Tag Archives: PHL Consult

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.

PHL Consult supports OpenNTF and open source

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My company, PHL Consult, became member of OpenNTF in August and thereby supports OpenNTF and the use of open source within the Lotus Domino/XPages community. This means that I support the idea of open source in general (and support OpenNTF as an organization) – and that I both contribute code to and reuse code from OpenNTF. I have so far contributed 2 open source XPages custom controls to OpenNTF:

At the time of writing this blog post OpenNTF has 23 company members. Members according to OpenNTF are “companies with the common interest to provide open source for IBM Lotus Notes and Domino and to encourage broad industry use of these applications. To achieve these goals members are willing to devote resources or participate in other ways”.

Client project: XPages CMS for company website

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My company PHL Consult completed another client project last week involving XPages. The purpose of the project was to modernize an existing Lotus Domino company website by creating a new XPages solution with a related Lotus Notes client CMS for article editing and related content handling (such as menus, graphics, and meta data) – and by using XPages to allow the website to utilize CSS for cross browser compatibility.

The client is Mediaplus.dk and this is an interesting company that takes advantage of Lotus Notes and Domino to offer a CRM solution called Mediaplus CRM targeted at supermarket and grocery store suppliers.

The Mediaplus.dk website

The design for the website was created by Thomas Arendt from Make Your Mark. Based on his design guide I was then responsible for creating the necessary CSS to allow the design to be implemented. The CSS extends the IBM OneUI v2 CSS (although you need to look in the HTML and CSS source to tell).

The CMS includes functionality to improve search engine ranking by providing a sitemap for e.g. Google Webmaster Tools, by using meta tags such as description and robots and by providing useful page titles. These are all small but useful extensions to a website if you want to improve search engine rankings.

My first two months as self-employed consultant

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This is a followup to my first two weeks as self-employed consultant at PHL Consult.

2 months have now passed since I started as full-time consultant at PHL Consult – and I am really enjoying it! It has been exciting to focus on my own business and see the immediate results of actions that I take. I have been in discussions with several potential customers and potential business partners about projects where I can offer my services. Some of these discussions has turned into real work for me and I am happy to say that I now have more than just the one customer I started with 2 months ago. The new customers and new projects are primarily focused around Domino administration (setting up new servers, upgrading existing servers) and around modern web development using XPages.

Almost all of my meetings with new and potential customers have been set up through my social network. This really shows that networking is very important for establishing business contacts. One customer, however, contacted me because they found PHL Consult through a Google AdWords ad when using Google to search for a Lotus Domino consultant. I have set up some Google AdWords ads because Google sent me a free trial of ads for $100. So maybe I should consider using AdWords when my free trial has been spent.

Starting a full-time business also require that I take care of administrative tasks. I have had meetings with my accountant to discuss the structure of my business and have decided to go with a one-man business setup (instead of setting up for instance a limited liability company). I have also talked with insurance companies in order to establish necessary company insurances to cover professional liability and business property such as my IT hardware.

I participated in the 44th DanNotes Lotus user group conference in early November. It was great to meet many of the Danish Lotus customers, Lotus business partners and Lotus consultants. I am also still an active member of the Danish Notesnet group of Lotus specialists.

My first 2 weeks as a self-employed consultant

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I started as self-employed full-time consultant on October 18 – and today the first 2 weeks has passed. So how did they go?

I have started working on my first XPages project for my first client. The project is currently in the design and early implementation phase and I have therefore been to a design workshop with Supermouse who is responsible for the information architecture and UI design. I find it very interesting to learn more about XPages and to apply it to a real project.

I was invited as special guest to IBM Hackday 8 at IBM in Copenhagen. It was a fun day with a lot of mobile app discussions including looking at Titanium Appcelerator and how it can be used to develop iPhone and Android applications.

I went to my first all-day Notesnet.dk monthly meeting – and it was nice to meet many of the Notesnet.dk members. I hope to have the opportunity to work with some of my Notesnet.dk colleagues someday on shared projects.

I took part in the recording of episode 24 for one of my favorite podcasts: This Week in Lotus. It was great fun to record the podcast together with Stuart McIntyre, Darren Duke and Joyce Davis.

All in all, I have enjoyed the first 2 weeks as self-employed consultant at PHL Consult.

Welcome to the opening of PHL Consult

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It’s October 18! Today is my first day as a full time consultant in my own company PHL Consult – where I am going to primarily work with Lotus Notes and Domino based solutions. Feel free to take a look around the new offices 🙂

For my first project for a client I am going to work with XPages. I look forward to the challenge of both learning a lot more about XPages and of implementing the web site for the client.

Let me know if I can provide you with my assistance. Thanks.

Independent member of the Danish Notesnet group

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I am pleased to say that my Lotus Notes/Domino consultancy company PHL Consult has been accepted as an independent member of the Danish Notesnet group of Lotus specialists. The members of Notesnet are all self-employed consultants working with Lotus products in general – and for most of the members with Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino in particular. I am sure that being member of this group will benefit me in some way or the other now that I start on my excisting new adventure.

Before being accepted as member I was invited to the group’s September meeting by the chairman of the group John Dalsgaard of Dalsgaard Data. I enjoyed being part of the meeting and now look forward to lots of interesting meetings in the future.

I will start on my own as a Lotus Notes/Domino consultant

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I have exciting news! I am leaving IBM October 15 to start on my own as a self-employed consultant at PHL Consult. I will work primarily with development and administration of Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino solutions.

I have been with IBM for 16 years and had almost never thought that this day would come – but I have been dreaming of working as a self-employed consultant for many years. I am very happy that I finally took the plunge and look forward to the exciting new adventure!

To quote Mark Twain:

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Wish me luck.