Month: November 2008

Lotusphere 2009: Cool demo – if I may say so myself :-)


My Lotusphere session preparation is in full swing and as previously mentioned this includes preparing demos.

The latest one I have done is about drag’n’drop and how you can use it to do some cool stuff. The demo shows how you can drag text from an e-mail to a sidebar plug-in and have the sidebar plug-in accept the drop. Then when you drag the text from the sidebar plug-in it is converted into a PDF document hence drag’n’drop from the sidebar plug-in results in a file. Text in – file out.

Using Wink I did a Flash movie that shows the demo.

Think how this could be extended to converting product items to PDF for custom quotations on the fly…

Notes 8 – impossible is nothing


Part of going out and preaching the extensible nature of Notes 8 is having a presentation and demos to back it up. The demos I have but I have been working on the presentation and a graphic for the closing slide. You can see the result so far on the right. It’s clear that I’m not a graphics wizard but I did manage to follow a description on how to create a rubber stamp effect on top of the Notes 8 graphics.

Lotusphere 2009: Demo showing off the extensibility of Notes 8


Part of my preparation for Lotusphere is preparing my session presentation as well as preparing demos for the session. One of the demos is an example of the different extension points available to you as a plug-in developer. As a general rule most of what you see in Notes 8 can be extended.


The demo I did this afternoon is a demo that shows how you might extend the search capability of Lotus Notes by adding your own search provider. In lack of better example I did an search provider that searches the IBM whois service. When the plug-in is loaded you see an additional entry in the search box in the upper right corner of the Notes client. When you submit the search I search the IBM whois service, parse the resulting HTML page and present the results in main search result UI. All in all the demo took me 1,5 hours to do with the HTML parsing being the most difficult part.

Imagine a similar plug-in for your organization to search for license codes, product numbers, DHL tracking codes… The possibilities are endless.

If you’re looking for specific demos you would like to see please let me know…

TOP 10 REASONS to upgrade to Notes 8.5 & Domino 8.5

NOTES

  1. Drag/Drop of Text within rich text editor
  2. Offline support for Activities
  3. Choose from multiple addresses for a person in typeahead
  4. Ability to make your own views look like the PIM views
  5. Forward contact as vCard (along with better import/export)
  6. iNotes improvements (e.g. calendar support in Lite mode)
  7. Roaming user available with new file-based option
  8. Support of ID Vault and Single Logon
  9. Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) and Ubuntu Linux support
  10. Calendar federation

DOMINO

  1. Expanded platform choices
  2. Increased reliability
  3. Dynamic group policies
  4. Improved router scalability
  5. I/O use reduction
  6. Domino Configuration Tuner (DCT)
  7. Domino Designer for Eclipse (DDE)
  8. XPages
  9. ID Vault
  10. Domino Attachment and Object Service (DAOS)

Some general reasons to upgrade to Domino 8.5: You can benefit by upgrading to Domino 8.5 even if the clients are on 8.0.x or earlier. Some of the benefits available:

  • Disk savings of 40% – 60%
  • Server consolidation
  • Application development modernization
  • Improved quality of service

Lotusphere 2009: Lineup revealed


As Ed posted the complete lineup for Lotusphere 2009 has been revealed at it looks like an impressive lineup as always. This year is going to be all about Lotus Expeditor, Composite applications, Sametime, Connections and XPages. Actually putting together a schedule incl. managing showcase duty is going to be difficult.

If you’re registered for the conference you should also have received the e-mail that lets you vote for the sessions and BOF’s you would like to see at the conference.

I’m at BP106 in case you wondered… 🙂

Lotusphere 2009: Session abstract and thoughts on the session

As posted previously I’m so fortunate as have been given a session slot at Lotusphere 2009. The session is titled “From Notes Java developer to Notes 8 plugin developer” and have the below abstract.

“Attend this session to learn the basics for leveraging your Notes Java development skills to start building plugins for the Notes 8.x client. Learn about the extensible nature of Notes 8, how to build plugins (not just for the sidebar) and how to create your own extension points to allow your plugins to be extensible. Bring your Eclipse IDE…”

I have loads of contents for the session and I’m trying to figure out how to limit myself and how to best provide all the information I would like to convey. I’m thinking of trying to gather a set of downloads to go with the session and a couple of followup blog posts to furter elaborate on the demos I showed. I already have about 10 fully documented sample sidebar plug-ins for people attending the session and I create more every day showing everything from basic viewers to animation to REST API usage to drag’n’drop to basic Notes data access while retaining a responsive UI.

If you have specific questions let me know by commenting on the blog. I’m very interested in hearing what YOU want to hear about and if YOU have specific questions.

Lotusphere 2009: I’ll be presenting a session

I’m happy to say that I once again will be speaking at Lotusphere. This time the title of the session will be “From Notes Java Developer to Notes 8 Plug-in Developer” and it will be in the Best Practices track. I’m very excited about this and I’m already off trying to figure out how to squeeze 3-5 hours worth of stuff into 1 hour. It should be fun… 🙂

Oh Bruce – wake up!!