Ramble On

I was unable to attend this year’s Lotusphere. As a customer and not a beta testing Business Partner, I was hoping to gain an insight into where Lotus’ products, especially Domino, are heading. Although there was some information it wasn’t as detailed as Lotusphere’s sessions. So the day didn’t really fulfil it’s my need. Here’s my impressions for what they’re worth.

The good

• The morning’s keynote sessions were good especially the demo of a slick looking ‘Project Vulcan’.
• Lotus appear to be close to having a consistent product catalogue with the OneUI being adopted across the product range along with similar design pattern
• The venue.
• Wifi that worked.
• Organisation was generally very good.
• Sessions being streamed live. Please can we have this for Lotusphere next year?
• Regular tweets from Lotus staff.

The Bad

• To much focus on collaboration so there was a lot of duplication between sessions.
• Lack of technical briefing on where technologies are heading, such as the IBM led Domino and Designer sessions they hold at Lotusphere.
• The labs could be improved
• Lack of experts on hand. (I guess I’ve been spoilt by Lotusphere)
• Chris Crummey expecting us Brits to ‘woop’.
• Too many ‘suits’. In my opinion, Lotus has an image problem. We need to attract good graduates to use Lotus tech. Any good undergrad attending the day would have ran a mile straight into the arms of companies such as Google.
• iPads. I can’t have one for another month so stop tempting me.

The Excellent

• Chris Crummey was excellent. Very enthusiastic about Lotus tech and he demoed  a very slick looking Project Vulcan
• Brian Cox’s closing session. A very good and passionate speaker.

How could it be improved next year?

• More parallel sessions
• Selected ‘best of’ sessions from development strands of Lotusphere
• Move the date closer to Lotusphere.

Lotusphere LCTY

(I meant to post this last week but didn’t get round to it)

It’s interesting to read the reaction to the abstract rejections for Lotusphere. I’m sure some of the rejected ideas would make great presentations. But I’m not going to go into the pros and cons of the abstract selection process, that’s been covered by many recent blog entries.

After I had my abstract rejected last year, I vowed that I’d blog about my particular area of interest, accessibility. After sitting through numerous XPage presentations, from both IBM and developers, I was concerned with the apparent lack of concern about accessibility issues XPages introduced. I came back vowing that this area was too important to wait for the next Lotusphere and vowed to blog about improving the accessibility of Domino web apps.

Guess what, I’ve done nothing about it. Yes, I have many excuses:

• My SysAdmin won’t allow me to move our live web systems to a ‘point zero’ release. Our Domino based intranet is too heavily used for it to collapse. It’s expected to work 24/7, so upgrade windows are limited. A server crashing when there are hundreds of assignments due in, tends to create support issues, both technical and academic. So, so far, I haven’t designed an Xpage ‘in anger’.
• ‘I’ve been busy’ – If I’ve got time to write a blog entry, it means I’ve got time to be adding extra functionality!
• Like many, we’ve been going through a restructuring. I’m now one member of my team short and another is leaving at the end of January (so unless my BOF is selected, it’s looking very unlikely that I’ll be allowed to go to Lotusphere). So my focus has naturally been on surviving the upheaval
• etc

But the reality is, I obviously didn’t think my point of view was important enough to waste my own time on it, and if I don’t think it’s important why should I expect other people who are paying good money to be interested in my sessions?

Working for a University and having started out on the research side, there’s an expectation that you present at the conferences . I still find it uncomfortable when I’m not ‘paying my way’ by presenting, especially for an expensive overseas conference. But this year I didn’t submit an abstract for the main session. I have to admit I hadn’t realised that presenters get their fees paid, otherwise, I would have. But re-reading my abstract from last year, it was obvious I knocked it together in a rush and although I think a presentation on the subject is needed, I think I need to blog about it first before getting annoyed that no one is interested.

(I did submit a BOF. Since they’re selected by attendees, I figured that if it is selected, then there’s a obviously some people interested – and that might be a good way of starting some sort of informal network to build towards a presentation in 2011)

The ‘in crowd’

It’s easy for people who’ve been to more than one Lotusphere, to look at the return presenters as the ‘in crowd’ and forget that most are there because they have been consistently good. So I thought I’d look back at the photos of my first Lotusphere in 2008. I remember capturing a few of ‘the stars’ of my first Lotusphere. At the time, the only Lotus related websites I was aware off, were Notes.Net, CodeStore and OpenNTF. So I was unaware who I should see as ‘stars’. So who stood out? (Other than the violinist at the opening session)

Stars of 2008

Bob Balaban was also in my photo collection but didn’t make it due to the fact that he was wearing one of his shirts that confuses cameras. It’s interesting looking back, how many ‘high profile’ people, impessed without me knowing they should!

Lotusphere, Reflection Lotus Stars, Lotusphere, Reflection

My photos from Lotusphere have already been added to the Lotusphere flickr group, ( as p_a_h) but I’ve just uploaded a bunch of Lotusphere related videos to Youtube:

• Country Music Solos from the Sunday night party
• Blues Brothers from the Wednesday night party
• Mustang Sally from Jamfest
• and documentary evidence if needed of why we turn up to work the following week so tired

All videos except ‘Mustang Sally’, were created with the new iMovie ’09. I installed it earlier today and as you can see it’s very easy to use and my first impressions are that it’s a big improvement over ’08. If you’ve a Mac user who plays with video, but not seriously enough to warrant Final Cut, it’s definitely worth upgrading to.

Apple, Lotusphere Lotusphere 2009

This is the biggie for us web developers. This is the first session on the technology at this year’s Lotusphere. It’s definitely popular, and hence very warm.

The session was ran by Maureen Layman and a newbie Maire Kehoe and demonstrtedb(live) many of the new XPage features in Designer 8.5. Maire was clearly nevous but did pretty well.

Most of the stuff was basic stuff. I’ve not looked at themes or localisation yet and I wasn’t aware of the server side inline errors (though configuring them didn’t seem to be obvious), so I got something out of the session.

Unfortunately, as expected, nothing was mentioned about accessibility.

Hopefully by the end of the week, i’ll see some good examples of how developers have used XPages.

Domino, Lotusphere, XPages

Lotusphere online has been available for several days. Although I’ve still not been sent an email informing me that it’s live (just like last year), unlike last year my email and confirmation number work. 

A number of features are created using XPage technology and this is the first application I’ve seen that uses this functionality. I’ve mentioned that I’m concerned that XPages will provide Domino designers with tools that they might use that caused them to embed an accessibility time-bomb into their company’s intranets. So I thought I’d take a brief look at how accessible this IBM site is and knocked up a quick video walk through.

Domino, Lotusphere Accessiblity, Domino, Interface, Web Design

I’m a big Led Zeppelin fan and I was lucky enough to get a ticket to their reunion gig. Imagine my joy when boarding my British Airways flight to Orlando to discover a certain Robert Plant on my flight. I’m not the sort of person who normally gets star struck so walked past him as I ventured through Business class to my cattle-class seat. But by the end of the flight I had decided it would have been rude not to thank Robert for the gig. Okay, I might have had to let my bag go around the carousel a number of times so that I could ‘accidentally’ bump into him to thank him, but it was great to meet one of my favourite artists.

Lotusphere 2008 was my first Lotusphere and I’m used to academic conferences that can be a bit of drag when you’re not presenting. But after meeting one of my idols, I knew Lotusphere was going to be good!

(Some friends falsely accuse me of being the reason why Zeppelin did not reform. I think this is grossly unfair. All I did was to suggest (blurt out) to Robert that whatever he decided the fans would accept his decision)

Lotusphere Lotusphere 2008

Most of know what we should be doing, but how many of do so – Best and Worst Practices, Lotusphere 2008

Lotusphere Lotusphere 2008