Tag: lotusphere2007

No trial of Portlet Factory?


I talked to a couple of the Websphere folks at Lotusphere 2007 regarding trying out Portlet Factory before buying the product. We have a web application where I can really see the development benefit in moving it to Portal though I have to build a business case for it to justify the spending. To speed up the migration I would like to use Portlet Factory.

Unfortunately there isn’t a trial version available for download and it appears that it would have to be made available to you by someone in the sales organization which doesn’t seem likely in our case. Unfortunately we do not have the PartnerWorld Value Pack either so I cannot simply download the product from there. So much for trying that product out… 😦

It sure looks promising though…

Lotusphere 2007: Sametime 7.5.1 miniApps


As mentioned the other day (Lotusphere 2007: Sametime 7.5 and Notes 8 sidebar compability) you’ll have to change how you do miniApps once Sametime 7.5.1 is released. I went and talked to Dave Schlesinger in the Developers Lab today since he’s in charge (or actually wrote) the Sametime client toolkit. It turns out that the com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.miniApp extension point will be kept for backwards compatibility but you should start writing miniApp plug-ins as ViewParts instead. This will also be the case for “miniApps” destined for the side-shelf in Notes 8.

Apart from discussing extension points we also talked about how one should go about discovering the active environment. We had a good talk about this since we as partners or ISV’s will need to be able to discover whether we are running in Sametime, Notes 8 or simply Expeditor. This discovery should be possible without having to link against or include specific libraries since not all libraries (e.g. notes.jar) will be available on all platforms. We kind of agreed that a system property would the simplest way to go.

I also asked him to please document the extension point schemas better… 🙂