Tag: auslug

It’s been quiet around here – what have I been up to?

Well it has been very quiet on my front both on the blogging side and on twitter. I’ve not been lazy but just have had a lot of stuff on my plate the last couple of months. It all started with a very productive trip to Japan and following that AusLUG to catch up with friends and speak at that user group. Businesswise Japan was especially great and we have hooked up with a new OnTime partner out there. Axcel Coporation is our new spearhead into the Japanese market and they are making great progress and already have an ontimesuite.com-like website available in Japanese (ontimesuite.jp) complete with trials, support and online buying all in Japanese. Impressive.

We’ve received a lot of very nice press coverage in Japan with the latest piece coming this weekend where Mr. Muneyuki Ohkawa of IBM Lotus Japan wrote a very nice summary of OnTime Group Calendar and how he sees it in the Japanese market (Japanese: ノーツのグループカレンダー – OnTime Group Calendar, Google Translated into English: OnTime Group Calendar – Group Calendar of Notes).

Besides our Japanese venture I also spent quite a lot of time working on opening up the API for OnTime Group Calendar (more information here). Part of opening up the API has been recording videos on the usage as well as writing samples as well as completing the API Explorer I started writing in a session at BLUG. Don’t say you cannot get inspired everywhere! 🙂 The API Explorer (demo.ontimesuite.com/apiexplorer) is interesting from a number of perspectives. First of all it affords easy access to the API and easily allows you to try out the API without installing it in your own environment. It’s also written as a web application without any hardcoded piece of information. Every endpoint and every operation and argument for the operations are fully dynamic and read from a JSON file allowing up to easily extend and update the API Explorer when we need to. Very nice if I may say so myself.

As if that wasn’t enough I’ve been very busy with the next release of the plugin based UI’s for OnTime Group Calendar programming a sidebar app (Team-At-A-Glance, out in beta currently), adding private group support, adding meeting and allday appointment support to the Notes 2011 UI. I’ve also completed porting the UI’s to use the newer JSON based OnTime API. Oh and of course finalizing the Japanese support in both clients by fully supporting the Imperial Calendar system. It’s all been great fun.

For the next two weeks I’m doing an IBM Connections widget project which I’m looking very much forward to. It is going to be very cool to do some web and JavaScript development and it will give me an opportunity to use my iWidget Test Harness framework which allows me to easily develop and test iWidgets without running a full IBM Connections or Mashup server – oh yeah – wrote that too… 🙂

Now back to work – happy coding!!

Round up of trip to Tokyo and AusLUG

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.

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.

Going to AusLUG


I’m happy to say that I once more will be joining the AusLUG crew downunder for the Australian Lotus Usergruoup on March 29-30 in Melbourne, Australia. I have been wanting to go all along but we had to make sure it was possible before I started getting my hopes up. So I’m very happy to say that everything has fallen into place and that I’ll be on site for AusLUG 2012! So thrilled.

I’m even more thrilled to say that I’ll be speaking as well. The first session is on Thursday at 2pm where I’ll be giving my “Easy as Pie – Creating Widgets for IBM Connections” session to get you up to speed on developing widgets for IBM Connections. On Friday at 8.30am I’ll be on stage again presenting my “Plug yourself in and your applications will never be the same! (An introduction to plugin development for Notes and Sametime)”. I really hope to see you all for both sessions on topics I think are extremely important to you as a developer.

This year the OnTime team will consist of myself and my manager Jens overgaard Dinesen (@jensovergaard) as we will both be making the trip to Melbourne. On our way (because what isn’t on ones way when going to Oz) we’re stopping for two days in Tokyo to meet with IBM and potential partners for OnTime in Japan. We’re very excited about this trip and hope everything will pan out. We will not be in until Thursday morning at 7am but will be there all of Thursday, Friday and Saturday and looking forward to meeting everyone there.

See ya!

Made it safely home from AusLUG

So I made it safely home from AusLUG with rather uneventful flights. On both flights I sat besides riders from the Australian Paralympic Team heading to the paralympic road bike World Championships in Denmark the week after next. Very cool.

A warm THANK YOU to the AusLUG organizing commitee and to all the atttendees that made the inaugural AusLUG a BIG success.

Stuff learned while at AusLUG

  • Don’t pretend you like the All Blacks when Australia is playing them in rugby them and you’re in Australia
  • Apparently Paul Calhoun knows the FBI
  • There is no such thing as Tam-Tams and the Chit Chat Tim Tam Challenge just may be a real thing
  • The Aussies knows how to drink and throw an excellent event
  • iThings will likely cause the percentage of hearing impaired from 1 in 6 to 1 in 4 over the coming years

AusLUG and my sessions

G’day! I’m now in Sydney – have been since Thursday evening (GMT+10) – and I’m getting ready for AusLUG on Monday. Besides sightseeing I’m fine tuning my session presentations for the event. As always one of the cool things about the LUG’s are catching up with friends and I had dinner with Mat Newman and Paul Calhoun last night. Very nice and from what I hear from Mat it’s going to be a stellar event.

I’m honored to be doing two sessions:

  • How the Jedis do plugin development
  • OSGi – Application Development power Unleashed!

The first one is a tested and proven session to get people up to speed on developing plugins for the Notes, Sametime and Symphony clients. Attendees are taken from bare bones Eclipse to being able to develop sidebar plugins in 45 minutes – it really is that easy! The latter session is a brand new one designed to tell attendees about OSGi, what it is and why they should know and love it. OSGi forms the basis for so many things within the Notes client and the Domino server now (the XPages Extensibility library to just name one) and I find it crucial that you as a Notes/Domino developer know about OSGi.

I’m looking forward to seeing a lot of new faces on Monday and Tuesday and seeing a lot of people at my sessions. Come on in – it isn’t as hard as it sounds.

Leaving for AusLUG tomorrow morning

Is it tomorrow I’m leaving? Yup – sure it is. I’m really psyched that I’m leaving for Sydney and AusLUG tomorrow. I’ve been spending some time today making ready for the trip which I’m really, really, really looking forward to. Of course it will be hard to be without my wife and daughter for 9 days but the trip will make up for it.

See you all down under.

Going to AusLUG? Maybe you should stay an extra day for the Tack-On events!

If you are going to attend the Australian Lotus User Group (AusLUG) in Sydney in August – and you really should – I think you should (at least) consider staying an extra day. The conference is on Monday and Tuesday but on Wednesday there are Tack-On sessions available. Besides presenting sessions at AusLUG I will be hosting a plugin development Tack-on deep-dive/hands-on session titled “Hit the ground running, Eclipse plugins for Lotus Notes and Sametime hands on”. If you want to get started with plugin development for Lotus Notes and/or Sametime I highly recommend you attend this session. Below is the abstract for the Tack-On event:


Eclipse plugin development for the Notes client and the Sametime client does admittedly have a steep learning curve but if you know where to look and get a solid foundation it really does get easier. This Tack-on will get you going with plugins so you can hit the ground running once you are back in your office. We’ll make sure you know the basics and have the foundation in order, before diving into hands-on exercises teaching you how to set up your Eclipse IDE, how to develop sidebar plugins that surface web pages, sidebar plugins that interact with data from web services and how to work with Notes data from your plugin. You’ll also learn how to debug your plugins, how to package it and how to get it rolled out inside your company. In essence everything you need to get going with plugins through practical, hands-on, exercises. This is the sh*t if you want to get going with plugins.

You may read more about the Tack-On events on the session page.