I’m a bit behind on blogging on the last day of this year’s conference, but here we go:

I started the last day, slightly hung over, by being treated to breakfast by Panagenda. Not because they want me to buy the Marvel Client, but because we over the years have struck up a friendship. And that is one of the reasons this conference means so much to us in the Domino/Connections/Sametime community: You meet old friends again, in between all the sessions.

Customize the mobile Connections app

Since I’m a developer focusing on GUI, and I’m a teacher and instructor, I like things to be consistent and recognisable to my users. And that includes IBM Connections. Which is why I‘ve skinned the Connections plugin.

Hence I thought learning how to be able to do something similar with the Connections mobile app would be a good idea. However, turns out there is very little you can do with the mobile app for Connections, since it must through rigorous review processes before publishing. There are some stuff you can do, though, especially when it comes to security:

• You can remove applications and services (for instance wikis if you don’t want to expose them if a phone is stolen)
• You can stop people from copying text and material from the plugin
• You can change the name of applications and services
• You can set a default language
• If you create your own widgets these can be included as long as they are outside of a community
• You can create your own login screen
• You can set up single signon via TAM, SPNEGO, SiteMinder etc.

The most important thing I took with me was the security part.

GURUPALOOZA

What a smashing bloke! Photo: Kevin Petitt

After this it was all set for something me, and most people there, are looking forward to: Gurupalooza. This is where the developers take the stage and everybody who wants to can come up to the mic and ask questions. The developers are IBM partners, OpenNTF-members (the Open Source site for Domino) or just people in the Domino/Connections/Sametime community that are considered experts in their field.

The whole thing reeks of the fact that everyone vaguely knows everyone else, and there is a lot of laughing. I received an award for asking the first question and I got a yellow bicycle vest with Lotusphere 2000 printed on the left side. Nice!

Plugins

It was time for a session about plugins, something I myself handed in a draft for a session for. I didn’t get picked up, though, so I decided to visit the one that did get picked instead.

The plugins in question are a the ones used for working with files in Connections from Microsoft Office, IBM Notes, Open Office, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Sharepoint or Windows Explorer. I’ve become quite the expert in utilising them and I’ve created both documentation and wikis about them.

I must brag a bit: I was able to answer a few questions from the audience that the people giving the lecture couldn’t answer. Finally the developers asked me to meet them in the lab afterwards, so that I could show them how to create favourite links to libraries in communities.

Closing Time

After the Plugins session I spent a few hours just talking with people in the community, as well as taking in lunch with a few of them. I also got a demo of some new features in ProjExec, a project module we are running in IBM Connections.

It was then time for the closing session. It seems that IBM consists of nothing but Vice Presidents, and two women I’ve never heard of before came up to wrap up the conference. Even mentioning the fact that the Lotusphere cookie was missing form the lunch box this year!

A lot of people have guessed that this would be the last Lotusphere (or whatever you want to call it) and that it would be absorbed by the annual conference in Las Vegas. However, the message we got was that we would be told in the coming months what would happen to the conference in the future.

Me and several others think IBM was surprised about the big turnout, and the strong feelings we have about Lotusphere. And despite that the conference clearly was a low budget affair this year, it was a really nice experience. And of course: Most people wanted to know about the future of IBM Notes/Domino, while IBM did it’s best to bury talk about it, apart from Bluemix. It never ceases to fascinate me how little IBM is in contact with their customer base. Or maybe they just ignore them…

The session was closed with a fantastic sequence with mathemagician Arthur Benjamin. My guess is that he has ADHD and several other diagnoses, but he was a born showman, and showed what could be done with mathematics, given a bit of training. But I seriously doubt many people will be able to reach his level. You can see him in action at a TED-conference.

And then it was over. IBM Norway treated us to a very nice farewell dinner, and after a few rounds in the karaoke bar Kimono at the hotel, it was all over. We stayed for a few days more and took in some sites in Florida. At the airport on Saturday, we ran into other Lotusphere-attendees and ha a final round of beers. See you next year?

Today: Hogne learned splendid new things about content management, libraries and plugins for Office and Explorer.

This Tuesday was the perfect example of why it’s so important to go to the conference in Orlando. You get to talk to the right developers and managers to present challenges and errors. And in mine and Gunnar’s case, we solved several of them. Others we were able to lift to a higher level. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s start at the top:

The future for Domino development

As usual there was a huge turnout for a Domion session. Most Notes/Domino sessions are very popular, since it’s the main reason people come to this conference, no matter what IBM claims. People are very anxious to hear if there is any point sticking to the platform or not.

Since a bloated client that takes several gigabytes on your hard drive is not very fashionable any more, the idea is to move more and more of the functionality onto web and hand held devices.

This will be done by separating data and presentation in a much better way. The data can still be stored in the .nsf-files on your Domino-server, but the presentation and manipulation of the data will be done on web or mobile. Writing and reading will still be done to the Notes datbase.

With Bluemix IBM hopes to exploit this by integrating other systems and platforms. I wrote more about this in my previous blog posting. So you can for instance, via Bluemix, combine your Notes/Domino solution with SQL databases, php-systems and so on. In addition, you can still use an ID-vault and ID-files for encryption and signature support via Xpages on web.

The possibilities are many, and I think most of our Notes solutions can be modernized in this way. In addition they will be available for you when you travel, and you can even set up offline syncronisation, like you’ve always been able to do in the Notes client.

Development for IBM Connections

Luis Benitez is the product manager for IBM Connections, and I’ve been in a lot of contact with him in the past year (read: I’ve been pestering him). He and one of the developers did a great presentation that really inspired me.

I’ve now learned how I can develop my own widgets for Connections. This makes it possible to present data from other sources into Connections, like a Notes database. I will test more of this via my own cloud account.

Solutions to problems with plugins, libraries and content management

And then we arrive to the part where I tell you why me and my colleague were so happy on this Tuesday. The conference had, as always, a lab where you can ask the developers of the various IBM systems questions, face to face.

We are using CCM in Connections. It’s a small content management system that makes it possible to create libraries for files. We’ve had huge problems with this.

We’ve not been able to create meta data and document types. This has all stranded in technical problems. We were able to create a form that popped up every time someone wanted to upload a file to a certain library. We wanted them to be able to fill in meta data like production number, thruster type and so on. This can then be used to organise and search for content.

After a talk with the main developer of CCM Gunnar, my colleague, managed to fix this. He was so inspired that he ran straight to his hotel room to finish the solution. And it works. Beautifully.

And: The form asking for meta data also appears when you upload files via the Office and Explorer plugin for Connections! Tears of joy were falling. Beautiful!

Speaking of plugins: These are constantly developed by IBM, and I was able to talk to the chief developer. We will now have offline sync for files in Connections 5.0, via the Office and Explorer plugin. In the newest version of the plugin, you are also able to check files in and out, directly from Office.

I was also told that there would be no more development for the plugins in Notes. Så those of you who have, like me, dreamed of file tagging in the Files plugin in Notes can just forget it. Darn that IBM Verse!

I also talked to him about a problem where my users get an error message when trying to drag certain emails from their inbox and into an activity in the Activties plugin in Notes. Has anyone else of you experienced this? Any tips or help is appreciated.

The trials and tribulations of becoming a social business

This was a very interesting session. It was a non technical session, because it was simply about the organisational challenges you face when converting to a social business.

They presented us a survey done among 20 large companies on what their experiences were. And I must say I nodded in recognition to a lot of the things that was presented.

2,5% of employees are often the ones that take the lead when it comes to introducing social solutions, like IBM Connections. They are impatient, and you can’t even train them, because they are ahead of you, finding every strength and weakness in the system.

13,5% are what we call early adopters. They immediately grasp what it’s all about and they see the possibilities and start their adoption right away. About 34% of the employees need more prodding to be convinced. They usually turn into team players after being trained and have to be able to see it work in real life.

The next 34% are the employees that don’t really see the point but they slowly adopt the system along the way. But they do not use it eagerly, and just look upon it as “just another system.”

The final 16% you should just give up on. You cannot persuade them, and they will use any trick in the book to get around the system and keep working “like we always have done.” It is important, though, not to force them.

We also discussed how you should go about to introduce social business solutions and methods. There’s no rule book for this, and there is no right and no wrong way to to this. But we can sum it up:

• Do not teach too much at once. Take it step by step and let things sink in
• Move data from the old system to the new system, so that they don’t start with an empty system. It’s much easier to graps with content
• How should you control the system? Too many rules, and people  give up. Too few rules and things can get out of hand
• Do not let everyone work as they please. Create guidelines and suggestions. If not, it can be impossible to find things
• It’s very difficult to move people from using email to start posting in forums, blogs or comment fields
• Training and adoption are two different things
• Give compliments and celebrate milestones. Make sure everyone feels an ownership to the solution
• Systems like IBM Connections are not projects. They are a part of the infra structure
• Remember that it should be fun!

Upgrading from IBM Connections 4.5 to 5.0

This session was about how to upgrade to Connections 5.0 and best practices around this. Even if my company will be using consultants to do this, it was very useful for me to get an overview what it really will entail. I also got hold of documentation.

Security on Notes/Domino and the Web

This was a very technical session, with a lot of abbreviations and strange jargon. Both me and Gunleif, who administer the Domino servers with me, were pretty tired afterwards.

It was a very thorough walk through on how to secure your Domino servers to minimise the danger of attacks via the web. Gunleif and me concluded that we will go through our web servers when we get home, and of course install all the latest Fix Packs.

In addition I learned that you now longer need a Windows XP PC to generate keyring files. Hurrah!

Register users in one place, let the rest just happen

Most companies, mine included, have a lot systems with employee data. The problem is that they all must be maintained manually. We want this to happen in the HR system, and then be replicated to Active Directory, then to Domino and further onto Connections and other systems.

This session was more of a discussion on how to achieve this, with a special focus on Active Directory and Domino. This will not just be about technical solutions. It’s just as important to have the organisational bits in place.

When a users is created she must be added to a group which reflect the access she should have. This will be based on which department she is a part of. Only after all this is in place can you start with the technical side.

How much of this we will be able to do at my company, we don’t know yet. The job has to be done, and I talked to an expert on Tivoli Directory Integrator, a system you automatically get via your Domino license. He was from Norway, and he felt that everything I wanted should be able to be scripted in TDI.

Beach party

Photo: Kevin Petitt

Because of winds that made the fountains blow the water horisontally IBM moved this year’s beach party indoors. We had good food and drinks, once again, and it turned into a late evening with good talks, exchanges of experience and the establishing of new contacts.

And so it goes!

Today: Hogne learns a lot of cool stuff about IBM’s new email solution, about inviting external users into IBM Connections and about Content Management!

Opening

Free Choice. Photo by Kevin Petitt

Since Sunday usually is a pre-day during the conference, the general opening session is always on Monday morning. This year it was severely reduced in scope. Usually they’ve had world famous guest speakers like Neil Armstrong, Michael J. Fox, Kevin Spacey and other big names, but this year it was a much more quiet affair.

There’s always a lot of speculation and expectations about what IBM will present, and we did get to see a lot of the stuff IBM will be releasing over the next year. We finally got a demo of IBM Verse, the new email solution. It’s very tightly integrated with Sametime and Connections, and it looks pretty slick. Main points:

• You can open attachments with one click
• You can drag and drop attachments out and in of emails
• You can mute email threads you don’t want to follow anymore
• A search engine that creates very powerful searches
• You can tag emails!
• The intelligent email engine in Watson can answer questions for you. In the demo, they sent an email to Watson, as if it was a real person, asking who was the  biggest expert on Connections. And Watson gave a reply, with a link to this person’s Connections profile.
• Everything will also function in the IBM Verse mail app
• It will run on Domino
• It will be released in the cloud first, and on premise in the second half of 2015
• I already have a test account

We were also presented with some customer stories, among them from Moet Hennesy Louis Vuitton, who dabbles with everything from wine to perfume, watches, jewelry and clothing. They told how they are using Notes, Connections and Sametime in the entire corporation. It’s proven vital for their interaction with their end customers.

We also got a demo of IBM Connections Next. The biggest change here is a new homepage that analyses what’s important for you to know from forums, profiles, communities and so on. In addition, Connections will get a new design. And everything is tightly integrated with IBM Verse and Sametime.

But the coolest thing about Connections Next was that if you were working on something in the web version of Connections, and then open the mobile version, it will pick up where you left off! Now, that’s cool!

This year’s guest speaker was saved for the end, a wise choice. It was a nice talk given by Phillipe Petit, the man who walked on a line between the towers of the World Trade Centre in 1974.

Think design during development

The next session was about the importance of thinking in the right way when doing development. This was about theories and methods that you can use in any form of design and development, not just for programming and software.

Where people in the past used the waterfall technique during development (start, planning, analyse, do, test, put in production), you now do a life cycle of development that is a repeating loop. Understand -> Explore -> Prototype -> Evaluate -> Go to Understand

It’s also important to encourage people to come up with wild ideas. Often those are the ones that are the catalyst for success. So I encourage all companies to have internal blogging, where people can come up with ideas and creative thinking. No matter how off topic or off the wall it might appear.

Panagenda

Panagenda Marvel Client

I now took a break from sessions to have a meeting with Panagenda about their Marvel Client. This program makes it much, much easier to install, upgrade and fix the Notes client on your users computers. Today people do all sort of stuff, like deleting the cache.ndk-file, removing workspace files and so on. This client makes all such stuff unnecessary.

Personally I want my company to invest in this product, so I got the license prices and forwarded them to my boss. Fingers crossed.

Working with external users in IBM Connections

Gabriella Davis, who has helped me with many a problem on several occasions, held a great lecture on how to invite external users into IBM Connections.

She first did a lot of technical stuff how to set this up with Active Directory, Domino and LDAP. After this she talked about the administrative and organisational challenges and decisions that would have to be made.

Can you trust the people you’re inviting into Connections? How should the external people be registered? Can they do it themselves? What kind of password policy should we set? Who will be allowed to invite external users?

Here are the main points about working with external users in Connections:

• Only persons who have been given a specific role can invite external users. It’s not an option for everybody
• You can only invite people into communities
• External users can only see files, forums and postings made inside the community they have been invited into
• External users will not be able to see any other information outside this community. They will not be able to see stuff like wikis inside the community they have been invited into
• If they do a search, they will only find content that exists within the community or content that have been shared directly with them
• External users will only be able to share content with the community, they will not be able to share directly with other users
• External users will only be able to see a person’s business card, with limited info. They will not be able to go into a person’s profile
• External users can tag content, but they will not be able to search for and see tags other people have used, so it’s safe to use sensitive tags
• All external users are clearly marked as external users, so there will be no confusion between external and internal users
• Communities containing external users will also be clearly marked
• If you share a file with a community containing external users, you will get a pop up warning you about this. But: This will not happen in the plugin in Office and Explorer. My suggestion is to prevent this by putting “external” in the title of the community

Bluemix

The next session was about how you can use IBM’s online platform Bluemix to put together applications in the matter of minutes. In that way you can combine data from a database in Notes, which then pushes data to Bluemix. You can then use other services or applications to act on that data. These services and applications can be almost anything, from php solutions to a whole other bunch of technologies. And setting this up is incredibly quick.

I’ve played around a bit with Bluemix, and it’s fun. But I still haven’t seen what business value one can get from this. We’ll see how it develops.

Content Management

Enhance Collaboration

This session was an eye opener for me! We already use CCM, the content manager plugin for FileNet and libraries in Connections, at Brunvoll. We haven’t really utilised the possibilities you have with adding metadata to files yet. With the IBM product Content Navigator this can be expanded on, quite heavily.

Instead of just adding text, you can with Content Navigator crop and edit photos, add design to files and so on. This in addition to adding document types and metadata. After this, you can publish this in Connections, on the web, in Notes and so on.

You can use widgets to show content from Content Navigator in IBM Connections. This is a product that I want to test to see if we can take advantage of it in Brunvoll. In addition, the product comes with a mobile application that gives you the same opportunities as you have in the original product.

IBM Nordic

After this I had to hurry down to Downtown Disney for the traditional IBM Nordic dinner, which this year took place at the Italian restaurant Portobello. Afterwards we were full and not thirsty, and that’s all she wrote…

Nice people, nice talks and a late night, that ended at the end of a labyrinth of hallways in our hotel, where we found a 24 hour store that I never knew existed, even though I’ve been coming here for over ten years now.

You learn so much at these conferences!

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!

I’m writing this on this Saturday morning (January 24th) at Oslo Gardermoen airport. Gunnar, a colleague of mine, and me are travelling Orlando in Florida, US. We are attending the annual IBM conference, that used to be called Lotusphere. I think IBM has changed the name of the conference every year since it stopped being called Lotusphere. This year the name is Connected2015.

I will be blogging every day from the conference to keep those who are not there, and for those who might be interested, in what’s going on when it comes to social business. But also what thoughts IBM has about this and how I think the technologies and solutions could have an impact on my working day. And maybe yours as well.

As I’ve mentioned, this is what used to be called the good old Lotusphere, since the focus used to be on the Lotus portfolio. First and foremost Lotus Notes/Domino, but also Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, Lotus Sametime and so on. Since the Lotus brand was killed a few years ago the conference changed it’s name, and focus.

In the past few years the focus has been on business and social collaborations as much as it has been on administration, development and other nerdy stuff. In fact, the focus was shifted so much to the business side that some of the old timers stopped showing up. So this year the focus will be more on the nerdy stuff, but not just that. Also: The conference is much, much smaller.

My first Lotusphere was attended by over 10 000 people. This year I’ve heard reports that less than 1000 people are signed up. This is not surprising. The demise and death of Notes has been touted since the late 90s, but in the past few years it’s pretty obvious that the Notes client is on life support.

And contrary to IBM’s hopes, everybody that is, or was, using Notes, hasn’t shifted to Connections and other IBM solutions. It’s Outlook og Google all the way for mail and documents, but also Sharepoint. So the market is much smaller. In addition, like everybody else, IBM is going for the cloud market now.

IBM also sucks at marketing. So instead of visiting all their Notes/Domino customers and showing them how relatively easy it is to mobilize and web-enable their Notes solutions, their customers are in the dark about it.

I still have great love for the Notes client, but in this day and age, a big bloated client is not the future. Web and mobile is. So me and Gunnar’s main priorities here are learning more about how to web-enable all our data on Domino, as well as getting the latest news on IBM Connections *

So watch this space! It’s currently 24 degrees Celsius in Orlando, but I’ve still brought a jacket. January is winter in Florida as well.

*= IBM Connections is a social tool for companies where people can share files and information, create wikis, have discussions and a whole lot of other stuff. The key is: Do not hide things in people’s mail boxes. Get it out in the open and collaborate!