This presentation given by Vinod Seraphin and Akira Sudoh was filled with content that made it difficult to listen and take notes at the same time. I know, all of the presentations should be available from LotuSphere On-Line after the conference. But the one presentation that you need and isn't available is the one you don't take notes on. Here are some of the things I learned during the presentation:

• E4X (ECMAScript for XML) adds an XML datatype to Javascript. This makes it possible to process an XML response without having to create a DOM parser in your JavaScript code. Unfortunately, this isn't supported in all of the major browsers yet, so you use this method in your code at your own risk.
• the new &OutputFormat=JSON url parameter works for ?ReadViewEntries, ?ReadEntries and ?ReadDesign:
• all attributes returned by OutputFormat are returned as strings
• all attributes are preceded by the "@" symbol
• multiple values are returned as a JavaScript array
• the value for each view column is preceded by a "0" element

As for Dojo:

• it has some notable contributors: IBM, SitePen, Sun and AOL
• it degrades gracefully. If your browser doesn't support the features necessary for the rich text editor, you get a TEXTAREA instead
• it has no server-side dependencies
• to use it, you select the pieces you want and create your own bundle, or select a bundle with common features
• compression tools are used to build compressed source files, to reduce the amount of code that needs to be downloaded by the client.
• the combo box is typeahead enabled
• the date picker allows you to scroll by week
• the dialog box is modal

On the plus side, this was the only session I attended so far that ended in 45 minutes and allowed 15 minutes for questions. Vinod is a very good speaker. The only negative I took away from this session was the realization that IBM Lotus will probably never add any widgets directly to Domino. They'll just expect developers to download Dojo and use that to augment the web UI provided by Domino instead.

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Bill Buchan and Paul Mooney delivered a presentation that described several situations where a Notes developer or an administrator caused problems in their environment by not knowing (or realizing) what they were doing. The case studies they presented included

1. Saving Disk Space
2. ECL Hell
3. Magical Mail File
4. Now You See It
5. Son of eMail from Hell
6. The "DeCrappy Code"
7. Identity Crisis
8. Missing You Already
9. Security for Beginners
10. Agent Ageism
11. Oh, is that important
12. The Leak

From these case studies, I learned that

1. The Domino server will continue to run even after you manually delete the Domino executibles from the server. A better way to get space in a hurry is to use Directory Links.
2. The Domino ECL is very powerful, and changes to it should be tested before they are pushed out to the entire organization via Policies.
3. Exclude your Domino data directories, temporary directories, etc. from your server's anti-virus software. Use anti-virus software specifically for Domino on your servers.
4. You can use the Full Access Administrator to view and fix documents where the Readers fields have been corrupted.
5. E-mails with large attachments (ex: 500 meg) will cause the mail router to grind to a halt.
6. Be aware of how much HTML you send to browser clients. A 20 minute page load time is never acceptable.
7. Never create a person "server" account to try to gain access to a restricted application. Deleting the person "server" account via AdminP can have dramatic consequences.
8. Be careful when changing the Leaving on date for the Out Of Office agent. If you set it several years back, it will send out messages to all users you received messages from since that time.
9. Never change the Allow anonymous Notes connections server doc setting to Yes. This is a huge security hole.
10. Always verify that your backups are working properly before making a major change to an application.
11. Deleting the LocalDomainServers group via AdminP is very, very bad! Disabling replication of the NAB alone will not stop the AdminP request from replicating to other servers and changing the NAB on those servers.
12. Be very careful with Domino applications that store personal data. Web search engines will find your application and the documents in it and will include them in search results.

Paul stressed several times that you should spend time collecting information before changing anything on the server. Check the Notes Log, the server console and other common repositories for server statistics before changing anything.

Bill also warned us against turning into Captain Click when troubleshooting a problem. Clicking through screens is not as useful as stepping away from a problem and thinking about what is going on.

As many others have stated, this is a great presentation and should be required viewing for anyone who thinks they are a legitimate Notes/Domino developer or administrator.

Oh, there is a Worst Practices website that you can submit your own experiences too. I plan on submitting something when I get back to the office, to see if Bill or Paul know of a way that I can prevent it.

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Mac Guidera and Dan Gurney gave a very insightful and entertaining presentation that mainly focused on the RSS template that was delivered with ND 7.0.2. In particular, they highlighted the RSS features available in the following templates:

1. RSS Feed Generator (rss-generator.ntf)
2. DWA (dwa7.ntf)
3. Blog Template (dominoblog.ntf)
4. SSO override (pubnames.ntf)

Dan gave a thorough review of the RSS Feed Generator template that he built. Among the key points:

• its easy to set up; no database design modifications are necessary
• it provides an Automatic Feed Listing page
• it comes with a Feed Generation agent
• it serves as an RSS "gateway"
• it works with Domino authentication and respects database ACL settings (you won't be able to access RSS feed content if you aren't authorized to do so

To configure a Notes database for RSS feeds, all you need to do is add a document to the RSS Feed Generator db. This requires you to select a database, a view in the database and a column in the view. Then, all you need to do is open the RSS Feed Generator db in the web. This will give you the listing of all available Notes database feeds. You can configure how the Automatic Feed Listing page's look & feel so that it better matches your intranet standards. I should say that design of the RSS Feed Generator template is very...Spartan. At first I thought this could create a problem with rolling it out for an entire organization. However, only Domino administrators and developers will ever look at this database in the Notes client, so my concerns were largely unfounded. When Dan was demoing the template, however, he discovered a bug that he believes was caused by enabling the Convert RTF to HTML option.

You can also get an RSS feed from your iNotes mail file by enabling a new Notes.ini parameter on the server: iNotes_WA_Feeds=atom,rss

As was mentioned in the Opening General Session, you can subscribe to feeds delivered by Domino in iTunes. This makes it possible to listen to podcasts stored in a Notes database in iTunes or your iPod.

Mac discussed several feed readers that work within the Notes client, including:

• Lotus Notes News Reader
• Madicon RSS Reader
• Studio Blog Reader (from OpenNTF)
• ProjectDX Feed Reader (from Domino Blog creator Steve Castledine)

Mac also described several feed readers available for public feeds:

• Firefox Sage (Firefox extension)
• Bloglines (web based)
• RSS Owl (Eclipsed based)
• Google Reader (web based)
• NetNewsWire for (Macs)
• Firefox (simple bookmarks)
• iTunes
• Feed Demon 2.1 (free trial, then you must pay a $30 one-time registration fee)

You need to remember that you probably won't be able to access internal Domino content using one of the above tools, as your Domino applications will probably have security settings on them that prevent this.

Mac also discussed the Outline Processor Markup Language (or OPML), and how it can be used to distribute lists of favorite blogs among your friends.

I really enjoyed this presentation, and told Mac that I want his job in case it ever opens up! ; + )

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Mark Vincenzes reviewed several enhancements to the Domino Web server available to Domino developers, including:

• The new $$HTMLTagAttributes field, which you an use to specify lang="en" for a page or form
• The new $$HTMLFrontMatter field, which gives you the ability to specify the DOCTYPE for individual pages or forms
• The new $$HTMLOptions field, which can be used to control the display of sections and tables
• The ability to disable passthru HTML at various levels in a page or form
• The ability to get data from a view in JSON format
• new URL commands for views
• the new HTML API

I was disappointed in this session mostly because the new features only involve controlling content. There were no new design widgets added to the product that would make a Domino developer's life easier. While its true that you can use AJAX libraries to add date pickers and rich text editors, isn't it time that some of this stuff be added to the core product, so that developers don't need to include this on their own? How about adding a web version of @PickList?

The HTML API stuff was way over my head. I would have appreciated this new capability more if Mark could have stated why it was being added.

Mark's delivery was pretty dry as well. Of course, he didn't have the sexiest material to review.

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Ed Brill moderated a panel comprised of Lotus customers and ISVs who were involved in the ND8 beta program. I learned that getting involved in the program requires more than being a loyal customer with a large installed user base. The nomination process for customers if a very rigorous process, starting with a nomination from your Lotus representative and then being approved only if your environment is different from other customers involved in the program. For ISVs, Lotus chooses those companies who will be able to bring products to market very soon after the gold code is released.

Of the comments I found insightful:

• DST Systems has a Lotus Notes user committee that were included in the beta first. I like this approach because it distributes ownership of the product to users outside of IT who can relate the challenges they face on a daily basis.
• ND8 looks and works exactly the same on a Linux desktop as a Windows desktop. This will spur an investigation of how many Windows desktops can be replaced by Linux desktops in the future.
• Everything that was compelling about Notes when it was first introduced is there. The impact of the new ND8 UI will be huge.
• R5 and V6 apps run perfectly in ND8 with no changes.
• Activities will be a great productivity tool. Each Activity is like a bubble that users can include To Dos, URLs, documents, etc. that will grow larger over time.
• Activity Explorer won't work locally in the initial release of ND8.
• ND8 can be delivered via Novell Zenworks.
• There is a basic version of ND8 that is not Eclipse based. This version is intended for users who need to be upgraded to the new release, but don't meet the hardware requirements. Naturally, not all of the ND8 client features work in this slimmed-down version of the product, which can be thought of as ND7+.
• The "Do you really want to send the attachment" prompt was a favorite feature, which should dramatically reduce the number of attachments sent in an organization.
• You can delete an entire e-mail thread in one step.
• The components you can include in ND8 can originate from any source, including proprietary applications, open source applications, etc.
• The Toolbar has been moved to underneath the tabs, and will not display all buttons every time. Instead, it will only display the buttons relevant at that moment.
• BES works fine with ND8, provided you're on the most current release of BES.
• The MS Office viewers included with the product will make it possible to reduce the number of MS Offices licenses in the organization.
• The Properties box is available within all documents opened by a viewer, just like in Smartsuite.
• You can limit the right-click options available for a message in your mail file.

In all, a very insightful session.

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Jack Ratcliff described a technique that makes it possible to generate the XML for an Ajax operation without invoking an agent. You create a page that includes static XML tags and uses Computed Text objects that execute @function code. Your Ajax code then opens the page via a URL. This technique has several benefits:

• Notes developers can maintain the XML structure outside of LotusScript or Java code
• Opening a page or form is much less taxing on the server than invoking an agent

Personally, I've presented on using pages and forms to generate XML, but hadn't thought of using this in the context of AJAX. Kudos to Jack for bringing this to my attention. When I get back to the office, I'll be changing an application I'm developing so that it will use pages instead of agents.

My only recommendation would be to cut the "history of @formula" slides, as well as the slides that discuss various AJAX libraries. Jack ran out of time, mostly due to the earlier filler slides. Great presentation, though!

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Rob Novak did an excellent job describing the current landscape of tools used to develop Rich Internet Applications. In particular:

• Backbase can be used to display view information in a method very similar to Notes client table captions
• Smooth Gallery provides a very slick interface to scroll through pictures in a slideshow format, without using Adobe Flash
• dojo provides both a rich text editor and a date picker

Viktor Krantz then got to take the spotlight and deliver one of the true "sexy" moments of the conference. In the previous version of this presentation, Viktor showed an AJAX-generated calendar that does not repaint when you scroll through pages, and can display more than one calendar at a time. By using dojo, the calendar is now internationalized for all locales. Additionally, a pop-up box of summary information displays when you roll-over a calendar entry. dojo also makes it possible to drag and drop a calendar entry into a new date, and prompt the user to either confirm or change the entry information. Way cool, guys!

The only thing missing from this presentation was Right Said Fred. But that would have been over the top, even for LotuSphere!

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Ben Langhinrichs discussed several AJAX toolkits he was familiar with, and then showed us how to use FCKeditor to provide a rich text experience for the web. By using FCKeditor, users can include pictures and attachments into document being edited by a browser client.

Unfortunately, I can't use a web-only solution as my user base needs to be able to edit documents from either Notes or the web.

I was also didn't think I could convince the Domino administrators to include the FCKeditor files on the Domino server. If a server goes down in my environment, it is rebuilt according to a documented process that applies to all servers. Adding another step to this process only increases the possibility that the step may be missed, which would result in the rich text editor not appearing.

Even if I had an application that was accessed only by a web browser, I wasn't sure I liked the fact that images and attachments are stored as separate documents. Honestly, though, I'm not sure how else this could be accomplished. It seems to me that emulating the Notes rich text experience in a browser is the Holy Grail that has yet to be discovered.

I really do appreciate Ben taking the time to fully research this solution and providing sample code at no charge for all of use to try out. I'm sure he spent a lot of time getting this toolkit to work in Domino, and there are certainly other developers out there with web-only applications who can use what he came up with right out of the gate.

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This was the first hands-on lab I've attended in three LotuSpheres. I did enjoy getting a chance to touch the technology, instead of just staring at power-point presentations. Rob Henry, a Notes developer from Toronto, Canada and I used Domino Designer 8 and the Notes client to create a composite application based on a Discussion database. The resulting application contained the All Documents in the top frame, an embedded view in the lower-left frame and an Eclipse component in the lower-right frame. (I shouldn't say frames. They are all components arranged using a GUI in Component Designer.) The composite application was wired together so that when you selected a document in the All Documents view, the embedded view's Show Single Category property was set so that it displayed only documents in the selected document's category, and the Eclipse component displayed the category of the selected document in a field. The example was a bit simplistic, but did illustrate how to create a composite application and see the communication that is now possible between the components. My guess is that Notes developers will primarily use this feature to wire together Notes applications.

I had two concerns about the lab exercise, though. First, the sample database included a form that we used to generate the WSDL for the Discussion database. All we needed to do was to type in the component properties in the form fields and click the [Generate WSDL] button to generate the WSDL. Is it that difficult to create the WSDL in the database directly using the WSDL editor? Notes developers may need to understand the basics of WSDL before they can start creating composite applications.

The second concern I had was that when we used the Component Designer to wire the components together, we needed to type in the Notes URL for the Discussion database. I'd have to think that this will be improved so that you can select the Notes database from an Open Database dialog box of some kind. However, if a component application can only point to a specific Notes URL, that means that a composite application would be problematic for those Notes customers that distribute their Notes applications across multiple Domino servers. But, I'm not going to get too worried about it now. ND8 won't go gold for another five months (at least), and they may include additional features in the Component Designer that would let us determine the location of a Notes application on the fly.

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Impressions from day 2 of the 'Sphere:

General Session

Mike Rhodin seems more comfortable in front of the masses than last year, his first year at the helm. He stated that there are 7,000 attendees this year, which is 11% more than last year. Based on my in ability to find my co-workers on the beach front yesterday night, I'd say that this is a very busy LotuSphere.

This year's guest speaker was Neil Armstrong. He told us about how his trip to the moon was essentially to act as the technician on a scientific project for NASA. He installed a mirror in the Sea of Tranquility that scientists back on earth would fire laser beams at from a mountain in San Jose. You can read a synopsis of this here.) This experiment would determine how far the earth was from the moon within 11 inches. The initial experiments failed because the latitude and longitude assumed for the mountain on Earth was wrong. The message Mr. Armstrong was trying to impart was that easy successes are never as satisfying as the those that require you to work through problems. I don't know about you, but there are good problems and bad problems. I always enjoy solving good problems. Its the bad problems, like debugging LotusScript code written ten years ago by someone who didn't understand Notes, that I'm just glad to be done with, success or not!

Mike Rhodin returned and discussed Lotus mission, which can be summed up as:

• Taming the Inbox (a lot like Tetris: you destroy one block, only to have four more take its place)
• Seamless communications (voice, video and data)
• Sharing information (you can never find it when you need it)
• Integrated services (simplicity on the front end, complexity on the back end)
• Assembling applications (a.k.a. mash-ups)
• Creating connections (with people, via social networking)

Bruce Moorse and Akiba Saeedi then took the stage to talk about Sametime. To me, Sametime clearly is the sexy product in the Lotus lineup. Which is incredibly ironic in that it hadn't gotten any real investment in over six years. Video chat, tabbed chat, Microsoft integration and Linux and Apple support are due in the 2nd quarter of this year. Keep up the good work, Lotus!

Ken Bisconti came up and mentioned that Lotus had 500 competitive wins last year. Fourth quarter shipments were up 30%, but I don't know if this is really that newsworthy as sales is always strong in the fourth quarter for Lotus. Via demos, we saw the new Notes 8 client in action. Its all driven off of a completely new template. The Notes client can also open documents, spreadsheets and presentation files within Notes using a new set of viewers. The Notes client also supports the open document format. At this point, I don't know why Lotus would bother to try to convert anyone to something other than Microsoft Office. At this point, isn't it better to just concede that market and move on? But I digress...

There are a lot of nifty enhancements to the mail template, including:

• Ghosted calendar entries, which allow you to see them in your calendar before you accept them
• the ability to import internet calendars
• the ability to view mail threads from the Inbox
• an integrated RSS reader
• a sidebar that lets you quickly access your calendar, Sametime and RSS feeds
• the ability to convert documents to PDF format (I can't remember if this was for just open document format documents, or if it includes MS Office docs as well)
• a thumbnail view of all open tabs in your workspace

Allistair Rennie took the stage and told us about Lotus Quickr. (Note the clevr name.) This product looks like a replacement for both QuickPlace and Domino.Doc. Which makes sense, as those two products hadn't seen many improvements in quite some time. And everyone who's on maintenance for the Notes client gets the personal edition for free. Quickplace users on maintenance get the standard edition for free. One very cool feature shown in the demo is how the Notes client is smart enough to know that you've attached a file from Quickr and ask you if you really want to send the actual file or just a link to the file. This is probably the easiest way to get people to stop sending attachments all over the place!

Larry Bowden came on next and talked about WebSphere Portal. I don't know if it was just me, it seems like the WebSphere talk really sucked the life out of the room. I still get the feeling that Notes/Domino people still don't like WebSphere and don't want to hear anything about it.

Jeff Schick was next, and seemed incredibly caffinated. I think he was trying to wake up the room after all of the WebSphere Portal talk. He went into a new product offering called Lotus Connections, which focuses on Web 2.0 functionality. I think I need to know more about Web 2.0 to know if this product makes sense or not.

All in all, a very good general session. The demos went well, and Lotus clearly has some new product offerings that are interesting. Is Lotus back? Could be!

Its getting late, so I'll blog about the breakout sessions I attended tomorrow morning.

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When my wife dropped me off at NWA @ 8:00 AM, I was worried that I didn't arrive early enough. Alas, I got through the baggage check and screening in about fifteen minutes. So, I walked around aimlessly for a while. On one of my tours I spotted Rob Wunderlich, who was interacting with one of those mobile device-thingies I keep hearing about. He let me in on how cool Notes 8 is going to be, especially the way that some of the Web 2.0 features will work without having a Domino 8 server running in the background.

After a fairly turbulent flight, Rob offered to give me a lift to the hotel in his rental car. This was great because now I can go back to work and tell my boss that I saved the company $20 on shuttle fees. Hey, when you work for a financial institution, every dollar counts!

Anyway, I got to my room and connected to LotuSphere On-line. The only person active at the time was none other than Don from National City. He had just gotten out of a jump-start session and had just been re-creating his contact list. Seems that the list he'd created before he left had been wiped out when the portal crashed. Darn that new technology!

Don let me in on how the conference actually started today. When I'd gone to LotuSphere in the past, Sundays always felt optional. Most of the content was either for Lotus Business Partners, or for people new to the technology. Today, there were Jump Start sessions that started at 8:00 AM. In fact, there were four sessions @ 8:00 AM, and seven @ 10:30 AM. I guess this LotuSphere is all business. No time for casual souvenir shopping--here's some heavy-duty technical presentations to pass the time instead!

Don and I attended the XML + IBM Lotus Domino = DXL Jump Start by Mac Guidera @ 4:00 PM. I admit, I knew most of the material. I'd given a similar presentation at the Advisor Summit last July. But there were some new tidbits that I took away from Mac's very entertaining presentation:

1. the DXLPeek tool at OpenNTF.org
2. that the Tools - DXL Utilities - Exporter option in Domino Designer only works if IE is the default browser
3. the Domino Ajax Db Utility that Mac wrote (Mac said that he unintentionally broke it recently, and will have it fixed by the end of LotuSphere)
4. that Lotus admits there isn't 100% fidelity between the DXL you export and the source of the export. Of course, I fought with this problem earlier in the year
5. that Notes/Domino 7 has a NotesSession.SendConsoleCommand method, and that you can have this method send the results back as XML. This is the underpinnings behind the Web Admin client. Very Nice!
6. that Ben Langhinrichs has been working on exporting Notes rich text to Open Document format

Mac also mentioned that someone had found a way to manipulate the Desktop.ndk as DXL. Boy, if that's true, I'd really like to see that code!

Later in the evening, I met up with several folks I know from the Notes blogging community, as well as members of the Detroit Notes Professionals. Since I didn't bring my camera bag, I don't have a way to get the pictures off of my camera. So, that'll have to wait until I get back home. Sorry, folks!

Odd thing is, I met just about everybody I know at the welcome reception except the three people from my company who are also here. I did a complete circuit of the area several times, but never saw them. I guess finding three people out of 5,000+ is more difficult than I thought! Hopefully I'll see them at breakfast tomorrow.

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After eight months, I'm finally making this picture available to those who were in it!


Pictured from left are: Nathan Freeman, Mac Guidera, Alan Lepofsky, Liz Novak, Bob Novak, Ed Brill, the person who insisted on having this picture taken (me), and John Vaughan (I think)
For a full-size version, click here

I can't remember who took the picture, though. If anyone involved remembers, please let me know and I'll include a "thank-you" here.

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