IBM platform statement for Symbian/Symbian^3 and Windows Phone 7 relative to Nokia announcement.

https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21470120

Following Nokia’s February 11, 2011 announcement of their plan for a partnership with Microsoft and Windows Phone as their primary smartphone platform, the longtime IBM and Nokia relationship will continue. The IBM 2011 strategy for the Symbian platform remains unchanged. IBM will continue to support its mobile products on Nokia Symbian devices that are in market today and intends to add support later this year for Nokia Symbian^3 devices based on customer demand.
IBM Collaboration Solutions organization has no plans for Windows Phone support at this time. The IBM Collaboration Solutions team will continue to watch market trends and listen to its customers as the prerequisite indicators for forming plans relative to Windows Phone support.


Wie verblödet sind diese GEZ Typen eigentlich?

Gerade kam ein Brief der GEZ gerichtet an meine Frau.

“Wir konnten Sie unter obiger Anschrift nicht in unserem Adressbestand finden …”

Na und, was schert es micht? Immerhin wohnen meine Frau und ich seit 14 Jahren dort und zahlen pünktlich unsere GEZ Gebühren.

Und wenn ich mir diese Schreiben der Inkasso Truppe aus Köln anschaue, könnte ich KOTZEN. §§ an jeder Stelle und ständige Hinweise auf PLICHTEN. Sogar in welcher Farbe ich den Zettel für die Rückantwort ausfüllen MUSS wird vorgeschrieben.

Und soweit ich informiert bin, muss man einen Brief, der ausdrücklich als ANTWORT gekennzeichnet ist NICHT frankieren.

Warum macht ihr bei der Wuchertruppe überhaupt noch den untauglichen Versuch, eure Daten in den Griff zu bekommen? Hat sich doch eh erledigt, wenn jeder Haushalt gleichermaßen zur Kasse gebeten wird.

Also verpisst euch aus meinem Leben und verschont mich und meine Familie mit euren idiotischen Briefen.

 


Entwicklercamp 2011 – Wrapup

Last week was packed with conference and 2 LCTY. Iwrote about the LCTY in another article earlier today.

Entwicklercamp 2011 was just great. The team around Rudi once again setup a great 3 days conference. The team acts very professional, either in setting up all the technical stuff that is needed to run a conference of this size ( appr. 190 attendees ) , helping newbies to find the right room, putting together the daily campnews and taking photos during the sessions and the social events. There is also a lot of work that remains invisible but has to be done before the first speaker enters the stage for the keynote.

Maureen Leland did the keynote and talked about Domino Appication Development Directions.

Lot of talk about XPages in the breakout sessions. No surprise is that. But there was also other interesting stuff to listen to. Look at the agenda to get an impression of the the variety of topics.

Before the conference, Rudi did a survey to get an impression of how many people would want to see which session. This was great because the rooms in the conference area are of very different size. So there was no need to change a room shortly before the session starts because the room was overcrowded. We have seen this in the past.

I myself delivered 3 sessions and according what I could see from the evaluations, the attendees enjoyed it.

There are a few other things to mention.

Thanks to Ellice Uffer, Manager IBM Press for shipping 4 FREE copies of “Mastering XPages”. Well, not really shipping. Maureen Leland had to carry the books in her luggage. So some pair of shoes had to stay at home for sure. Thank you Ellice and Maureen.

Thanks to Joyce Davies and David Leedy for providing 250 copies of “XPages Cheat Sheet”. Sorry, Joyce for the extra gray hair you got by trying to get the copies delivered in time.

And also a big thank you to Manfred Dillmann (madicon.de) and Juergen Gabel (sdd.de). Both gave me coupons for free licenses of their products as a giveaway. An overall value of € 4.000,- !!

And last but not least, Teamstudio gave me T-Shirts for the attendees of my session. On tuesday evening you could see shiny blue Teamstudio shirts all over the conference.

If you have never been to Entwicklercamp before, consider attending next year. If you are more like an Admin there is also Admincamp.

 


I’ll be speaking at BLUG

The next pre-Lotusphere event will be BLUG. The Belux Lotus User Group is proud to deliver a 2 days event on March 31st and April 1st in Antwerp, Belgium.

The speaker list is impressive and so is the agenda.

If you not have registered yet, do it right NOW –> register here

I will also do a talk about the History of Lotus Notes. Hope the IBM inquisition will not punish me for saying LOTUS 🙂

Here is the session abstract.

When Plato Left The Cave – A brief history of Lotus Notes

Jump back in time to 1974. In a Harvard dormitory, Bill Gates, future cofounder of Microsoft, is goofing off playing poker and pinball. Over in India, Steve Jobs, future cofounder of Apple, has shaved his head and is wandering around seeking enlightenment. Out in Hawaii, Steve Case, future cofounder and head of AOL Time Warner, is busy writing album reviews for his Honolulu high school newspaper. While these future billionaire CEOs of Internet-industry behemoths are busy enjoying their last teenage years, at a university town in Illinois the ‘Net’ has already arrived. Indeed: it’s in full swing!
In the following years the germ cell of Lotus Notes began to grow and to evolve to the world’s leading groupware application.
Follow the timeline from the past to present in the history of Lotus Notes / Domino.

Hope to see you there. Did I mention that this is a FREE event?


LCTY 2011 – Duesseldorf

I had the chance and pleasure to attend LCTY 2011, Rheinland Nachlese last thursday. LCTY 2011, Rheinland Nachlese is the small brother / sister of the edcom LS review in Munic earlier this week.

Small only regarding the timeframe. LCTY Rheinland attempts to put all the great content into one single day while edcom is a two day event. This might give you a bit of the feeling you have at Lotusphere, because you have to decide which session you attend and depending on your decision, you maybe missing some other great content that is is presented at the same time.

Every year, timetoact has an impressive lineup of speakers.

Ed Brill, Ron Sebastian, Angela Blasberg, Daniel Nashed, Stephan Wissel just to name a few.

After a short introduction by Otto Förg and Felix Binsack where they showed some tweets that popped up on Twitter during LS 11 OGS shouting for “DEMO, DEMO, DEMO!!! “, Ron Sebastian took the stage for the keynote. His presentation skills are tremendous. I love to listen to him and watch him doing demoes of all the new stuff. Everything works smoothly from my point of view. If this had been the OGS at LS, it would have been less boring.

After the keynote, the audience had the choice to attend sessions in different tracks ( administration, development, vendors … ).

I decided to spend most of my time in the development track. Stephan Wisssel, who came all the way from Singapore, presented an excellent session on how to enhance XPages to deal with CSV files and to get content out of a RDBMS and display the data on an XPage.

Another session, also by Stephan Wisssel, was about how to combine the best of two worlds, Domino and Sharepoint.

Both session were at an advanced level regarding your skills as a developer. Again, as an advice. If you have not started to look into XPages ( and Java ), do it NOW!!

Angela Blasberg presented on Extensibility API and the Extension Library ( available on OpenNTF ).

I missed the “Hacking the Designer” session while hanging around in the vendors area talking to Daniel Nashed and Stephan Wissel.

After a long day and a view on IBM’s future Software strategy, all attendees were invited for a dinner.

The Maritim Hotel at Duesseldorf International Airport was a great place for this conference. Last year the Swissotel in Neuss was the venue. I cannot see any big difference between these locations, so it is not easy to answer the question in the final evaluation, which venue was better.

During the final speech, Felix Binsack asked the audience if LCTY should be a two days event the next year. There were only a few handsigns for this option.

If you not have the chance to attend Lotusphere, you should attend the LCTY 2012 either in Munic or in Duesseldorf depending on your location.Expect a great line-up of speakers presenting excellent content in an appropriate location.

 


LCTY 2011 – Cologne

On Friday, 25-Feb-2011, I attended LCTY 2011 at ebf.de in Cologne. ebf is an IBM Premium Partner for many years and they also work together with RIM. So it is no surprise that they offer solutions for the Blackberry and other mobile devices.

The venue was the IBM building in Cologne near the river Rhine. The slogan was “Go social, do (mobile) business”.

Ed Brill was not able to speak at this LCTY because of some overlap with other LCTY events in Germany. So this year there were no “high rank” speakers from the US to present a session in Cologne.

But ebf got Dr. Peter Schuett as the keynote speaker. Dr. Schuett is the leader of Software Strategy & Knowledge Management in the IBM Software Group.He has great presentation skills so even for me as a Lotus Notes tekkie his presentation was not boring at any time although it was all about strategy.

There were all the now well known topics in his talk; Lotus Live Symphonie, Activity Streams etc. The fazit for me ( putting my administrator hat on ) is that we have to aggravate our efforts in the mobile business. More and more content will be available on the mobile device. And there is another important point that comes into play. BYOD ( Bring Your Own Device ). More and more companies allow their employees to use own devices at work. So from the company’s perspective you will no longer be able to handle only one mobile device technologie in the future. You have to lookk for solutions to get the content onto different  end-point devices ( Nokia, Blackberry (PlayBook) , iPhone/iPad ).

Putting my developer hat on, the message clearly is “Learn XPages. If you have not started, do it NOW !!”.

Device management is also a big topic, IT departments have to deal with. Looking at all the different devices and the inconsistency in security and the lack of features in remote wipe and also billing, you should think about a device management solution that tries to simplify the handling of different device types.

MobileIron is the solution that was presented at LCTY. It is not feature perfect. Some features like the billing for iPhone/ iPad are not available. But this is caused by iOS.

So even the device vendors have to do some work to put all the features into their operation systems to allow a consistant way of handling different end-point devices in the future.

To sum up this event. A free event, perfect location, excellent catering. Keep in mind that ebf does not provide much technical content in the sense of code samples and stuff. The target audience is decision makers and managers. Maybe Marco can comment on this :).

One sidenote on presentations in general. Most of the presentations were original slide decks from LS 2011. These sessions are meant to be held in 45 – 60 minutes. It is irritating for the audience when you try to present a 45 minute session in 30 minutes and skip some slides from the presentation because they may not be important from the speakers perspective.

Let the audience decide, which slide contains important information from their point of view and not simply skip a slide because of time pressure.


[Ytria] – New Release available (V.10)

A new major version of Ytria’s suite of tools is available.

Ytria tools and a number of their functions are now available directly in the Domino Designer client with a new DDE integration option.

Now you can just right-click a design element to open in a Ytria software tool.

This offers enormous advantages for developers working on remote databases because it is no longer necessary to open all the designs in a database. In addition to the contextual menu, the integrated options are available in a new Ytria pull-down menu which is always visible. Note: DDE integration features require that you’re using Domino Designer 8.0 or higher.

Read more about the new features here.


Book Review – IBM Press, Mastering XPages

“I never got the chance to meet the inventors of ‘Notes’, but these guys were true visionaries.” This is the first sentence in a 748 pages book about XPages that was recently published by IBM Press.
The book is written by Martin Donnelly, Mark Wallace and Tony McGuckin with a foreword by Philippe Riand. Although all authors declare that “none of us had been down the book-writing road before”, the book is well written, even for readers that do not have english as the first language.

The main content starts with a high level overview about XPages. Even if you are already experienced in XPages development, it is worth reading this chapter. Start writing your first XPages application and follow the instructions step by step. The resulting application is a good starting point to put enhancements on top.
If you run into a problem regarding security settings on the server take a look at the very end of the book where you find the settings that have to be applied to your server.
IMHO, this information should be part of the “Getting Everything You Need” chapter.

The anatomy of an XPage is described in detail in chapter 4. Newbees to this field should read this chapter carefully. You will need this information if you want to dig deeper into XPages development later on.

Chapter 12 explains how to build your own user interface controls. This part of the book is not easy to understand for a non experienced developer, but if you follow the step by step instruction carefully, you will succeed.

All over the book you find tons of source code and numerous screenshots. It would be a good idea to make the source code available for download. But perhaps it is already available and I missed this part in the book.

The book also gives credit to all of the members of the Notes Community that started back in 8.5 with spreading the news about XPages in blogs, podcasts etc. Take these ressources as a supplement to the information you find in the book.

As a conclusion, I would recommend this book to every developer who wants to start with XPages development.

I’m not sure about the availability on amazon.com or other amazon sites around the world but I’ve heard from colleagues that there is or at least had been a massive delay in delivery. If you live in Germany, you can order the book at  here. I received my copy within 3 days.


EntwicklerCamp 2011

Lotusphere is just about to start in a few hours and there are only a few days to go to  EntwicklerCamp 2011. The Camp is one of two big conferences in Germany run by dutchman Rudi Knegt and his team.

As always, the lineup of national and intenational speakers is impressive. Maureen Leeland, Ben Langhinrichs, Paul Withers, Detlev Pöttgen, Thomas Bahn to name only a few.

With this camp so close after Lotusphere 2011 you can expect sessions right from the ‘Sphere’.

I will also do a session called “The Lotus Code Cookbook”. The content is not XPages centric because  there are already 8 XPages related sessions on the agenda. So I decided to do a session dealing with “classic” programming techniques.

We will look at some basic settings in the DDE, @formulas, LotusScript, C-API and do RichText manipulation on the CD-record level using LS2CAPI. The content is for beginners to geeks. It took me about 6 months to put the session together. Hope you enjoy it.

If you cannot make it to EntwicklerCamp, chances are that I will give this session at BLUG and / or UKLUG ( if my session proposal gets accepted )

I will also speak at the CGS of Entwicklercamp. “From PLATO to the leading groupware platform” is about the history of Lotus Notes from it’s beginning long before Release 1 to present.

Session slides are prepared and I also have packed a box of giveaways for the attendees. Laptop cases, T-shirts, bools USB-sticks and other stuff.

If you are a company and would like to support me, you are invited to send me some freebies that I can give away at conferences. Any help is much appreciated.


First steps with my brand new iPad

A few days ago, my boss gave me an iPad 16G WiFi for testing in our company environment. I’m working with an iPhone 3GS for almost a year now and I would not like to miss it any longer.

What do we need the iPad in our organization for? Here are a few from our list of requirements

  • Lotus Notes Traveler
  • Connect to our network via VPN and CheckPoint firewall
  • Intranet
  • Connect to SAP via Business Object Explorer app or browser
  • Synchronize documents ( M$-Office, PDF )
  • Edit documents
  • Other aplications via browser
  • Access files on our servers

As we already use Lotus Notes Traveler 8.5.2.1 on iPhone and Nokia devices, I didn’t expect any issues with installation and configuration on the iPad.
The iPad has only WiFi and so I connected to our LNT server internally. The server can be accessed from outside using SSL via a reverse proxy. The connection from the reverse proxy to the internal LNT server uses http only thru the checkpoint firewall.
After downloading the profile and the usuable steps to install it, I was able to sync my mails, calendar and contacts. Next I installed a second profile accessing my server at home ( HTTPS and DSL ). No problem at all at this time.
Later that day I tried to install the access to my company mail accout from outside the network via the reverse proxy. As I said, this works perfectly on the iPhone and Nokia devices, but I am not able to install the profile on the iPad. All I get is an “Error DomainÚErrorDomain Code=0 “Operation could not be completed.” (DAErrorDomain error 0.)” . Thanks to Dennis van Remortel for some tipps on twitter.

There are a few hints on this error and I will sure need to do some more investigation. ( Reverse Proxy logs, Domino server settings etc. ).

Next was to connect the iPad using VPN. This was painless. No app needed. Simply throw in the servername or IP of the corporate firewall, username and password and a shared secret. PN, I am now able to connect to LNT and sync my company mail.

Intranet and other browser based ( XPages- ) applications work perfectly and the size of the display makes it easy to work with them.

We also tried RDP connection to some Windows machines and so we did with SSH to Linux boxes. Teamviewer and VNC work as well.

Now for the documents. I searched the AppStore and found “Documents To Go” which seems to fit perfect for our needs. Pls. forgive me, I’m, a newbee in the Apple world ( except a few free apps on the iPhone ) and perhaps there are better solutions. But I guess that you will write your suggestions in the comments.

At first sight, “Documents To Go” looked like the perfect application. It can open all fiele formats that we use and you are able to modify documents and spreadsheets.

Now for the sync part. “Documents To Go Desktop” lets you sync the content of folders on your computers with the iPad or iPhone. I installed the client on my laptop. After the start it complains that I do not have “Bonjour” installed on my laptop. No surprise is that because I do not have iTunes installed and Bonjour is a part of iTunes. This is the first big minus point for the iPad in the enterprise. We do not allow iTunes on computers in the enterprise.

But this is my private Laptop. so I installed iTunes and started “Documents To Go Desktop” again. I had connected the iPad by USB. To my surprise the device was not detected by “Documents To Go Desktop”.

There is a hint on the screen that sync only works via WiFi but not via USB. This is the next mega-big minus that makes this app absolutely useless for our needs. Not only that you have to connect the iPad via WiFi to the network; you have to connect your local computer to the network via WiFi as well. No problem with a laptop, but try this with a desktop PC …

By the way, the iPad does not load its battery when connected to USB. Tried several ports on the laptop, dockingstation and a desktop PC. Also tried different cables. The pad connects to iTunes in all tests.

Anyone an idea to connect to CIFS shares on Novell Netware using the FileBrowser app? Can connect to Windooze 2003 server and Windooze 7 workstation, but Novell Netware.

So far for my first steps with the iPad. Feel free to comment and give hints and tipps. Much appreciated.


Designer Help: @V2IF Typo or a sack of rice fell over ?

I did some investigation on how often an @function is used in the mail template. It is absolutely useless information, but I wanted to test the usage of  Teamstudio Configurator from Lotus Script.

Here is a snapshot of the resulting view

Reading through the results I stumbled upon the @V2If formula. This formula is used 21 times in the mail85.ntf template.

But why should one use this @V2If in a template that would never be opened on a Notes 2 client. I looked in the Designer Help to find out if there is some difference betweeen the @If and @V2If .

To my surprise I found the following sentence in the help description for @V2If

Note  In applications created with Lotus Notes prior to Release 4, the @If function is automatically renamed to @V2If during the upgrade to Release 4.

If I understand this sentence correct, all @if entries in the code of an application created in Notes 3 are replaced automatically by @V2If when you convert the application from Notes 3 to Notes 4.

IMHO this must be a typo, because this would not make any sense. @IF was introduced in Notes 3. Why should one convert this to the old @V2IF when you are obviously using Notes 4?

Oh listen, a sack of rice fell over in the Yunnan district …


XPages – For … Loop issue

While working on some XPages app dev, I encountered a problem with for … loops in an output script block when the loop is used together with other XPages elements in the block.

There are two ways of filling the content of the script block. The picture below shows both ways and in both cases I get an error message and the code does not compile.

The only way to get rid of the error in the second sample was to replace the “<” with a special character substitution code  &lt; or &#60; .


NotesHound Developer License is now Free!

Just received a mail from Kenneth Hagman, the maker of Noteshound:

Dear Ulrich Krause.

First of all, a new version with number 8.3.2 has been released.
It contains improvements to the Element Library.
– Design elements can now be re-compiled after a ‘put’
– The system tries to handle agents so that the agent data context document is created.
– Improved error handling informing the user what must be done to design elements after a ‘put’.

Secondly, we have some not so happy news.
Due to reasons we could not have foreseen or anticipated in any way, we can no longer support the NotesHound products in such a way that customers get a reasonable level of service.
With no proper support, we can not expect people to pay for the products.
For those reasons, we have decided to give away the Developer version of NotesHound for free.

It is with sad hearts we take this decision, but we see no other way around it.
For existing customers like yourself, we will do our best with regards to continued support.

Starting on 23 December 2010, anyone can download a Developer version absolutely free.
Registration is optional, and will only mean we can contact users about new releases.

Corporate customers will still need to log in using the Corporate Members Area.

Thank You

// Ken Haggman, NotesHound

So jump over to the NotesHound site and get your copy today!!