Technical Sessions

1. Notes & Domino 8.0: Technical Architecture Deep Dive

2. Lotus Sametime 8.0: Technical Architecture Deep Dive

3. Lotus Quickr: Technical Architecture Deep Dive

4. Lotus Connections: Technical Architecture Deep Dive

I presume this is a way early demo shot of what is to come, but it looks like a long leap if it revolves around Sametime. My gut reaction is this is some sort of new item, since there is nothing to be had online anywhere in searching. I am betting on the side that says this is some other type of meeting service and not Sametime.

However, this would be quite a cool tool to have for meetings and change the way you look at the meeting windows for Sametime. Mainly with the P2P video and audio abilities. A nice corporate directory with everyone's pictures would be a good start for most of you so you do not have a circle of gray-man group members looking at you in a circle

I apologize for the drop in the audio while in the live section. Skype decided to crash when someone sent me a request to share contact details. So that means I dropped everyone connected to me, of course. But after that was eloquently handled by Carl Tyler, the talk continued and we had a good conversation and some good questions.

The podcast - The Collaboration University 'professors' (minus Gabriella) get together to talk content and answer any and all questions. All live on TalkShoe this morning!!

All the call details and even web login information (for live chat) can be found here.

• If you participate in the web side, click on a conversation thread you want to respond to in the chat area and it will highlight the color of your chat for easy viewing.
• Raise your hand if you want to go live
• By default your microphone (or phone) is not live until we unmute you, be patient!
• If you are on the phone only, we will unmute you also to ask questions
• Everything is being recorded to podcast for those that couldn't get on the call, be aware!

This call was an open format for Q&A which was a nice change.  (I lost some text in live saving somehow, will try and recover it)

Rod Smith, VP of Emerging Technology in IBM started the discussion on where IBM will be headed in Web 2.0 in the Enterprise.

Carol Jones, fellow of IBM, was the other panel member.. she is always excellent in her answers

• Lotus will rely on input from the consumer (ie employees) to help drive feature requests of such products like Lotus Connections
• Nathan Freeman asked a question looking for early adopter stories and successes
• Chris Byrne asked about having a personal network, like LinkedIn, without adding everyone from a tag or group.  Carol said they have a lot of work going on in that area that wasn't in the product yet.
• Dana G asks about how IBM is already using open source and where 2.0 intersects with tools and functionality, applications, widgets and whether IBM will bring all this open source and Web 2.0 future.  Rod talks to the IBM participation into AJAX, Dojo and Eclipse.
• Neil Ward-Dutton asked a beyond the technology question on how IBM is looking beyond software and into consulting in how to leverage the new technology innovations.  I say they sell Lotus Connections.  Rod said that business strategy becomes a component of engagements continually.
• Chris Byrne asked about any response to the Microsoft plug-in announcement for Sharepoint
• Nathan asked about the implementation of the new products and how to simplify them..  Carol said Lotus Connections was a simple install.  Nathan took objection to that and I tend to agree.  While the blog portion is based on Roller, the entire Lotus Connections package requires quite a bit of installation and configuration.  Rod agreed that the cost would be large for smaller companies to launch a full Lotus Connections implementation, so hosting and other offerings becomes important.  Chris Byrne chimed in about the complex architecture.  Rod said they see other programming models in the future might need inclusion for simplification or changes.
• I asked about the ever changing the architecture in the future based on Web 2.0 growth and enhancements and the scare of rip-and-replace challenge and adding new features/options from the public Web 2.0 world.  Carol took on that challenge.
• A quick roll-call to see if Volker was on the call, yes he was
• A asked about better integration and future integration into Notes 8, like multiple plug-ins for Activities in the same client.  Carol took the initial tackle and then I tuned i and we took it offline for later
• Rod took last questions to head off to a mash-up
• Chris Byrne looked for online demos and was pointed to YouTube
• Stuart McIntyre jumped in and asked about Info 2.0.  Rod stated it was a suite to take information from multiple places (DB2, syndication) and then a tool to help merge and filter feeds.  Then catalog them with tagging and mash them up.  All of this in a Web 2.0 package.  They are looking towards the end of summer for some type of beta and then GA end of year of later.  A news feed server was also mentioned

You are officially invited to join Rob, Carl, Gabriella and myself while we live podcast about all the sessions coming to Collaboration University #1.  Think Quickr, Sametime 7.5.1 and what we have all new for this year in sessions.

Then stick around for live Q&A with any of us on Quickr and Sametime.  The podcast will be recorded for later playing and on iTunes.

Friday Jun 22 2007 at 10am EST/9am CST/7am PST

Phone Number: (724) 444-7444
Talkcast ID: 31241

And join via the web at http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/tscmd/tc/31241  to join the live chat portion also.

No need to spread the message to thin, so let's take a different approach.  Quickr comes out June 29th and then you get hit with all the information you need on implementing and deploying it at Collaboration University.   Rob has announced all the sessions on his blog, quite an impressive lineup of knowledge sharing

I have played with the Quickr betas and this is a stronger move than Lotus Connections at this time.  Hopefully Lotus will offer a 90-day trial like they just did for Sametime 7.5.1

File - Make Available Offline  is the menu item that tells the user they can take the data with them (local replica).  Then they get a simplified UI with defaults already set that looks like this:



The best part is that if the database already has a local replica then the menu option is grayed out.  Cool!   Seems to be a very simple way for users to create local replicas of databases.. errrr..  applications

I am calling this an issue whether it gets counted as such or not.   While working with a new Sametime 7.5.1  cluster (version doesn't really matter here) against a Domino LDAP cluster (version 7), we set a limit of 100 for the maximum number of entries returned against LDAP browsing and searching.

This broke the ability to add names to policies or browse from the 7.5.1 Connect client.  If I allow the maximum returned entries to unlimited, it allows you to add names to policies and browse from the Connect client.

In my humble opinion, I should be able to set a limit, still add names to policies and only have a certain amount returned when someone tries to browse the entire LDAP directory.  This would force the user to use a finer search string and release load on the LDAP server when there are over 20,000 users involved.

Make sense?  Bug or no bug?

While we were building a Quickr cluster for testing here in Sweden we came across an interesting scenario.  They had set the hostname field in the server document to the DNS name of the cluster.  Then, when setting qpconfig.xml to utilize a cluster hostname we also set it to the cluster DNS name.  However, it started placing the DNS cluster name twice in a URL when creating places.  For example:

http://quickrcluster.company.com/quickrcluster.company.com/placename

Now if we removed the qpconfig reference to the DNS cluster hostname and set it to a totally different host such as quickr.ibm.com it worked perfectly.

The solution?  Remove the DNS cluster name from the server document hostname entry back to the actual DNS entry for the server and then reference the DNS cluster name in qpconfig.xml and it all worked great.  Apparently placing the same name in both causes a duplication but having alternate names get replaced.

One of you out there had a quirky RSS feed which was affecting the install.  If anyone has any issues grabbing and completing the new install please let me know so we can get it fixed right away.

So grab it right here or go back and read the previous blog posting.  I will post more tech tips around tweaking it shortly.

Go peek right here

After only 1 minor delay and then a 160km drive across Sweden, we arrived successfully at Stadshotellet Princess in Sandviken.  Amazing to us to see minor amounts of daylight left at 11:30pm and the sun rises at 3:30am fully.  Beautiful small city so far.  Let me collapse some and I will get some pictures and more info

I am in transit at the Chicago airport watching a person struggle with Notes 6 and a R5 mailfile template.  Not the most entertaining item, but I can see the frustration.  I spun my laptop around to the full Notes 8 client and new mail interface and said, good things are there, hopefully they will upgrade.  The response?  He was the IT manager and was under orders not to move to 7 yet, let alone 8.  Ugh....

What a collection of speakers that received high marks everywhere.  It was good to see everyone, attendees and speakers included.  Paul Mooney has some pictures up on his blog already, I know Susan Bulloch and Kathleen McGivney will have some blog comments.  We can always count on Wild Bill to take a stab after much late night and speaking recovery.  Francie Whitlock, Warren Elsmore and a few others joined as new admin speakers this year.  Mary Beth Raven walked everyone through the end of what will soon be a major step in the Lotus Notes direction with version 8.  Julian R, of the famed Taking Notes Podcast was presenting in full developer style.  Bruce, of course, was tethered by telephone and IM all week. I know I forgot some, I am brain dead however this early after the week is now done.

Andy and Rob of Technotics did a bang up job as always.  All three of us joined together to do a BOF on Notes and Domino 8 upgrading.  I went ahead and recorded it for a podcast that will be edited and online shortly

It was even rumored that Ed Brill himself stopped through for some socializing.  Someone said Alan Lepofsky was coming for dinner the last night but I left early and you will notice it was after Ed left, hmmmm.  A couple surprise appearances for some drinks and dinner from Carl Tyler and Rob McDonagh.

There was a comedy night sponsored by Blackberry on Tuesday which was a refreshing change and a break of all the information being shoved into the heads of attendees.  You can see some pictures I have up showing that event.

Now as for attendees, one of the best overall positive responses I have gotten from all of them.  There is always a minor thing here and there, but everyone went away happy.  I took them from the first session of building a disaster recovery solution for their entire Lotus portfolio all the way through S/MIME, LDAP infrastructure and all sorts of Sametime aspects.  Ten sessions later I walked out hoping I shoved enough into their brains to make their time worthwhile.  The event was a strong showing of the commitment to Domino by IBM and the user community.  Displays of current features of ND8, Quickr and Lotus Connections left more than a few re-energized in what exciting new paths they are about to take.

Sorry for the delay, I was traveling out of the country right after Admin2007

Warning: I would zoom in many times.  The image is large in width and height to see all the font and information clearly.

Sorry for the delay, I was traveling out of the country right after Admin2007

http://www.idonotes.com/idonotes/idonotes.nsf/dx/live.htm

We had a great comedy show night here at Admin2007, plus I took the time to get up what few pictures I had so far this year..  Here is the Flickr listing, the Yahoo slides..

http://www.IdoNotes.com/IdoNotes/IdoNotes.nsf/dx/live.htm

UPDATE: If you get a watch words error or other, make sure the watch words is not blank and it will work great.  I used these words in the build and think a duplicate caused the error (Sametime,Quickr,Quickplace,Domino 8,Lotus Connections,podcast,Lotus Notes,Domino)

So I got tired of managing RSS feeds full time trying to keep up and came across a product (Particls) that I have now made a permanent part of my desktop.  You seed it with fixed feeds and keywords and just monitor those, or let it explore the web for you outside of your main feeds.  You can then start training it, filtering data, making some sources higher in priority, some lower, remove some.  It goes on and on.

The default is for the program to run in a ticker type anywhere on your screen.  Floating or docked.  You can then 'tear' off news feeds right to your desktop.  If you need to work, set the reader to run in the background.  As you highlight a feed, tear it off, mark it read or even make the source to get more or less info for you in the future.  Build your keywords on the fly and add sites while in webpages.  No, you don't even need to know what the feed is, let the software find all possible RSS feds listed on the page or just watch the page itself and then select form there.  I could go on even more.

So give it a shot...   screenshots to follow

Everyone seems to be playing with Domino 8 in some fashion, but so many enterprises are still in the midst of upgrades to Domino 7, they don't see 8 in the near future for the company.  However, Sametime is flying off the shelves.  It seems they have more flexibility to upgrade Sametime then they can get support from management to move Domino 8 in.  Sounds like we need to not only show the compelling reasons of feature sets, but to push any performance info we can down to them (hint hint).

The attendees are being taken on a ride quite different than Lotusphere, all tech and very minor marketing.  Many made that exact comment at a vendor party this evening.  Good to see we are doing our job on the presentation front.  I snuck into a couple other speakers sessions during a downtime to see rooms of people furiously taking notes.  I even allowed everyone (on purpose) to take out and use their Blackberries during my notes.ini session.   If you missed it..well....

Here are the files for you, enjoy!!  Thanks for attending

Let me know of any questions!   Enjoy and thanks for attending.

When you see the pictures, you will notice quite a large turnout for the OGS.  It was great to see such a packed room.

Mike jumped right into Lotus Connections and Quickr announcements.  Both are fast approaching release date.

Bringing up Ron Sebastian to do the live demos was a great move, they love the love code here.  Humorously, this was almost the exact order and presentation from Partnerworld2007.  So you can go read that long posting.  Mike took a nice long lean on the other podium to watch Ron strut his demo.  Ok, unless they toss some new info out there you can read the previous posting.

Take a look at my schedule posting for Admin2007.  I will try (depending on bandwidth) to get as much as I can on my live page that you can find right here

This was the official first day of the conference in Boston.  It was good to see many of the faces from previous years and quite a few new people attend the jumpstarts.  Quite a full room of people there to dive into Sametime for my session. Andy P of Technotics was next door selling Server Statistics 101.  A great session by all counts I heard.  I did find that most of you that took m little survey about your current Sametime version are well advanced in the curve.  Smaller than 5% of the room had Sametime 7.5.1 installed and running.  Many had no Sametime and a the rest were upgrading.  I spent quite a bit of time on the architecture side and scaling before working a piece of the client in.  There is a session this week on the client and plug-ins.

Photos will start being online shortly, as I only have a handful.

Here is you completed file.  Email me with any questions.  I put the extra slides, Sametime install movie and the extra images into a zip file

I know I had issues on one machine and got an IM from another person looking for the installer for Plazes 2.  So here you go!

[Plazer]Version=2.1.2706
http://www.plazes.com/files/Plazer2Setup.exe

It is nice to get feedback with either corrections or just plain happiness for a posting.  Attensa sent the Director of Marketing to show me that you can install the new beta of their RSS reader into your Sametime Connect client.  This beta has a few options in the install.  It will hook into Outlook, IE, Firefox and Sametime.  Nice touch, don't think you need it everywhere at once however.

It does prompt you to become your default RSS reader, so beware on those screens.  It also puts a desktop alerts icon in the system tray, I am waiting to see what that part does with a follow-up posting.  Here is the screenshot from the first part of the install after selecting ONLY Sametime components.  It did drop a nice amount of files into other areas however, not just a plug-in as one would normally expect.