I was very happy and humbled when I received word that I have been renominated and reappointed as an IBM Champion for IBM Collaboration Solutions for 2013. I’ll do my best to live up to this great honor and continue my evangelism for the platforms we all use and love.
Thank you!
The IBM developerWorks newsletter was effectively retired on Friday which really bums me out. I’ve using the newsletter as an easy weekly way of following along with what happened on developerWorks and I’m going to miss the ease with which I could do that. The “new way” (for me at least) is to use the social media outlets (Twitter, Facebook) or the feeds available. I’m going for the latter and just added a series of feeds using the feeds page to my Google Reader. RIP developerWorks newsletter…
I was really happy to receive confirmation yesterday night that the session that I submitted with Ryan Baxter was accepted for the Best Practices track. I also co-presented with Ryan in 2011 on plugin development (they are cool you know!) and it will be great to be back on stage with Ryan.
The session is titled “In The Land Of Social Apps The API Is King” and will be all about developing API’s for your (existing) applications. The mantra these days is really “no api no fun” and it will be increasingly clear as you start your venture into supporting platforms such as IBM Connections and of course for IBM Notes Social Edition. The abstract of the session is below.
“It doesn’t matter if you are a developer in a large enterprise or a small startup – all developers face the same challenges. You need to build apps that run on multiple platforms, are easily deployable, flexible, and provide value to your end users. So how do you do that? The answer, APIs! Good APIs help you build desktop, web, and mobile apps, as well as provide tight integration into different platforms such as Notes, iNotes, and Connections. In this session we will show you best practices for designing and building APIs as well provide real world use cases for how it will help you build top notch apps. So whether you’re into XPages, iWidgets or OpenSocial gadgets for Notes Social Edition or IBM Connections this session is for you!”
I really look forward to seeing everybody in Orlando and at the session.
If you’re part of the Notes/Domino community you are probably excited today!
Unless you’ve been living under a rock you have seen and/or heard the announcements from IBM yesterday about the upcoming IBM Notes and IBM Domino Social Edition. If not do yourself a favor and go watch the recording. And a new major release – no longer is it 8.5.4 but 9.0!
I’m SO pleased that IBM/Lotus/ICS FINALLY took the plunge and stripped the “Lotus” from the product – not that I dislike the Lotus brand but we (the community and the customers) have been in a strange state of flux for so long. From Lotus, to IBM Collaboration Solutions (ICS) to IBM Social Business. We’ve been wondering what the product we love and work with every day would be called or whether it would actually go away and be replaced with some “Websphere thingy”. With the announcement of IBM Notes and IBM Domino Social Edition yesterday IBM finally tore of the Band-Aid that should probably have been torn off back when IBM bought Lotus (or at least shortly thereafter).
With the move to IBM Notes and IBM Domino we can move past all that and look forward knowing that there’s at least a 3 year roadmap and the product isn’t going anywhere. With the best (and only?) public webcast in a long time IBM made it official! IBM has got our back!
And even better – we will also have a PUBLIC beta (see the sign up form). The “public” part is important – no longer is the beta and code drops for the select few of us in the design partner programs but for all. So be sure to take this opportunity and sign up for the beta. Download it. Use it. And most important of all – tell IBM what you think!
This is a webcast not to miss. IBM will discuss the next version of Notes and also discuss the open beta that will start soon!! And as one who has been using the next Notes version for a while I can honestly say that you want to see this. Below is the announcement from IBM.
“Join IBM on November 13th at 10am Eastern Time US for an important series of announcements and previews. Learn how IBM Lotus Notes and IBM Lotus Domino, better than any other platform investment, positions you to create a more effective workforce. During this special broadcast, we will introduce our new IBM Notes and Domino Social Edition beta program, and updated product roadmaps, that truly demonstrate IBM’s strong commitment to the Lotus Notes and Domino platform. Speakers include Ed Brill, Director for Social Business and Collaboration Solutions, IBM; Scott Souder, Program Director for Notes, iNotes and IBM Connections Mail and Daniel Lieber, Innovative Ideas Unlimited. And, stay afterwards for a special edition of the IBM Collaboration Solutions monthly community call to discuss what you just heard. “
Speakers:
Ed Brill, Director for Social Business and Collaboration Solutions, IBM
Scott Souder, Program Director for Notes, iNotes and IBM Connections Mail
Daniel Lieber, Innovative Ideas Unlimited, Inc.
Date: Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2012
Time: 7:00 am PT / 10:00 am ET / 4:00 pm CET
The agenda for the upcoming Social Connections IV event in Amsterdam is now public and I’m happy to say that it includes yours truly. I will do a 30 minute introduction to the joys of widget development for IBM Connections. I’m pretty sure that there are still slots available for the event so if you’re in Europe on 30 November and you’re working with IBM Connections you really should join us. Oh – and bring your customers…
Explore how progress happens with the THINK exhibit app, for kids, innovators and forward thinkers.
From the very beginning, we’ve sought to improve the way we live. We’ve worked to make our world more efficient, accessible, and safe. While each leap of progress has required its own intelligence and hard work, many seem to follow a distinct, repeatable pattern.
The app is available in the Apple AppStore.
Starting June 2012 customers are “requested” to start opening IBM Serbice Requests (SR) using the electronic support portal and from 2013 only electronic entry will be possible for severity 2, 3 and 4. This is in no way a surprise and makes IBM move funds from the probably costly phone based support they are offering now and probably also makes a lot more sense for supplying all the relevant information. This is all well and good so long the quality of the data entry forms are top notch. More information can be found at the announcement.
For one of our products we are using the Sametime Web API which is a great way to Sametime enable applications outside the Notes client. Basically it uses the web container running within Notes Standard to provide a HTTP API for Sametime awareness. Great. We had an issue however after upgrading from Notes 8.5.2 to Notes 8.5.3 where Sametime awarenss stopped working but thanks to the design partner program and the help of Khuan Hoe Kong from IBM we’re now back in the business. As this issue may bite others I thought I would post it here.
Our problem was that we were using the “mystatus” and “getShortStatus” API calls to get awareness status that is we were using local calls like http://localhost:59449/stwebapi/mystatus/ and http://localhost:59449/stwebapi/getShortStatus. These calls returned JSON we could use to get awareness status and as previously mentioned these calls worked fine in Notes 8.5.2 but after going to Notes 8.5.3 (and hence a newer version of the embedded Sametime client) they stopped working. Apparently these calls were considered a security risk so there were blocked and needed to be unblocked in order to work. Below is the response from IBM.
For security reasons, many of the WEBApi functions are disabled by default, including the mentioned two. To enable the function, add a preference to the plugin_customization.ini in the following format:
com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.webapi.<function>Enabled=true
For example, to enable the getstatusshort, you would add this preference:
com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.webapi .getstatusshortEnabled=true
To enabled all the Web API functions you can use the global override:
com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.webapi/ enableAllWebApisOverride=true
The details of this change may be found in ST8.5.1 SDK.
While the above solution works it requires the customer to configure the client and hence wont work for us. The funny thing is that while the getstatusshort method is blocked for “security reasons” the getstatus method works just fine. Only difference is that the getstatus method returns more info. Makes no sense.
My main reason for considering this a bad approach is that I get an HTTP code 200 back but the response is empty/invalid. That seems wrong. A better REST solution would be to return a 403 Forbidden with an explanation why. What would in my mind have been the correct solution. Hope that can be incorporated into a future release.
But it works now so I will go back under my rock.
Had a customer report the above issue and have it fixed by IBM so I thought others might benefit from it. The issue has been fixed as IBM SPR# KBRN8AKKA9. The technote is 1449825 and contains a lot of good info. Setting notes.ini “Disable_Random_RW_File_ATTR=1” fixes the issue.
“After Domino opens many NSF files in quick succession during a backup, the Virtual Address Space of the OS system cache may be completely used up (for example, 1TB of data may be used in this OS cache). Successive calls into the OS cache manager to get memory from the OS system cache then results in mapping/unmapping of views from the system cache. These mapping/unmapping operations takes a lot of CPU time and as a result shows as high OS CPU usage. In addition, because the large OS system cache may now reside on the disk (the RAM is not large enough to hold the OS system cache) this results in significant I/O on the system.”