We're a week away from the big Lotus event of the year: Lotusphere 2011. As most of you know, Lotusphere is one of my yearly personal highpoints.
I love going to Orlando, seeing all of my Lotus community friends, looking at the innovations coming out of the developer community, and seeing the wonderful life and vibrance that exists (despite the naysayers) in all of you.
This year, along with all the regular learning and fun to be had at the Dolphin, when you go to Lotusphere, there are five particular areas you might want to pay extra attention to.
1. Social business "Social business" is the buzzword that brings social networking into business. It's more than just checking your Facebook page while at work, it's a new way of connecting with your colleagues and constituents in a work environment -- and it could be transformative to business success.
Lotus is offering a particularly strong focus on social business, and one area we're particularly interested in is the concept of social analytics. Not only do we want to know who we can do deals with and how we can keep those relationships strong, we also want to know which of our efforts and relationships are the most valuable.
This is definitely an area to watch.
2. Cloudification The cloud is becoming more and more mainstream and with it are offerings from IBM. On the one side is the LotusLive offering, but for developers and business partners used to controlling their whole solution, LotusLive is often more of a competitor than a solution.
Where we're most interested is looking at cloudification using technologies like Amazon's EC2 and virtual appliances, where full Lotus implementations can be deployed to customers and clients in a turnkey manner.
Keep an eye on this and ask yourself, "Which offerings benefit the entire Lotus community vs. which just benefit IBM?"
3. Mobile Analyst company comScore just came out with an interesting study showing that mobile email is on the rise, while Web email (and, by extension, desktop email clients) are dropping.
Mobile is huge and it's here to stay. As more and more people adopt smartphones, both in the enterprise and in their personal lives, your Lotus-based applications will have to fit on smaller screens.
If social is hot, mobile is molten -- and we're watching it closely.
4. New release rumors, news, and buzz The buzz. Release 8.5 is two years old, if you can believe it. Even 8.5.2 is six months old. And, while Lotus did release 8.5.2 FP1 just last month, that's mostly a fix release.
If you look back over all the major Lotus releases, going back as far as 1993, Lotus generally releases a new number release every two to three years.
That means we're due. Unless they completely buck with the trend, expect to see a new major Notes/Domino release at least in beta by Lotusphere 2012. That means we should be seeing something about R9 at this Lotusphere.
This is the big one and we're definitely going to be peeking behind every curtain.
5. The vibe We can't sugarcoat this one. Lotus aftermarket vendors have been hurting in the past few years. While everyone put on a good, happy face last year at this time, there was no doubt some developers were running scared.
In late 2009 and early 2010, I had some very frank and very disturbing conversations with IBM Business Partners who were concerned about their future prospects, given what was then a very bleak economy.
The mood among those I've talked to this month is way more upbeat. Developers I've chatted with seem to think the worst of the economic downturn is behind them, and many of them are seeing substantial growth opportunities in their future.
When you walk the exhibit floor and the corridors of the Dolphin, you can always pick up a "vibe," a feeling for the general mood and sense of well-being of the crowd.
Attune yourself to the vibe this year. It'll be very instructive. We're strongly hopeful and think you should be, too.
See you there Well, that's a wrap. I hope to see many of you there. I'll be on the floor (and in boatloads of meetings) all during the show, and I can't wait for it all to start.
Have a great time, travel safely, and enjoy the show!
David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.
Bob Balfe is working with CSS in Lotus Notes to provide thumbnail views of photos. But. The last photo in the group insists on displaying in full size. If you have any ideas, he'd like to hear from you.
When the agents run on all servers, you don't need to go through the Scheduled Agents process during every upgrade. To prevent the agents from changing docs on all servers, you could use a configuration field to decide if the agent must continue or exit.
Yesterday someone turned off the redirect for notes.net.
It no longer redirects the browser to http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/
Instead it now goes to http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dwl
This page contains the following:
"Http Status Code: 404
Reason: File not found or unable to read file"
Most of us have been typing notes.net for a decade or longer. Evidently ibm considers it an improvement for us to type ibm.com/developerworks/lotus instead. If you disagree, vote for this idea.
Yesterday someone turned off the redirect for notes.net.
It no longer redirects the browser to http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/
Instead it now goes to http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/dwl
This page contains the following:
"Http Status Code: 404
Reason: File not found or unable to read file"
Most of us have been typing notes.net for a decade or longer. Evidently ibm considers it an improvement for us to type ibm.com/developerworks/lotus instead. If you disagree, vote for this idea.
Update: It's working again!
It could have been just an accident or it could have been intentional.
If it was intentional, thanks to those who may have played a part in getting it restored, especially Ed Brill.
It used to be that if an executive wanted a smaller font in his calendar views, for example, it was easily possible to whip out Designer and "make it so".
In Notes 8.x, the underlying implementation of standard views in Mail, calendar, contacts, etc. changed to take advantage of the 'coolness that is eclipse'(tm). That means that now all attributes of the default views are controlled by CSS and other constructs hidden away in compressed jar files.
It's been years and years since Notes 8 launched. I think it's time to return more than a measure of control to Designer. At the very least, let us influence the fonts, colors, sizes, etc of what we get in Notes Standard using the best RADD tool... DDE.
The IBM Lotus Sametime Connect client user interface can be customized with images, icons, logos, slogans, design schemes, and more. Users can brand the Lotus Sametime client to provide a unique and personal experience. A company can brand the Lotus Sametime client so that all employees see the company's branding when they use Lotus Sametime. This article describes installing and modifying a Lotus Sametime branding plug-in, using the branding plug-in of a fictitious company, Your Co.
The Domino server fails to start with the following message: Unable to bind to port 2050 on host machine <ipaddress>/<ipaddress>: Either the host name or address is wrong or the port is already in use. Domino Server Controller exiting: Listener startup timed out. Please check if another Server Controller instance is running in the same data directory.
This post describes defaults and best practices for Domino administrators responsible for rolling out Widgets and Live Text in conjunction with available policies and preferences controls. We first discuss the defaults when not using policies and then present the recommended policy roll out based ...
IBM Lotus Notes Client Standard 8.5.2 Fix Pack 1 Interim Fix 1 (852FP1IF1) for W32/ Type: Incremental Installer / Release Date: 21 January 2011. See 'More info' link above for additional information.
Tips for mail
The tips differ depending on whether you are coming from Outlook 2003 and 2007 or Outlook 2010. Here is an overview of what we'll cover, with detailed instructions following: Change the Inbox sorting order to have most recent on top
Set key mail preferences
Automatically close ...
Attempts to install Notes 8.5.2 Fix Pack 1 (852FP1) on Windows will fail for users of the Notes Single Login (NSL) feature. The file used for NSL (npnotes.dll) is locked and cannot be overwritten during a typical install/uninstall. Interim Fix 1 for Notes 8.5.2 Fix Pack 1 installs without failure by omitting a Notes Single Login fix, but otherwise contains all of the other 852FP1 fixes.
Why is the warning message "Registry editing has been disabled by your administrator" displayed during Lotus Notes setup for a restricted Windows account?