Really wanted to highlight Stuarts blog entries on making it easier to find the wikis and info centers we all use on a regular basis. To find out how see Stuarts two blog entries – for wikis see Making it easier to find the Lotus product wikis and for info centers see And while we’re at it… LotusInfocenters.com.
The direct links to the sites are http://lotuswikis.com and http://lotusinfocenters.com.
As you know Lotus Notes is built on Eclipse so following Eclipse plugins and projects makes a lot of sense from a platform point of view. Surfing the other day I stumbled over an Eclipse project that provides a Ribbon IDE for the Eclipse platform. It makes your mind wander to Microsoft centric but it might make sense for other applications incl. Lotus Notes.
For more info see “Eclipse plug-in sightseeing: Ribbon IDE / Eclipse”. There’s also a PDF showing it off.
After what feels like a cascade of widget specifications (iWidget, Google Gadget, Wookie) the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is working on a widget specification to unite them all. If you’re interested in stuff like this I recommend this developerWorks article (W3C widget configuration and packaging (Learn about the candidate specification for W3C widgets)).
Good thing is that we’re still talking JavaScript, CSS and HTML so existing widgets should be pretty easy to port if need be.
Via my blog subscriptions I picked this wiki article on getting started with Lotus Domino for Amazon Web Services (IBM Lotus Domino 8.5.1 on Amazon Web Services: A getting started guide) and decided to look into it. The availability of Lotus Domino on AWS was announced at Lotusphere 2010 so this was a good opportunity to look into it.
The setup steps in the wiki article are easy to follow although the Lotus Domino image isn’t available in the Europe region “data center”. I had to choose US East or US West to be able to select the Lotus Domino AMI (read: “image”). For testing that isn’t an issue but for production you need to consider network latency to your server. If you have other existing AWS servers it may also be an issue as data transfer within the same region is free but isn’t among regional centers which can become costly for maintenance operations etc.
Besides that it looks slick and allows you to easily setup test servers based on templates. Also you only pay for servers as long as they are running so it might be a nice way to test big deployment scenarios. As mentioned earlier on this blog there are a lot of other IBM templates as well (for DB2, Tivoli, Websphere etc.).
Note that Amazon is not alone in this space. As you might have seen in the showcase at Lotusphere Group is also promoting their GroupLive platform as a service (PaaS) product. Some European companies might want to partner with a European company than with an American company.
When developing plugins for Lotus Notes you need to know about Target Platforms in Eclipse. The Target Platform is what describes the functionality that’s available to your plugin in the, you guessed it, target platform. You can use this to simulate your plugin running in a number of different scenarios or products (such as Sametime, Notes etc.).
The other day I found this nice blog series about Target Platforms and thought I would share.
For us in Europe using the ISO standard for week numbering one of the fixes delivered in Notes 8.5.1 FP2 has been a long time coming. Previously when using the calendar regional setting of “Use my operating system regional setting” Notes would still get the week number wrong. Of course the solution was simply to specify “Always use the ISO standard” though it didn’t feel right.
Now with Notes 8.5.1 FP2 there is a fix for this issue and Notes will now behave correctly (at least it does so on my client).
“SPR# FPAI7X7KL3 – There is a preference for how week numbering is handled in the Notes calendar. There are 3 choices for the preference: “Use my operating system regional setting”, “Always use the ISO standard”, and “Custom week numbers”. Prior to this fix, the choice of “Use my operating system regional setting” was not working properly for those users who had their OS regional setting set for a country/language that used the ISO standard. It should be noted that this fix does not make an inspection of the registry settings (on windows platforms). Instead, the fix uses the Java JVM’s settings for week numbering based on the country/language the user’s OS is running in at the time the Notes client is started.
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Saw this link on Planetlotus.org and I think it’s well worth making sure that more Yellowheads know about it. It’s becoming clear that more and more Lotus products are being based on Websphere (which I understand and somewhat support!!) so getting to know Websphere is probably not the worst way to spend a weekend. This PDF from IBM (1 hour course to demystify Websphere Application Server for Lotus is now available) is a crash course introduction to Websphere Application Server, what it’s all about and what the terminology is. I highly recommend you take a peek.
With all the talk we have been having around Lotusphere presentations and the availability of session presentations and video afterwards it’s strangely refreshing to see how Microsoft approach their MIX10 conference which was just held in Las Vegas. If you go to live.visitmix.com/videos you are able to download all presentations and download or stream all sessions as video (WMV for HD and h.264). They even provide a downloader to download all the contents in one go.
All you wanted to know about the Notes directory structure is explained here: “Understanding the IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.x client directory structure” via Stephan Wissel.
“This article explains the changes that were introduced in the IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 File System installation and describes them with respect to the installation, setup/launch/run, and uninstall phases in the client’s life cycle. Also included are answers to some FAQs on the client file system.”
Let me start of by fending you off by saying no I do not mean that we need a way to log into Lotus Connections… 🙂 We have a fair number of those and all are actually well documented and are working just fine. What I mean is that I have been wondering whether we need a specific feature (like Profiles, Bookmarks, Search) to handle the login into Lotus Connections. So why do we need that when we have a working product today?
The Lotus Connections product today have one sore point which is really a hazzle and it’s something that most customers would love to do and that’s customizing the UI. Today customizing the UI can be done albeit it’s a bit tedious and a lot of steps are necessary. It is however relatively easy to centralize the UI files and customize it in one location. All but for one thing. The login page. You can make Lotus Connections look the way you want except for the login page.
To customize the login page today you have to touch 15 files across all features. 15 files!! Are you kidding me?! The main issue is that every single feature has it’s own login page located deep within each feature code base (as a JSP which is somewhat readily editable). Also editing this login page means you have to hand-carry the customizing across upgrades.
So that’s when I thought about having an extra feature that handles the logging in. So instead of having a login page per feature you’d have a single login page in a single feature. Customizing that one would be trivial as it’s just a single JSP and it could maybe be sourced as an include from the HTTP server where all the CSS and image files are already stashed. I know there are stuff to consider such that SSO would have to be enabled among features (plus probably a host of other things I didn’t think of) but I think it’s an interesting idea. From my limited knowledge of the Lotus Connections innards it looks reatively easy to implement.
Simplified I know but interesting. Comments?!