As Rob Novak already blogged about here, today is SNAPPS (real name – Strategic Net Applications, Inc.) 10th birthday.
I have been an employee of SNAPPS and Rob for 8 years now and I could not be happier and, yes, proud that we reached this milestone together.
Congratulations Rob, and the rest of my co-workers, Melissa, Troy and Jerald.
A few months back I created a group called Friends of Lotusphere and an event, Lotusphere 2008, on facebook. Today the group reached 200 members, but I think it should be a lot more. If you are a facebook user and have been to a Lotusphere and/or are going to Lotusphere 2008, go join the group and check your RSVP to the event.
I have had the privilege to speak at every Lotusphere since 2002. In 2001 my first son, Jakob, was about to be born and my wife did not want me to travel that close to his birth. I have actually never attended Lotusphere as anything other than a speaker. This year I have three sessions accepted by the Content Team.
| Session: | Building Custom Themes for IBM Lotus Quickr |
| Track: | Hands-on Sessions |
| Abstract: | The elements of a good user interface are just the beginning when it comes to Lotus Quickr — with this platform, you expose functionality, user context and security in the “look and feel.” Custom themes give you much more. In this first-ever hands-on session you’ll explore the inner workings of themes, building one from scratch (with a little help). Your instructors wrote the book on themes, and have developed more than 100 in the past 8 years for companies worldwide, from simple corporate looks to highly complex, feature-packed themes. You’ll learn the custom tags, tips and tricks on Lotus Quickr CSS, and how to use themes to improve Lotus Quickr performance. You’ll also get some brand new themes you can take home to study … and even deploy!The corresponding breakout session for this hands-on is “AD502 Customizing IBM Lotus Quickr Themes and Skins”.Please refer to the Pocket Agenda for date, time and location information. |
| Speakers: | Viktor Krantz Troy Reimer |
This is the first time that I am presenting at a hands-on session and it will be fun. You will learn a lot about theme developing here.
| Session: | Extending and Customizing Templates for IBM Lotus Quickr: Straight from the Developers |
| Track: | Track Four: Best Practices |
| Abstract: | The IBM Lotus Quickr 8 release was quickly followed by a suite of eleven free, open templates, now used by thousands of companies worldwide. Each template has a specific business purpose and design, but they share common elements and reusable techniques and components. In this session, the developers of the templates will dig into the code, expose and explain some of the most valuable components, and teach you to assemble Lotus Quickr applications using a modular, extensible approach. By learning techniques for adding comment capabilities, custom workflow, tagging, and more, you’ll come away with the skills and tools necessary to build your own Lotus Quickr application. Plus, you’ll also receive a new template designed exclusively for Lotusphere 2008! |
| Speakers: | Viktor Krantz Troy Reimer |
This will be a really fun session. You will learn how to extend and combine some of the 11 free templates we at SNAPPS have created for Lotus Quickr 8.
| Session: | The Great Code Giveaway: “Beyond Cool” |
| Track: | Track Four: Best Practices |
| Abstract: | All new development techniques are brewing in the labs at SNAPPS, an IBM Business Partner with a penchant for giving expensive code away while providing a great education. It’s always very cool, and incredibly useful — the code is used by businesses, governments, partners, customers, and celebrities to improve applications and techniques. This year the SNAPPS labs have produced some of the most impressive IBM Lotus Domino-centric techniques in four areas: visual effects, data access and processing, mashups, and cross-product integration. Sounds like a lot, and it is! We’ve logged more than 500 hours bringing you these demos, so don’t miss the opportunity to experience “Beyond Cool” and take home incredible examples and full-blown applications! |
| Speakers: | Rob Novak Viktor Krantz |
This is the session I look forward to all year long. Rob Novak and I spend a lot of time on this one. Over 500 hours last year and it will not be less this year. We have delivered it several years in a row now, always with new content, free useful code to take home and sometimes a little cool.
I hope to see you at Lotusphere 2008 in January.
The Dojo Toolkit 1.0 was released this morning. Many of us, including me, has waited patiently for this release. Now I can finalize the updated code for Dojo Calendar.
There are many new, improved and awesome features.
New and Awesome:
- The Grid. This is the feature everyone’s been waiting for, and now it’s here! With support for virtual scrolling to accommodate huge data sets efficiently, built-in sorting and column resize to help you find what you’re looking for, complex formatting, and fixed rows and column headers, the new Grid lets you slice-and-dice your data as never
before. The 1.0 grid features a Tundra theme, editing and write-back examples, support for custom cell editors (including the full set of accessible and localized Dijit editing components), and markup-driven instantiation.- Charting returns! The new dojox.charting supports automatic axis calculations, widget-driven instantiation, multiple chart types, dojo.data data sources, and theming. Good-looking, data-oriented default themes help make your data understandable and easy on the eyes at the same time. And since dojox.charting is based on dojox.gfx, the general-purpose 2D drawing layer in Dojo, charting will only get more powerful, responsive, and good looking over time.
- a11y and i18n: rich experiences for everyone. All Dijit 1.0 widgets feature keyboard navigation, right-to-left text detection and layout, and solid localizations for 12 languages. No matter where in the world you are, Dijit has you covered. Dijit goes even further by providing ARIA role and state hinting to give users of assistive technologies the experience that developers intend.
- Universal data access. dojo.data and the growing list of data store implementations makes building and using data-driven widgets simpler and faster.
- dojox.gfx3d. Beautiful, portable 2D drawing is what dojox.gfx has always been about, and we’re taking it further with the ability to draw 3D scenes. 3D charting is based on gfx3d. This module was developed as a Summer of Code project by Kun Xi.
- improved widget look-and-feel. The base Tundra theme continues to be improved. New and exciting extension (dojox) widgets are appearing in 1.0, including a new Lightbox widget.
- Django templating for widgets. Many people have fallen in love with Django’s templating syntax and now you can now use it to build widgets thanks to Neil Roberts’ excellent dojox.dtl package.
- improved stability, speed, and compatibility across the board.
Improved:
- Dijit form widgets obey width in a way that makes visual sense
- reworked validation indicators for form elements
- lightbox widget
- the widget lifecycle has been improved such that create() is now called from postfix(), allowing your constructor code to “get in on the ground floor”
- the new Drupal front-end for the Neil’s documentation parser is now checked into the util namespace. This version provides disambiguated summaries and detail pages of the parsed object hierarchy, and since these pages are in Drupal, comments can be left by anyone.
- better command-line functioning of the unit test system
- an improved Firebug Lite which allows inspection of errors, popup-window placement, and parent-child cross frame logging.
- smoother animations
- build system now handles UTF-8 correctly end-to-end
- improved documentation and unit test coverage for all Core and Dijit APIs/widgets
Congratulations to the Dojo team for this milestone. I know it’s been a lot of hard work.
From Rob Novak’s blog, his original posting can be found here.
So – to recap – we found a massive, hairy, evil monster that can cause pain and most definitely fear in most human beings, especially around the office. So naturally, we named it SharePoint. Here is an actual photo of the beast, taken just this weekend.
Sadly this week, we’re going to kick SharePoint out. Turns out it’s too expensive to keep feeding it, and it really needs a bigger box (probably more than one) and more attention than anybody originally thought. It keeps getting bigger and bigger, and we’re honestly getting more afraid of it every day.
We have a lot of fun at SNAPPS.
Troy Reimer and I spoke for a couple of hours in front of 30 or so geeks Tuesday night in Stockholm, Sweden. Ekakan sponsored the event and Troy and I had a great time. We spoke about the Lotus Quickr Templates, you can download them here, and about workflow lotusscript, JSON and the Dojo Toolkit. It was great to see some familiar faces from past years when I was working in Sweden but also several from Lotusphere.
Before the event they took us to Icebar Stockholm. They made an entire bar in ice from the northern part of Sweden. That’s right, they ship the ice down and build the walls, bar and seats out of pure ice.
The pictures are taken by Joachim Dagerot who also together with Niklas Waller has blogged about the event.
Warren and Kitty Elsmore, Troy Reimer, Rob Novak and I had the opportunity to visit one of London’s great buildings Tuesday. The Gherkin, as it’s also called after it’s pickle shape, is London’s sixth tallest building with 590 ft (180 m). It’s located in the City of London in the main financial district. The building was designed by Lord Foster and Ken Shuttleworth and constructed by Skanska of Sweden 2001-2004.
The building is closed to the public but we got to visit the building through Matt White who works as a consultant in the building. We had drinks at the very top of the building that overlooks London with spectacular views. You can see for your self.
IBM has announced Lotus Symphony so we finally has a name for the productivity editors inside Lotus Notes 8. This is a free download from IBM and they are based on the OpenOffice suite of editors. Last weeks announcement that IBM will contribute back to OpenOffice community is in direct relation to this announcement. We at SNAPPS have been using these tools for the last few months now and I could not be happier with them. FREE does not hurt either.
There were other announcements made at the New York city event on Tuesday and by Kevin Cavanaugh here at Collaboration University in London yesterday.
Mobile support for Lotus Notes and Domino Web Access users through IBM Lotus Notes Traveler- Following the shipping of Lotus Notes and Domino 8 that began worldwide in August, IBM is announcing Lotus Notes Traveler, a new client for Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.1. Currently scheduled to be available in the first quarter of 2008, Lotus Notes Traveler will provide out-of-the-box, mobile support for Lotus Notes and Domino Web Access users, enabling access to Lotus Domino mail from Microsoft Windows Mobile devices. As currently planned, Lotus Notes Traveler will provide automatic, real-time replication of email, including attachments, calendar, address book, journal and to-do’s and will work over all wired and wireless connections.
With a beta coming a few weeks there are a lot of enhancements and new features in the new version of Lotus Notes 8.0.1. New Domino Web Access with two different versions of light (fast) and normal. Finally a secondary calendar & time zones that will work good. Mail file quota guage that Mary Beth Raven showed us at Collaboration University in Kansas City last week and will show here in London on Friday. “To do” UI improvements. They did not have time to get those in in the 8.0 release, but now they will be there. Quickr 8.1 integration into side shelf. 35% increased compression on the databases (sorry, they are called applications now) Native support for 64-bit on Windows and AIX. FIPS 140-2 support, a federal standard for security and Citrix support.
Sametime 8 will have three flavors – Basic (just IM in Notes), Standard (integration with mobile, telephony integration) and Advanced (meetings +).
WebDialogs purchase became Sametime Unyte – web conference available as a service. Simplifies collaboration outside the intranet. Will link to other Lotus products via plug-ins.
Side shelf connector for Notes 8.0.1, Connector for MS Outlook. Strong UI improvements and performance improvements of over 50%. Personal file sharing for free to Notes users. Enablers for ECM integration.
HUGE! New product announced available early 2008: Quickr Content Integrator: Migrate from Sharepoint, Exchange public folders, Domino teamrooms, and DDM libraries. Also provides coexistence running in parallel, or migrating. Synchronization is an option.
Dropped Workplace name. This is a big deal – Zero footprint eForms. Browser-based using XML XForms standards.
It’s been a few days since I wrote a posting. I’ve been really busy with customer work and getting ready for a lot of conferences and events coming up in the next weeks.
First there is Collaboration University for Lotus Notes & Domino in both Kansas City, September 10-12, and in London, September 19-21. On the 22nd Troy Reimer and I travel to Sweden for a couple of days of vacation but also to speak at g33k on the 24th. Ekakan is the host once again for this “Geek Meet”. I know we will have lots of fun there and nice to meet some Swedes I haven’t seen in a long time, or never. It will also be fun to show of Stockholm and Västerås to Troy since he has never been to Sweden. We are spending all day in Stockholm that Monday and I’m thinking that the Wasa museum, Gamla Stan (Old Town) and Skansen will be a great day. If you have any other suggestions please feel free to comment below.
On the 26th and 27th I travel back, first to London then back to Kansas City. Home for 2 days and I’m off to Miami on the 29th for the Advisor Summit. Back home on the 4th of October and there was all September and the beginning of October gone.
See you there.
As many bloggers out there, including Rob Novak, Ed Brill and Mary Beth Raven, has posted; Lotus Notes & Domino 8 will be available this Friday.
Speaking of above bloggers, Collaboration University for Notes & Domino 8 still have seats available. This is the first technical conference on the new release. Other notible IBMers present at the event are Bob Balaban and Kevin Cavanaugh.
Hope you can join us.
UPDATE! I must be really tired. It’s not September but August 17 for the release date. I’ve changed the title of this post.
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