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! ; + )

Lotusphere2007

No comments.