Episode 66, recorded live from MWLUG 25th August 2011, with Gregg Eldred, Ray Bilyk, Mike McGarel, Lisa Duke, Darren Duke and the MWLUG lunch audience.

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Lisa DukeLisa Duke (twitter | company | podcast) is Business Development Manager for Simplified Technology Solutions, Inc. (also known as STS), an IBM Lotus business partner specializing in collaboration, mobility, and virtualization.  STS also resells IBM System X hardware and related storage.
 Gregg EldredGregg Eldred (blog | twitter) Messaging Administrator that dabbles in application development. Enjoys reading and reviewing books
Ray BilykRay Bilyk (blog | twitter) IBM Lotus Notes/Domino Administrator (and closet Developer) from the Detroit, MI area Hakuna Matata! No worries… Just relax and have a homebrew… Cheers!
Mike McGarelMike McGarel (blog | twitter | company) is a Collaboration Solutions Developer for Czarnowski, a North American exhibit services company. He is responsible on both intranet and extranet applications. Mike is the developer for the Blogger Open and SkiLUG sites. He is Vice President of GRANITE, the Chicago-based Lotus user group.

Topics

This is a live podcast so the topics started with MWLUG and headed off from there!

Episode 65, recorded on 18th August 2011, discussing quality at IBM, Lotus Protector 2.8, OpenNTF, IBM’s support for older releases and more…

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Flemming ChristiensenFlemming Christensen (blog | twitter | company | linkedin) is the chief quality architect for IBM Collaboration Solutions responsible for the process by which new releases commit to quality improvements and measure attainment.
Bruce ElgortBruce Elgort (blog | twitter | company ) is the Chairman of OpenNTF, Inc., an IBM Champion and also Adviser at Elguji Software, LLC.
Niklas HeidloffNiklas Heidloff (blog | twitter | OpenNTF blog) is is an architect in the IBM Lotus Domino development team and leads IBM’s engagement in OpenNTF including XPages.info.
Sean BrownSean Brown  (blog | twitter | company | linkedin) is the Product Manager for IBM Lotus Protector, and responsible for all collaboration security solutions including Lotus Protector for Mail Security and Mail Encryption

Topics

Quality at IBM 

  • What is quality?
  • How do you manage that (i.e. quality as just discussed)?
  • How do IBM avoid regression bugs, particularly in very large mature products?
  • How do you measure for LotusLive? Is that any different than what you do for on-premises software?
  • How do you strike the balance between quality and timeliness?
  • IBM releases to OpenNTF – mobile toolkit, extension library etc. Are they under same Quality controls?
  • How do you measure whether you’re getting better?

New release of Lotus Protector 

  • What is Lotus Protector and what does Collaboration Security mean?
  • Lotus Protector for Mail Security 2.8
    • Protecting your organization with new Data Loss Prevention for files and emails
    • Support for IBM Connections and Lotus Quickr (for Websphere Portal)
    • New licensing models to better match to customer needs
    • What to expect next
    • When will we get “sidecar”for Domino and QuickrD?
  • Branding still Lotus?

OpenNTF.org 

  • Now a Not for Profit organisation
    • What’s the rationale?
    • What will it mean?
    • Why should organisationss become OpenNTF members?
  • Can we hear about some highlights from past few months of contributions?
    • Contest
      • http://contest.openntf.org and http://xpages.info/contest
      • 46 submissions with >50 controls (one more day to submit)
      • 13 first time contributors
      • Some contest controls (not prioritized): JavaCharts, View Picklist, Involve, Multi Database Search, Recaptcha, ZK Spreadsheet, Calendar plan, Asynch Files Upload, Select Database, Poll, Search and TagCloud, MySQL
      • Next week judging, shortly after this announcement of winners
      • Next: import in Designer, out of the box controls
    • Statistics
      • 17k downloads last month (compared to ~8k when IBM got engaged end of 2008)
      • 300k page visits per month
      • 50 new releases (41 non IBM, 9 IBM) in June
      • > 100 approved OpenNTF contributors plus CCLAs from IBM and Group
    • IBM contributions
      • Latest: REST APIs, JDBC, servlet sample
      • Soon: Mobile, social, surprise
      • New model/taking back code in product
    • XPages.info

IBM Policy of Supporting N-2 

  • Why the change?
  • What does it mean for customers?
  • Won’t this hinder motivation to upgrade?
  • What will the cost be to maintain these additional versions?

Domino Danderers Dander for Dosh 2011

  • Eileen & Steve walking 26 miles for Dadaab refugee camp. Please donate!

Tips

Darren:
CDBurnerXP –  use it to burn ISOs and files to CD, DVD, BRD and HD-DVD(!). Also works on x64 Win7 and 2008. Oh, and completely free and completely free of adware and other nasties.
Flemming:

IBM Electronic Support has its own Youtube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/IBMElectronicSupport and Lotus Support has a new Facebook page: ‘Like’us at http://www.facebook.com/#!/IBMLotusSupport and follow us on Twitter with ID @Lotus_Support 🙂
Bruce:
XPages101 – XPages Video series with over 50+ video tutorials
Niklas:

XPages.info/contest to see descriptions, screenshots and videos of all controls of the contest.
Sean:

Drag/Drop emails to your desktop with Notes.  If you need to send an email in it’s original format (non-forwarded) you can drag the message right from your Notes inbox to your desktop and then attach it to a new email.
Stuart:

Lotusphere 2011 videos posted to YouTube

Thanks for listening!  Buy a Sonos – This Week in Lotus will sound even better!!!

Episode 64, recorded on 11th August 2011, discussing AusLUG, the future of Notes & Domino, the new Connections native apps and more…

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Mat NewmanMat Newman (blog | twitter | company) is the Director of Education for ISW (an IBM Premier business partner in Australia, and this years winner of the IBM South-East Asia Business Partner of the Year award), Mat is an IBM Champion for Collaboration Solutions, owner of the coolest yellow suit around and friends with Lisa Duke and Sharon Bellamy!
Karen HooperKaren Hooper (company | twitter | linkedin) is an Advanced IBM Certified Instructor in both System Administration and Development. Karen and her husband Steve own and manage Dr Notes Solutions, a Premier IBM Business Partner in Australia. Karen is the author of the IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 User Guide (available on Amazon). Her passion is to empower people so that they increase their productivity and use the tools available to them.
Richard SmithRichard Smith (company | linkedin | twitter) is a skilled and passionate IT professional, able to communicate both at technical and business levels.His awareness of business systems, processes and workflows orginated from a business background, before making the jump to more technical systems development roles on IBM’s Lotus Notes and Domino platform. His grounding allowed him to quickly apply Notes and Domino technology to real business problems. He’s been architecting systems for this platform since 1996 (version 3). Richard’s overriding aim for the solutions he has architected, is to provide a defined return on investment and demonstrable wins for users of his systems.Richard is a PCLP Administrator and is the Technical Director and Owner of Basic Business Systems Ltd a IBM Lotus Business Partner in the UK..

Topics

Auslug

  • Why:
    • Why did you feel AusLug was needed?
  • The process:
    • Is it immense amounts of work?
    • How are you coordinating activities?
  • The details:
    • When? Sydney
    • Where? 29/30th August
    • Are there any other events taking place that week? TackOn by Chris Miller on Sametime on Wednesday, The View Bootcamp Weds-Fri.
    • Who’s speaking? 5 IBM Champions. Paul Calhoun, Chris Miller, Mikkel Heisterberg, Mat Newman, Adam Brown, Ed Brill presenting the keynote.
    • How is attendance looking?
  • How will it compare to other LUGs?
  • The social stuff:
    • What extra-curricular activities will be taking place?
    • Will the yellow suit make another outing?
    • How can people that can’t attend in person take part?
  • What’s your one wish for Auslug?

The future of Notes/Domino 

IBM Connections apps for Android, Blackberry and iOS 

  • All three apps now available on the App Stores
  • Is there still a place for iWildfire?
  • Mat runs down the differences between the IBM versions and iWildFire

Tips

Darren:
Free antivirus from Microsoft…..yes! Microsoft. And it’s pretty good. Good for home PCs and personal laptops. See the Microsoft Security Essentials site for more details.
Mat:
Web 1.0 was I’ll publish something, so you can you consume it, Web 2.0 is “let’s interact with one another”. I know a product that’s over 21 years old which does BOTH!  If your Admin hasn’t given you “social”apps in your Notes/Domino environment, things like Forums, Wikis, Blogs and SameTime you should be demanding them to improve your productivity and interaction with others – they are, after all – FREE!
Karen:
Attend the biggest IBM/Lotus conference in Australasia – AusLUG!  And buy my book – <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1849680205/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=twilotus-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=1849680205″>IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 User Guide</a>!
Richard:
Xpages and modern web interfaces mean that you need to know CSS, as well as everything else! A good CSS editor will help. Getting into this means understanding how pages will look in a different way. I user TopStyle but there are other tools. The trick is to lay out your CSS in a good way, so your processing order is correct as much as possible as styles are applied in order as they are read by the browser as they go through the sheet. The first style is applied and then the second and so on. That means  if a style appears at the top of a style sheet and then is changed lower down in the document, the second item of that style will be the one applied, not the first one. So what you might think should be black could be Red, as its defined again later in your sheet. !Important helps overide this, but its better to structure your CSS sheets in a logical way up front, using a defined structure. So, your most underlying elements, like pages, navigation, content containers and global styles such as default fonts, define at the top of your CSS sheet in clearly labelled areas. More granular stuff, define later in the sheet, but labelled according to the job the code is going to do, eg article styles,  call to action buttons, quote boxes or page specific items.
Stuart:
My word, these tips are getting tough!  Handbrake DVD ripping made easy. Awesome app, started on Mac, now on Windows & Linux too.  Oh, and Plex for viewing said rips, including new Plex iOS app.

Episode 63, discussing Domino on IBM i, new Notes connectors for Mac, native Connections apps for mobile devices, IBM Connections winning at Bayer and numerous Lotus User Groups…

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Steve PitcherSteve Pitcher (blog | twitter) is Enterprise Systems Manager for Scotsburn Dairy Group, a 200-user SMB in Nova Scotia, Canada.  Steve has been a Domino admin/developer since 2003 and a journalist for MC Press Online since 2009. Scotsburn went from ISP hosted email with no collaboration software to internally hosted Lotus Domino based mail, custom applications, Quickr and Sametime in the last year…all on one IBM i partition.
Lisa DukeLisa Duke (twitter | company) is Business Development Manager for Simplified Technology Solutions, Inc. (also known as STS), an IBM Lotus business partner specializing in collaboration, mobility, and virtualization.  STS also resells IBM System X hardware and related storage.  IBM Champion and friend of Mat Newman.
Sharon BellamySharon Bellamy (blog | twitter | company) is Lead IBM solutions specialist at City University London.Sharon supports all of the IBM / Lotus / Tivoli stack at City and will soon be taking on the Domino implementation at the Cass Business School. IBM Champion and friend of Mat Newman.

Topics

Advocating Domino products on IBM i 

  • What Lotus products run on that platform?
  • What are the advantages/disadvantages?
  • Is iSeries still an expensive platform to run?
  • Are the skills out there to manage/host/upgrade?
  • Most Sametime components run natively, some (Media Manager, etc.) do not
  • No native Connections support
  • Plugin support

Notes connectors for Mac 

Mobile Clients for Connections released to app stores 

  • Release for Android
  • iOS and RIM coming soon
  • Posts posted then withdrawn, waiting for PR
  • Anyone tried them?
  • Feel bad for iWildfire and mLinked

IBM Connections wins at Bayer

IAMLUG 

  • How was the LUG as a whole?
  • What was the attendance like?
  • Keynote by Brian
  • What did you think?
  • What else?
  • How did tack it on work?

MWLUG’s social track & Lisa’s panel discussion

Tips

Darren:
The Paladin Tools PT-540 Powerplay Multi-tool For Electrical and Networking – a geeks Leatherman tool. This thing is great! It even has a 110 punch-down tool. How fricken cool is that?
Steve:  

When thinking about deploying Lotus software, have a hard look at IBM i on Power Systems considering the stability, security and throughput capabilities of the platform.
Lisa:

Louis Richardson’s new social videos:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6toR7am7OAE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y0xNv8JXFg
Sharon:

Deliver It – post your RSS feeds to Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter automatically! http://dlvr.it/
Stuart:

Downcast – on the fly podcast download and management on iOS devices. No need to sync your device to get the latest This Week in Lotus!