64: The tyranny of distance (AUSLUG & the future of Notes/Domino)

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 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 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 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

Mat blogged about this in the past week – What is the future of Lotus Notes? Will it compete with other technologies? and #LotusKnows it ain’t over ’till *I* say it’s over!
Is the future to divorce mail from applications?

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.