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:
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.
One of the highlights from Lotusphere 2012 was the accouncement of the next feature release of Lotus Notes called Lotus Notes Social Edition.
Lotus Notes Social Edition features a new homepage with activity streams and embedded apps (embedded experiences) using open standards such as OpenSocial. From the Lotus Notes homepage a user can interact with an external application without leaving the home page (collaboratio in-context). Lotus iNotes (the web mail component for Lotus Notes) will also support activity streams and embedded apps. The new homepage looks similar to the activity streams in the upcoming IBM Connections 4.0 release.
XPages and the Extension Library Social Enabler toolkit can be used to implemenet applications that support activity streams and OpenSocial gadgets in order to create embedded apps. The Social Enabler Toolkit is currently only part of the OpenNTF release and will be part of Upgrade Pack 2.
Social Edition also features a brand-new and more simple UI for mail (for both the Lotus Notes client and for iNotes webmail):
In between now (8.5.3) and Social Edition we will see a 8.5.4 release with features required to be able to deploy the Social Edition upgrade on top of Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.4. In 2012 we will also see the release of Upgrade Pack 2 (IBM supported Extension Library with new features currently only available in the experimental part of the OpenNTF Extension Library).
Lotus Domino 8.5.4 is planned to support SAML and oAUTH for authentication. With Domino supporting oAUTH it will be possible to bring XPages applications into the context of other applications.
Finally, the Lotus Notes app browser plugin for Firefox/Windows was presented at Lotusphere. This plugin is a lightweight Lotus Notes client in the browser that can run Notes client applications. This enables organizations to focus on implementing new XPages web applications and have their existing/old Notes client applications use the plugin.
Ed Brill from IBM has blogged about Lotus Notes and Domino Social Edition and also posted his “Messaging and Collaboration Strategy” session from Lotusphere on Slideshare.
Chris Reckling from IBM has blogged about the Notes and iNotes announcements from the Lotusphere 2012 OGS.
The XPages Extension Library project on OpenNTF was updated yesterday to version 853-20111215. This version matches the newly released Domino 8.5.3 Upgrade Pack 1.
If you want to use the OpenNTF version (and not Upgrade Pack 1) you can update your servers and clients using the update site method.
You can find the installation instructions for the OpenNTF version and for Upgrade Pack 1 on the Lotus Notes and Domino Application Development wiki.
Great news for XPages today: Notes/Domino 8.5.3 Upgrade Pack 1 has just been released.
In short, Upgrade Pack 1 is an IBM supported version of the XPages Extension Library. This should help remove the fear of the Extension Library being open source that some customers have had, and thereby improve the adoption of XPages out there.
Upgrade Pack 1 is available on Passport Advantage as part number CI5HUEN.
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.
A quick blog post to let you know that last week I was invited to be part of This Week in Lotus episode 79 together with Stuart McIntyre, Darren Duke – and Gab Davis as the 2nd guest. We discussed Sametime, OpenNTF, XPages and very naturally the 46th DanNotes conference which took place the day after the recording.
It was great fun and I look forward to being a guest again sometime in the future. By the way, this was my 2nd appearance on the show as I was a guest on episode 24 too.
The beta version of XSnippets was recently announced by Niklas Heidloff on the OpenNTF blog. XSnippets is a code repository of useful XPages code snippets that OpenNTF contributors can contribute to. If you have useful code snippets then consider adding them to XSnippets.
I have added my first code snippet to XSnippets based on my blog entry on how to control the HTTP response status code in XPages:
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.
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):
I look forward to the next year and what it will bring me of interesting work and projects.
One final advice: pursue your dream!