OpenNTF has announced a new initiative called OpenNTF Webinars.
The first webinar takes place tomorrow, Tuesday May 7, and is all about OpenNTF. Join the web meeting and hear Bruce Elgort, Serdar Basegmez, Jesse Gallagher, Niklas Heidloff, Peter Tanner and me talk about OpenNTF and about what OpenNTF can offer the open source community.
Future webinars will be announced at the webinar landing page.
I am proud to announce a free 1-day seminar hosted by Notesnet.dk. The purpose of the seminar is to show companies the powerful features of IBM Notes 9, IBM Domino 9, IBM XWork Server 9, IBM Connections 4.5, XPages and much more – including case stories. The seminar is for existing IBM Domino customers and for potential IBM Domino customers, and takes place on April 24.
Have a look at the agenda and sign up to attend if the seminar is of interest to you. The seminar and online content is in Danish.
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.
The DanNotes 48th conference takes place on November 28 and 29. We have lots of interesting sessions and speakers:
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.
At the Lotusphere 2012 Opening General Session (OGS) and throughout the conference IBM showed the next version of IBM Connections (to be called IBM Connections 4.0?). My first impression of the next release of IBM Connections is that it looks really, really great! Among many things it features exciting new elements such as activity streams, social mail and embedded apps (using open standards such as Activity Streams and OpenSocial gadgets).
Embedded apps for activity streams can be created using e.g. XPages. An embedded app makes it possible for the user to take action directly from the invidual post in the activity stream (without leaving IBM Connections).
The integrated mail and calendar of IBM Connections (social mail) will support Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange as backend mail servers. This is an interesting move that makes the underlying mail server in use irrelevant to the IBM Connections deployment.
IBM Connections 4 also includes community metrics (to track e.g. adoption rates), optional realtime group video chat using a plugin from Polycom, ECM library integration and realtime co-editing of documents, presentations and spreadsheets using IBM Docs (IBM Docs is currently in beta on IBM Greenhouse).
Last week we held the 46th DanNotes conference. We had 80 participants and 7 speakers. Some of the presentations are available now as links on the agenda. Others will be added to the agenda later. We will also publish videos from the event once they have been edited.
On the agenda you can find links to the presentations by Chris Connor on XPages, Java, and Mobile – and links to the presentations by Ulrich Krause on compact, compress, DAOS and more. The presentation by Ulrich is also available on Slideshare.
The following presentations held by Stuart McIntyre and Niklas Heidloff have not yet been added to the agenda:
Niklas has blogged about the event – his blog entry contains links to the projects and controls that he showed in his sessions.
Stuart has blogged about his impression of the event. He even calls DanNotes for “the daddy of all user groups“.
I look forward to the 47th conference which takes place in May, 2012. Let me know if you are interested in speaking at the event.