Lotusphere 2007: Sametime 7.5.1 miniApps


As mentioned the other day (Lotusphere 2007: Sametime 7.5 and Notes 8 sidebar compability) you’ll have to change how you do miniApps once Sametime 7.5.1 is released. I went and talked to Dave Schlesinger in the Developers Lab today since he’s in charge (or actually wrote) the Sametime client toolkit. It turns out that the com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.miniApp extension point will be kept for backwards compatibility but you should start writing miniApp plug-ins as ViewParts instead. This will also be the case for “miniApps” destined for the side-shelf in Notes 8.

Apart from discussing extension points we also talked about how one should go about discovering the active environment. We had a good talk about this since we as partners or ISV’s will need to be able to discover whether we are running in Sametime, Notes 8 or simply Expeditor. This discovery should be possible without having to link against or include specific libraries since not all libraries (e.g. notes.jar) will be available on all platforms. We kind of agreed that a system property would the simplest way to go.

I also asked him to please document the extension point schemas better… 🙂

Lotusphere 2007: The power of DXL (AD503)


Apart from being told that the DXL implementation in Notes/Domino 8 will be able to surface the source code and WSDL from web services the session was below my expectations.

The fact that the source code of web services will be surfaced will make LotusScript.doc able to pick it up which is nice since I’ve had problems with this in the past (Domino 7 web services woes). I talked to the developers about this last year and it appears I’ve been heard. Thank you for that!

Lotusphere 2007: Lotusphere Online runs Notes 8 and Lotus Connections


I got pleasently surprised as I logged into Lotusphere Online on-site for the first time yesterday. Last year the site used DWA but this year we’re running Notes 8 beta 1. Nice!! It’s cool to be able to play around with it on your own pace. I didn’t play with it too much but I already dig the new thumbnail functionality.

Apart from Notes 8 there’s also a running instance of the newly announced Lotus Connections. Very nice!! Seems like Lotus is really listening and giving us Lotus geeks access to the real stuff. Me like it… 😉

I know I’m gonna get in trouble for saying this but who needs a Mac when you can run Notes 8 on SUSE Linux Desktop (SLED) with the “cube-desktop” functionality?

Lotusphere 2007: Run your Update Sites from Domino (ID211)


Just attended ID211 by Thomas Gumz from IBM on how you can use Domino as the source for your Update Site to provision features and plug-ins to Sametime 7.5, Expeditor and Notes 8. Lotus has built a really cool template, shipping with Notes 8, that allows you to run an Update Site out of a Notes database instead of using a file system based site. Very cool.

Thomas also mentioned that in Notes 8 you can provision features and plug-ins using NRPC instead of HTTP for remote sites. This will only work against Domino 8 servers since this is a new call that has been added to the NRPC protocol. The URL syntax will be something like nrpc://intranet.company.com/_<replica_id>/updatesite.nsf instead of the http:// equivalent.

Lotusphere 2007: Sametime 7.5 and Notes 8 sidebar compability


After INV107 I talked to Kevin Cavanaugh since I wanted to hear if the the extension point (com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.imhub.miniApps) we currently use for miniApps in Sametime 7.5 will be the same as we should use in Notes 8 sidebar applications.

It turns out that the extension point name will be changed with the Sametime 7.5.1 release. From thereon it will be frozen and the extension point name will be the same for Sametime 7.5.x miniApps and Notes 8 sidebar applications.

A small detail worth noticing…