Lotusphere 2007 Closing Session

Last year I was unable to attend the closing of Lotusphere and missed part of the "Meet the Developers" session due to travel arrangements and had this lingering feeling that I had missed something. Well this year I had made to effort to avoid that oversight and was pretty happy with the choice. The "Meet the Developers" session had a lot of tidbits of information as to the technical future of upcoming planned (or unplanned) changes coming from Lotus. The Closing session had an appearance by the Astro-Physicist Neil DeGrasseTyson. The inside joke was we moved from Comic to Cosmic (a reference to last year's closing performance). In the read more section, I will go into some of the interesting pieces of information from the Closing session. To read more about the (See Meet the Developers) session please see that blog entry.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson was one of the astro-physicists that attended the meeting that captured the nations attention last year when Pluto was demoted to a "minor planet". His topic of discussion was a "Top 10" list of numbers to put certain ideas into perspective.

From the distance covered when placing the amount of hamburgers consumed end to end. To the dates of impending doom from a giant asteroid. The topics were a break from the central theme of "it revolves around you" to the more grounded reality that we are but a small part of incredibly larger universe (possibly multi-verses).

Some of the items mentioned to get to the matter of perspective:

• The number of hamburgers would make trip around the earth 300 times and the remaining would make a round trip to the moon 4 times
• There are more molecules of water in a cup of water than there are cups of water in all the oceans of the world
• There are more molecules of air in a breath of air than there are breathes of air in the atmosphere
• On your 31st birthday, you will have celebrated your billionth second
• Various orders of magnitude were displayed to hint at their size: number of people in a stadium, number of people on earth, the number of grains of sand in all the worlds beachs, the numbers of stars in the galaxy
• Brief coverage of past extinction events that at least one was determined to be from meteor impact which led to the final item
• On Friday the 13th in April of 2029, if the asteroid "Apophis" passes through the "keyhole" (a specific point in the earth's orbit) in 2036 it will be collide with the Earth

The one hidden item in all this smallness, apparent from the anecdotal topic of the psychiatrist that attended one of his previous sessions that accused his presentation of making people feeling much less important and insecure than before. Neil's counterpoint to the argument of smallness was that while we are, but a very small piece, we are all made of the same stuff. From no matter where one is in our universe, we are comprised of the same stuff. "We are all Stardust."

Meet the Developers

As noted in the Closing session blog (See Lotusphere 2007 Closing Session), this year I was able to attend the complete "Meet the Developers" session where other Admins and Developers from around world are able to directly question and get feedback on future enhancements. The availability of being able to "Connect" with the lead developers within IBM is a just a great experience. While not having a specific item in mind to have addressed, I thoroughly enjoyed hearing others experiences and getting the insight into what is currently going on in the industry and what is going to happen. In the read more session, I have included just a few snippets of ideas that I was able to get from the session.

• In Notes 7, Nomad was introduced. The ability to completely run Lotus Notes from a USB key was highly touted feature that has found a great appreciation in a lot of consultants, developers, and admins. Currently planned release R8 does not have this, however...
• Version 8.01 "should" have Nomad ready
• Embedded Views ability to become dynamic will be put on the list for future development
• An enhancement to the Search Results view (searching?) is on the DWA list to be looked at making available. It was mentioned that it currently used within IBM, but was not yet at "commercial" grade/ quality
• Daylight Saving Time issue still remains to be a problem. On the 31st of this month an agent will be made available to address this issue for those users needing to address. A tech note number was given(not noted here) as to what to reference if needed to request it.
• In the Room & Resources reservation on before and after update....Not enough notes taken on this one. If I get the chance, I will see if there are any posting on this from Lotusphere Online
• When pasting graphics directly in Notes, Notes by default uses a format that stores the graphics in a large format. To override this functionality an ini variable was given to change the default behavior. I believe the mentioned variable was IMAGEPASTESIZE= 1 will use a GIF size for pasting.
• A requested default change on Paste action to "Paste Special" to address the issue of copying HTML instead of simple text
• Request to have MySQL available as a direct version, as it is only available through ODBC which is apparently too slow
• Version 8 will correct the issue of multi-monitors having the properties box get stuck to one monitor
• IBM is looking at integrating more SAP scenarios. Currently only have HR, time sheets available, will look at others. A suggestion from developer to address having the finance module available.
• A question regarding the relationship of Domino.doc to QuickR. There would be no migration necessary as both would be supported.
• A 7.03 release addresses a bug when searching the log file. The search was taking too long and should be addressed in this release.
• Todo's will be better integrated with R8, not as part of current design update, but soon after. The designers of R8 concentrated heavily on mail, contacts, & calendar

More questions and topics covered in the Gurupalooza section.

Interface Matters

One of the great Developer sessions at Lotusphere this year was

BP101 Designing the User Experience: Why your Interface Matters

Presented by Chris Blatnick & Nathan Freeman. Rather than try to explain their expert work, go check out their blogs at: Chris's InterfaceMatters Site and Nathans Notes911 Site.

They also had a very excellent podcast with Bruce and Julian over at the Taking Notes Podcast (Episode 49).

(Haven't listened to the one's at LotusUserGroup.org ... more on that later.

Lotusphere 2007 Opening Session

The opening session of Lotusphere occurs on the second full day of events so people attending have already been exposed to the ideas and concepts that will be threaded through out the conference. The opening session is usually a celebration of the years past successes and a look forward to the future opportunities. The session gets rockin' with an opening band singing out some songs that will hint at the underlying themes of the week. In this blog I have capture some of what was happening during the event as I was experiencing it. Sort of a live blog, but will be editing the actual content well after the event was over to clean up the content and hopefully fill in some of the gaps that may have been overlooked while jotting down the info.

The opening session's band first appeared to be 12 piece cover band with 6 singers. They started with "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (leading into "With a little help from friends") during this song the familiar kaleidoscope shown in the handouts and some bright red fractal images appeared on the huge wall to wall screens).
The images morphed into a different kaleidoscope in circle of the around the Lotusphere logo. Mid-way through the song the stage lasers burst into a wide array of psychedelic flare and the wall screens then changed into a large swirling galaxy of stars.

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Somewhere between the first in second song the number of performers on stage increased to 20 or more.

The second act was a series of David Bowie songs. The first being "Changes". This song displayed a large image of the moon as seen by one of the hovering Apollo spacecraft. This image changed back to the galaxy image with a slight difference of what may have been a supernova or star chamber cloud. The following song was "under pressure" which had a water effect image.

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The third act consisted of songs from the who: "Pinball Wizard", "I'm Free", and the theme from Lotusphere that is revolves around you. The who's "You?" (Think about you...I see the millions of you...) song.

After these series of songs on stage appeared a number of IBM Lotus executives such as: Michael Rhodin, Ken Bisconti and Ron Sebastion. Appearances by the executives of Sametime also gave brief keynote speeches (notably Bruce Morse).

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Mr. Rhodin began the keynote address by mentioning that 2006 was the year of "You", most notably from Time magazine's person of the year (cover shown on screen). Some of the announcements he made were:

• midyear delivery Hannover
• there was a 30% increase in Notes users forth quarter and that this was second year sustained increase of double digit growth
• 7000 people were in attendance
• 1869 certified Lotus Professional attending which was a large increase over last year( was it 400% quoted?)
• He even mentioned that Lotusphere had made its appearance in "Second Life" - although it was shown on screen, I have not had a chance to go see it yet.

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Mike finished the main opening keynote by presenting this year's guest speaker Neil Armstrong. Neil gave an interesting talk about his experience in the Apollo missions. Some of the interesting items quotes and facts from his topic were

• Orlando airport's designation of MCO was a hold over of the old McCoy Airforce base which is where the test flights of the X1 for the preparation of the Apollo missions were held
• Russians had sputnik first, the engineers in the early days of NASA had "kaputnik"
• The navigation of the early astronauts were by eye "Hey, that must be Australia down there..." dead pan delivery was very funny
• The navigation was pretty bad that although they had naval ships ready for his landing he was so far off he actually landed just outside Okinawa
• Even with the low powered computers they had (only 4KB memory, 8 digit -no alpha read out display), he still had to get accurate distances (within 11 inches) for the "3 day trip" to account for the mileage on his expense report (another great delivery)

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Mike Rhodin cam e back on stage for the next session and started talking about the future products coming out Lotus. The strategy of their focus was that more and more individuals were working away from there office: business travel, telecommuting, and every day computing for entertainment. The signs were leading to what might become one day of making the "office" obsolete (slight pun intended).

By way of example, an anecdotal comment was made that on a recent interviewee at IBM, the applicant said that "email is for their grandfather". Current and future generations are embracing technologies of social networking more quick and more readily. They are sharing more, more frequently and more quickly. The tools to perform these tasks must make sense for user, they must be cool to the user and they need to solve the problems for real people.

Tools like Sametime that give immediate presence and awareness. Two major companies / government that have embraced this technology are the Dept of Defense and GE. A product related to(third party?) intellicare gave a Sametime testimonial from several nurses having the immediate access to medical opinions from Doctor's throughout the hospital.

• An announcement was made that video chat was coming as a supported framework on the Mac & Linux.
• There will be multi devices chat (chatting not only individuals but other hardware and software). An example was demonstrated on this, that was a bit complex to explain.
• Chat windows will be merged. No longer have many separate windows open, there will be a "toolbar" showing the individual chat sessions open (displayed using the individuals picture captured from their account)
• There was a live demonstration of a soft-phone (software integrated possibly through VOIP?) with voicemail in the chat window

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A new product line was introduced to push through Lotus' brand into the social networking for business with Lotus Connections.

• A public beta will be available next month
• There was a demo of how "mashups" were created. "Mashups" is a relatively new term for composite applications: pieces of different applicants pulled together in a new way to perform a new and important business task.
• In the demo, the "Mashup" creation reminded me of the simple way that you would create joins in Access: a table here, a table there, you click and drag and the information was connected. Now take that concept to a Notes application: a database here and a database there that you define the wiring/linking and viola the information is joined: you select one piece of data in one frame/window/portlet you have its related data automatically updated from a completely different application shown in its window.

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Another new product was announced for the social networking crowd: "QuickR" (taking the recently fashionable naming conventions from other products in the community).

A (cue the angelic AWWW music) FREE personal version (for those with maintenance packages) of QuickR is to be made available (in February).

• Provides for project management
• social networking
• templates, templates, templates

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Other news:

• Lotus recently acquired filenet (this was an item to look into for imaging products... to be discussed later in the Product Showcase area)
• Available through QuickR will be a check in and check out of the document/attachment/ files that are shared
• There will be an enhancement/add-in? to Lotus that when you send an email with an attachment, Lotus will automatically prompt you to say "Would you rather send a link (to this massively huge attachment that will clog up your email traffic if you try) instead of an attachment?" (Commentary added as this was a huge ovation from the admins in the room that have to detail with overloaded email traffic (such as video clips)

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To close out the opening session, the fanfare increased with more great light show affects.
All around the room "Connections" were made with yellow lasers as Mike described how you will share the content with the person in the next cubicle, to the person across the office, to your immediate business associates, and then around the world. A very cool laser affect crawled along the wall about 10 feet up reminiscent of some recent scifi films showing even more connections. The opening band closes the session with the light show with a repeat of the Who's Song "You" song earlier. A nice ending of the opening session.

BP104 Worst Practices in IBM Lotus Domino Environments - Learning From the Mistakes of Others

(Monday, January 22) - This was one of the more memorable session from last year, that I looked forward to seeing again. Bill is back with Paul to go over some of the harrowing experiences that have occurred in their world of administering and developing in Lotus. Bill represented the developer issue and Paul the admins. Their delivery of the content is mainly for fun, but they point out they are actual experiences (with the names of guilty parties removed, although hinted at on several occasions, but appeared to mainly be inside jokes) and can be learned from.

Another version of one of the most successful presentations from Lotusphere 2006 - updated with new stories. We'll lead you through the top 20 mistakes seen in live Lotus Domino environments, both from an infrastructure and an application development point of view. All of these mistakes have cost companies around the globe significant amounts of support and downtime costs -- and all could have been prevented. Common mistakes (such as not actually reading documentation), to lack of change control and training, right up to absolute disasters caused by a chain of successive mistakes are de-constructed. This highly amusing session will show you how to avoid making these mistakes in your environment.

The session was as captivating as last year, so I was only able to jot some brief notes. See the slides for some of the revealing information, but for now here are the items I was able to get down:

1. Configure your Anti-Virus software to exclude the Notes Data directory. The evidence was of a Client's mail "disappearing" every Friday. It seems that the scheduled av program had designated the mail as a virus and guaranteed it leaving it inaccessible. A corollary, leave transactions logs and view index temp directories also excluded as they are potential targets for av programs. If needed look to getting AV specific for Lotus.
2. Full Access Admin allows access to readers fields, be mindful of who has access to Full Admin rights.
3. User's were wondering why their Email was not routing... an attempt was made to "share a video" via email attachment...it was a half GB in size ...to 428 people...Notes would have eventually handled it, but it brought the servers "to its knees". Rules are available to set the max message size.
4. Black Berry users out of office (OOO) setting defaults to the last date used. This example had 200+ out of offices notices going out from the individual after not using OOO for 2 years on black berry.
5. A notes about about a clean up agent in DomLog.nsf...(check slides for further information)

One of the sites briefly mentioned that users can submit their own "worst practice" experience can be found at the following link.

Lotusphere Worst Practices Site