Lotus Connections 2.0.1 available

As posted by Luis Benitez Lotus Connections 2.0.1 as been shipped.

This quarter we shipped Lotus Connections 2.0.1 (on Halloween). If you are upgrading, you can download it from IBM’s Fix Central. One question that I’m continuously asked is: “what’s new in Lotus Connections v2.0.1?”. Well, here’s a list of what I’ve gathered:

  • Quickr integration with Activities – Push-button publication from an Activity into one of your Quickr Places for permanent document storage
  • Quickr integration with Communities – Allows communities to use Quickr as their content repository and document collaboration platform.
  • Enhanced person card
  • E-mail is no longer a required attribute (great for external implementations)
  • New feeds inside of Communities
  • New feeds for forums
  • New APIs for Activities, Blogs, Communities, Homepage (federated search), Profiles
  • Hidden support for STLinks (more about this later)
  • User Interface and Usability enhancements, for example:
    • Can now save members as part of an activity template
    • Drag-n-drop activities entries
    • Uploading images to a blog is now easier
    • Improvements in the Activities widget
    • Easier way to work with multiple bookmarks
    • A couple of bug fixes

Dragging Sametime buddies around

I have been playing a little with the drag’n’drop support in the Notes 8.5 beta client and found out that a VCard is created the you drag a Sametime contact to a place that accepts dragging files to (this probably also works in earlier versions). This means that dragging a Sametime buddy to the desktop will create a VCard for that person. Nice! Dragging the buddy to an e-mail (or other place which accepts text transfer) will create a mailto-link.

Just one of those nice, time saving features…

How I survive using Notes 8 sidebar plugins on my 4:3 display at home

Lets face it! The advent of Notes 8 and the sidebar really requires you to use a wide-screen display if you want to keep the sidebar expanded and have some screen real estate left for mail and business applications. This is a major head ache for me when I’m in my home office as my primary display is a 4:3 (i.e. traditional) display and my wide-screen laptop is the secondary display. I found a solution that works for me though.

The way I solve this is by detaching the sidebar plugins I use the most (TwitNotes and Sametime) and have them open in a new window (see the part menu for that option) and then collapsing the sidebar. Now I have the screen real-esate I need on the primary display and my main sidebar plugins visible all the time on the secondary display.

That works like a charm for me.

Do you work across timezones?

Well if you do, do you then use the new feature of Notes 8.0.2 / Notes 8.5 to show an alternate timezone in your calendar? I do and I find it very nice that it’s easier to see across the timezones.

To set it up open the preferences, navigate to “Calendar and To Do/Regional Settings” and specify the alternate timezone in the middle box (cleverly named Timezone). The change doesn’t require a restart of the Notes client. Below is my setup.

Doing Java in Notes? – make sure you know about JavaCompilerTarget

I blogged about the JavaCompilerTarget back in August last year when Notes 8 came out as you needed it to enable Java 5 in Domino Designer. Last week some nice new info on this notes.ini setting came my way in the Design Partner forum for Domino NEXT. If you’re doing Java development in Notes you would want to read on.

And yes – I did check with IBM whether it was okay to blog it. Since this info is on its way out in technote (technote 1320401) it was fine that I blogged it.

JavaCompilerTarget

In Notes/Domino 8.5, you can set the JavaCompilerTarget INI variable to any value from 1.1 through 1.6. Here is a draft of the documentation (Note: In the following text, we refer to JDK 1.6, which is also known as JDK 1.6.0 and JDK 6.0.)

By default, Notes/Domino 8.5 utilizes JDK 1.6 to compile and run agents, but it limits language features to maintain backwards compatibility through JDK 1.2, to allow agents to run on earlier Notes/Domino installations (and, more generally, with any JVM version earlier than the target flag), regardless of whether the new language features are actually used in the agent’s code (e.g., setting JavaCompilerTarget=1.6 could introduce the possibility of having an agent recompiled and replicated to a V8.0 server, and then failing to run). Additionally, problems could arise editing and saving agents compiled in Notes/Domino installations that are not using the same INI setting.

Developers must override the default behavior if they wish to use features specific to different JDKs. The default behavior is equivalent to the setting
JavaCompilerTarget=1.2

In Notes/Domino V8.5, the developer may specify any JavaCompilerTarget from 1.1 to 1.6. (In each case, the -source flag is the latest source that can be specified with a particular -target flag.)

The developer may also specify
JavaCompilerTarget=CurrentJavaVersion
which means the target flag will be synced to the version in future Notes/Domino releases (e.g., if some future Notes/Domino version were to include JDK 1.9, then “JavaCompilerTarget=CurrentJavaVersion” would create “-target 1.9”).

JavaCompilerTarget Resulting compiler flags Agent would run on Notes/Domino versions
1.1 -source 1.3
-target 1.1		 V5.0 or later
1.2 -source 1.3
-target 1.2		 V6.0 or later
1.3 -source 1.3
-target 1.3		 V6.0 or later
1.4 -source 1.4
-target 1.4		 V7.0 or later
1.5 -source 1.5
-target 1.5		 V8.0 or later
1.6 -source 1.6
-target 1.6		 V8.5 or later
CurrentJavaVersion -source 1.6
-target 1.6		 V8.5 or later

Remember that these settings may prevent compiled agents from running on some earlier Notes/Domino installations. Therefore, it is suggested that organizations use a consistent setting across machines.

Developers who will not be using language features specific to recent JDKs are encouraged to keep the default Notes/Domino behavior to maximize backward compatibility.

Remember that XPages is built in JSF

As you might know the new XPages design element of Notes/Domino 8.5 is based on a Sun Java technology called Java Server Faces or JSF for short. As such many techniques from JSF development can be reused in XPage development why it might be beneficial for you to follow some of the JSF litterature as well.

As always the newsletters from Sun is a good place to start and just recently there was two articles on composite UI components in JSF. You can find part 1 and part 2 on the web.

Update (4 Dec 2008): Corrected typo from “Java Server Pages” to “Java Server Faces”.

Sametime Web API disabled by default

Apparently the Sametime Web API is disabled by default (at least as of Notes 8.5 beta 2). This is important since Lotus Connections and other newer wen products from Lotus use the Sametime Web API in the Sametime Connect client / Sametime embedded in Notes for awareness. For more info see this post).

To enable the Sametime Web API do as follows:

  1. Close Notes
  2. Find your plugin_customization.ini File (in <Notes binary directory>/framework/rcp)
  3. Open the file in an editor and toggle the value of “com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.webapi/startWebContainer” from false to true (of the line is not there simply add it)
  4. Save, close and start Notes