Tag: japan

Back from loads of travel – thoughts on the Leadership Alliance and Tokyo

So I’m back from a 16 day travel which had me home for 50 odd hours after the 5 days away. First Boston for the Leadership Alliance in Boston which of course – as seen other places on the interwebs is very hush hush – and then Tokyo for 8 days to meet up with our OnTime partner there. The trip was far easier from a jetlag perspective than what I had expected but then again I usually cope with jetlag very well. I did come back with pneumonia though 😦

As mentioned what happens at the Leadership Alliance stays at the Leadership Alliance but suffice to say that it was indeed VERY interesting. If you are wondering whether IBM Connect 2013 will be worth attending it would be a resounding YES!!!! from my point of view. The message is better than it has been for a long while if you ask me. Of course IBM still needs to execute on it but man it’s looking good!

In Tokyo we joined our partner at the booth at the annual ITPro Expo. I’ll do a separate blog post on our adventures in Japan and how the event went as it really deserves it. Also it should be a lesson to many IBM Lotus Notes/Domino markets out there as it clearly shows why Japan is a thriving and vibrant Notes/Domino market. They do so much stuff right marketingwise and leaves so many markets in the dust. Including Denmark. Really. It was very interesting to see.

Now once I’m off this pneumonia thing I will be back in full swing. Stay tuned.

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!!