Site relaunch

Hi folks,

long time no speak. I neglected my private blogging for a while due to lack of time. I am back now and will be posting a lot more from now on. So stay tunded.

Lotus Day in May

Dear all,

long time no speak. I have an announcement today. On May 6th IBM and We4IT organize a Lotus Day at IBM’s PSC in Hamburg. Check out the official announcement on We4IT.com and have a look at the agenda.

The event will be completed by speakers from IBM, Group Technologies, AHB Elektronik and accept-it. Follow this link to register.

 

Hallo Zusammen,

am 6.5. findet im PSC Hamburg eine gemeinsame Veranstaltung der We4IT Gmbh und IBM Deutschland statt. Der Lotus Tag richtet sich gleichermaßen an Entwickler, Administratoren und Anwender / Entscheider. Drei spannend besetzte parallel laufende Tracks halten interessante Vorträge für jeden der genannten Bereiche bereit. Es ist für jeden etwas interessantes dabei. Informieren Sie sich auf We4IT.com und werfen Sie einen Blick auf die Agenda.

Hier können Sie sich anmelden.

Lotus Mashups – tough start

After a successfull installation of Lotus Mashups in a VM I started to play around with it today. To be honest, this start was not as easy as I expected. I understand, that basically mashups either show data from feeds or from webpages. Feeds can be accessed directly, if already provided as such, or generated from different data sources via the mashup hub.

The data sources can be relational databases, domino databases, ldap directories, excel tables, other xml sources and so on. Mashup hub automatically transforms the data from these sources to feeds and these feeds can be used in Lotus Mashups to show, connect and interact.

With that basic understanding I tried to connect to my data sources. Excel works just fine, but when it comes to domino databases or ldap (which is a domino server as well in my case) struggling starts. It says that the domino server must run the diiop task, so I started it.  I am capable of accessing the diiop_ior.txt file via http, but as soon as I try to connect using mashup hub I get an error. Same for ldap access. I try to figure this out and come back with my results.

A Lotus Link Collection

Here is a collection of links to lotus resources and information. The list is most likely incomplete. Links missing but worth listing are welcome. I don’t list links to Lotus Notes / Domnio resources here since there are too many. If there is a demand for such a link list please let me know and I will provide a separate list.

LOTUS CONNECTIONS:

Product homepage: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/connections/
Wiki: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lcwiki.nsf
Developerworks: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/products/connections/
Lotus Greenhouse (Test Connections Online): https://greenhouse.lotus.com/home/
Download (login needed): https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/dswdown/dswdown.wss/web/searchDescription?ls=true&tt=DD&st=All&sl=image&apd=0&txt=lotus%20connections
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Connections
Blog (The Connections Blog): http://lotusconnectionsblog.com/ 
Blog (Synch.rono.us): http://synch.rono.us/social/blog.nsf
Blog (Luis Benitez): http://www.lbenitez.com/

LOTUS QUICKR:

Product homepage: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/quickr/
Wiki: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lqwiki.nsf
Developerworks: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/products/quickr/
Lotus Greenhouse (Test Quickr Online): https://greenhouse.lotus.com/home/
Download (login needed): https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/dswdown/dswdown.wss/web/searchDescription?ls=true&tt=DD&st=All&sl=image&apd=0&txt=lotus%20quickr 
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Lotus_Quickr
Blog (The Quickr Blog): http://quickrblog.com/

LOTUS MASHUPS:

Product homepage: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/mashups/
Wiki: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/mashupswiki.nsf
Developerworks: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/products/mashups/
Download (login needed): https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/dswdown/dswdown.wss/web/searchDescription?ls=true&tt=DD&st=All&sl=image&apd=0&txt=lotus%20mashups
Wikipedia: —
Blog (): —

LOTUS FOUNDATIONS:

Product homepage: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/foundations/start/
Wiki: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/lfndswiki.nsf/ 
Developerworks: —
Download (login needed): https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/dswdown/dswdown.wss/web/searchDescription?ls=true&tt=DD&st=All&sl=image&apd=0&txt=lotus%20foundations
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Foundations
Blog (Foundation and Empire): http://lotusfoundations.blogspot.com/ 
Blog (Bilal Jaffery): http://www.bilal.ca/ 
Blog (Foundations for SMB): https://www.asnddesigns.com:4443/blog/Fdn4smb.nsf/

 

This list should enable everyone to get started. Finally there is one more source of information I want to recommend:

PlanetLotus.org: http://planetlotus.org/

IBM announces E-Mail Hosting service

Bob Picciano (General Manager Lotus Software) announced on Interop. fare last week that IBM is going to start an E-Mail and Calendaring service based on Lotus Domino. It is available for companies from 1,000 to 10,000 employees and can be licenced at a price from 8 to 18 dollars per person.

This is most likely the answer to Microsoft’s Exchange Online which is available for companies with more than 5,000 employees.

 

    

Lotus Foundations – First steps

Installing Lotus Foundations start is quite a simple thing following this guide. You end up with a VM holding a basic Foundations installation. 

Lotus Foundations Server

Webmail and calendaring (Domino Web Access) is already included and ready to use. You can choose between Full and Light version of DWA.

The web interface provides and easy way to manage and monitor your Foundations installation. There are functions to add users, to install AddOns, to configure mailing, ports and other stuff. Adding a new user automatically creates a new mailfile for this user so that she/he can immediately start over with writing mails and creating calendar entries.

There are a couple of AddOns you can install to enhance the capabilities of the server. Lotus Domino, Lotus Notes, Lotus Symphony and Engate Mail Sentinel (Anti-Spam). All AddOns will be installed to the Foundations server and managed from there. The Domino Server runs on the Foundations server. Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony however are installation packaged which can be downloaded to workstations and installed there. Both Lotes and Lotus Domino are currently version 8.0.1!

Altogether the installation and configuration of the server is very easy, AddOns install themselves with no additional settings to be made and it simply works! Now all sales people have to convince S and M customers to buy this server. I have no clue how to licence the server and the AddOns and how much a licence costs, but given the simplicity of installing and configuring the server and yet the power of tools it provides it should sell well.

 

    

Lotus Notes 8.0.2 language packs available

Most language packs (Group 1 and 2a) are available now including German, French, Italian and so on.

 

    

How to keep track with all the news and developments?

Gee, I have to reorganise myself. There are so many blogs, tweets, feeds, … I follow that I have to find the right platform to do so. The ideal way would be to have a single site where all this data can be linked together and provided in a easy to manage way. Where is this site? Task for today: find it!

Java EE Server survey – My solution

I posted an article asking about JEE servers and which best to use in different scenarios. Well, I had to find a solution for my company and want to share it with you in case you have a similar task.

We have developed a web application that collects appointment data from Lotus Notes Mailfiles, writes this data into a relational database and provides an ajax frontend to view appointments, create new ones, update existing appointments and many more features. Changes will be synchronized with Lotus Notes mailfiles.

Anyway, it is a web application running on an application server. Since we have not used any EJBs, we don’t necessary need a full application server. Now there are a couple of installation scenarios for which to choose the appropriate server.

1. New installation for a customer that has no application server running yet
2. New installation for a customer already having an application server
3. Internal productive installation
4. Internal demo installation hosted on the web
5. Internal demo installation in a VM for sales personnel to take to presentations

Numer 2 implies that we have to at least support the major application servers (IBM Websphere, BEA Weblogic, JBoss, Glassfish, Tomcat).

This is what I would do today in all other cases:

1. New customer installation: Glassfish – I reckon Glassfish is at least as good as JBoss but has a web frontend for administration purposes. So I favour Glassfish over JBoss.
2. We have to cope with what the customer already has
3. Internal productive installation: Glassfish – When suggesting Glassfish to customers theres no way not to use it internally as well.
4. Internal web demo: And again Glassfish.
5. VM demo: Apache Tomcat – A virtual machine has not as much power as a server and there is other software running on it as well like Lotus Domino, Lotus Notes, a relational database, … Tomcat is lean and fast and sufficient for the given case.

All right. I’d appreciate any other suggestions.

Lotusphere 2009

Registration gates are open for next year’s Lotusphere! My first Lotusphere ever was, let me think, this year and all I can say is: AMAZING. There is nothing comparable in the world if you are interested in the Lotus Brand. I will definately go next year to inhale the athmosphere, meet many great people, learn a lot of new things and hopefully sell some stuff.

So, if that was not convincing, here is what other people say about Lotusphere.

If you need good arguments to get a couple of bucks from your boss check this out.

Anyway, I am already excited and can’t wait to go. Hope to meet you there.