Per Henrik Lausten

The DanNotes 48th conference takes place on November 28 and 29. We have lots of interesting sessions and speakers:

• Ed Brill: keynote speaker
• Frank van der Linden: activity streams, embedded apps and XPages
• John Foldager: HTML5
• Abigail Roberts: Teamstudio Unplugged
• Paul Mooney: Lotus Notes Traveler High Availability
• Christian Dencker: iNotes 8.5.4 infrastructure, SAML and SUT-lite
• Mat Newman with his popular User Blast session and also a session on Lotus Notes 8.5.4 Social Edition
• Mona Håkansson and Mikkel Heisterberg: IBM Connections 4

I will also be speaking at the conference on the subject of XPages for administrators. The purpose of the session is to introduce administrators to XPages and to lots of useful tips and tools that can improve the use of XPages within their organizations. I am looking forward to this as it is my first speaking engagement at a Lotus user group conference.

If you are interested in joining the conference, then head over to the DanNotes website and register. There is a Facebook event, a LinkedIn event and a Lanyrd event for the conference if you are interested in tracking the conference using social tools.

I hope to see you at the conference 🙂

Update November 21: I will also be speaking about source control with Domino Designer 8.5.3.

My term on the OpenNTF board of directors expired after 1 year, and I am happy to have been re-elected for a 2 year term service.

My 1st year on the board was an exciting year where I among many things helped with the judging of several contests (including the 1st XSnippets contest), helped setup even more demos, and was part of the team that implemented Collaboration Today.

I look forward to continue to help OpenNTF spread the use and knowledge of open source for the IBM Collaboration Solutions community.

The IBM Connect 2013 (including Lotusphere 2013) conference takes place in January 2013. I am going once again and really look forward to the atmosphere and the sessions, and most importantly the people.

I arrive Friday evening January 25th and leave again Friday February 1st. I will be staying at the Disney's Yacht Club Resort.

See you there?

I recently passed the LOT-922 certification test (Developing IBM Lotus Domino 8.5.2 Applications: Advanced XPage Design). The test is a multiple choice test with 32 questions and a required passing score of 75%- I scored 90%.

Since I was already an IBM Certified Application Developer on Notes/Domino 8.5 the passing of the test upgraded my certification level to IBM Certified Advanced Application Developer - Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.

I prepared for the test by reading the test objectives and by practicing using a practice test from CertFX. The test focuses on advanced XPages programming and covers the following areas:

• Building themes
• Extending the data sources
• Optimizing, troubleshooting and localization
• Using advanced Dojo controls
• Using Server-side JavaScript
• Using XPages for mobile user interfaces
• Working with Java

Unfortunately, the test is already somewhat outdated in its focus on Domino Designer 8.5.2. So be prepared for that if you plan to take the test.

Stack Overflow is a programming Q&A site for developers with more than 3.5 million questions and even more anwers on every programming language you can image.

On Stack Overflow you can also find questions and answers related to XPages. At the time of writing this blog post there are 597 questions tagged XPages on Stack Overflow with questions and answers coming in every day. If you have a question on XPages then have a look at some of the already asked questions and  their answers and see if that helps you. If not, then go ahead and ask a question.

I will also encourage you to help the community by answering questions and also upvoting great answers and downvoting misleading answers. This will improve the quality of Stack Overflow as a Q&A site for XPages.

XPages.info always lists the latest questions tagged XPages and also the top users for the XPages tag on the Stack Overflow tab.

I am currently busy working on Sherlock Web: a complete web solution for management of quality, health, safety and environment (QHSE). The solution is based on XPages and the IBM XWork Server and is available as a hosted solution or as an on-premises solution. The licensing cost of the server and application platform is fixed at $2000 per year, since the solution runs on the IBM XWork Server. This makes it an ideal platform for companies with a large number of users.

Sherlock Web is based on the existing Sherlock Lotus Notes solution that runs successfully at more than 500 companies. However, Sherlock Web does not require a Lotus Notes client at all - all you need to use Sherlock Web is a web browser, a tablet (such as the iPad or the Samsung Galaxy Tab) or a smartphone (such as an iPhone or an Android phone).

The document management part of Sherlock Web

You can attend 2 free (physical) seminars at IBM in Denmark on May 24 and May 30 where the Sherlock Web solution will be introduced. For more information and information on how to sign up for the event, please visit the Danish IBM Social Business blog. If you are unable to attend the seminar, you can get more information at the Danish Sherlock site and at the international Sherlock site and by contacting the Sherlock team.

The DanNotes 47th conference takes place today and tomorrow. Here are links to presentations available online:

• Ulrich Krause: XPages - Beyond the Basics
• Paul Withers: Ready, Set, Go! How IBM Lotus Domino XPages Became Mobile
• Paul Withers: The Eureka Moment - XPages Under the Covers
• Jakob Majkilde: From Notes to XPages in 1 hour
• Morten Christensen: Using TDI with IBM Connections
• Dave Hay: Websphere Administration for Domino Administrators
• Dave Hay: Desktop Single Sign-On in an Active Directory World
• Bo Falkenberg: De bedste widgets
• Bo Falkenberg: Lotus Traveler - Hvad er der af nyt & undervejs...

I gave this presentation along with a live coding demo at the monthly NotesNet.dk meeting on April 19, 2012. The presentation covers elements of the XPages Extension Library that you can use to rapidly convert an existing Lotus Notes client application to a web application.

The sample database is available for download and uses a custom forum database as "backend". You can easily modify the code to use another backend database.

I am a member of the NotesNet.dk independent group of IBM/Lotus consultants and also a member of the board. We are 25 independent consultants specializing in services and solutions for Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino, XPages and more.

The members of NotesNet.dk participated in the annual general meeting in March, 2012. Our now former chairman John Dalsgaard wanted to resign as chairman after many years of great service. New members of the board were therefore elected.

At the board meeting held a week later we decided on the responsibilities for the board members. I accepted the position as chairman of the board.

I look forward to continue my work in the board for NotesNet.dk.

Here are 2 very easy ways to optimize performance for your XPages applications:

• Enable "Use runtime optimized JavaScript and CSS resources" to have your JS and CSS files combined into fewer files. This reduces the number of HTTP requests that the browser has to make against your server and application and thereby makes the site load much faster.
• Select "GZip" as the compression method to have your Domino server compress files and images. This reduces the amount of data that the browser has to retrieve from your server and application which again makes your application load much faster

Both of these settings are in Application Properties on the XPages tab.

Once you have done those two, you now have more time to go into detailed performance optimization and look at optimizing backend code, server settings, and much more. Tim Tripcony has answered a question in the XPages Development forum about performance optimization that has a lot of details about performance optimization.