Collaboration University Day 3 recap

Collaboration University day 3 sessions:

The Future of Lotus Sametime (Kim Artlip, Worldwide Sales Leader)
Kim demonstrated the business value of Sametime Advanced, including persistent chat, moderated chats, broadcast tools, instant polls, and more. Next was a review of the 2008/09 roadmap:

Q4 2008: Sametime Advanced initial release, Standard and Entry 8.0.1
H2 2008: Sametime Unified Telephony, Sametime 8.0.2 (Citrix, better codecs, Sharepoint)
H1 2009: Sametime "Next" (Web 2.0 browser integration, enhanced meetings and admin)
H2 2009: Sametime Advanced and SUT "Next"

Sametime Unified Telephony major features include Click-to-call/conference, Embedded softphone, Aggregated telephony/IM presence, Incoming call management, and PBX integration. SUT will integrate with many SIP based and traditional PBX vendors, including support for multiple vendors.

Also look for a new mobile client coming with expanded capabilities including multi-community support. (Yea!)

The Future of Lotus Quickr (Jelan Heidelberg, Lotus Quickr Offering Manager)
Jalan shared some of the ideas and directions for the "Next" versions of Quickr. Look for more solid details in the Lotusphere time frame.

Bringing It All Together (Everyone)
Each presenter gave their best 10 minutes of the conference:

Carl Tyler

• IBM is no longer supporting Sametime servers if you use Remote Desktop.
• Go get the "Sametime Essentials" database from IBM.
• Make sure you change the language version STCenterStrings_EN.properties when changing Sametime static text.
• One last demo of live telephony integration

Troy Reimer

• A quick review of PlaceBots
• Using a c_PlaceBotErrors field to record errors during agent processing
• Calling PlaceBots as if they were web services
• Don't use PlaceBots for large scale deployments - switch to centralized agents
• A review of standard and QuickrTemplates based workflow options
  

Gab Davis

• Choose your Quickr version based on the features you need
• Connectors are identical across all versions of Quickr (Entry, Domino, Portal)
• Mix and match version deployments as needed (the license allows this)
• You can share places across platforms, but they are only visable from the Portal side
• Choose Portal if you don't want Domino or if you already have a Portal infrastructure
• Sametime Advanced requires a large stack of components, including a Sametime Community server
• Do not change the credentials used for the Sametime Advanced services!
  

Viktor Krantz

• Customizing Quickplace redbook is still 78.2% relevant
• In Quickr 8.1, you need to be a little more sophisticated with stylesheets
• Firebug for Firefox is the best thing since sliced bread
• Using JSON and multiple versions of DOJO (0.42 and 1.0) with Quickr
• Using &OutputFormat=JSON for view data
  

Warren Elsmore

• Reviewed all of his slides he gave during the conference (which were few as he built a fully clustered LDAP/Sametime/Quickr environment live during the conference)
  

Overall, this was a great conference. Even though I know a lot about Quickr, Sametime, and Connections, I still learned a lot of good tips and met some great people, both presenters and attendees.

Collaboration University Day 1 recap

Collaboration University kicked off in Chicago yesterday.

Here is a quick summary of the sessions I attended:

Installing Sametime Advanced (Chris Miller)
Chris (a.k.a. IdoNotes) ran through the complex and detailed Sametime Advanced install. It is nice that there is an easy Linux based appliance install to get things running for demos or small to medium deployments. Unfortunately, as soon as you need to separate a component like the database or spread out the components for scalability, you are thrown in a long process of installing the many components individually.

Installing and Configuring Lotus Connections (Mitch Cohen and Chris Miller)
Mitch (a.k.a. CuriousMitch) showed us the details of installing Lotus Connections, including many good tips on deployment and administration best practices. Chris jumped in with a quick course on social networking when a poll showed that many in the audience had not looked beyond Quickr and Sametime yet.

Installing and Configuring the Sametime Gateway (Chris Miller)
Still more Chris (I highly recommend his sessions when you get the chance!) describing the Sametime Gateway business case and showing tips on how to install, including the need to use the default database and ID names and to leave the server running untouched for 4 - 5 days while you wait for your requests to join services such as Google or Yahoo to be processed.

Using the Sametime Toolkits and APIs (Carl Tyler)
Carl gave us a technical demonstration of the toolkits he has used to build Sametime plugins such as Sametime Wallpaper and the BuddyList Admin Tool. He also covered topics such as extending server side functions, including adding features to the Meeting Center and Gateway.

Top 10 Quickr Support Issues 2008 (Jerald Mahurin)
Jerald covered performance and troubleshooting tips for supporting Quickr on Domino. Some key things to look for are the indexer eating disk I/O and ram and and large numbers of places or concurrent users.

Keynote (Ed Hackett, Colonel, USMC (ret), President, EH Group)
Col. Hackett provided some good insight on the importance of proper information and social connections for teams to be effective. This was an inspiring talk covering his experience leading a fighter squadron, delivering humanitarian aid in Somalia, and running the Joint Chief's planning group. In all cases, social awareness was the critical component for the teams to get their jobs done. (See Julian's post on the keynote here)

The day wrapped up with a nice reception, giving everyone a chance to compare notes and experiences. Day 2 is already shaping up to be a similar set of great sessions.

IBM shows Microsoft that social computing is about the people

This morning, IBM and Microsoft presented Lotus Connections and Sharepoint in a head-to-head demo of social networking platforms. Of course, the play by play got published instantly on the public social networks.

Apparently Microsoft focused on email and document management, which did not wow the crowd. IBM got points for talking about how social networking is about the people. Quotes included "MS failing dismally at showing off Sharepoint collab tools. IBM totally ate their lunch.".

A few blog posts on the session:

IBM wins round 1 against Microsoft!
Enterprise 2.0 Conference - Social Computing Platforms: IBM and Microsoft
Social Computing Platforms: IBM & Microsoft Part 1
Social Computing Platforms: IBM & Microsoft Part 2

Finally, the conference has a social page devoted to the session:
Social Computing Platforms: IBM and Microsoft

Upgrading Lotus Connections Profiles to 1.0.2, take 2

I posted previously on how to update the Lotus Connections database schema from version 1.0.1 to 1.0.2.

Over on the Lotus Connections Forums, Henry Walther posted that he found the original files in the TDI directories. For others, here is the location of the files:

C:\Program Files\IBM\TDI\V6.1\tdisol\TDI\database\db2

I did a comparison between my version and this one and the EMPLOYEE columns are the same. Interestingly, the Lotus version does not include expanding the description and experience columns in the EMP_DRAFT table:

ALTER TABLE EMPINST.EMP_DRAFT
ALTER COLUMN PROF_DESCRIPTION SET DATA TYPE VARCHAR ( 4000 )
ALTER COLUMN PROF_EXPERIENCE SET DATA TYPE VARCHAR ( 4000 );

There are a couple of other useful files in the \TDI\database\db2 directory. Look for the runstats.bat batch file, which will help DB2 run faster on the Profiles tables.

Good find Henry!

Upgrading Lotus Connections Profiles to 1.0.2

Update: We found the original update files!

In the last week, I've been upgrading several Lotus Connections 1.0.1 installations to version 1.0.2.

As part of this process, there is a missing sql script needed to upgrade the Profiles database to include a few column changes and updates. The only script that is provided by the update is peopledb.db2, which is used to create a whole new Profiles schema using create table and related statements. This script will not work to update existing data tables since you would have to drop your tables before running peopledb.db2.

I resolved this issue by comparing the new table definitions in peopledb.db2 to the existing Lotus Connections 1.0.1 tables.

I have listed below a simple version of my script. The full upgrade102.sql also includes the index and other updates to the EMPLOYEE and EMP_DRAFT tables to make sure we get anything added in 1.0.2.

CONNECT TO PEOPLEDB;

SET INTEGRITY FOR EMPINST.EMPLOYEE OFF;

ALTER TABLE EMPINST.EMPLOYEE
ADD COLUMN PROF_UID_LOWER VARCHAR (36) GENERATED ALWAYS AS (LOWER(PROF_UID))
ALTER COLUMN PROF_DESCRIPTION SET DATA TYPE VARCHAR ( 4000 )
ALTER COLUMN PROF_EXPERIENCE SET DATA TYPE VARCHAR ( 4000 )
ADD COLUMN PROF_GW_EMAIL_LOWER VARCHAR (128) GENERATED ALWAYS AS (LOWER(PROF_GROUPWARE_EMAIL))
ADD COLUMN PROF_LOGIN VARCHAR (36)
ADD COLUMN PROF_LOGIN_LOWER VARCHAR (36) GENERATED ALWAYS AS (LOWER(PROF_LOGIN))
ADD COLUMN PROF_GIVEN_NAME VARCHAR (128) ADD COLUMN PROF_SURNAME VARCHAR (128) ;

SET INTEGRITY FOR EMPINST.EMPLOYEE IMMEDIATE CHECKED FORCE GENERATED;

ALTER TABLE EMPINST.EMP_DRAFT
ALTER COLUMN PROF_DESCRIPTION SET DATA TYPE VARCHAR ( 4000 )
ALTER COLUMN PROF_EXPERIENCE SET DATA TYPE VARCHAR ( 4000 );

COMMIT WORK;

CONNECT RESET;

TERMINATE;