Jul 302007
 

I’m back from my trip to London, England and a weeks vacation in Sweden. It was a great event in London and I think the attendees got a lot out of the event. Don’t forget that there is one more Collaboration University in September, covering Notes and Domino 8.

It was great to visit with my family in Sweden. I stayed most of the time at my sister’s, but also a couple of nights at my brothers house. I’m coming back in September and my dad said if I didn’t stop running in and out like this he had to install saloon doors on the house.

It was however very nice to come back to my family here. Two weeks is way too long to be apart from your family. Beth, Jakob, Emma and Erik all waited at the airport and gave me lots of hugs and kisses.

Jul 172007
 

It’s been nearly four months since IBM said “go” on the Lotus Quickr template project that you’ve read so much about on my and other blogs. Today, after an exhausting but very rewarding development cycle, we get to say “go” too. Code was complete June 29 (as promised to IBM), testing on Lotus Quickr Gold code was July 2-6, last week was CU and finishing the download system, and this weekend we put the final touches on and did a limited test with IBMers. Then yesterday we knocked out one last bug in the download system after flying to London for Collaboration University this week.

In these last months I and the team at SNAPPS had a lot of fun developing these templates. I learned new code and got to dig really deep into the Dojo Toolkit which, you know by now, I really like.

So after all that we’re happy to announce that the SNAPPS templates for Lotus Quickr are ready for you. Make absolutely sure you get the documentation, read it, and install and sign the prerequisite files. Then go have some fun!

I will continue posting on developing and digging deeper into both Lotus Quickr as well as the Dojo Toolkit code.

QuickrTemplates.com

Jul 052007
 

Rob Novak’s and my session, BP311: The Great Code Giveaway – Web 2.0 Edition, at Lotusphere 2007 is added as one of the 14 (so far) podcasts that IBM put up on the DeveloperWorks website. The podcast is a recording of the session and a transcript of it is also available, even though they did spell my name wrong in there. Click here to listen or read. You can also go download the session materials and code.

Jul 052007
 

It is finally here, the Grand Finale! The eleventh and last Lotus Quickr template demo is here: QSite. Rob Novak puts it like this:

Now this is where I usually ramble on about the features and functions, their applicability to a business situation, and how wonderful your life is going to be as soon as we have the download database all ready. But to do so here would just detract from the big kahuna surprise we have in store for you with QSite. It’s been kept such a secret that my team and Satwik were the only ones who “really” knew what was coming…

Head straight to the demo of QSite and I’ll see you at Collaboration University!

UPDATE! I have added links to all the demos on the right side, so if you’ve missed any go check them out.

Jul 042007
 

The next to last Lotus Quickr Template demo is: QActivities. In QActivities, we have strived for a combination of an approachable, professional user interface and a base level of integration with Lotus Connections. Specifically, QActivities integrates with the Activities server, allowing the user to add any page in the Lotus Quickr place to an activity on the Activities server. This becomes very powerful when combined with the Lotus Notes 8 client and the embedded Activities sidebar. You can add a Quickr page to an activitiy, see it immediately in your Notes client, and launch the Quickr page form the context of the activity. Simple but very cool and effective and dare-I-say-it-again contextual collaboration.

In addition to a refreshed UI accomplished almost entirely with CSS – hence much faster – we’ve added some great features to Lotus Quickr like a list of the last 10 updated documents, a member list that searches for documents created by the member when clicked, and a nice little tab with place statistics!

You can see the demo of QActivities here.

Jul 032007
 

For the ninth demo, QContacts, we are getting into some eye candy and heavy Dojo work. I showed you a preview of it in my post Embedded Domino forms with Ajax submit and JSON view refresh a couple of days back. From Rob Novak’s blog:

Contacts? Why would you need that when you have a member list? Good question, easy answer. You need more information than the member record can supply, or the project contact isn’t a member of the place, or you need to share role-specific information about this contact with the team. There’s nothing more frustrating than having an out-of-date, incomplete, or low-confidence contact list. QContacts help to solve these problems, centralizing contact information while automating much of the work involved in maintaining it.

The use case is simple. You’re running a project using Lotus Quickr, and you want to maintain a contact list with more comprehensive information than is available in the member list (which is, in fact, mostly for authorization). You also don’t want to re-enter information from the member list, and it makes no sense to duplicate information available about a contact that may be a member of another place, or not a member of a place at all. QContacts consists of a single form for the Lotus Quickr place, and a Domino database to coordinate, automate, and consolidate contact data. It lets you add information about people that can be shared across places including all pertinent addressing information, personal contact information, a photo, and place-specific comments that are kept in context even if the contact is a member of multiple contact lists.

Take a look at the QContacts demo.

Jul 032007
 

The eighth Lotus Quickr Template demo has been posted. This time it’s QIssues.

Similar in feel to QSurvey, the form creation process is very simple. A floating window lets you build questions for your issue form and submit them to build the form. There are a couple new types of questions not found in QSurvey, a member list and date control. Once the questions are built, you can move them around, define a layout (1, 2, 3 columns or a wizard) and – this is key – decide right at the form what kind of workflow to put submissions through. And of course, using the workflow engine we’ve bundled with several templates, you can define that workflow yourself.

You can see a demo of QIssues here.

Jul 032007
 

The Dojo Toolkit has released the brand new Dojo 0.9 in beta. Very exciting! This is a brand new Dojo that is much faster than the 0.4 release, easier to customize the branding and with great accessibility (a11y).

SPEED: Stripped of all ‘excessive’, redundant, and backwards-compatible code, the new Dojo core is a speed-demon. It consists of a streamlined, compact Base (aka: dojo.js) which provides a plethora of reliable features for you and your application to expand upon. Our goal was to keep the new Base under 50K on disk and we’re happy to say that even with the many improvements to it since M2, Dojo Base still clocks in under the wire and gzipped it’s even smaller: 24K. The base of the new widget system (dijit.js) is even lighter, weighing in at 21K on disk and 11K on the wire.

You can download it here.