Aug 142007
 

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.

Aug 062007
 

The Collaboration University website has been updated for the September event. CU is the first major technical training event following the release of Lotus Notes and Domino 8.

We have lined up some incredible talent for both speakers and keynote addresses. Ed Brill will deliver the keynote in Kansas City on September 10 and Kevin Cavanaugh, Vice President of Lotus Notes and Domino Development on September 19 in London. Other speakers that we can announce are Mary Beth Raven, Ph.D. and Bob Balaban. All the speakers and sessions are now posted on the CU site.

We also welcome three partners this time around. SNAPPS, The Turtle Partnership and BE Systems.

Register Now for Kansas City (September 10-12) or London (September 19-21)

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
 

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.

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!