5:52 PM today, Friday June 29, on the day we promised IBM and the rest of the QuickrSphere we would be finished with Lotus Quickr Template code, we wrapped up the last template for submission to IBM.  Believe me folks this has been one of the most challenging, exciting projects we have ever worked on - 15 weeks of heads-down, cutting edge, and FUN rapid development made possible only with the dedication and effort of an incredible team of people at SNAPPS and support from our friends at IBM.

Each member of the SNAPPS team - Viktor Krantz, Melissa Rieke, Jerald Mahurin, Troy Reimer, and yours truly took this challenge head-on, meeting what was deemed an impossible schedule with a seven-weeks late start.  Thanks and congratulations to the team.  And thanks once again to Satwik, Marc, Paul, Bob, Tony, Mike, and everyone on the IBM Quickr team who provided assistance, feedback, late night sessions, and most of all collaboration to bring us both to a successful June completion.  At fifteen emails/day and at least two or three phone calls, we've enjoyed a close relationship with the IBM team and look forward to working with them again should we be lucky enough to be tapped for similar projects in the future.

So you're wondering when the goods will be available - and even more so, what they are.  Well now that code is complete, we have a few days of tasks ahead, in addition to making some more movies:

1. Full functional tests on the Quickr GA code.
2. Creation of "Quick Start" pages in each template so users know what to do and how to start.
3. Documenting the common and unique installation and configuration steps, making sure customers can get it going easily.
4. Finishing off a download mechanism that's been cooking in the background.
5. Posting places, source code, licenses, and a second set of places with sample data.

This will take a few days.  I'm working this weekend, in case you wondered.  There are a couple other things on my plate as well, but we'll get it out to you as soon as we can!

Posted by Rob Novak At 9:41 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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I'll have three servers up in an hour, testing and testing...

Posted by Rob Novak At 10:20 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (4)

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Who knew there were so many Lotus Quickr fans out there?  I just checked my stats and apparently the first two demos have received more than 1,200 and 1,000 views so far, and the other three posted this month should get there within a week.

So I had better post the others before Lotus Quickr ships in ... 3 days!

Well all but #11, I'm going to leave a bit of a surprise for when they get posted.  On that subject I've been asked a few times, so the answer is this - the templates will be posted for download after we've had a chance to run them through a series of tests on the GA code that posts on Friday.  That means, I'll be testing them on two servers this weekend and into Monday.

Posted by Rob Novak At 9:36 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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I've decided to create a few session spotlights for you - also because IBM has asked me for real abstracts for some dedicated event pages they're putting up for Collaboration University!

So here are a few of the sessions you can see at Collaboration University in just two weeks in KC, three weeks in London.  The hotel block in KC has sold out, but you can still stay at the conference hotel if you don't mind the extra hundred bucks a night (believe me this is a gorgeous hotel, formerly the Ritz Carlton now the Intercontinental on the Plaza in KC!).  If not, you can stay a few blocks away and get a little exercise early in the morning and evening.  We've packed the agenda completely full, and made a critical decision to give you the opportunity to go to more sessions - 50% more than last year - by starting earlier and going later (believe me, it wasn't easy to plan!)

Today's spotlights:

	Gabriella Davis on: Lotus Quickr for WebSphere Portal Installation and Configuration
	Chris Miller on: Sametime 101 - Deploying Sametime in YOUR Environment (Including Mobile!)
	Carl Tyler on: The Top 5 Hidden Sametime Hacks and Programming Tricks

Our opening Keynote in Kansas City will be Mike Rhodin, General Manager, Lotus Software.  Mike will deliver his keynote address followed immediately by a product introduction and live demo of the GOLD Lotus Quickr by Satwik Seshasai, Development Manager for Lotus Quickr.  These sessions will be delivered in the beautiful Rooftop Ballroom, 13 stories above the Kansas City Country Club Plaza, overlooking the Plaza and the Kansas City skyline.  Here's an overview of the area - the hotel is bottom center.

It's not too late to get to Kansas City, and in fact it's one of the more affordable places to fly.  So if you've been waiting, it's time to act and get registered!  (Can you tell we have to give the banquet people some final numbers?).

Tomorrow, I'll spotlight the London venue...and a few more sessions!

Posted by Rob Novak At 6:58 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (3)

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I had the pleasure of working once again with Bruce Elgort and Julian Robichaux of the Taking Notes Podcast for this week's episode #62 alongside Lance Spellman.  We had a lively and casual discussion about ILUG 2007, The VIEW and Collaboration University, then moved on to the big news of the week about Lotus Quickr, and discussed the Dojo toolkit in depth.  As always, a great time talking with these guys about good solid Lotus topics.   Have a listen!

Posted by Rob Novak At 6:02 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Nice!



...and a little bird told me it'll switch over next week...

Posted by Rob Novak At 10:25 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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You are all officially invited to join your Collaboration University instructors Chris Miller, Gabriella Davis, Carl Tyler and yours truly this Friday, June 22, for a LIVE podcast highlighting CU's new materials, workshops, and more.  After this brief overview, we will open the lines for your Q&A about all things Sametime 7.5.1, QuickPlace, and Quickr 8.0! This is an unprecedented opportunity to get your questions answered by some of the industry's top experts in these technologies.

Here's how you participate. Tomorrow, Friday June 22 at 10 AM EDT, 9 AM CDT, 3 PM GMT, 4 PM CET...pick up the phone.

Phone Number: (724) 444-7444
Talkcast ID: 31241

Then log onto the website for the live chat portion of the podcast - those who cannot call may still participate, and we'll try to keep up!

Expect that we'll also make a few announcements on the call to be blogged shortly thereafter...

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:21 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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In addition to yesterday's announcements of Quickr and Connections availability June 29, IBM has been actively involved at Enterprise 2.0 this year.  Early this morning (for us Midwesterners anyway) IBM held a blogger's Q&A call reminiscent of the 30-minute session we had at Lotusphere '07.  During the call, Carol Jones, IBM Fellow (which is something like being "Michael Jordan, basketball player") and Rod Smith, VP of Emerging Technology hosted the lively call with several bloggers in the Domino community.

To be honest I could relate my opinions of the call but it's so much better if you hear it for yourself...Chris Miller took the initiative and did the hard work.  The recording is here and his summary of the call is here.

I had one multi-part observation and couldn't find a place to fit it into the flow of the conversation so here it is.  

Lotus Connections, which I've experienced both through Paxos - the Connections for partners site - and the Lotus Greenhouse, is one of Lotus's more intriguing Web 2.0 offerings.  Yes I know about the other one .  I do have some experience with Connections and Activities.  I'm not converted yet on Activities...but have an open mind...I have too much experience with the way people work to commit to one model at this point.

However, my point about Connections is this - there are three unique paradigms (shoot me, I typed an MBA word without the degree!) to the adoption-to-value equation with Connections.  What I mean by this is that it's accepted that the more a company adopts a system, platform, or unique way of doing things, the more they can derive benefit and value from it.  Connections is no different.  So with Connections, we have blogs, communities, dogear, profiles and activities.  

The first three, blogs, communities, and dogear, represent more mainstream social networking constructs familiar to consumers.  As such, their value is realized through voluntary and viral participation.  The more people participate, the better, but you can't force it.  That's the nature of the beast with pure social networking constructs.  

Profiles represents the second model by which companies can derive value, and in fact will get the best return if it is centrally managed through policy.  While corporate policy cannot mandate participation in the pure social networking models of blogs, communities, and dogear/tagging/links, it's completely appropriate with profiles to require updated information to benefit the organization.  

So, this leaves us with activities - the most highly touted, most visible and most value-driven construct in Connections.  It leaves us with a unique challenge.  Simply stated, its adoption depends on a key success factor and a basic assumption.  First, in order for the collaborative activities model to be successful, absolutely everyone involved in an activity must participate actively, be engaged and use the software.  If a project, task or other artifact of an activity is missed, missing, neglected, or left out of the collective knowledge represented by an activity, that missing information could lead to decisions based on incomplete information.  A branch of this logic requires us to consider the activity that incorporates external participation - the partner and customer angle - where other companies may not be able to or ready to participate in activities, leaving out a big chunk of their value.  Second, the assumption, and this is where I believe IBM and its partners may have the most work to do educating customers.  Activities assumes that participants view the concept of work within similar parameters - that work units called activities correspond to some universal truth about their scope.  The challenge is, we don't.  Some people view work activities in larger more broad categories than others.  It's been observed that those with more responsibility tend to categorize their work in bigger buckets while others live day to day.  I may consider an activity "produce a conference", while someone closer to the details might consider an activity "order pads and pens".  See the challenge?  Involving people who have different views of a container model of work that is defined by others could be a challenge.  The value of social software in business is in its infancy, and IBM is leading the charge (good for them and for me!), and I look forward to working with customers, IBM and the partner community to "socialize" on the best ways to achieve the most significant value from Connections.

Posted by Rob Novak At 7:57 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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The fifth Lotus Quickr template demo introduces QIdeas, an innovation and idea management template that probably has more uses than I've imagined for it. Visualize if you will the free-flowing nature of a wiki where revisions and enhancements to a concept and content are able to be made as simply as clicking "New Version". Then to this collaborative model add the blog-like ability to let others comment on each version of the evolving document (idea in our case), and -- this is key -- making sure the comments are maintained in the context of the version with which they are associated. Not a free-flowing discussion about all versions, but very specific comments about the current version. An author might choose to incorporate those comments or not, but there is a record of when and by whom they were submitted.

Now that we've combined the concepts of a blog and wiki to collaborate, we have a platform on which to evolve business ideas and innovations to the point where they are worthy of submitting to some authority or group for "approval" or "review". This is where the business construct of a workflow comes in, but it has to be flexible, manageable by the business user, and be able to be initiated at any time and not based on pre-set rules. The custom workflow engine we've built for these templates does just that, as you'll see in this and four other template demos.

So sit back for 17 minutes and enjoy the QIdeas demo.

Don't forget - ask questions and make comments here, and check back soon for more demos!

Posted by Rob Novak At 5:09 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (10)

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In case you are wondering, I wanted to make sure the IBM announcement was released first...originally I thought it would come a few weeks earlier, hence the wild blast of blog postings today!  So I'm pleased to share the sessions list for Collaboration University for Lotus Quickr, QuickPlace and Sametime.  Again the dates are:

July 9-11, Kansas City
Mike Rhodin, Keynote Address

July 18-20, London
Ken Bisconti, Keynote Address

As well we've lined up some awesome content with help from IBM and the partners who are producing the conference.  David Marshak, Akiba Saeedi, Satwik Seshasai, Marc Pagnier, and Jelan Heidelberg are coming along to help out with the IBM perspective and we really appreciate their willingness to join this partner event!

80% of the Sametime content and 95% of the Lotus Quickr content is brand new!  Here's our session breakdown:

For Sametime

• Sametime 101 - Deploying Sametime in your Environment (Includes Mobile)
• Sametime Meeting Center Customization Tricks - How to Roll Your Own!
• Top 5 hidden Sametime Hacks and Programming Tricks
• Developing Sametime Connect plugins
• Exploiting the Toolkits for Sametime Bots and Automation
• Sametime Links - Developing your own Queueing Application *Note from Rob - $10,000 in free code anyone???
• Installation and Configuration -- Sametime Gateway for Public IM
• Deploying Sametime Connect Plugins
• Sametime 7.5.1 New Features (It's Bigger than it Sounds!)
• Clustering Sametime Servers -- Models and Examples
• Bandwidth and Capacity Planning
• Top 10 Support Issues for Lotus Sametime
• Monitoring and Managing Your Sametime Servers (Including the new Monitoring Toolkit)
• A Guide to Telephony Integration - A User's Guide to Terminology and Options

For Lotus Quickr:

• Lotus Quickr 8.0 Introduction and Features
• Lotus Quickr Domino Installation and Configuration
• Lotus Quickr - Introducing and Understanding the new Templates Part 1
• Lotus Quickr - Introducing and Understanding the new Templates Part 2
• Quickr Development Fundamentals - Placebots, Forms and Themes
• Introducing the Dojo Toolkit
• Lotus Quickr Development -- Leveraging Template Code to Create Your Own Applications
• Lotus Quickr for WebSphere Portal Installation and Configuration
• Lotus Quickr for WebSphere Portal Development Overview
• Using the Dojo Toolkit for Advanced Development in Lotus Quickr
• Integration Strategies for Lotus Quickr, QuickPlace, Domino and Sametime
• Flexible Views, Workflow Engines and More Reusable Tools!
• Roundtable - Small Groups Session (size limited)
• Lotus Quickr - Deploy How You Want, Where You Want - Integrating the Platforms

And of course we'll have some foundation sessions on LDAP, Firewalls, and the popular "Best 10 minutes from each speaker" session at the end.  This was a great time last year and we are really looking forward to it.

Collaboration University is a small, focused conference so you get one-on-one time with real experts and IBM development - folks like Carl Tyler, Viktor Krantz, Gabriella Davis, Chris Miller and more.  Check out the speakers page, and get registered!  See you in Kansas City and London!

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:24 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (5)

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From Rob: That's right folks - the long awaited official announcement!  Lotus Quickr will ship June 29, 2007 - that's just 10 days!  Here's the release, to be posted by IBM in a few minutes....sorry I couldn't help myself.  The fourth and fifth bullet there, that's what we've been working on for months with IBM.  Enjoy!

Update 12:15 CDT: It's hit ComputerWorld, others coming soon...

#  #  #

IBM Lotus Quickr 8 Expedites Team Collaboration

Armonk, NY…June 19, 2007…IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announces the June 29th availability of IBM Lotus® Quickr 8 software, an open standards-based team collaboration tool that helps teams inside and outside the company firewall easily and effectively work together across geographies, working styles and operating systems.

Lotus Quickr provides a rich set of team collaboration capabilities, including blogs, wikis and team space templates supporting a variety of business processes to get a collaboration project up and running quickly. Already an enterprise-ready team collaboration offering supporting both Microsoft and Lotus software environments, Lotus Quickr interoperability will be further expanded with a connector to Microsoft Outlook software currently expected to be released in a beta program for Lotus customers this summer.

Posted by Rob Novak At 10:59 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (4)

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For my fourth demo I am introducing QProject, which contains enhancements to the tasks and notifications in Lotus Quickr, introduces a concept of overall and cross-project status, and implements an enhanced AJAX Gantt chart for viewing tasks and their relationships to other tasks. Relationships? Yes, with QProject you can declare task predecessors and dependencies! One to one, one to many, however you like. The major features include the ability to set these dependencies, visualize them through the Gantt chart, receive consolidated overdue task notifications, and (my favorite) automatically push out dates when a predecessor is completed late. Not that this ever happens, but...

If you're wondering about other project-related features, keep in mind that we still have QIssues, QContacts, QIdeas...you get the idea. Developers will be able to take multiple design elements and assemble applications with a little work - well a heck of a lot less work than creating it from scratch! Once all our demos are done, we'll be teaching you how to do this. If you're really interested in integrating the capabilities of the templates, come see us at Collaboration University coming in just three weeks (gulp!) where we have a workshop dedicated to creating your own Lotus Quickr application, and sessions that will tear apart the templates and piece them back together.

So let's go now to the 16.5-minute QProject demo.

Don't forget - ask questions here, and check back soon for more demos. I'm on a fast track to get them all out before Lotus Quickr ships!

Posted by Rob Novak At 10:30 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (9)

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And we wonder why customers get confused...

So I'm installing the Activities server.  It's a WAS server plus stuff.  Requires a WAS 6.1.0.3.  Which means, download a WAS 6.1.0 then update it to 6.1.0.3.  Easy?  Just read:

Installation Instructions (Fix Pack)
Install Fix Pack 3 (6.1.0.3) on top of IBM WebSphere Application server Version 6.1.0.

The Update Installer is not packaged as part of the fix pack download and needs to be acquired seperately. To get the Update Installer needed to install this fix pack, follow the instructions provided in Update Installer for WebSphere Application Server V6.1 releases (a link).

OK...so you don't just install a fixpack, you have to use an installer to install it....so I go there...then...

Installation Instructions (Fix Pack Installer)
The Update Installer for WebSphere Software has a new installation program for Version 6.1, Installation Wizard for the Update Installer. Download and extract the contents onto file system and use the install wizard to install the Update Installer. Refer to the instructions found in the WebSphere Application Server Information Center topic on Installing the Update Installer for WebSphere Software (a link)

INSTRUCTIONS TO INSTALL THE 6.1.0.1 UPDATE INSTALLER TO INSTALL THE 6.1.0.3 UPDATE TO 6.1.0.  This stuff is not for humans.  I need say no more.

Posted by Rob Novak At 2:39 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (8)

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In my third demo, you'll be introduced to QSurvey, a component that allows you to create surveys, lets users take them, and provides two methods of generating survey reports. I'm loving this one myself, because having been in the Lotus world for nearly 15 years now, surveys have been in demand and really hard to do. There have been and may still be some third party products for this. I've even built it myself, many years ago. There was much pain in the days when it was nearly impossible to assemble fields onto forms without being a trained developer, and have it look good on the web.

The implementation here in Lotus Quickr is fairly elegant, as we store all the survey questions as JSON, all the answers as JSON, and simply reassemble it all for the live reports. What I like about QSurvey is how easy it is to use...I can create a survey quickly with a question "wizard", enable it, and let people take it for either a defined period of time or disable it myself. And of course, there are options for securing the survey, deciding who can see result reports, and choosing whether to allow anonymous access.

So without delay, let's go check out the QSurvey demo. Don't forget, please ask questions here...or meet us at Collaboration University where each template will be reviewed, analyzed, and broken down for you.

Posted by Rob Novak At 10:38 AM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (11)

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I had all intentions of making movies for you last weekend, as we've wrapped up QMeeting, QProject, QSurvey, QIdeas, and QAnnounce, with QContacts and QIssues coming in hours or days and ready for demos.  But all of a sudden, I'm on the road again for the week in Washington, DC, working on client proposals and some code and testing from my hotel room at night and pretty much out of contact in buildings with mobile phone ion clouds during the day.  So possibly, if the stars are aligned, tonight is "movie night"!

Collaboration University is shaping up very nicely as well - we have just confirmed another speaker for London (thanks IBM!) and are about to post the final sessions.  Sametime and Lotus Quickr/QuickPlace fans alike will like what they see and get - we've assembled code samples and new materials that have never been seen, presented or demonstrated before for the July events.  We've invested a little more this time in advertising, you'll see CU materials at DominoPower.com, on The Register in the UK, at Volker Weber's blog, at the product sites on Lotus.com, and more cropping up here and there the next couple weeks.

Lastly before I go off to a BWOW (building without windows - nod to Karen Hobert!) it's Rocky Oliver's birthday today - go give him a hug!  Love ya Rock!

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:26 AM Location Washington, DC | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Yes I spelled that right - Viktor Krantz has gone Web 2.0 and renamed himself Viktr  He found the domain name was available so has registered and is redirecting Viktr.com to his eKrantz site.  He's just added forums and is planning another major article on JSON and associative arrays - so add him to your blogroll and RSS feedreader.

In his spare time, Viktor, er, Viktr has created two Google Maps for Collaboration University to help our delegates get around and become familiar with the venues.  Check out the maps for Kansas City and London here.

Just arrived home from the Irish Lotus User Group (and events before and after) and a meeting of the Penumbra Group that was held in part at IBM's Westford, MA facilities.  IBM was very gracious in permitting us use of the facilities, and presenting both current and future information about Lotus Software - technical deep dives and market statements alike.  It's quite a treat to be across the hall from Mike Rhodin and Ken Bisconti's offices, and have Mike drop in at lunch for a chat.

So Sunday night I arrived home to a pile of work and customers a mile deep.  But still, we have been working feverishly on the Lotus Quickr templates, just delivered two more yesterday, and are on schedule for end of June.  I will have some more demos up very soon, like maybe even today.  Or tomorrow.  And a few cool announcements about Collaboration University #2 in September are coming in a couple days, as soon as it's all worked out.

Posted by Rob Novak At 12:54 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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It was with some sadness I left Dublin the other day for places further west and south, having had the chance to visit the city for the second time for ILUG.  This time was different, though, as it wasn't just a single-day stop-off on the way home from Amsterdam like last year.  My session was well-received, as you can imagine from the preparation you see above. Having a packed room at the last session before closing was pretty gratifying, and I hope that folks got some use out of the materials - not just the beer!  The session kicked off with a blatant apology about my two transgressions from last year's presentation - first, I had brought over some Heinekens from Amsterdam (not the right thing to do at the IRISH Lotus User Group I suppose) and second I hadn't brought enough.  So after a show of hands, Bill and the helpful Declan from the O'Callaghan staff helped me order a round of 80 pints.  I've read that it's an Irish custom to do this, so I'll gladly sit back and let each and every one of you take your turn before I die...

I have to comment, as many have done, on the organization and coordination of the event.  This event ranks very highly on all my criteria when I think about where it would be great to speak again.  Namely those criterial are

• Depth and breadth of content (value for attendees)
• Ability to attract well-respected speakers
• How appreciative the organizers are of speakers, publicly and in private
• How well-thought-out are the details and how smoothly everything is run, while allowing for flexibility
• Fun!  (Where else can you start a session by buying a round of Guinness?)

So hats off to Paul, Bill, Eileen, Tom, Kitty, Warren, Volker, and everyone else not wearing a green shirt who was involved in planning this great event that keeps surprising me with its quality and with the viral nature of its growth.  I look forward to ILUG next year and hope to be able to participate again and at an even more involved level.

Collaboration University was a proud sponsor of ILUG.  I was able to invite each of the delegates from ILUG to come visit us in London this July and September, and look forward to helping promote the growth of the Lotus community in the same ways these great folks have with ILUG!

In case you're wondering, we went from ILUG to here for the weekend, then here for two more nights.  I highly recommend both.

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:36 AM Location Kinsale, Ireland | Permalink | Comments (4)

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ILUG 2007 is a blast, and I have to say extremely well run and produced.  The entire team here is doing a brilliant job of keeping the sessions rolling, on time (signs lead to waving leads to ridicule, the way it should be!).  And having attended sessions all day, I can say that delegates are getting the deal of a lifetime.  Alan Lepofsky gave a great strategy session to open the meeting, followed by Mary Beth Raven explaining the decisions and design process behind Notes 8.  This was particularly interesting as Beta 3 was released early in the morning, and I had downloaded and installed it before the keynote (that's right - downloaded, installed, and working productively in the time required to shower and dress...).

Tom Duff gave a great intro to Ajax, setting the foundation for understanding some of the more complex implementations that will be discussed today.  Bruce, Vince and Kevin introduced OpenNTF to a new crowd of people - 120 or so - then I learned more about Domino Domain Monitoring than I ever wanted to know from Kathleen McGivney.  I'm only sad that I could not be in more than one room at a time...I do have photos to post though and will do that later.

The day's technical sessions ended with Speedgeeking (which for the uninitiated works like speed dating, 5 minutes at each speaker's table while they do a presentation, demo, or whatever they want to get across).  I was happy to participate and used my table to explain and demonstrate some of the Lotus Quickr templates that are finished.  I only had time for one demo even though eight of them are done, so I let the delegates choose each time.  I put out water glasses with numbers, and everyone took a coin when they got to my table.  After two minutes of slides, they dropped their coin into the glass with the number corresponding to the demo they wanted to see.  Whichever had the most coins in 10 seconds won, and I went off and did the demo.  It was great fun, and I saw what people were most interested in!

This morning I'm headed over to Kristin Keene's session introducing Lotusphere 2008 where she will be asking for feedback on ideas, suggestions, and possibly even making some decisions and announcements.  Can't wait.  After lunch, IBM has a session introducing Lotus Quickr, so I'm going to offer my services to discuss the templates and give them some demo code.  Later on, I have a session on Domino integration with open source Javascript toolkits.

I should mention that the sponsors here are doing a great job as well, given the tight space.  Collaboration University is a sponsor (logo on the bag!) and we are all wearing the new CU shirts today, but don't have a booth...so if you're here at ILUG and want to know about Collaboration University in London (July or August), come find me!

Posted by Rob Novak At 2:52 AM Location Dublin, Ireland | Permalink | Comments (4)

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Sorry Paul, I know I said I'd send the presentation and demo files this morning but I found a cool little open-source navigation widget I just HAD to integrate with Domino today.  It's coming tonight, just in time for the USB sticks.  Phew.  

So for ILUG and my session "Free Code and Beer 2: Guinness's Revenge!" next week, I'll have integrated Prototype, Scriptaculous, Backbase, MooTools, SmoothGallery, Lightbox, Slider, Rico, and the big Domino-calendar-replacement demo Viktor did for us on Dojo...and of course give it all away.

So if you're going to be at ILUG, look me up - here's my bio for the event - and hit me up for a beer!

Posted by Rob Novak At 4:55 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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In my second demo, you'll be introduced to QPresent - the collaborative presentation development template for Lotus Quickr 8.0. This one really has had me excited, based on the number of presentations I develop, manage and deliver each year. QPresent's innovations build upon a core capability in Lotus Quickr, namely the ability to upload a Microsoft PowerPoint slide presentation and view it as slide images in the browser. In Lotus Quickr (and QuickPlace before it), you could do this then page through the slides or zoom the presentation. With QPresent, we've plugged in our custom workflow engine, made slide navigation Ajax-enabled to avoid screen refreshes, and -- the big feature -- plugged in a commenting module that lets other users comment on the presentation slide by slide.

Read that again...you can collect comments from your team on every single slide in a presentation, without ever having to email the big bloated PPT file around, and you never have to worry about merging random comments sent in email or versions of a file. And because it's all in a Lotus Quickr place, there's only one copy to worry about. Oh, and it's secure.

You'll see similar commenting models in other templates in the future, and you'll see the flexible, custom workflow engine in about five of them. But slide-specific commenting is one of my favorite features (you can post an overall comment on the presentation as well). The business applications of QPresent are varied, including general team review, executive approvals of public presentations (with the workflow engine plugged in), legal department reviews, globalization and translation services, and more. Any time you've ever wanted to get someone's input on a presentation, QPresent would come in handy. So without further adieu, grab your popcorn, sit back for 19 minutes, and enjoy the QPresent demo. Don't forget to turn up the sound - and please ask questions here...

Posted by Rob Novak At 2:02 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (17)

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This will be the first of many (many) Flash demos I'm posting about the upcoming release of free business applications (templates) for IBM Lotus Quickr. As I mentioned in a previous post, SNAPPS has partnered with IBM to produce these 14 business applications for Lotus Quickr. A couple of them, blogs and wikis, are destined for the product installation while many more are going to be downloadable, upgraded from time to time, and customizable.

In addition to demos of the applications themselves, I'll be posting demos of some of the new cross-template concepts and innovations separately - items like the new custom workflow engine, adjustable views (we finally settled on a name), Dojo integration concepts, and automated view provision via DXL. And as I mentioned earlier today, Viktor is also writing technical articles and will be working on several demos himself. Mine are designed for you to understand what they are and how users will benefit, while Viktor's will be more geared to the developer who wants to understand the details of a particular concept, possibly to reuse it or modify it. The "tag team" approach should give you a great education on what is possible with Lotus Quickr. Eventually we'll have a library of demos and put them all in one list.

So without any further delay, pull up a chair and launch the 9-minute QPhotos demo! Enjoy - and please ask questions here...email is overflowing right now!

Posted by Rob Novak At 5:15 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (15)

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Viktor Krantz and I are starting a game of tag.  He's writing some tutorials and technical articles, providing code examples related to the templates we're developing for Lotus Quickr.  Meanwhile, I'm creating Flash demos of features and extensible code for the same.  With 7 out of 14 templates initially completed, we have a lot of examples with which to work.  Viktor' first tutorial describes how to add Dojo floating panes to your applications - and even though it's written for Lotus Quickr, it works just as well with Domino applications.

So go on over to EKrantz.com for the tutorial, download an example, and look for the sneak peek of one of the templates.

At the moment I'm at Advisor Summit in Anaheim, installing the J2EE version of Lotus Quickr (Beta 2) so my laptop will be busy for a while.  But later, I'll be posting the first Flash demo of one of the templates, so check back here in the next day!

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:43 AM Location Anaheim, CA | Permalink | Comments (0)

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What's wrong with this picture?

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:27 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (7)

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In case you have missed blog posts by Adam, Steve, Ed, and others, here is where you can learn all about the 7.5.1 release of Sametime.  Massive new features and capabilities are in Sametime 7.5.1 - more than you would expect in a point release.  Of course with every new release there are issues to get through or new behaviors, some of which have been covered in depth by Chris this week.  Volker's also been posting on the Mac release - what works and what needs work.

I for one am thrilled about one thing, and it has nothing to do with new features.  IBM has FINALLY fixed the server installation bug that previously removed any StChatLog.dll file during an upgrade.  This annoying bug had bothered global clients for ages, as removing this file turns off their chat logging solutions.  Being one of a small number of ISVs with a solution in this area (SnappShot), it had caused more headaches than I can count.  I have Carl and some customers to thank for making noise on this one...

We'll of course be covering Sametime 7.5.1 administration and development heavily at Collaboration University - sorry I couldn't resist.  We sponsored the podcast this time.  

Posted by Rob Novak At 1:46 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Well this is pretty exciting for a group of business partners...we started out last year with an idea to foster relationships with technology professionals with an event at its center, and it turned out great.  Now with a year under our belts, we again decided to put time and energy into the concept, bringing the latest technical information and well known speakers out from their jobs working with global enterprises for a few days.  And not-so-coincidentally, each event is right around the time of a major product release from IBM.  Collaboration University continues to be an event run from the ground up by technical and business experts in the industry.

IBM has been very supportive of this effort.  In fact, this year we have the good fortune to have asked for and received some really impressive resources to help out with our efforts.  One of the most significant of these is the keynote speakers.  We're thrilled, humbled and very appreciative of IBM's generosity in providing this, not the least significant reason being that I would have had to do it myself if nobody was available  Thanks to IBM for stepping up with these great headliners!

So we're pleased to announce the keynote speakers for Collaboration University, which as you might know has two different events (Lotus Quickr, QuickPlace, and Sametime in July, Lotus Notes & Domino 8 in September) and two cities for each -- Kansas City and London.  Here they are:

	Mike Rhodin General Manager Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software IBM Software Group Mike Rhodin was named General Manager, Workplace, Portal and Collaboration (WPLC) Software, in August 2005. He leads a team responsible for developing IBM's collaborative technology and solutions, which integrate people, data and business process to create the "human side" of IBM's On Demand Strategy. Previously he served as Vice President of Development and Technical Support for WPLC, working to transform the front-end of computing. Mike has a passion for simplifying the way people work, improving organizational performance, and helping IBM customers maximize their return on IT investment. Before joining Lotus in 2003, Mike led IBM's development efforts for Pervasive Computing from November 1999. This included development of the WebSphere Everyplace family of offerings, WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Voice offerings in addition to new embedded software componentry. Mike also served as Director, IBM Server Solutions within Software Group. He joined IBM in 1984 upon his graduation from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science. He resides with his family in Carlisle, Massachusetts. Mike will deliver the keynote address at Collaboration University on July 9 in Kansas City.
	Ken Bisconti Vice President Messaging and Collaboration Software IBM Software Group As Vice President of Messaging and Collaboration Products for IBM Software, Ken Bisconti has business responsibility for IBM's Lotus Notes and Domino, Lotus Quickr, Workplace Forms and Workplace Collaborative Learning product families.  He oversees the business strategy, tactical execution, market management and product management of these market leading software products. Since joining Lotus in January 1994, Ken has served in a variety of positions, including vice president of Lotus product management, vice president of Lotus channels and alliances, and vice president of Lotus product marketing. Prior to that he served as senior director of communications product marketing. Ken has also held roles in competitive strategy and channel sales. Prior to Lotus, Ken was an IT architect with the IBM Consulting Group where he designed groupware implementation plans and developed collaborative applications for large enterprises. Ken holds a bachelor's degree in quantitative economics and decision sciences from the University of California at San Diego. Ken will deliver keynote addresses at Collaboration University in London on both July 18 and September 19.
	Ed Brill Business Unit Executive Worldwide Lotus Notes/Domino Sales IBM Software Group Ed Brill is responsible for the continued worldwide success of Lotus Notes and Domino, the market's leading collaborative software products.  Ed works with the IBM sales organization, IBM business partners, and customers to provide insight into the Lotus strategy, product direction, and market successes.  He leverages this in-market experience to provide counsel and direction to the Notes/Domino product and marketing organizations, ensuring constant improvement and responsiveness. During Ed's time in this role, the Lotus Notes/Domino business posted double-digit revenue growth for nine consecutive quarters, and gained hundreds of new customers. Ed will deliver the keynote address at Collaboration University on September 10 in Kansas City.

Posted by Rob Novak At 10:46 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Ed Brill blogged today about the conference ratings from Lotusphere 2007. I'm really proud to say that Viktor Krantz's and my joint session "BP311 -- The Great Code Giveaway -- Web 2.0 edition" was listed at #1 for "quality and relevance of information".

Of course I do understand, as many of you do, that Viktor totally carries the show and a chimp could do my part of the presentation. But we must have had a good topic! Seriously, this year both Viktor and I contributed code. That's right. I coded. Alert the media.

I can't help but be humbled by the company being kept there - this was an amazing Lotusphere and with so many obviously well-thought-out and delivered sessions, this group of 10 that Ed posted represents just the 2.94 to 2.97 ratings, out of 3. That means that each session in the list was not only in the top 10 but also received scores within 1.3% of each other. At this point it's obvious that there is no real distinction between the top 10, they are all don't-miss sessions. And as Ed says, 35 sessions over 2.85 (95%), wow. My friend and colleague Scott Good for instance, 3 out of his 4 sessions! Amazing. And Alan, way to go! People LOVE tips and tricks sessions. Paul, Bill, Henry, Carl, Kat and the other IBMers, wow again.

We here at SNAPPS put a lot of time and effort on our presentation material for the conferences that we speak at, and it's fun and very gratifying to see that people appreciate it. I'm sure each of these speakers feels this way today. If you haven't already downloaded the pdf and the code samples from the session, go to SNAPPS download site and do it today. There are many other code samples there as well.

If you want to attend one of our sessions and see new code (like those Lotus Quickr templates, hint hint!) being developed as I write, head over to Collaboration University and sign up for one of the four events this summer and fall.

Thanks again to everyone who attended our session at Lotusphere 2007, we sure hope to see you again in 2008...

Posted by Rob Novak At 10:10 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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You’ve been working on Domino applications for a long time, and are pretty confident in your methods.  You follow best practices, attend conferences to learn new methods, and are confident that your code is well-structured and efficient.  Now after an acquisition of your company, the boss steps in and compliments your hard work on the Domino extranet / customer service / help desk / whatever application you have brought to life.  It goes something like this:

Boss: “I’m really impressed with the XYZ application. Our customers get a lot of value from it and the new CEO we got after the merger has even said it’s a great piece of work.”

You (swelling with pride): “Well thanks, it’s great to be appreciated!”

Boss: “Just one thing.  Could you make it available in Spanish, Dutch and French?”

You: “Uh oh.”

Having worked on the application for several months, you know that a translation of the HTML, JavaScript, and anything else users might see is a big job.  Picking through code isn’t one of your strong points, so how can you approach this in as orderly a fashion as you did your original application?  Here are a couple tips that will help you on your way. And, whether you are writing Domino code for globalization or not, you may find these techniques useful for other reasons – they make your code more maintainable and easier to read while facilitating language independence.

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:44 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (9)

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Last year, SNAPPS teamed up with three other business partners and IBM to produce a unique type of seminar, and called it Collaboration University.  We focused in on Sametime and QuickPlace, on the heels of the Sametime 7.5 launch from IBM.  On the heels by, like, 30 minutes!  We held the event in both Kansas City and London, diving deeply into the technical aspects of these two products.  Delegates had the opportunity to network and learn in a super-focused environment, working their way from intermediate to advanced materials over 2 1/2 days.  We presented 30+ sessions, introduced what would become Lotus Quickr 8, its templates, and were an official launch site for Sametime.  It was a great success and we thought we might repeat in 2007...even though none of us are conference companies but rather a group of business partners, it seemed to make sense.  The small yet focused event was valuable to everyone involved.

So based on feedback from 2006 CU Alumni, I'm pleased to announce Collaboration University 2007's TWO events, each to be held in both Kansas City and London.  

In July, we're holding Collaboration University for IBM Lotus Quickr, QuickPlace and Sametime.  This event will introduce the release of Lotus Quickr 8.0 and focus once again on Sametime 7.5.  All-new materials are being prepared for developers and administrators of these products.  The Lotus QuickPlace users aren't being deserted - exactly the opposite - don't forget that QuickPlace becomes Lotus Quickr this summer!  Sametime shops have had version 7.5 for six months now, so it's time to address those issues and deployment concerns that are starting to crop up.  This is a great opportunity to do just that: Kansas City: July 9-11, 2007 London: July 18-20, 2007

Then in September, we're adding an all-new technical event.  With the most significant release of Notes and Domino ever, we figured it would be valuable for the technical community to have a deep-dive educational experience so have created Collaboration University for IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.  Here you will learn the details of composite applications, planning for deployment, the new Eclipse UI in the Notes 8 Standard client, new development techniques, and more.  This will be your first opportunity to dive deep into this most significant release. Kansas City: September 10-12, 2007 London: September 19-21, 2007

Each of these four events will provide delegates with an opportunity for significant technical education on the new releases.  They each have more than 30 technical sessions, and provide significant return for delegates through networking with experts, code and examples, and hands-on opportunities.

So we listened to our Alumni several different ways...you asked for locations closer to major attractions, so we moved to the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City and from Heathrow to Central London.  You asked for hands-on training, so we added three post-seminar workshops for each event.  You asked for more coffee....wait, that was me.

I'll be blogging about CU throughout the summer - both in preparation and reporting from the events live as they happen.  For more information on CU, please visit the website launched this morning at http://www.CollaborationUniversity.com.  There are some discounts available, so make sure you check out the dates while you surf the site!

Update 4 PM - we just confirmed the keynote speakers for all four events - I'll blog about it tomorrow when they are all posted...

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:26 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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Just had the pleasure of speaking with Bruce Elgort about rock & roll and oh yeah, we mentioned Quickr templates.  Bruce wanted to know a little more about them than I had posted previously, so we went through all 11 and talked about the defining feature of each.

Always good to talk to ya, Bruce!  Rock on!

Here's a link to the Taking Notes Podcast site, or of course you can use iTunes like I do...

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:06 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Though the guys at SNAPPS would argue that I don't qualify for geek status...

Monday night was awesome, the realization (finally!) of Liz's Christmas present...we went to the Eric Clapton concert in Kansas City at Kemper Arena - about 12,000 in attendance.  Fifth row, just left of center, about 20 feet from the stage.  Robert Cray opened with a magnificent yet under-appreciated set full of simple but elegant guitar work and vocals, and then joined Eric for a magnificent duet later on.  Of course EC played Layla - a very upbeat, pounding version of it, one of the highlights of the evening.  A set of reviews of the KC show can be found here.

Having said that, of course the real highlight of the evening was (turn on the sap-meter) the company I was with...

It's late in the evening; she's wondering what clothes to wear.
She puts on her make-up and brushes her long blonde hair.
And then she asks me, "Do I look all right?"
And I say, "Yes, you look wonderful tonight."

We go to a party and everyone turns to see
This beautiful lady that's walking around with me.
And then she asks me, "Do you feel all right?"
And I say, "Yes, I feel wonderful tonight."

     I feel wonderful because I see
     The love light in your eyes.
     And the wonder of it all
     Is that you just don't realize how much I love you.

It's time to go home now and I've got an aching head,
So I give her the car keys and she helps me to bed.
And then I tell her, as I turn out the light,
I say, "My darling, you were wonderful tonight.
Oh my darling, you were wonderful tonight."

Sadly, back to work...

Posted by Rob Novak At 6:00 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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So this is a really big cheat, a copy & paste exercise from last year.  But since I'm flying 8,000 miles to give a single session I figured I'm due a break...

With that, I'm pleased to say that I'll be speaking at the Irish Lotus User Group meeting!  So to complete the cheat:

I may be wrecked and knackered by the time I get there, but Bill Buchan (this one, definitely not that one) and Paul Mooney (this one, definitely not that one) have been gracious enough to arrange for a bit of time to throw shapes at the Irish Lotus User Group meeting in Dublin May 24-25.  I'm expecting a shower of savages for this one, but nothing a good piss up won't cure by Saturday morning (I adore the Black Stuff)!  That said, I'll be full shilling on Friday when the lights go on.  Bleedin' deadly.

Also doing 90 to the dozen that day are so many more: http://www.ilug2007.org

Should be a craic!

Posted by Rob Novak At 4:54 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (3)

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I had the pleasure last week of recording an 8-minute segment on the upcoming release of Lotus Quickr 8 with Megan Moyer, Marketing Manager of Lotus QuickPlace and Lotus Quickr.  There we announced the templates in my last posting, and gave folks the information on their locations, shipment plans, etc.  Please go check it out on the QuickPlace and Lotus Quickr home pages, or here is a direct ftp link to the podcast.

Also I'm pleased to welcome the one, the only, the big Swede himself, Viktor Krantz to our world of blogging.  Now Viktor loves to play with new (and free) technology, so while his blog is "about" Domino, it's hosted on his little PHP server in his office - in fact the first PC I bought for SNAPPS 10 years ago!  He uses WordPress, but don't hold it against him...it's a great blogging mechanism with lots of cool widgets.

Viktor's first few articles and blog entries combine his family and personal life with highly technical content including a really great article on the use of JSON in Domino.  If you've been following Ajax in the Domino world, you probably know that IBM sort of secretly slipped this into 7.0.2, and it's also in Domino 8 of course.  Viktor's speed tests with JSON and XML are a great resource for web developers looking for ways to improve their Ajax applications' performance.

Welcome Viktor, I look forward to reading more (after you finish those templates!).

Posted by Rob Novak At 4:41 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Well it's time for some big news.

After six months of secret behind-the-scenes contract and specifications work, I'm pleased to announce that when IBM ships Lotus Quickr 8, you'll have the ability to jump-start your company's advanced collaboration with a series of fourteen business-focused templates for immediate productivity.  They won't just be "look and feel" either, these are full-blown applications, each designed to add unique and focused value for Lotus Quickr users.

IBM has contracted with Design Partner SNAPPS to accelerate the development of eleven new templates ("placetypes" in Lotus Quickr terms) that will be available free to licensed Lotus Quickr users.  Each of them has a different purpose, is being designed with modularity in mind, and makes use of the latest in Web 2.0 technologies.  In addition, IBM has acquired the rights to incorporate SNAPPS' open-source templates developed a few months ago for QuickPlace 7 into Lotus Quickr 8.  So out of the box, you will see IBM Lotus Quickr versions of QDoc, QBlog, and QWiki.  The team here and at IBM are hard at work on both the integration and the new templates.  To get the current versions that work with QuickPlace 7, go here.

The eleven new templates will be distributed by both IBM and SNAPPS as open-source and free under the Apache open source license, version 2.0.  They encompass a variety of functions you might want to perform with web-based team collaboration:

• Project Management
• Ideas and Innovation
• Image Repository
• Meeting and Agenda Management
• Activities Integration
• Contact Management
• Dynamic Surveys
• Corporate Communications Management
• Collaborative Presentation Development
• Issues Escalation, Workflow and Management
• J2EE Document Library Integration

SNAPPS has been building high-value applications for QuickPlace since 2000, and is bringing those years of experience to bear on this exciting new project for IBM Lotus Quickr customers.  The templates above will be developed using the latest web development techniques.  We're incorporating the Dojo Toolkit just as IBM is, in line with the giant leap you'll see in the out-of-the-box enhancements in core Lotus Quickr 8.  As well, we've developed a brand new, dynamic workflow engine for Lotus Quickr to support four of the templates.

Personally I am thrilled that our hard work and dedication to the QuickPlace platform has turned into something this great for so many users.  Offering the type of development often associated with a skilled, focused consulting team in an open-source community, simultaneously adding value to the IBM offering, is pretty much a dream scenario - win/win/win I believe it's called!

While we are in development in Q2, I will be posting more information about each of the templates.  How they're being designed, how they will work, and what the use cases are for each one.  Feel free to ask questions here, send me email, or come see me at one of the upcoming conferences for much more detail!

Posted by Rob Novak At 2:52 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (15)

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Before coming home last week, I had the pleasure of taking a tour of some of the oldest windmills in Holland, courtesy of my customer in Rotterdam. I had a wonderful time taking a few photos of some of the nineteen windmills, preserved and functioning. In eighteen of these (one is reserved for visitors), people live inside the windmills and rules govern how much they must let the windmills turn each year. They were built in the 1730s and 1740s, and follow a canal.

If you've clicked on the link above, you've figured out by now what the title of this entry means - yes, another fun open-source JavaScript trick that I've incorporated into Blogsphere. It's the Lightbox JS toolkit, available here. Dependent on Prototype and Scriptaculous like many effects-based scripts, Lightbox gives you the ability to really show off images by dimming the remainder of the screen, not navigating away from the page, and with a little thought and work, presenting a set of images that are navigable inside the show. Go ahead, click the link again and scroll over the image - you will see a "Next" icon appear that lets you scroll through the four photos I've uploaded.

In a future posting I'll show you how to do this in plain old Domino. There are a few tricks, especially if you've changed the server setup to generate "!" instead of "?" in Domino URLs like I have. Why? That's another story...

Posted by Rob Novak At 6:00 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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I've been with a client in Rotterdam for almost two weeks (and a few days left before an overnight in London then home Thursday or Friday).  The fact that I'm gone for two weeks is unique when it doesn't involve a conference.  You could say I'm "taking one for the team", as I travelled against my surgeon's recommendation for a long trip, got help with bags everywhere, and am sitting in an office chair 12-15 hours a day including the weekend.  It's an implementation and upgrade assignment in clustered environments, of course right over the US DST weekend, so even if I didn't need them the pain drugs do help.

I've managed to maintain rapid contact via my BlackBerry 8700 and BES back at the office, with a few nice enhancements.  My recent find after trying the no-cost route was to purchase Shark Modem for $44.97 USD, turning the BB into a fairly low-speed but serviceable modem for my laptop at the remote office.  I'm running replication perhaps somewhere near a 56k speed, and due to buffers either in BB or the software it fails to bring over large attachments.

However, I have managed to get it running with Notes so I can replicate most mail, post this blog entry, etc.  I've configured IE and Firefox, and tried a few others with limited success.  Sametime won't connect, and Skype is a lost cause due to the hub/superhub issue.  As the BlackBerry OS supports only 5 concurrent connections, as soon as you connect to Skype other people take up all your connections!  Turkeys.

So hey, I'm running the public Notes 8 Beta 2.  Stability and some UI cues seem to have been improved between the Extended Beta 1 version and this one.  I'm only a few hours into it, but it seems more stable and does what I want it to with less complaining.  The Home screen, which was OK before, seems to have a nasty graphic issue, but the Getting Started screen is nicer than before.  It's not quite there supporting my double-right click habit.  The names of the IBM Productivity Tools have changed to Lotus Documents, Lotus Presentations, and Lotus Spreadsheets, dropping the name "Editor" from the end.  That's OK, I kinda knew I'd be able to edit things with them.  I had the opportunity to create a Document with the prior beta...enjoyed the native PDF creation but experienced a weird bug in tables.  Have to see if that's still there and report it if so.

In coming days I'm going to certainly have news (big news) about Quickr 8.0, CU, and a few other current events.  Stay with me, I'll try to blog a bit more.

Posted by Rob Novak At 5:26 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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So soon after surgery?  Yes mom, dear, sister, and everyone else who has asked.  I'll be careful.  After all, I'm supposed to have a 5 lb lifting limit (How do they come up with those?  Increase it until someone breaks something?).  I don't think I will be 100% compliant as nobody's there to help at the luggage conveyor.  Once it's off though it has wheels...

I'm off today for London on a site visit in preparation for Collaboration University 2007...no, this isn't an official announcement or anything, but suffice it to say that I'll be visiting four hotels on Wednesday and it's not just for the British....hotel....food.  Having said that, we had an awesome sold-out conference last September, but one piece of feedback was that folks would like to be closer to central London.  It's a trade-off, cost and convenience to Heathrow on the one side and "something to do" on the other.  So I'm looking closer to town this time.

Then it's off to Rotterdam to work with a client for two weeks.  It's not a typical thing for me or SNAPPS to go onsite for more than a few days, so this should be interesting...it certainly was interesting trying to put 18 days worth of clothing into 44 lbs (thanks KLM).  In case you've not been to Rotterdam, it's a vivid cultural, shopping and cuisine experience.  The Dutch are friendly and personable outside the office and straightforward, determined and persistent at work.  I've found the combination both challenging at times and refreshing compared to some of the more "political" organizations you can encounter in the US.  And no, if you're my client, I don't mean you.

A personal mission this time (it's my third visit to Rotterdam, sixth or seventh to The Netherlands) is to get my own chip card, "chipknip". This debit-like card is used all over the country for payment for things like car parking, meters, and is the only method of payment available in the corporate cafeteria of my client.  Two visits now I've mooched because I don't have one, and the guilt is racking up.  So do any Dutch folks know where I can get one of these in Rotterdam and fill it up???

Posted by Rob Novak At 12:49 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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So I've done a bit of blogging (through the haze of painkillers), done perhaps five calls with IBM sales folks and customers who wanted to know more, and of course the Taking Notes Podcast with Bruce and Julian.  Don't worry, there's more to come and I'm putting out a newsletter soon as well.

But I am curious - how will your company use Quickr, knowing what you know about it now?  Check out the poll to the right, availabel fro a couple weeks.  If you have any other questions just ask here!

Next up, I'll blog about the connectors.  They are incredibly cool...when used properly...and do have some ramifications for your network and "email culture" to consider.

In the meantime, you might want to see the kind of press Quickr is getting.  I particularly like this one...eh.

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:35 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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Neil asks in an earlier comment about the future of Domino.Doc.  The answer is, of course, subject to all IBM's "futures" disclaimers.

Quickr is one of five "pillars" under the Lotus Software banner - Domino, Sametime, Connections, Quickr and WebSphere Portal.  This much was made clear at Lotusphere.  The idea was to simplify the product lines.  Oh - and if you're wondering about fringe products like LEI and Workplace, just count them under Domino.

Quickr is the pillar that addresses team collaboration and document management, so the natural assumption is that Domino.Doc is part of Quickr, right?   Right.  Just not yet.  Domino.Doc (and yes I do know the full name) won't be subsumed into Quickr until 9.0.  There just wasn't enough time for engineering to do it for 8.0.  The NSF side of Quickr is already approaching a managed beta of some kind, and the various parts that comprise the J2EE side are still being Steve-Austin-ed.

Will Domino.Doc be a back end repository (also asked by Neil)?  Not sure.  IBM's repository story named IBM JCR, Domino, FileNet, Sharepoint and "Other".  But FileNet, DB2 CM, and Sharepoint are all listed as futures, leaving Domino and JCR, otherwise known as NSF (today's QuickPlace repository) and WAS's content repository, where docs live now from PDM or Workplace Documents.  The Domino repository doesn't specifically name Domino.Doc as a component...but the brand integration does lump it in with Quickr 9.

Posted by Rob Novak At 12:31 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (5)

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Just noticed during recovery that iTunes is downloading the Taking Notes Podcast podcast I did with Bruce and Julian on Tuesday night.  Hope I didn't sound too drugged up...but the good news is that I probably told the truth about everything!

Please enjoy and let me know if you have any questions about what I said....comment here and I'll try to reply in a somewhat timely fashion...

Posted by Rob Novak At 7:26 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Yeah - funny guy, or at least I will be after about 2 PM tomorrow when the new drugs kick in.  Some of you know I've been crawling around with a herniated disc since October, and having been through three injections am finally having the proper fix put in.  The bit poking the nerve there in the picture is going to be removed and the rest smoothed out at about noon tomorrow.

Liz and I will be having a nice romantic Valentine's Day dinner at the hospital as I have to spend the night. On the bright side, flowers will probably be close by.

Who knows the effect on blogging.  I'll be on bedrest through the weekend, then on work-from-home-because-there's-a-couch-nearby doctor's orders for another 10 days or so. I could go crazy blogging, or I may neglect it altogether. Either way, please note that like all my postings since November 2, they will be done under the influence of pain killers.

So see you again sometime soon...I'll be the one standing straight up.

Posted by Rob Novak At 6:00 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (8)

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As the official IBM Design partner for Lotus QuickPlace and Quickr, I wanted to take a few moments to give you some information about what I believe is one of the most significant market moves made by IBM in quite some time.  This post will be updated on a regular basis, and I will also give it a dedicated page as soon as it scrolls.  

So feel free to comment and ask questions here - I'll update the post with answers.

What is Lotus Quickr?
Lotus Quickr, announced at Lotusphere 2007, is an evolution of Lotus QuickPlace (which for the uninitiated is a web-based team collaboration product), expanded to include options for a new platform, and enhanced with connectors to end user tools and products like Windows Explorer, Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes and Sametime Connect.  In addition, under the Quickr banner is a completely new set of capabilities that deliver robust document management on a standards-based platform.  So in a nutshell, it's team collaboration and document management.  One brand name, several ways to deploy, but one license instead of five or six to achieve the same capabilities.

What's happening to QuickPlace?  Is it dead?
No!  And if anyone says this to you, send them my way for a good kicking.  What used to be called QuickPlace 8.0 is alive and well and part of Quickr 8.0. That's why it's starting its brand life with "8.0".  Get it?  It's just more than what IBM promised in 2006.  Plus, for the QuickPlace customer on maintenance, you get to upgrade to Quickr 8.0 and get not only the NSF-based QuickPlace capabilities you know and love, you get the connectors, an option to deploy team spaces on J2EE, and robust document management reminiscent of Portal Document Management or Workplace Documents - if you want to.  You're entitled, not forced.

OK so part of Quickr is QuickPlace.  What's better about it?
You can visit this post to see all of the features that were intended for QuickPlace 8.0 and simply translate them to Quickr 8.0 - the NSF version.  Quickr's NSF implementation of what used to be QuickPlace still is as customizable, has drastically enhanced the user experience, is accessible to external programs with a Web Services interface, and drastically enhanced handling of documents.  Save a file to a Quickr library from Word or Explorer?  Easy.  Check it out, approve it, revise it?  Easy.  You can then go even further and add robust document management capabilities with Quickr's Portal-based document management options, if you need them.  One more thing - you do NOT need to upgrade Domino to 8.0 in order to run Quickr 8.0!  You can deploy it on Domino 7.0.2, so you don't have to upgrade your infrastructure if you're not ready.  Another good reason not to hesitate.

I have QuickPlace but no J2EE or Portal Skills.  What should I do?
Upgrade to Quickr 8.0 as soon as possible when it's released - it is a user-focused release with almost 10 years of engineering behind it.  Do not be afraid of "dot-zero" this time, they could have just as easily called it 7.9.  Upgrade, then deploy the Quickr Connectors (which, in the product as of now, are called "Desktop Plugins") to give users maximum flexibility in how they access and contribute content.  The connectors, combined with Quickr 8.0's enhanced management of documents, really moves it out of QuickPlace's "document management light" into a more mature set of capabilities, on par with and competitive with Sharepoint.  But Quickr trumps Sharepoint easily with the addition of email and IM connectors, something Microsoft hasn't even envisioned let alone engineered.

I have WebSphere Portal and never once deployed QuickPlace.  What should I do?
You can use Quickr's J2EE option to deploy team spaces with near parity of functionality as the NSF version out of the box.  As well, you can easily deploy the J2EE-based document management options, giving you both capabilities with minimal hardware investment.  If you really want a customized experience, or want to enable a business process with external or disconnected participation, have a look at Quickr's NSF deployment.  It's not too hard to manage and is quite scalable.

I see some duplication here. NSF and J2EE options for the same thing?
While combining what used to be QuickPlace, Team Spaces from WSE and WCS, Portal Document Management and Workplace Documents, it's inevitable that some features would become available on both platforms.  Fortunately, what IBM has done here is to give us choices without pegging us into one platform or the other.  And in some instances, you'll end up using both.  Say you have an extranet and an intranet.  On the extranet, you need maximum flexibility, more UI customization, and user-managed membership.  Great, deploy Quickr 8.0's NSF-based (formerly QuickPlace) offering.  Then perhaps you have departmental task forces for a specific goal, fairly uniform, with similar needs (such as a Six Sigma initiative)?  You can easily deploy Quickr 8.0/s J2EE-based Team Spaces to meet this need.  The key is that you have options and already have the licenses to do it.

What about Domino Document Manager (Domino.Doc)?
While it's in IBM's plans to integrate the final piece of the "team collaboration and document management" puzzle into Quickr in the future, there just wasn't enough time to do the engineering work for Quickr 8.0.  But don't worry, it's been publicly stated that they'll merge in the future.  Hang onto it, and wait a while for IBM.  They have proven that they can do quite a bit of engineering work in a short period - and it will benefit users to hang in there.

Why the Name Change?
It's really a melding of what used to be five or six products into one entitlement and license.  So, calling it QuickPlace would have been confusing.  Besides, dropping vowels is cool these days.  Using "Quick" in the name was important to preserve some of the heritage of the original name - it's an easy mental leap from one to the other.

Jeez that's a lot. What else is coming?
OK so while (insert IBM disclaimer here) a lot is still on the drawing board, you can expect the future to (insert second IBM disclaimer here) include new connectors, integration with Lotus Connections, Forms, more lifecycle management, a rich client experience with lotus Expeditor, and back-end integration with other content stores like FileNet, DB2 Content Manager, and even...maybe...Sharepoint.  Although, if you have it...oh never mind.

Last but not least, we (SNAPPS) will have some interesting news and developments around Quickr as it comes closer to shipping.  Keep coming back, or subscribe to my newsletter!

Posted by Rob Novak At 4:47 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (21)

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But so little time.  Upon my return from Florida last Wednesday (a post-LS respite in Naples is an annual affair, visiting parents and grandparents) I arrived to an escalating family situation.  Mom had fallen on the ice on Monday, was checked out and cleared on Tuesday, but got worse Wednesday and I ended up taking her to the hospital very ill on Thursday morning, where she stayed until last night.  The bump on the head was really a concussion, and a paralyzed nerve has caused double vision.  She's feeling better but it'll be weeks until the vision clears itself up.

So all my wonderful plans to react publicly to the Lotusphere announcements and make one or two of my own have been on hold.  I'm working on an IBM Lotus Quickr FAQ for those of you who want more info on what's going on there...and a quick piece on Lotus Connections and how it will change the way some companies work.

I'll also be posting some photos using a gallery viewer featured in our once-again packed "Great Code Giveaway" session (1500+!!!)...and to the people who weren't there, you'll be able to download it anyway.

So back to work today, and back to blogging tonight.  See you again real soon.

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:48 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (3)

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As you all know, next week is Lotusphere. You may have attended in years past, or this year may be your first. Whether you're a Lotusphere veteran or newbie, you can use this guide to help you get to know some of the friendly faces you're likely to meet this year. Coincidentally, they are the same friendly faces you're likely to meet at any other software or technology conference. They are the 12 universal icons of the conference phenomenon.

The Corporate Line Puller Marketing Session Guy - He's young, handsome, smart and articulate, and the only subject he knows is his product. Everything reminds him of it. The thought of his product delights and invigorates him. He hasn't heard about any of your references to bugs or complaints about his product, but he'll take them under advisement and mention a few great new features in the current release. Often a speaker and marketing-oriented session presenter (secretly when talking to IBMers he calls his session a "pitch"), he is the darling of the corporate overlords. Since he knows the product better than they do, they, and the conference as a whole, are heavily dependent upon him. Secretly you get to make fun of him because he still calls Lotus products by their names from 2005, which as we know means he's two names behind. Poor guy.		The Let's-Talk-Business Guy - This is the guy who will follow you around most of the week, convinced that there's some synergy between your company and his - you know, his "123 Maple Lane, Suite 200" company. He'll sit next to you when he can find you in sessions, and constantly whisper how "that's something we can really use!" in his proposed collaboration. He'll set up meetings with people you don't care about, but promise that they have budgets and power, calling on some long-distant past project where the guy had saved the world. At Kimonos, he'll seek you out and butt into your conversation with an IBM exec so he can help you. He'll wave you over when he's on a cell phone to see if you call to talk with his prospects. He'll introduce you as his partner. You'll want to kill him sometime by the middle of the third day. Beware of his requests to borrow money. At Kimonos, just pay the bill. If you sit with him long enough, you deserve it.
The Drunk Conventioneer - This guy may or may not be left over from the conference that was here the previous week. Most of his friends are people he sees once a year at Lotusphere. He has been known to upgrade his room to a suite and tend bar the entire week. Most of the stories told in later years will be connected with him somehow, including the one about the former Lotus employee now headlining in Vegas. He is a central figure in any incidents that involve hotel security, police, or angry residents from the vacation suites. Like the jock who peaked in high school, the Drunk Conventioneer peaks once a year at the end of January.		The Hot Sales Girl - This poor woman is plagued 24 hours a day by guys with "sales questions" or "issues they want to raise" or - anything. Can she make an onsite sales call next week? Wrong territory? Well, I'll be in your town next month - maybe we could get together. For the Hot Sales Girl, the week of the conference would be a good time to schedule that root canal, or maternity leave, or anything that could get her out of it. Recognize her by the V formation of developers following her around. Just developers. Admins know they don't have a chance.
The Opening General Session Energetic Guy - He's the best thing that - you think - has happened to Lotus since R3, yet he came out of nowhere like the guy who flew down from the Swan in 1996. His degree of excitement hasn't been seen this side of a 1993 Hanson concert, yet you can't quite reconcile his "kicking ass more sexy-ness-ness" speech with the fact that the last guy in that job disappeared without a trace. You're pretty sure he is an actor and is trying to make you forget the demo that crashed with his tuarine-induced, yet infectious, energy level. Beware running into this guy at Kimonos unless you really like to sing. Ladies, he's taken. Or gay.		The Live-Blogging Podcasting Press-Wannabe Guy - At first you are flattered by the request for 3 minutes with - YOU! Then you realize that this guy is podcasting 84 times during Lotusphere, has set up a professional studio, and is personally skipping all but the opening and closing sessions, which he will shorthand up to his blog site in unintelligible prose for the less fortunate to read. His goal in life is to wear out your RSS reader and take up as much room as possible on your iPod, crowding out that last episode of Heroes or Battlestar Galactica you really wanted to see. This guy was definitely a middle child.
The Nerdy Foreign Product Guy - He's quiet, friendly, unassuming, and doesn't know anybody else in the country so he needs you to be his friend. He engages you in long conversations in broken English, and you're never quite sure what the subject is, or what he wants from you. It's not quite clear what country he's from. He's got some products that you may be interested in (how did he get away from the booth so long???), but none of the documentation is in English yet. At night at Kimonos, Nerdy Foreign Guy can always be found at one of the tables with others of his ilk - usually separated from everyone else by an empty table or two. You wonder if his rendition of Rhinestone Cowboy during karaoke might actually kill someone.		The Famous Geek - Tickets for his rockstar sessions are scalped outside the Swan at high prices. The Famous Geek is a major draw, both among fellow geeks who worship him, and among regular attendees who have heard his name so often that they have to see what all the fuss is about. Generally his pants don't fit very well, and he has a disdain for shaving, but he's always entertaining. He's often hard to find at the conference when he's not on stage; no doubt hiding from all the autograph hounds.
The Serious Microsoft Bigot IT Guy - He wants nothing to do with your toy Macintosh or Linux machine, and collaboration is for wussies. He's a Microsoft certified engineer all the way, and he'll stand for no tomfoolery. The only reason he's here is that his management made him come. If you're experiencing any kind of a problem or you have a question, it's your fault for not following strict Microsoft security guidelines, and published Best Practices. Since nobody actually does all of those things, nothing is ever his fault. Despite his permanent Get Out of Jail Free card, the Serious Microsoft Bigot IT Guy never seems to be very happy. Maybe it's because he secretly yearns to be like Drunk Conventioneer Guy.		The Grand Old Dame of Collaboration - For years she has been a fixture in the community. Everyone has read her books and articles, sat in her sessions, or secretly blessed her at some point over the past decade. You'd think she'd have made a ton of money over the years, but still she's never gotten around to getting a half decent outside life. Or hiring a decorator for her office. Or getting herself fixed up at the salon, or buying new clothes. Probably what you see is just a front: when out of her customers' eyes, she drives a BMW and lives in a classy neighborhood where she's quite the playgirl.
The Educational / Government / Non-Profit Attendee - At first she is heavily courted by all the developers and consultants, at least until they hear the words "educational", "government", or "non-profit". At that point they scurry away like roaches when the light comes on. The showroom salespeople love her, however, since she always buys about ten thousand volume licenses. She received her Lotusphere registration through a lengthy three year process that involved numerous purchase orders, vouchers, budget reviews, administrative approvals, and check requests.		The Hot Hotel Employee - Though technically not a conference attendee, the Hot Hotel Employee always manages to have a dramatic and lasting effect, and stories are told for many moons to come. You can overhear guys talking about what days she works and what her hours are. She gets to listen to the same tongue-in-cheek pickup lines from the same dorks night after night. She doesn't mind this one bit. When you count up her tip income for the week, she's made more money than anyone else at the entire conference. Including me.

--by Rob Novak, with thanks to my friend in the obviously more creative Apple industry, Brian Dunning

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:16 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (23)

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Some strange things start to happen when you've been going - as a Business Partner, speaker, attendee - for as many years as I have (12).  First off, you receive BCC invitations from IBMers to come to somewhat-remotely-interesting-roundtable-with-lunch things.  Ostensibly, I am being courted for my intellect and genuine feedback on a product direction, UI, or something of the sort with the recompense of a slightly-better-than-the-tent plate of food.  Or a muffin, which happened one Lotusphere a few years back.  Invitations start to appear left and right once you're on a few lists.  I'm holding out on some other plans for the coveted "iris" reception invitation, always a good time.

Next among the strange things is the level of activity coming out of your sometimes remote contacts at IBM.  All of a sudden you are a rock star (oh yeah...) if you can do just this one thing in your session, or help by blogging about this or that, or "are you live blogging..."?  Depends on the connections, I say.  They have to be quicker than before.  It was "dead blogging" last time I tried.

Customers who have left you alone since last May have just come back refreshed from the holidays, and in their New Years' Resolution of cleaning their rolodex have come across your name.  Cool!  Not.  I got an email from one such customer whose IT department never followed through on our instructions and now it's critical that they implement...so can we have a couple conference calls THIS WEEK PLEASE???  Grrrrrrrrrrrr.

A giant weight is lifted from my back when the third and final presentation is uploaded.  It has the appearance of being done.  It has a start, some content, and a finish.  It ends.  It has fun new disclaimers so nobody will steal it and use it with their customers, passing it (and our code examples) off as being their own.  Wow, did I say that out loud?  That would never happen (cough, 2002, cough).  Is it final?  Doubt it.  I'll think of something extremely cool and valuable an hour before the session and put it in.  Viktor will look at me funny when he sees the new slide, and realizes he has to code a demo before I switch the screen over to him.

Speaking of giant weights and backs, this year I'll be hobbling a little more slowly from session to session.  No more mad dashes from Dolphin N Hem IV to Swam 10 in 15 minutes (thanks for that last year Chris Reckling!).  Yeah, bad disc is poking out into my spinal cord and causing my leg to be in constant pain.  Three shots in the spine so far and now a post-Lotusphere appointment with my old buddy the neurosurgeon.  Hopped up on codeine and, well, better codeine pretty much constantly, so we'll just have to see how funny my session shtick is with Viktor.

A few days prior to Lotusphere, I take a break from all things work for a few hours at least.  It was my lovely wife's 40th birthday yesterday, the 17th.  Her parents just didn't plan that very well.  We have a very nice dinner at Piropos.  Go home.  Watch Top Chef.  Don't look at BlackBerry for a few hours.  Then look.  Damn.  OK midnight.  Sadly, birthday is over.

The day before leaving - today - there is always one more demo, one more slide.  Two more conference calls.  One more super-cool toolkit I'd like to include.  Oh well, I have some time on Saturday...no wait, I won't.  Penumbra meeting, annual dinner at Fulton's for 75 of my closest friends and enemies.  People I hope remember me, and I hope I can remember while on the pain killers.

Sunday - two sessions, one is my favorite nontechnical session of the year where I get to teach BPs how to sell, how to deal with CEOs, and how to write proposals that don't stink.  I have a lot of fun with that one.  Another session in a supporting role, either showing off or filling time.  We'll see.

Monday - OGS.  Opening General Session.  We learn new words, see new stuff, and a surprise or two.  Viktor and Troy's QuickPlace session, with some cool news and an announcement.

Tuesday - The Great Code Giveaway.  Be there.  Repeats Thursday if you aren't.  I will hunt you down if you don't go.

That's as far as I can think ahead.  Back to work.  There's a cool toolkit I can squeeze in if I skip lunch...

Posted by Rob Novak At 6:00 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Posted by Rob Novak At 6:00 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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This recent post by Craig on the developerWorks Lotus team blog almost brought me to tears (big baby, suck it up!).  I came to the rapid realization that SNAPPS too is going to turn 10 this year.  That and, I vividly remember the site shown on that blog entry, and how I downloaded the Domino 1.1 server task plug-in on June 4, 1996 about a minute after it was posted.  But I digress.  So, I decided to dig a bit and see what SNAPPS looked like back then.  I was able to find a few pages from 1998, which were mostly pasty-white backgrounds focused on building websites, having an Amazon.com bookstore, and this memorable tagline:

"If your website doesn't say SNAPPS, well, we didn't build it..."

So much for dry humor.  I don't recall busting past a half million in revenues that year.  A little more digging and I found this image, which was captured in November 2000.  I remember it well, as it was the first design created by Viktor, and the basic concepts of the underlying Domino-driven model are still part of our site today.  Thank goodness, the content has changed (though I like the bit about QuickPlace webcasts...).  We kept this design for a while.  Partly because we got busy, partly because it was modern for 2000, and partly because I thought the girl in the white sweater was hot.



You can find your own site or fun ones like this gem that I remember well -- Lotus.com, December 20, 1996 -- in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.  And, in addition to the main sites, most of the links on each page are archived too!  Have fun wasting amazing amounts of time!

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:23 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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I've always wanted to say that.  OK not really, but the reference ("snaps!" - from Legally Blonde) certainly applies here.  You might have noticed that every now and then, I integrate a new feature into the BlogSphere template, usually to try out an Ajax library -- such as with my Lotusphere session posting -- or make it more visually appealing.  Well snap.com has given me a new toy called Snap Preview Anywhere and I have to say it's worth the price (free) and encourage all of my blogging colleagues to use it.  It's a great tooltip enhancement that presents an unobtrusive image of the target site.  Just roll over some of my blogroll entries, or a link on this or any posting, and you'll see.

It's smart, too.  Smart enough to determine whether a link should have a tooltip, cache images it has retrieved, and in case it hasn't retrieved the image yet, it will do so inline while you hover.



The tooltip code is implemented as a call to an external (snap.com's site) JavaScript file, with parameters passed.  You have to provide a host name and your email address in order to get the code, but it's immediate.  You can optionally include a search bar at the bottom of the tooltip.  Once an image is retrieved, or if it's already cached by snap.com's servers, it gives the visitor an idea of where they're off to.



Implementing the script tag is easy, it just needs to be in the head tag - or at least high up in the body tag where it is here.  In my case, using BlogSphere, I just added it to the center block HTML.  Go ahead and view source on my site, you'll see it near the top:

<script defer="defer" id="snap_preview_anywhere" type="text/javascript"
src="http://spa.snap.com/snap_preview_anywhere.js?ap=1&amp;
key=779d72df9d4ec849b5737edddaf27674&amp;sb=0&amp;
domain=www.lotusrockstar.com"></script>

Bloggers, go get it yourself. It took 2 minutes and has added a great new feature to my site.  Oh, the fun I get to have when we're prepping for Lotusphere!!!

Posted by Rob Novak At 10:06 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (6)

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So before things got all crazy around here with QWiki, QBlog, QDoc, and all other things Q, we (which is my two-letter word for "Viktor Krantz, inspired by me promising something cool to people") created a custom theme for QuickPlace.  Not just any custom theme, gawd we've done hundreds, but a nice one that exactly matches the Lotus Sametime 7.5 meeting center in look and feel.

It takes the custom theme one step further, however, something that developers will enjoy.  There are absolutely no tables in this theme - everything is positioned with CSS, as recommended by the W3C.  And, while I don't have a timer on it, the theme seems to be pretty snappy.  Pun intended.

Here's a screenshot of the theme.  You can download it yourself here.  Just unzip, upload the stylesheet.css, Page Layout.html, and thumbnail.gif files to a new theme (you can create an Edit layout if you want, we didn't mess with it).  Switch to it and you have a spitting image of Sametime's meeting center layout.  Clean, a pretty web 2.0 blue, and fast.  If you happen to integrate with Sametime for meeting generation, or even if you don't, it's a nice experience.

Happy New Year....!

Posted by Rob Novak At 4:10 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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I'm cleaning house here at the end of the year...my annual removal of software that really doesn't need to be on my machine.  I've written six certification exams and delivered 50 conference sessions this year on various (mostly niche) technologies, so certainly don't need everything that is installed here.  In fact, I typically gain 20-30% of my disk back this time of year.  So the first 30 minutes after a failed uninstall (meaning the installer wouldn't launch) of the WebSphere Portal 5.1 UTE was looking at this...



Then finally, Windows telling me that the darn thing at about 3 GB was too big for the Recycle bin and letting me delete it in 20 more minutes.

Next was RAD7, which was a monster 6 GB on disk, but it uninstalled smoothly with the new IBM Installation Manager.

Not so with Workplace Forms 2.6.1 Webform Server, which uses Installshield and gets you to this screen:

Then follows immediately with:

..over and over and over.  Of course, after a moment this started to make sense.  I shouldn't have removed the Portal server before trying to remove the Webform Server.  One was installed on the other.  Doh!  Oh well, another manual uninstall and registry cleanup.  By the way, when you install software using Installshield (Java thing version) and it asks you for the language (English), doesn't it make sense that it could maybe skip that question when you uninstall it?  I think they took lessons from the ATM people.  You know, just in case I -- a bank customer for 15 years -- decide I'd rather bank in Spanish from now on.

WebSphere Portlet Factory went away quickly, of course it was only 70 MB or so and used the Zero G installer (is that three installers used by three related IBM technologies?  Yes! It is! Vive la diversity!)

OK so next is Workplace Managed Client (as reported in the add/remove programs, but it's really Workplace Designer 2.6).  This one uninstalled clean, but was also the only one that wanted me to restart my computer.  Why would UNINSTALLING software, especially platform-independent Eclipse-based software, need me to restart my operating system?

OK so now it's time to go look for the Webform Server directories to nuke them, and what do I find in the Program Files\IBM directory but a Rational subdirectory.  Not 7, but 6. But it was gone when I upgraded - gone from the Add/Remove Porgrams list anyway...not so!  3.16 GB of disk being used stealthily by inactive, unusable software.  Nuke.

Posted by Rob Novak At 5:19 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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As we approach Lotusphere 2007, we at SNAPPS are putting our typical few hundred hours into creating demos and writing content - the difference being that this time, it's for two technical sessions and not six or seven!  The biggest session I have is with Viktor, "The Great Code Giveaway - Web 2.0 Edition".  In this session, we are going to show developers how Domino can be the perfect container, development environment, data source and more for advanced Web 2.0 applications and sites -- and the catch -- integrating only with free toolkits and libraries.  You see, I strongly believe that Domino developers have way more available to them today than ever before, and that we routinely sell ourselves, our applications and our users short by ignoring the open source JavaScript phenomenon.  The result is the same, semi-boring methodologies and random jump-thru-fire-hoops to do things that take a few lines of code from a nice open source library.

Well if that's not flamebait I don't know what is.  However, I have a challenge.  We have chosen several toolkits and libraries for integration - Prototype, Dojo, Rico, Backbase, an image one and maybe a few others.  But our quest is not over.  I'd like to add one that YOU would like to see, and integrate it with Domino (and maybe if it's compelling, Sametime or QuickPlace, but most likely Domino).  So through this blog posting and a newsletter I'll send out next week, I'm soliciting ideas and challenges from the community.

What open source, free technology would you like to see integrated with Domino?  I'll pick one, develop it into a pluggable example, and show you how to do it in Orlando!

Posted by Rob Novak At 10:17 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (3)

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Yet another awesome episode of the Taking Notes podcast - interviews galore, including one with yours truly and Viktor Krantz about the release of QWiki and QBlog.  Go have a listen!

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:00 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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Just heard the great news that my friend and colleague Carl Tyler's company, Instant Technologies, has won a 2007 Lotus Award.  You may recall meeting Carl at Lotusphere, Collaboration University, or another event...he and Peyton McManus have built a great company focused on Sametime.  Well deserved for their hard work and great products.

Congratulations Carl...and enjoy your vacation!

Also congrats to all the other winners and finalists...

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:20 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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I'm pleased to announce that the free QWiki and QBlog templates are now available for download at http://www.snapps.com/qptools.

Much thanks to everyone who helped with ideas and input at conferences and meetings over the past few months.  QWiki and QBlog (along with their QDoc counterpart shipped last month) are super-advanced customizations of QuickPlace that stretch the idea of how the security and architecture of QuickPlace can be merged with Ajax, "Web 2.0", and open source models for social computing.  The "Q's" as we're calling the collection, extend the Dojo 0.4.1 toolkit.  Some of the more advanced features include 9 new Dojo widgets, automatic propogation of design elements via DXL, zero-refresh Ajax comment posting, and a complete replacement of the QuickPlace rich text editor.

Support for QDoc, QWiki and QBlog are available (unofficially - it's free) at http://www.snapps.com/qforum.  QDoc was updated earlier today to version 0.7.1.

You can find out more about the templates at Lotusphere, where their architecture and code will be reviewed at a couple of sessions.  Also if you're interested, check out the Taking Notes Podcast episode 39 - to be posted later today - where Viktor and I were interviewed by Bruce Elgort.

I will be posting more information about all the Q's -- but feel free to ask questions here or at the support forum.

Posted by Rob Novak At 12:04 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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Some people will do anything to avoid deadlines, but this one takes the prize.

Congratulations to Viktor and Beth Krantz who on Friday evening welcomed Erik David Krantz (8lb 8oz, 20.4", 8:16 PM, 4 weeks early!) to the world.  Mom, dad and baby Erik are all healthy and happy, and even though Erik came early for Christmas he was quite ready to be with us!  While the Krantzs will - understandably - miss our company holiday party today, our thoughts and best wishes are with them as they enjoy their new family.  We'll save some for them!

Dedication
I was gone yesterday morning at my son's annual checkup.  While I was away, Viktor got the call that Beth was ready to go, so he left to take her to the hospital. Once there, the decision was made to have the baby, but she needed 4-5 hours of medication before inducing.  So Viktor, never wanting to miss a ship date, came BACK TO THE OFFICE for two hours and finished up a new - the last - feature for QBlog.  Beth was resting comfortably at the time, and didn't mind at all.  We all thought he was crazy, but at the same time really didn't want to tackle his code ourselves next week.  We'd just muck it up.  So he finished it, and we are left with a completed project that just needs deployment packaging and some instructions written.

Oh yeah...and when Viktor knew that the baby was coming, he was relieved.  Why?  Because the original due date was too close to Lotusphere.

The Dirty Dozen
Viktor and Beth's new bundle of joy brings the SNAPPS kid count to 12 - most of them born since the current five employees have worked together.  Something in the water???  Who knows.  So for anyone keeping count, here is the breakdown.  Viktor has moved into a solid second place.

Troy
Viktor
Jerald
Melissa
Rob

So once again, congratulations to Viktor and Beth!  Feel free to drop him a line, I'm sure he would enjoy it.

Posted by Rob Novak At 9:38 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (4)

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Viktor and Troy set aside a full workload for the day to finish QBlog and QWiki.  Last minute?  Nah...we have way more than 30 hours left.  Added this week were RSS feeds, archives, calendar links, anonymous posting, and automated view deployment with DXL.  The final wrap on the placebots will happen in the morning, then a little readme.




With a few hundred downloads of the quietly launched QDoc and all the pre-release questions (even conference calls - conference calls about free software!), I'm expecting next week to be pretty busy.  I'll post again here when the downloads are ready tomorrow...late in the day...Hawaii time...

Posted by Rob Novak At 6:16 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Waiting for Godot...or RAD6 to uninstall, over an hour now.  Can't wait until I start the RAD7 install.  Fun times.

Posted by Rob Novak At 6:00 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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You might consider UPS ground or USPS mail, however:

Posted by Rob Novak At 1:25 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

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We'd been pondering this for a couple weeks, when during a call with Carl Tyler yesterday I was reminded that yes indeed, there is an open source Domino bulletin board application called domBulletin available on OpenNTF!  I had downloaded it once before but didn't have a reason to use it then.  Now I do, and I have to say it is quite impressive.  Excellent job Michael Bourak!  

So I'm using domBulletin to provide a community resource for support of QDoc, QWiki and QBlog, and probably a few other things as well.  And because I think the key must be stuck on my keyboard these days, I am calling it QForum.  Between domBulletin and an internal support database for tracking bugs that Carl so graciously helped out with, we can easily support the hundreds of downloads we're getting for the free placetypes, themes, etc.  I might even use it to support our free Lotusphere downloads this year.

It has an RSS feed, anonymous post capabilities, and awesome web-based (and Notes client for us) administration and moderation.  I'll be messing with the features a little to tweak it, but overall it seems as if it will suit my needs just fine.

Posted by Rob Novak At 1:06 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

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As I returned from Austria last night (20 hours door to door) to a pile of snow in my driveway, I found myself longing for gluhwein and sleep (a causal relationship if there ever was one) as it was 4 AM in Vienna.  But pushing through to after midnight has put me back on track, something my son will appreciate at his rescheduled band concert tonight.

There is much to catch up on -- another certification exam to write, Lotusphere 2007 preparation, a few projects for customers, and getting the new QuickPlace templates finished and posted.

My final session at The VIEW conference was fun.  I was using a borrowed VMWare image of Domino/DB2, and had integrated them for DB2NSF for storage earlier Friday morning.  But I hadn't configured a database with DAVs and SQL Query views.  I had one from a prior setup, and started the session by promising the audience that if I could not get them all working, the beer was on me.  It was a new experience watching attendees smile and clap when a demo failed, then moan when it worked.  In the end, I was able to get everything working so was off the hook - but offerred a round anyway.

The insanity of a nonstop 11-session conference over, I'm happy to be back and looking forward to some family time this weekend. Also some salt and sand, as I figured out this morning with a northern exposure, half of the driveway at our new house won't see the sun for several months.

Posted by Rob Novak At 12:10 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

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The first 10 minutes free this week...!

I've had the pleasure of working with The VIEW again in Vienna, Austria this week speaking for the ADMIN2006 Europe and Developer2006 Europe conferences.  They are running concurrently, and as this was the first year I've done the Developer conference for The VIEW, I was asked to repeat my sessions from Las Vegas here.  Including both admin and development, that's eleven of them.  Yep, eleven.  Domino, DB2, DWA, QuickPlace, Sametime, Ajax, WP Designer, you name it, I have a session on it.

So, having just finished the ninth session - the first one I finished early - I am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak.  Two more sessions and I have a free day to roam around Vienna with the new camera (Nikon D80) and come home Sunday.  While I have been able to make it through all of the sessions OK, the connectivity in some of the rooms has prompted some "creative demos".  Good news for me, a lab laptop has been available for my Domino+DB2 session, as I uninstalled DB2 over the summer to make some room on old Sonya here.

So next week, with hazy afternoons on the horizon (7 hour time shift), I will rejoin my office and begin preparations for Lotusphere 2007, and for the release of the much-anticipated QWiki and QBlog templates for QuickPlace.  QDoc has had a great response with 200+ companies downloading it, in addition to a large group of IBMers!  Hope everyone is having fun with it.  If you don't have it yet, you can find QDoc here.

So enough rambling and on to "Getting Up To Speed with Workplace Designer", where the first thing I do is change the title slide.

Have a happy Friday and a good weekend!

Posted by Rob Novak At 5:02 AM Location Vienna, Austria | Permalink | Comments (1)

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Download Now!

I'm pleased to announce the immediate availability of QDoc, a free template for IBM Lotus QuickPlace 7 that provides Web 2.0 capabilities to QuickPlace users.  An upgrade to the standard QuickPlace templates, QDoc makes significant enhancements to QuickPlace:

• A streamlined custom theme
• Enhanced folders - better navigation, no refreshes, and a selectable number of documents to view (10, 30 or 50 at a time)
• Expand/Collapse controls on discussion folders (we've wanted this so long that we built it!)
• A brand new way to view QuickPlace folders - "Synopsis View", with direct access to abstracts, metadata and the attachments straight from the view

QDoc can be deployed several ways - as a placetype itself, as a customization to existing places or placetypes, or its code may be incorporated into existing custom themes, css and placebots.  All these options are documented.

QDoc is free, open-source code developed and maintained by SNAPPS (the official IBM Design Partner for QuickPlace) in cooperation with IBM.  Technically speaking, it contains a number of innovations that are quite interesting to developers for their own Domino and QuickPlace applications - so taking it apart will be fun.  For users, it gives QuickPlace a great new look and a very responsive and intuitive interface, enabled with Ajax controls.  We've used some of the same technology that is going into QuickPlace 8.0, but you can deploy it today on QuickPlace 7.

To download QDoc, and for information about the availability of two more free advanced templates QWiki and QBlog, see www.snapps.com/qptools.  We are working on a mechanism for you to submit bugs and make feature requests...this will be ready by the time QWiki and QBlog are done.  In the meantime please feel free to email me questions.

Look forward to a couiple technical articles on QDoc and the other templates, and an interview with Viktor Krantz, the chief architect behind them!

Thanks and enjoy...

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:02 AM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (5)

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I just ran across Vince DiMascio's site that in a short time has built up a wealth of great sample code.  Thanks Vince...so how about a blog so folks can get to know the man behind the mystery...?

Posted by Rob Novak At 6:00 PM Location SNAPPS Galactic Headquarters | Permalink |