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Round up of trip to Tokyo and AusLUG

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:37:21 GMT

I'm back in the office after two weeks away for going to Tokyo, AusLUG in Melbourne, Australia, and then Easter vacation. While the latter is of no particular interest to anyone (I think) my trip might be. Let us get the most obvious thing out of the way first - we did a lot of flying. Besides having been in Antwerp, Belgium, on the Thursday/Friday for BLUG before going on this trip we went Copenhagen-Singapore-Tokyo-Singapore-Melbourne-Singapore-Frankfurt-Copenhagen in 8 days! The trip earned us about 27000 air miles and with the circurmference of the Earth being 24900 miles we actually went around the World and then some.

View Full Size Travel Map at Travellerspoint

The trip started out in Tokyo where we had 2 days (Monday and Tuesday) of meetings with potential OnTime partners and with IBM. Great meetings and very good to meet local partners and learn about Japanese culture and language. Nothing is simple in Japan let alone the calendar. In Japan they actually have four (4) calendars that they use those being the international (the one we use in most of the World), the Imperial (based on the Japanese emperors), the Buddhist calendar and the 6 day Japanese calendar. The latter is not used in business but it does mean that a calendar product will need to support all if not most of them. At least at the UI layer. Besides business we had some time although not a lot for a look at Tokyo and to sample the local cuisine. While we unfortunately didn't get to try Kobe steak (top of the list for next time) we did have local sushi (a must) and sampled sashimi with raw chicken and raw liver. Many thanks to the IBM'ers we met and to Atsushi Sato (@acchan777) for taking us out to dinner on the Monday.

On Wednesday we flew on to Melbourne via Singapore and landed early Thursday morning (7am). After a cab ride (through what can best be characterized as chaotic traffic) and a quick shower we were on scene at AusLUG to catch the last 30 minutes of the keynote. Not bad planning.

The event was excellent both from a technical, business and personal perspective. It's always good to go to interesting sessions, learn new stuff and meet up with the friends I got at the inaugural AusLUG in Sydney. I spoke at two sessions - one on Thursday at 2pm and one on Friday morning at 8.30am where I slept through 3 alarms only to wake at the calendar reminder I set for 30 minutes before I should present! Let me just say that I didn't shower before the the session but I made it (we stayed only 5-10 minutes away on foot) so all was good. Lesson learned? Set multiple timers - and go easy (easier) on the drinks the night before. :-) The night before was a very fun one as we went drinking after the AusLUG dinner. Great night out.

After the conference on Friday night we went to see "footy" at the MCG as part of the speaker/sponsor thank-you-event together with approx. 79000 other nice people. And boy was it excellent fun! Lets just say that if I'm invited to go see footy in the future I'll go anytime! Great event and a great conclusion to our trip.

Saturday we went for a stroll about the city, chilled at the apartment, watched some footy on the telly and had some bieeerh (think that's how the native spell beer) before we headed to the airport for our 1am fligth back home. What a trip - many memories and many good oppportunities to persue in the Japanese market.

The Java native2ascii tool (also important for you XPages geeks)

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 07:59:25 GMT

To prepare for our upcoming trip to Tokyo I've been working on a Japanese translation of our OnTime Group Calendar 2011 client for Notes based on Java plugins. The internationalization engine (i18n) was already in place so it was merely a matter of doing the translation (thanks to Google Translate and friends) and then adding language files to our API. In that process one becomes very thankful of UTF-8 and the fact that Java works natively in UTF-8.

Please note that the approach discussed in this post translates (excuse the pun) directly to making translation files for XPages as well.

Using the Japanese translation the GUI looks like the below screen shot (cropped of course).

(click the image for a large version)

The funny thing about most non-Latin languages is that even though you have the translations it's hard to impossible to write the characters yourself. And once you have the words getting them into the language files which are mere property files. Take the weekdays in Japanese as an example:
月曜日
火曜日
水曜日
木曜日
金曜日
土曜日
日曜日

Because we're running the OnTime Group Calendar out of Notes and because Notes is fully double-byte compatible we could actually just add the Japanese characters directly to the translation document. Instead however we opted to use the Java way that is the native2ascii tool.

The native2ascii tool is shipped with the JDK and lets you translate a file containing native characters to their UTF-8 equivalent escape sequences. So having my Japanese characters in japanese_source.txt and wanting to store the result in japanese_result.txt I simply ran the following command:

native2ascii -encoding japanese_source.txt japanese_result.txt

The encoding parameter specifies the character encoding of the source file (here japanese_source.txt). The result is something like this:
\u6708\u66dc\u65e5
\u706b\u66dc\u65e5
\u6c34\u66dc\u65e5
\u6728\u66dc\u65e5
\u91d1\u66dc\u65e5
\u571f\u66dc\u65e5
\u65e5\u66dc\u65e5

Chose escape sequences go directly into the language property file and when read into a Java property file they are automatically translated into Japanese. Sweet!

OnTime Group Calendar for Social Business

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 10:12:41 GMT

As part of the OnTime Group Calendar we're building a series of widgets for IBM Connections to allow easier collaboration - the more we collaborate the more we need access to accurate, updated, calendar data. This puts OnTime Group Calendar smack in the middle of the move to social business. We are getting ready to release the widgets as part of the product and we have the first demo ready.

The integration into the Profiles feature is easily understandable and shows the calendar of the user right there on the profile page as shown on the right. Click the image to see a larger version.

However the real power lies in the integration into communities. Here we bring the calendar of community members into the community is a text list UI and a full graphical viewer based UI as in the rest of our clients. For communities we are also offering a Social Scheduling widget to allow you to find available meeting times and book meetings with community members plus people you may only know based on tags (keywords) or location. Very powerful and possible due to the API offered for OnTime Group Calendar.

(click the image for a larger version)

Please note that everywhere the access to calendar data is only available if the querying user has sufficient access.

The demo below outlines how OnTime Group Calendar for Social Business brings calendar data into IBM Connections in the Profiles feature and in the Communities feature.

All videos are available on the ontimesuite YouTube channel.

20% off OnTime Meeting Manager until December 2011

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 07:21:49 GMT

(click to learn more)

OnTime Meeting Manager is your one-stop organizer dedicated to making the process of organizing meetings quick and efficient, leaving you free to concentrate on what's central to your business.

Booking rooms for meetings or even teleconferences should be an easy process. Most people would agree on that. Adding catering to the booking should not be much harder. However often organisations find that handling this procedure is a lengthy process that absorbs much more time than imagined.

If you consider some of the hidden "time consumers" like handling the entire approval workflow for catering and facility management it becomes clearer why this is true.

OnTime Meeting Manager is targeted at turning the entire process from invitation, meeting attendance, delivering catering and at the end doing the cost accounting into one fully integrated process.

New IBM Connections Kick-Start offering

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 11:53:31 GMT

IntraVision is happy to offer a fixed price IBM Connections Kick-Start offering to get you started with IBM Connections per the entitlement offered by IBM as part of the Notes 8.5.3 maintenance release. At our Social Business event on Thursday 27 October (there's still time to register) we will be happy to discuss this offering as well as our new OnTime for IBM Connections product with you. More information about event may be found as part of our online newsletter (linked below).

IBM Connections Kick-Start and Social Business event with Stuart J. McRae (in Danish).

Stommunity - now released as open source on OpenNTF.org

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 11:57:34 GMT

As you might recall we at IntraVision some time back quit running Lotus Sametime on-premises and switched to LotusLive. This wasn't without issues and I also blogged about the apparent lack of public groups in my "Using LotusLive for Sametime - 2 months in" post a couple of months ago. After experiencing this issue I talked to Erik Vos from RealConnections in the Netherlands at NLLUG. Erik was also having the same problem for his SaaS customers so we worked together to develop a proof-of-concept Notes sidebar plugin called Stommunity to work around the issue. The name Stommunity plays on the words Sametime (ST) and (LotusLive) Community.

So what does the plugin do?

The plugin synchronizes your LotusLive communities with your Lotus Sametime client and creates private groups based on the LotusLive communities you are a member of (and that you select for synchronization). This mimics the missing public group feature of LotusLive Sametime. The below screenshot shows a Sametime client with 4 communities synchronized from LotusLive.

So how does the plugin work?

The plugin sits as a sidebar plugin in your Lotus Notes client and monitors your Sametime client for when it logs into LotusLive Sametime. Once a login is detected it reads the communities the active user is a member of using the LotusLive REST API and shows a list of the communities. The user may then select the communities to synchronize with Sametime. The below screenshot shows the Stommunity plugin waiting for the user to log into Sametime.

Once logged in the communities is read from LotusLive. In the below screenshot you can see that the user is a member of a couple of communities but only one is synchronized with Sametime.

After selecting an additional community and clicking Apply the community is synchronized to Sametime and a private group is created. The below screenshot shows the Sametime client after synchronizing the BlueExtend community with the Sametime client.

So why only a proof-of-concept and not a ready-to-roll plugin?

While developing the plugin we discussed the license implications of a plugin like this. When you sign up for LotusLive Engage you receive a Sametime Entry license which means you may not use the Sametime API which again means that a plugin like this cannot work (from a licensing standpoint). That alone made the project a dead-end and after working a bit with IBM on this it became clear that changing the licensing agreement wasn't in the books. Due to this we are releasing the plugin as a proof-of-concept with open source on OpenNTF hoping that it may inspire someone.

Looking at the plugin as it is now I see a lot of potential. Of course the selection of communities needs to be pushed into the preferences but as a LotusLive customer it would be really cool to have. I imagine an auto-sync option being added as well as an option to just sync all and change (or remove) the prefix I automatically add now ("LL Community:"). Think of having a policy option to automatically make certain, company wide, communities be synchronized to all users (or a set of users). Maybe even controlled from within LotusLive. Now that would be cool and bridge the gap between the products. One could even argue that a plugin like this should be a standard component that should come bundled with LotusLive Notes.

Anyways - I hope it may inspire the LotusLive teams.

The Stommunity plugin may be found on OpenNTF.org and the code may be downloaded from the SVN repository. See below for links to each.

Links and resources

Notes 2011 Accordion widget

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 11:48:20 GMT

Part of the OnTime Group Calendar Notes 2011 client is the option to only display favorite groups instead of all public groups. To switch between the two views I wrote a small animated accordion control. Nicely animated and double-buffered. Loving it!

Why choosing Eclipse for Notes 8 was the right choice

Wed, 18 May 2011 12:02:00 GMT

It's been quiet around the blog the last few months because I have been neck deep in work getting a new product ready. I'm slowly resurfacing and as blogged about the last few days we (OnTime) are now shipping the latest release of the group calendar product called OnTime Group Calendar 2011. We showed of the UI's at Lotusphere 2011 but now we're shipping and are ready to go.

Besides having a brand new backend with it's own interesting features and performance improvements (see here) the product also ships with a brand new, all Java, Notes UI that runs full screen inside the Notes client. The client is called OnTime Group Calendar 2011 - Notes (or Notes 2011) and is a good showcase of what's possible inside the Notes client and why choosing Eclipse as the platform for Notes 8 was important. We no longer have to use separate clients for our UI but can run it inside Notes where it belongs. The below screenshot shows the UI running inside Notes 8.5.2.

(click the image for a larger version)

The Since the group calendar now runs full screen (a perspective in Eclipse Java parlance) it's launched from the Open menu in Notes. Once opened it adds its own top level OnTime menu and loads data using the new OnTime Group Calendar API. One of the cool things about the UI being in Java is that it does away with the traditional Notes view limitations (for instance one document per row) and allows for some super cool, pixel level, UI drawing. It also allows us to read from an API layer that abstracts the actual reading and providing of data from the application itself and allows us to reuse the API in all our UI's (Notes 2011, Discovery 2011, Web 2011, Mobile 2011 and Team-At-A-Glance 2011 (sidebar)).

The UI allows the user to switch between a day view (see above) where the user may choose to see from 1 to 7 days to a week view to a month view. The week view for instance gives a very nice overview of the calendar of the people you work with.

In all the views you may filter the people shown using groups and legends. Legends are what we call the types of appointments/meetings being shown. On the server you configure what makes an appointment be put in what legend and may be based on category, type or a formula you specify. Once you select one or more legends the viewer is filtered to highlight the appointments/meetings that match the legend. Below I have chosen to only see external meetings.

(click the image for larger version)

Besides the cool and slick UI (if I have to say so myself) we also provide some nice new functionality. If you have write to a calendar (your own or a colleagues) you may drag'n'drop appointments in the group calendar. The below screen shot shows me dragging an appointment from Susanne to Saiful.

The Notes 2011 also allows for full Lotus Sametime integration and customization using Eclipse based extension points but that's a topic for another day.

If you like to try out OnTime Group Calendar 2011 you may obtain an unrestricted, 30 day, trial. Simply drop us an e-mail at sales@intravision.dk. We'll even be happy to offer you 20% discount for all new licenses purchased in May or June as an introductory offer. Just tell us that you learned about OnTime on lekkimworld.com and we'll discount your purchase.