Sunset between Dolphin and Swan

Today: Hogne, of all people, learns something he didn’t know about the Notes client (and now you will too).

It’s early Monday morning in Orlando, and the rain is pouring down outside on the balcony of my hotel room. It hasn’t been summer temperatures, but Sunday we did have sun. Not that I had much time to enjoy it, since I had sessions to attend.

We arrived late Saturady evening, and already on the airport I met the first old friends from the Domino community. IBM Norway had been kind enough to invite us for dinner in the evening, but it took so much time to get to the conference hotel that we decided to go to the Disney board walk instead. Arve from Atea and Gunleif from Evry (or Evru as his name tag spells it). The latter is the guy who administer our Domino servers in cooperation with me.

Before I start with the sessions: Dear Orlando International Airport. Those new machines were we scan our finger prints and passport ourselves, do not cut down the lines and waiting time. Because after doing this, we still have to line up in front of a TSA officer to get a stamp. So everything is just the same as before…

 IBM Verse

IBM Verse future

The first session was about IBM’s new solution for email, IBM Verse. The session was very dissapointing. We didn’t get a demo, since that will be done during the opening session, and they talked more about the thought proesses and ideas behind the solution.

The interesting part of this was that we were told that it was the company Colgate Palmolive (yup, the gigantic company with the soaps, toothpastes, cleaning liquids, dog food and so on) that had come ot IBM and said they needed a smarter way to work with email. They are running their mail in IBM Notes, and combine this with IBM Connections and Sametime. Their demands were:

• Email isn’t going away, make it better
• Keep it simple
• Focus should be on lifting important email
• Email should be easy to find
• The email should trigger an action

As an example, the development manager for IBM Verse said that the last time he came from a two week holiday, he had 5862 unread emails in his Inbox. IBM Verse quickly managed to reduce this to “only” 1000 emails that he had to read. The other emails he simply ignored and/or deleted.

The session became more interesting towards the end:

• Notes is not dead, but there’s a little doubt that both emails and applications will be lifted to the web
• Domino will live for years to come
• Everything is still running on Domino, with nsf-files
• IBM Verse will first be deployed in the cloud, before they will present an on premise version
• The goal is to have one billion users on IBM Verse within four years
• Internet Explorer is not a prioritised web browser, since Microsoft refuse to follow standards. The development browser of choice is Chrome

Customizing IBM Connections

The next session was about how you should go about to do simple changes of the design in IBM Connections. The most interesting bit for me was learning on how to create your own widgets that you can add into communities, profiles and the home page. I was very inspired, not least when I started thinking about how I can present things from Notes applications into IBM Connections, and maybe even the other way. It’s going to be exciting to try it out.

 User Blast

Mat New man in action. Photo: Kevin Petitt

Now it was time for Mat Newman himself. He’s a bit of a character and an institution in the Domino community. And if you think my love for the Notes client is huge, you should meet Mat. He’s the first lover! Mat has also been my main source of inspiration for the way I’ve conducted my Know Your Notes classes and courses, that I’ve given for several Norwegian companies. But my enthusiasm is peanuts compared to Mat’s.

Notes celebrated it’s 25th anniversary in November, which is pretty unique for a piece of software. Mat did a short tour through the development of the Notes and Domino platform. He explained the incredibly high level of security Notes has, which makes other solutions look like they just keep the door open.

 As per usual, he talked about the importance of training the users on how to use their Notes client, and to show them all the possibilities Notes has. He also gave a lot of tips. Now, I know the Notes client so well that there is very little anyone can teach me about it. Except Mat.

All Notes users know that you can sort on date in most views, especially in your email. But did you know that you can sort on date, and then simply type “today” to jump to the first email from today? No? Me neither. And what do you think happens if you write “yesterday?”

Notes also has an incredibly powerful search tool in the form of Search in View. However: If you write “conference orlando” in the search field, it will search for documents containing either conference or Orlando. This can produce too many results. But try writing “\conference orlando” instead. Now it will search for documents containing both “conference” and “Orlando.” Voila! A much smaller search result.

 Mat told me that the Singapore-office he works at had sold 250 000 new Notes/Domino licenses in 2014. Seems like there is some life in the old lady after all.

Socialising

At the end of the day it was time for what used to be the beach party on the beath between the Swan & Dolphin hotels. The party was much smaller this year, but it contained food, beverages and good conversation with great people. I talked to quite a few of the Norwegians here, and we exchanged stories and experiences. This is the best part of a conference like this and you learn a lot from it. Not to mention that you strike up connections and friendships.

I crashed into bead already at 09.30. I’m glad I did a one hour run in the morning after all the food and beer. Tomorrow: The official opening day and opening session!