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My sessions at Lotusphere 2008

Nov 162007

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.

HND305

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.

BP205

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.

BP212

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.

g33k Geekmeet in Stockholm

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Sep 282007

Troy & Viktor at g33k in Stockholm, Sweden 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.

Viktor and Troy at Icebar, Stockholm 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.

Lotus Symphony and other announcements from IBM

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Sep 202007

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.

Notes Traveler

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.

Lotus Notes 8.0.1

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

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.

Lotus Quickr 8.1

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.

Lotus Forms 3.0

Dropped Workplace name. This is a big deal – Zero footprint eForms. Browser-based using XML XForms standards.

SNAPPS templates for Lotus Quickr available to download

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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

Lotus Quickr Demo: QSite

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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.

Lotus Quickr Demo: QActivities

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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.

Lotus Quickr Demo: QContacts

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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.

Lotus Quickr Demo: QIssues

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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.

Lotus Quickr Demo: QMeeting

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Jul 032007

From Rob Novak’s blog:

For the seventh Lotus Quickr Template demo, you’ll see QMeeting, an organizational and planning aid for complex meetings. Not the 2-hour staff meeting or the 90-minute group conference call, those are better handled with your Notes Mail and Quickr’s native group calendar, respectively. The meetings that benefit most from QMeeting are those that make you tear your hair out – multiple agenda items, planned breaks, different people responsible for each agenda item, multiple electronic resources (attachments), and a timeline to keep. Examples of such meetings? Shareholder’s meetings. Conference tracks. Corporate retreats. Financial reviews. The big ones!

QMeeting lets you distribute responsibility for agenda items to individuals, or lets you manage agenda items as discrete elements as a proxy for an outsider, or even create them on the fly. Agenda items are the building blocks of complex meetings, and each can have its own “Owner”, resources, rich text, and set of appropriate attachments. So if John is in charge of Finance, let John manage the agenda item for the financial report!

The meeting manager – a person who puts together the meeting agenda – can then easily assemble an electronic meeting agenda that automatically computes time slots, adds breaks and lunches, and even includes online meetings. If someone hasn’t completed their agenda item, it can be added easily. Once the meeting agenda is built, it has direct links to each agenda item, and (this is cool) direct links to each attachment. This document becomes the easy access point for all meeting participants. In practical use, it can be projected and run by a person when the meeting is live in person, and used online when the meeting is managed via teleconference or Sametime. It becomes a nice adjunct to online meetings by storing all meeting “artifacts” in one place.

Go have a look at the QMeeting demo.

Lotus Quickr Demo: QAnnounce

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Jul 032007

Rob Novak has posted the sixth Lotus Quickr Template demo: QAnnounce. From Rob’s blog:

QAnnounce lets you put structure around the creation, edit, approval and archive process for any kind of “official” communication. The form is fairly simple, with the kind of metadata fields you would expect – a distribution date, a field to track the disposition of the document, and (something new) a field to track comments as each edit is made, and display them in an audit trail along with the name of the person making the edit, the disposition at the time, and the date and time the edit was made. Of course, we’ve included some flexible views to let you categorize the communications by disposition or category.

Go have a look at the QAnnounce demo here.

All the demos are now done. Check back here today for the postings!