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.

Lotusphere2007

1. Lance Spellman01/22/2007 03:00:25 AM
Homepage: http://www.workflowstudios.com

I know Mac fairly well and he may have been referring to a conversion of the Notes desktop into XML by the folks at Client Genie. They have a wonderful tool for complete management of the Notes client by an admin and one of the ways they do it is via gathering the desktop data and transmitting it back to a db on the server as xml. They have a ped at Sphere. Ask for Florian or Franz and check it out.

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