Per Henrik Lausten

Intravision is hosting two IBM Connect 2013 Update seminars in Copenhagen on February 25 and in Århus March 6 where speakers from Intravision and from IBM will share news from IBM Connect 2013.

I am happy to have been invited by Intravision to speak about news from IBM Connect around XPages. I will be speaking about the IBM Social Business Toolkit, integration between XPages and IBM Connections, Embedded Experiences and more.

Remember to register if you are interested in attending one of the seminars.

Here are my impressions from the IBM Connect 2013 conference that I attended last week.

Social collaboration
IBM connections 4.5 is coming this March and is improved in many areas such as the new file sync feature.

Customers with a valid IBM Domino entitlement can continue to use IBM Connections Files and Profiles features for free.

Embedded applications in IBM Notes, IBM iNotes (web mail) and IBM Connections activity streams make it possible to act on business applications directly within the context of your mail or your activity stream.

Business applications
The IBM platform for building powerful business web applications for the IBM Collaboration Solutions platform across desktop, tablets and smartphones is XPages running on IBM Domino 9.0 or IBM XWork Server 9.0.

The platform contains many improvements such as including the XPages Extension Library in the default server and client install. XPages Extension LIbrary makes development and deployment of modern business applications faster and more powerful.

The license for IBM XWork Server 9.0 is now $1,000 per 8 databases which further makes the IBM XWork Server a very competitive platform for business web applications.

The IBM Social Business Toolkit (IBM SBT) allows you to integrate the different IBM Collaboration Solutions products. You can as an example use  the SBT to create embedded experiences in XPages that runs in the activity stream of IBM Connections. You can check out the features of IBM SBT in the Social Business Toolkit Playground.

Mail
IBM Domino 9.0, IBM Notes 9.0 and IBM iNotes 9.0 continues to be the center of mail and messaging.

IBM Domino 9.0 makes it easy to migrate from Microsoft Exchange by using the Domino Migration Utility which is part of the 9.0 installation.

IBM Connections Mail makes it possible to use mail directly within the context of IBM Connections.

IBM Notes and IBM Domino
IBM Notes 9.0 Social Edition and IBM Domino 9.0 arrives in March 2013. The roadmap for IBM Domino has detailed plans until 2015 - showing a strong commitment from IBM towards IBM Notes and Domino.

The IBM Notes 9.0 client comes with many improvements in areas such as usability, productivity, and social collaboration - including a browser-based version of IBM Notes (Notes browser plugin) for use in combination with for example iNotes to be able to access applications that do not have a web frontend. IBM Notes 9.0 Social Edition also provides an activity stream for your IBM Connections updates and for embedded experiences for custom-built business applications.

The IBM Domino 9.0 server adds lots of improvements to security (such as the option to run IBM Notes with no need for a local ID file!), OS support (Domino is finally available in a 64-bit version for Linux), maintenance, serviceability and performance.

IBM can help you double check your investment in IBM Notes and Domino. Contact IBM for a free engagement where IBM will analyze your Domino environment and give you facts that you can use when comparing Domino with alternative solutions. IBM uses DNA by Trust Factory for this analysis. This offering is now called IBM Domino DoubleCheck - Powered by Trust Factory.

Cloud
IBM does cloud too (and at a great price) - whether it's about moving your mail to the cloud, adding social collaboration including collaborative editing of documents and instant messaging or going hybrid (cloud and on-premises servers).

With the before metioned IBM Social Business Toolkit you can extend your on-premises business applications in the cloud.

Chat
The IBM Sametime product family will be enhanced with version 9 which is expected in the second half of 2013.

Final thoughts
Overall it's a very impressive product family.

Personally, I look forward to continue to build great business applications based on XPages for my customers.

All presentations from the sessions at IBM Connect 2013 are available for registered attendees. Some of the presentations from the sessions are also available publicly. Furthermore, some sessions have been recorded and are available as video including the Opening General Session.

IBM Notes 9.0 Social Edition is coming in March 2013. Read all about the new features and download reference sheets with more detailed info at the updated Experience IBM Notes site.

Here is the presentation that Bruce Elgort and I used for our IBM Connect 2013 session called "How We Built CollaborationToday.info in a Matter of Weeks".

Thanks to all that attended our session. It was a great experience for me as a 1st time speaker at IBM Connect/Lotusphere.

I am truly honored to have been nominated as IBM Champion for IBM Collaboration Solutions for 2013. Thanks!

I look forward to seeing a lot of them at IBM Connect 2013.

Ed Brill just announced that the IBM Notes and Domino 9.0 Social Edition betas are now available for download. The beta program is open for everyone so go ahead and sign up and try the new IBM Notes 9.0 🙂 Use the 9.0 beta forum for feedback.

Here's the beautiful IBM Notes 9.0 (Mac) client:

I have upgraded my developer environment to 9.0 and look forward to lots of improvements to IBM Domino Designer.

Session abstract notifications for the IBM Connect 2013 conference were sent out yesterday (the conference previously known as Lotusphere). I submitted two session abstracts with Bruce Elgort and I am proud to say that we had one of the session abstracts accepted!

Bruce and I will be speaking about "How We Built CollaborationToday.info in a Matter of Weeks" on the new Spotlight on IBM Business Partners track.

This is the session abstract:

In this session, we will show you how we developed a great-looking, user-driven community news site called "Collaboration Today". We will walk you through how we developed the site's user experience and architecture. We will dive into how we made the app scalable, quick and accessible on all mobile devices and web browsers using responsive design. Best of all, this app is built with open-source components and is itself an open-source app available for you to download and use today. We will show you how other apps can utilize and present the content from Collaboration Today using the app's API.

The session focuses on the Collaboration Today news site that was released by OpenNTF in September 2012 and recently released as open source too.

This will be my first appearance as speaker at Lotusphere and IBM Connect. I am really looking forward to it! See you there 🙂

For the Sherlock Web solution I had a need to be able to update rich text content in a CKEditor with rich text content from backend document templates. These backend document templates can be created and edited with the Lotus Notes client and will in some cases contain rich text content of type Rich Text (and not MIME). I can not change these backend document templates to be stored as MIME, so in order to be able to update the rich text content in a CKEditor, I thought I had to wrestle with conversion of Rich Text to MIME.

I spent a lot of time getting Rich Text to MIME conversion to work in order to add the backend document templates to the rich text content in the CKEditor. I ended up with a clumsy solution that involved saving the XPages backend document in order for the updated content to appear. I had a lot of inspiration from the answers to this Stack Overflow question on appending and prepending text to a rich text field. It worked, but...

A couple of good XPages guys suggested I took a look at using the datasource getValue() and setValue() methods instead. This turned out to be right way to go.

Part of trick is that I use the wrapDocument() function from XSnippet  to get a NotesXspDocument representation of the backend document template. I can then just use getValue("body") on that NotesXspDocument followed by getHTML() to get a HTML representation of the content. Brilliant!

The setValue method on the inputRichText control expects MIME and not text, so I use an XPages supplied method that converts from HTML to MIME. This is necessary in order to save the document at all.

So here is the important part of my code that reads content from the target field and updates it with a backend document field contaning Notes Rich Text, and ends up saving it as MIME:

if (templateDoc != null) {
   // Insert contents into existing field
   if (templateDoc.hasItem("body")) {
      var orgValue = document.getValue(bodyFieldName);
      var origValue;
      if (orgValue != null) {
         // The target field already has content
         origValue = ((typeof orgValue == "string")? orgValue : orgValue.getHTML()) + "";
      } else {
         // The target field is empty
         origValue = "";
      }

      var templateField = wrapDocument(templateDoc).getValue("body");
      importPackage(com.ibm.xsp.http);
      document.setValue(bodyFieldName, com.ibm.xsp.http.MimeMultipart.fromHTML(origValue + templateField.getHTML()));
   }
}

I also used an answer from Sven Hasselbach on partially refreshing contents in a CKEditor to put my inputRichText control inside a div control in order to partially refresh the div control when the above logic runs.

Using this method I am completely rid of the need to save the backend document. This just works! 🙂

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I have added the part about updating the inputRichText control with MIME to the OpenNTF XSnippets catalog.

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Notice: this code snippet does not work with embedded images and attachments.

Update October 2013: Here's my solution for adding embedded images.

The 48th DanNotes conference took place yesterday and today.
I had 2 sessions. My first session was on the subject of XPages for administrators. My second session was on the topic of source control with Domino Designer 8.5.3 and Git. Here is my presention from that session:

The 48th DanNotes conference took place yesterday and today. It was 2 days filled with lots of interesting sessions.

I had 2 sessions. My first session was on the subject of XPages for administrators. My second session was on the topic of source control with Domino Designer 8.5.3 and Git.

Here is my presentation from my XPages for Administrators session: