New Kids on the Blog... :-)
I too (like Ed) am noticing the explosion of IBM'ers bloggin' and the explosion of IBM Lotus product blogs. It's getting hard to follow along on all the subjects!
Deploying your plug-ins in Notes 8 and Sametime 7.5.x
This document discusses the Notes 8 "shelfViews" programming model, and explicitly explains how to contribute a shelf view to the Notes 8 sidebar. There are basically two steps: 1. Create a view and add a contribution to the org.eclipse.ui.views extension point. 2. Contribute the view to the com.ibm.rcp.ui.shelfViews extension point to have it appear in the sidebar. Following these descriptions, we compare the Notes 8 "shelfViews" programming model to the Sametime "miniApps" programming models, such that developers will know how to migrate a plugin from the Sametime client to the Notes 8 client.
Documentation -- Sidebar Contribution Design Pattern and Migrating a Sametime 7.5 plugin over to Notes 8 via the Composite Application blog.