Episode 88 recorded on Thursday 9th February 2012. Jason Dumont joins Darren and Stuart to discuss the roadmap for the Lotus clients – Notes, iNotes and Connections Mail – through 2012 including the exciting Social Edition release. He also fills us in on the details around ‘that plugin’ – the ability to render Notes applications in a browser as if in your Notes client.  

Hosts

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

Guests

Jason Dumont

Jason Dumont (twitter | linkedin) is currently the Program Director for Messaging & Collaboration Client Strategy at IBM. His responsibilities include strategy development and product planning for all of IBM’s messaging and collaboration clients within the Lotus brand, including our on premise and cloud based delivery options. He also leads a new strategic effort focused on the delivery of a more social messaging experience, which will first be represented as IBM Connections Mail. His team is located in the United States with an extended team around the globe.

Topics

Lotusphere announcements

  • Lotus Notes and Domino Social Edition
    • What is Notes/Domino Social Edition?
    • Is this the ‘Notes Foo’that has been discussed over the last year?
    • Why ‘Social Edition’?
    • When will it ship?
    • Is this the equivalent of Notes Next?
    • Lets break it down:
      • What will Domino Social Edition offer in terms of iNotes functionality?
      • How about Notes Social Edition?
  • What Social features will be available in the new release?
  • IBM Connections Mail (aka social mail)
    • This has been explained as ‘triage mail and calendar’, can you explain the use case?
      • ‘Picture in picture ’analogy
    • When will it be delivered? Need Connections Next and Domino 8.5.3+ or Exchange 2007 & 2010
    • Works with Domino and Exchange mail? 
    • Will it support cloud-based mail?
  • The Plug-in
    • What does it do?
    • What are the use cases you foresee?
    • What are the requirements? Which browsers (IE, FF both on Windows), which Domino release?
    • How big is the plugin?  Will it get cached?

‘State of the Union’

  • Are you excited about 2012?

Tips

Darren:

  • Workflow for XPages : OpenNTF project released by Phillipe Riand, Qian Liang and Niklas Heidloff. Fills a missing gap that has always existed in Domino.
  • Also in an XPages vein, the 3rd and latest XPages Development Contest is open. More prizes this time, again from the kind folks at We4IT!

Jason:

Stuart:

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 62, discussing Notes/Domino 8.5.3, relevance of the products to the Social Business message, the effect of seniority on social engagement and more…

Hosts

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

Guests

Ed BrillEd Brill (blog | twitter) is Director, Product Management, IBM Lotus software.  Ed’s focus is on growing and continuing IBM’s success in messaging and collaboration software, through working with customers, business partners, and IBM sales, marketing, and product development organizations.  Ed’s responsibilities in this role have included the market launches of Lotus Notes/Domino 8.5 and 8.5.1, the introduction of Alloy, the release of Lotus Symphony 1.3, and plans/development for LotusLive Notes, an IBM cloud offering for messaging and collaboration. A frequent speaker at IBM and industry events worldwide, Ed is well known for direct contributions to the many Lotus software-focused social media and virtual communities.
Louis RichardsonLouis Richardson (blog | twitter) serves as a worldwide social business evangelist for IBM. As such, he gets to talk to executives and business managers around the world, about how they are using…or thinking of using social software in their organizations.

Topics

Notes/Domino 8.5.3

  • What are the major new features?
  • With the release of the XPages RDBMS extension library we’ve made a huge jump forward. Currently it is on 8.5.3 CD5 users which means Design Partners only
    • When is the public beta of 8.5.3 starting so non-DP’s can get their hands on this tasty goodness?
  • When is it coming?
  • When will it be available as LotusLive Notes?
  • Can you talk at all about Notes/Domino Next, timescales, aims etc?
  • Will this be a key deliverable in terms of the realisation of Project Vulcan?
  • When you’re talking to customers about SocBiz, how much does Notes/Domino come into the conversation?

Social Business

  • The campaign/brand
    • What has the response been from customers to the Social Business message?
    • How about ‘traditional’Notes/Domino customers?
    • We are used to Microsoft being the main competition in the Messaging/Collaboration space – is this still the case around Social Business?
    • Which products are involved?
  • What is the key element for a company to understand if they want to become a social business?
  • Is Blogging still relevant?

OpenNTF

  • Pleased with progress in the opensource support for these technologies?

IBM donates Lotus Symphony code to Apache

  • What does this mean for Symphony going forward?
  • Is Symphony still getting development effort from IBM?

Tips

Darren:
Milebug – THE best mileage tracker for the iPhone (and also Android and Nokia now). For $2.99 a real bargain. There is a lite version too (limits the number of trips you can store, but allows you to see if it fits your needs)
Ed:

Plantronics Savi Office –  I’ve switched over to this as my UC/UT environment in my home office and it’s just a dream along with Sametime 8.5.2
Louis:

When you’re considering how your company is going to implement and leverage social in your business, be sure to (1) keep the focus on the people and (2) make sure it integrates into your business. It’s not about making social your business..it’s about making your business social.
Stuart:

Customise your menus in Connections 3