Monthly Archives: October 2011

I am a member director on the OpenNTF board of directors

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As previously blogged my company PHL Consult and I support OpenNTF and open source. To further show my support I nominated myself for one of the 9 member director positions in the OpenNTF board of directors.

The board of directors for the newly incorporated OpenNTF has now been set and I am happy to have been elected to be part of the board (for one year). The new board had its first board meeting last Thursday and I look forward to be able to add value to OpenNTF.

My 1st year as self-employed consultant at PHL Consult

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One year ago I started as self-employed consultant at my own company PHL Consult after having worked for IBM for 16 years – and what a great year! Starting on my own has proved to be one my of my best decisions ever.

It has been a year of classic Lotus Notes application development work, XPages development work, teaching courses and much more. I started with one customer and have since then been doing work for 10 other paying customers and been involved in proposals for a handful more. Furthermore, I reviewed David Leedys XPages cheat sheet, and reviewed the IBM course “Modernizing Lotus Domino 8.5.2 Applications”.

This year I also became member of the boards at NotesNet, DanNotes and OpenNTF.

The following are public sites that I have implemented for customers during my 1st year:

Lessons learned (and assumptions confirmed):

  • Networking is important: several of my customers have chosen me for their work because we were connected in some way.
  • Advertising helps: I advertise my business services on the Google advertising network and know for a fact that some customers came to me via that channel.
  • Being social: I am a strong believer in blogging and social networks and the impact that it can have on you and others.

I look forward to the next year and what it will bring me of interesting work and projects.

One final advice: pursue your dream!

Going to Lotusphere 2012

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Lotusphere 2012 takes place January 15 – January 19, 2012 in Orlando, Florida – and I am very happy to report that I will participate in the conference. This will be my first ever Lotusphere in the US (I participated in the Lotusphere conference in Berlin in 1999).

I arrive Friday evening (January 13) and leave again Thursday evening (January 19). I will be staying at the Disney’s Yacht Club Resort, if you need me 🙂

I look forward to meet a lot of interesting people from the Lotus community – most of whom I have only been in contact with through blogging, Twitter, Skype, mails etc. and never met before. See you soon!

Update: I have created a Lanyrd event for Lotusphere 2012.

Lotus Notes/Domino 8.5.3 and IBM XWork Server 8.5.3 are here

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It’s October 4th and Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.3 are now available for download on Passport Advantage. The brand new IBM XWork Server has also been announced.

I have been looking forward to this release in general, and in particular because of features specifically for XPages developers:

  • improved JavaScript editor
  • finally a java design element for XPages
  • Dojo 1.6.1
  • OneUI version 2.1 (which looks very similar to the prototype 3.0 version that the Lotus Notes and Domino Application Development wiki uses)
  • option to combine CSS and JS in a single file to improve site speed
  • improved HTML5 support such as support for adding HTML5 attributes
  • source control enablement
I look very much forward to an improved experience when working with XPages development in the Domino Designer client. Happy coding!