Live Blog of May ATLUG Meeting: Bruce Elgort on XPages and Richard Sharpe on Teamstudio Unplugged

Contingent on getting connected at IBM's Atlanta TEC Center today, I will be live blogging the Atlanta Lotus User Group meeting featuring Bruce Elgort and Richard Sharpe.

Tune in here at 11:30 am Eastern!

The agenda is:

Bruce Elgort, president and CEO of Elguji Software, noted speaker, and co-producer of the Taking Notes
Podcasts will be doing a technical presentation on programming with XPages!

Also, Richard Sharpe of Teamstudio® will present
Teamstudio® UnpluggedTM - Mobilize your Lotus® Notes® applications
• Extend the power and reach of your Notes® applications
• Store data locally on your BlackBerry® with a lightweight Notes client
• Work remotely, with or without Internet connectivity
• Mobilize your existing applications fast, using drag-and-drop XPage technology

Ports used by Lotus Sametime 8.5 servers

With the addition of the Sametime System Console, Meeting, Media, and Proxy servers in Sametime 8.5, the configuration has gotten a little more complex.  If you have these servers running in different parts of your network, you may need to configure firewall ports to allow proper communications between the components.

Details on the port configuration is in the Sametime InfoCenter, but searches will usually lead you to a document that is specific to the Community server and does not address the new components.

The topic you want is in the Planning section: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/sametime/v8r5/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.help.sametime.v85.doc/plan/plan_ports.html

Live Blog content fixed and a tip on CoverItLive

I did my first live blog yesterday covering Luis Benitez and David Rosenfeld's session on Lotus Connections and WebSphere Portal integration at the Portal Excellence Conference.

My experience with CoverItLive was very good, with one issue:  During the session Luis talked about using an iFrame tag to embed Lotus Connections.  When I typed the tag, including the HTML brackets < >, CoverItLive did not encode the tag as text, sending it back as a real HTML tag.  This had the effect of starting, but not ending an iFrame in the middle of my session notes, and cutting off all notes after that point.  The iFrame tag also broke the edit capabilities in CoverItLive, so I was not able to correct the issue my self.

I emailed the support people at CoverItLive and they were able to resolve my issue quickly.

Here's the tip: When live blogging with CoverItLive, be very careful of typing in text that would resolve as HTML.

Side note for Blogger users: I just found out Blogger has the same issue in their rich text editor. :-)

Live Blog: Luis Benitez on Integrating Lotus Connections and WebSphere Portal

I am at the Portal Excellence Conference this week and will be live blogging Luis Benitez and David Rosenfeld's session on Lotus Connections and WebSphere Portal integration.

Collaboration University 2009 Day 3 wrap up

Collaboration University 2009 just wrapped up today with three sessions:

• The Future of Lotus Sametime (Rob Ingram, Senior Product manager, IBM Lotus Sametime)
• The Future of Lotus Quickr & Connections (David Kajmo, Senior Product manager, IBM Lotus Quickr)
• Bringing it All Together - Quick recaps from all of the CU speakers

The good news is that the CU crew had gotten permission to show us all of the latest Sametime features and news during the week.  Unfortunately, IBM is keeping other news on Quickr and Connections under wraps so they can make bigger announcements at Lotusphere 2010.  This meant that the two "Future" sessions this morning were more of a summary of the new features from sessions earlier in the week.

Probably the main bit of news was that there is a specific plan to release Sametime client updates for the Notes client which can be installed separately or using integration with the Notes Install Kit.

Two Collaboration University announcements on additional value:

1. There will be ongoing education through the year available to sign up for, free for this year's students and discounted for older alumni.
2. There is an online Collaboration University Campus providing a community of past students coming soon
   

Some folks are staying around for the extra hands on labs for Quickr Administration and Quickr Development, but I am off to catch a flight home.

My sophomore year at Collaboration University has been a great experience.  I have learned a lot, not just from the sessions, but from the ability to network with people and learn from their own experiences with the Lotus collaboration products in various deployment situations.  I look forward to coming again next year and hope to see you there!

Collaboration University 2009 Day 2

Day 2 of Collaboration University was a sprint of 8 back to back sessions.  Here is a summary of what I attended:

Quickr Performance Tips: Getting more from your Server (Warren Elsmore)

Warren gave us lots of good tuning tips, many of which can be found on the SNAPPS team blogs.  I was also on the Lotus Connections beta call going over detailed deployment and performance options and did not take detailed notes during this session.

Quickr Data: In, Out, Everywhere! A Wide Array of Approaches and Tools (Troy Reimer)

• Many issues to consider, including file and folder names and folder level access control
• Documents are easy to move, meta data is not
• Quick and easy: Quickr Connectors or PandaBear
• Use a migration tool such as Casahl ecKnowledge, Lotus Quickr Content Integrator, or DDM migration tool from IIUI/IBM
• Mid-level: ATOM, REST, SOAP, API calls, Feed parsing, Web Services - SOAP calls
• Harder: Native Notes Database Access

Customizing and Extending Sametime Meeting Centers: 8.0 and 8.5 (Carl Tyler)

• The 8.5 Meeting Center is much more extensible than the current version
• 8.0 customization tip: Just use a static HTML page to wrap the STCenter.nsf links
• Avoid direct customization of the STCenter.nsf design
• Sametime Online Meeting Toolkit supports a RESTful interface to create/delete/update meetings
• Meeting Room Client Accessibility Toolkit is a javascript client that allows adding menu items to the Meeting Center and to Sametime Activities
• Sametime 8.5 is based on Websphere/DB2 and meetings are reservationless and not scheduled
• There is a simple web client and a rich client plug in to the Sametime Connect client
• Rich client is required for advanced features like audio/video
• The REST APIs and JSON allow for many ways to do customization and integration of meetings

Going Mobile with Rob Novack


As an extra session over lunch, Rob Novack led a discussion on the Top 5 things users want to do w/Quickr and Connections on mobile devices such as Blackberries and iPhones.  The main requests were for:

1. Approve docs in Quickr
2. Comment on docs
3. Read/update a blog
4. Manage tasks in Quickr and in Connections Activities
5. Add folders/rooms to Quickr places

Rob also shared some secret information with us at the end of the session. (shhh!)


Your First Lotus Connections 2.5 Customizations Made Easy (Mitch Cohen)
Mitch delivered Stuart McIntrye's presentation that he will give at the Collaboration University in London next week. Mitch did a good job impersonating Stuart, except for the English accent.

We covered:
Themes - Look and Feel
Profiles - Changing, adding, and editing fields
Widgets - Extending Connections functionality

Key points:

• Mitch recommends you only change the header and footer on the look and feel unless you have a solid business reason
• Move your theme files to the HTTP server before you modify them
• Use Firebug for easy testing of your changes
• Additional UI changes can be done through JSP changes and iWidgets
• You can now change language resource bundles without rebuilding the internal jar files

Using and Customizing the Sametime 8.5 Web Client (Carl Tyler)

• STProxy is a lightweight Websphere based server that provides the web client and the communications proxy to the Sametime Community Server
• Set up and maintained through the new Sametime Console
• The Browser IM client will use the local Sametime Connect client connection if it is available
• Provides a large subset of the Connect Client functionlity, but not A/V or screen sharing/capture
• Built using the Web Client Toolkit
• Look and feel is easily controlled through CSS files
• Functional changes can be implemented through Javascript/Dojo updates

Sametime Telephony: TCSPI Plugins and Unified Telephony Options (Carl Tyler)

• In Sametime 8.5, IBM will be providing better hooks for telephony providers for audio/video/calls
• Client plug-ins give you click to call, voicemail, and presence awareness
• TCSPI is an application layer deployed on the Sametime server can integrate with office integration, Sametime Meetings, and client plug-ins
• Drag and drop to add people to a call is a nice feature
• SUT does not integrate with Sametime Meetings
• SUT is purely a GTS and ISSL play and can not be purchased direct from other partners!!
• SUT requires Websphere and an IBM SAN and provides Click to Call, presence, and office integration
• SUT provides call transfer to another device. This feature is also provided through client plug-ins from some other vendors.
• SUT can also merge active calls to bring together separate calls into a conference
• Most SUT integration and features are also available as TCSPI or client plug-ins from other vendors
  

Deploying Sametime on Linux: The Root of the Problem (Warren Elsmore)

• Sametime on Linux is not hard to do
• Once it is installed and running, it is exactly the same as any other server
• The downside is that many third party tools such as telephony integration are designed for Windows
• Warren prefers Linux for deployments, especially for large scale (>1000 users) systems
• Linux is more scalable than Windows, has no CALs, and will contain only the components you want (no DNS, DHCP, Kerberos, etc.)
  

The Other Side
Once again cloning technology failed me and I had to miss 7 great sessions:

• Sametime 8.5 Administration: Solutions Console and (gulp) Websphere Admin (Chris Miller)
• Alphabet Soup: SSO, LDAP, DNS, LTPA, We Could Go On... (Chris Miller)
• Quickr Themes Part 2: Adding Functionality With JavaScript (Viktor Krantz)
• Sizing for Quickr Servers: Load Testing and Deployment Planning (Warren Elsmore)
• Quickr REST and Web Services APIs for Mere Mortals (Viktor Krantz)
• Quickr & Domino Apps Together: Integration Strategies and Concepts (Troy Reimer)
• Top Quickr Support Issues 2009 (Rob Novak)

Tomorrow we wrap up with sessions direct from IBM on the future directions for Sametime, Quickr, and Connections.

Collaboration University 2009 Day 1, the other side

Collaboration University has two sessions going on in any given time slot, plus a hands-on lab open all day.  While not as bad as Lotusphere, where this year I had an instance of 5 concurrent sessions I wanted to attend, at CU I still find myself wishing I had a clone.

Luckily I got to see last year's version of most of the sessions I missed in Day 1, because it was some great content.  

Here is what I missed:

• Installation and Configuration of Quickr 8.2: Best Practices (Chris Miller)
• Sametime 8 and 8.5 Toolkit Overview (Carl Tyler)
• Development with Quickr: Three Solutions Deconstructed (Troy Reimer)
• Quickr Themes Part 1: Server-Wide Extensions and Custom Themes (Viktor Krantz)
• Using Forms and Placebot: Three Reusable Examples for Quickr (Troy Reimer)

As you can see there is a ton of value in Collaboration University. These guys go into way more depth than you will see in a typical overview session at Lotusphere and they are available to answer questions or go into a detailed discussion.  I saw at least two people get critical issues resolved just by being able to grab an expert between breaks.

Go ahead and start making your CU 2010 plans for next September!