The Tech Connection

 by Ruth Jarvis

In case you’re buried beneath a rock, ignoring all forms of social media including twitter hashtags, Facebook profiles, LinkedIn updates, and technology based new outlets, Lotusphere this year is pushing Social Business. It’s on signs, badges, videos, and napkins, allowing very few to ignore the statement at the annual Lotus event much to the chagrin of technical based developers and admins hoping to see the latest in the Lotus brand but great for LOB decision makers.

Day one started with Business Development Day (BDD) a full day of sessions, jumpstarts, and discussions for the IBM Business Partner community. Of course, we wanted to jump in and see what the brand has in store for various product bases but most important for us, IBM Web Experience Factory (formerly Portlet Factory). While it didn’t make much discussion during the BDD it did come up as part of the Web Experience Suite and the Intranet Suite discussion at the Opening General Session (OGS).

Speaking of the OGS, what were the big suprises? It started with the viral rock band OK Go, playing live with their fun and low-budget music videos, followed by a special and inspirational special guest, Michael J. Fox discussing how social networking effected how he was able to learn, update, and build a community around Parkinson’s Disease (PD). The last surprises were based on content, in fact for most of the conference, this long standing technical based event has slowly morphed into a joint technical and business conference. This year you could feel it more then ever, as the first hour of the OGS didn’t contain any mention of “Lotus”, “Notes”, or “Domino,” replaced instead by terminology like “social”, “mobile”, and “marketing.”

OK GO at ls12 OGS

MIchael J Fox at ls12 OGS

Notes/Domino Next

I will leave it to my technical Davalen peers to update you on what is happening in the tech-world of the brand as they are much better suited to do such, but I will provide some of my favorite shots from the event thus far, including new shots of my wonderful team: Len Barker, Managing Partner, Dave Jacob, Managing Partner, and my fellow female co-worker, Deborah Corcoran, Resource Deployment Manager.

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Len Barker

 by Len Barker

Once upon a time thousands of people from around the world descended upon Disney World to learn about the latest Domino release and the cool features that they could brag about to their user base when they got back home.  The winds are blowing in a different direction now and Domino has been relegated to a supporting role.  Notes and Domino wasn’t even mentioned in the opening session until an hour and a half into it.  And if you were looking to spend your Lotusphere attending technical tracks on Domino, you would have been disappointed.  This year’s event was all about making business social and Lotus Connections plays the starring role.

IBM is doing everything it can to help organizations take the first step to becoming a social business.  With Domino 8.5.3, Lotus Connections profiles and files are included as a free entitlement.  Once organizations get hooked on Lotus Connections, they will want to spend most of their business life on those social pages.  To help make that a reality, IBM demonstrated a completely redesigned interface for Domino email that is completely integrated with Connections.  This should be available in the next release of Domino.  Oh, and the Notes client won’t be necessary any more, even for Notes client only applications.  Notes client functionality will be available via a browser plugin in future releases of Domino.  As usual, IBM has seen the future before the rest of us and I think it makes a lot of sense.  In case I haven’t made it clear, the future is Facebook for business, aka Lotus Connection.  You will live in it and love it.

The warm Florida winds have blown a new sheriff into town and forever change our beloved Lotusphere.  Expect an even bigger social message next year and maybe some big changes to Domino.

Len Barker

by Len Barker

This year’s Lotusphere will focus on Business made Social and I know that it will be impossible to walk away from the event without the burning desire to inject more social into your business once you get home.

Turning this desire into reality will require both social engineering and software engineering.  The whole purpose of a making your business social is to involve everyone so your effort to make this happen will be very visible.  Involving Davalen from the start will help ensure success.

I am looking forward to sharing Davalen’s RapidValue approach for creating a social business built on IBM software:

1. Create excitement
2. Plan on a series of social victories
3. Lay down reliable and capable software components
4. Execute

Each of these simple steps are made successful by a team that understands the many small details behind them.

Stop by and visit with Davalen at Lotusphere 2012 and speak with the experts in making social business happen.

by Len Barker, Managing Partner – Lotus Practice

If you have your Len Barker tracker turned on you would have noticed that I am spending a lot of time in California lately.  What you probably couldn’t have figured out is that the reason for my regular trips to this great state is to lead a Davalen team that is producing an Executive Dashboard built on IBM Mashup Center.  Mashup Center is a perfect fit for this project and provides a great story for me to showcase the value of Mashup Center to you.

IBM Mashup Center is not a repackaging of WebSphere Portal.  Both run on WebSphere Application Server and the themes and skins in Mashup Center make you think you are in WebSphere Portal at times, but the technology is completely different.  There are two parts to Mashup Center:  the Mashup Hub and the Mashup Builder.  Mashup Hub is a wonderfully versatile tool that contains the real power of Mashup Center.  It is here that information sources are truly “mashed up”.

From the Mashup Hub, an administrator can create feeds to any number of enterprise data sources.  In my project, I have created feeds to everything from data stored in spreadsheets on a corporate Sharepoint site to Oracle databases.  Once the feeds are created they can be combined into a single feed (i.e. mashed up) or consumed by any application that can access the Mashup Hub.  I use IBM Web Experience Factory to consume the feeds and create widgets that are then deployed to Mashup Center for display in the Mashup Builder.  The Mashup Builder has a WebSphere Portal like interface that allows you to create spaces and pages within spaces and then to put widgets on the pages.  Web Experience Factory 7.0.1 allows you to publish widgets directly to the Mashup Center widget palette.

Feed Sources available in Mashup Center

IBM software makes it easy to create applications that provide business value without investing in a team of high-end java developers.  Within two weeks our team was able to make the first set of widgets available to the executive team.  This was possible because IBM Mashup Center made it easy to create feeds to existing data sources, IBM Web Experience Factory made it easy to create the widgets, and Davalen Charts made it easy to create the great looking charts that the executives were looking for.

Len Barker

 by Len Barker, Managing Partner – Lotus Practice

Perhaps the biggest news around the release of Domino 8.5.3 is the free entitlement to Lotus Connections Files and Profiles.  This is really big news. I  can’t think of a single customer of mine that does not have some method of sharing files and some method of providing access to a directory of employees.  The fact that they now are entitled to the foundation of what is arguably the best business social networking software on the market should have them all planning for the upgrade.  While the entitlement to the software is free, there are still costs involved in implementing Lotus Connections.  This article will help get you started with the planning process.

Start the planning process by becoming familiar with what Lotus Connections Files and Profiles (and the status updates that come with it) are.  IBM has a nice demo of these features being used within the Notes 8.5.x standard client.  A web browser can be used to access the same functionality, so if you have any licensed Notes users that don’t use the Notes client, they can access the Connections server directly.  Once you understand what the software can do, you’ll want to decide which features will be used in your organization.  You may decide to use this as a trial of the full Lotus Connections feature set.  In this case your planning for server deployment and configuration should be adjusted accordingly

Installing Lotus Connections

Let’s assume that you have decided to take advantage of both the Files and Profiles portions of Lotus Connections and you are ready for a full production installation of both.  The installation is fairly straightforward, especially if you have experience with WebSphere Application Server (WAS).  If you haven’t touched WAS before I recommend reading this short tutorial on WAS for Domino Admins so that you are familiar with the terminology that is tossed around in the installation guides.  Most organizations of any size will need two machines (or virtual machines) to host Lotus Connections Profiles and Files.  IBM tech line can help you with the sizing of these servers.  You can download Lotus Connections for Domino 8.5.3 from the Passport Advantage site.

Installing Profiles

Profiles provides the directory of users to Lotus Connections.  This is where email addresses, phone numbers, pictures, expertise, and organizational structure is stored.  It is also the piece of Lotus Connections that provides the Facebook-like status update functionality.  The wonderful part of the installation process is that you can use your free entitlement to Tivoli Directory Integrator to import and later synchronize the Profiles directory with your corporate LDAP source (e.g. Active Directory, Novell eDirectory, etc).  I can’t overstate how powerful TDI is.  It will make getting started with Profiles a breeze.

Installing Plugins

Notes client side bar plugins for Lotus Connections status updates and files are available from the catalog at IBM Greenhouse.   If you haven’t already done so, you will need to create an Eclipse Update Site on your Domino server to hold your plugins.  Once you have put your configured plugins into the catalog you can push them to your Notes clients via policy.

Total investment

Once hardware is available, the total installation of Lotus Connections for Domino 8.5.3 can be completed in all but the largest organizations in three weeks or less.  For a clean path to success, make sure your implementation team consists of a representative from the network team, LDAP group, server team, desktop support and Lotus Domino administration. A good internal marketing campaign that advertises the upcoming new features and how they will be used in the organization is very helpful as well.

Davalen can remove the uncertainty in your upgrade plans by leading the effort for you.  We have done many full installations of Lotus Connections and have created a Lotus Connections installation for Domino 8.5.3 service just for you.  Contact me for more information.

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This article is from our monthly resource e-Newsletter. Did you miss it in your inbox? Visit our eNewsletter archives for past editions or if you want to receive our monthly newsletter automatically, simply write to Ruth Jarvis and request to be added to our E-Newsletter list. Thank you!

Len Barker

 by Len Barker, Managing Partner – Lotus Practice

 

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This article is from our monthly resource e-Newsletter. Did you miss it in your inbox? Visit our eNewsletter archives for past editions or if you want to receive our monthly newsletter automatically, simply write to Ruth Jarvis and request to be added to our E-Newsletter list. Thank you!

Len Barker

 by Len Barker, Managing Partner – Lotus Practice

Let’s face it; we are a connected bunch here in the 21st century. At home we can locate our family and friends, instantly find out what thousands of people think about a book we are thinking of reading, and (guys) you can be reminded of exactly what you were supposed to pick up while you are standing on aisle three at the grocery store. Most businesses are not taking advantage of the same technology that is revamping our home lives. Companies that are embracing the adoption of social technologies in the workplace are reaping the rewards.

I have been working with a large client on a full implementation of Sametime 8.5.1. By full, I mean they have:

Len Barker

by Len Barker, Managing Partner – Lotus Practice

Did you ever notice that it is a lot easier and more enjoyable to cook a gourmet meal when you have nice appliances, cookware and specialty tools to work with?  I mean, a good chef will produce a pretty good meal regardless, but in order for the customer and the chef to have an exceptional experience, you really need the right tools.

The same is true for creating web sites and web applications.  Give a good web developer a text editor and some pretty good results can be created.  Give a good web developer the right appliances and tools and exceptional results will be delivered.

Seven Hills Dance Studio in Lynchburg, Virginia, has been providing dance education to young people for over 70 years.  My daughters have been students there for the last 14 years.  Recently, the studio management asked me if I would be interested in developing their new website.  The initial idea was to create a simple website using the tools provided by their hosting company.  Being a professional developer of sites that improve productivity, I couldn’t force myself to simply create a static website.  I found myself asking questions like, “Wouldn’t parents like to login and find the phone numbers of other students in their child’s class? Wouldn’t it be nice for management to edit any page of their website, in-line, and not have to call me to make changes?” And, “I am sure the ability to create news and alerts that automatically show up on the home page for the dates that you specify would be a powerful website function, right?”

Of course they said yes, and I quickly abandoned the hosting company and decided to create the site using IBM Lotus XPages.

XPages was the logical choice of development tools for several reasons:

1. I am a Lotus developer and know this tool
2. I only had 40 hours to complete the entire project
3. I needed an authentication mechanism
4. I needed document level security
5. In order for the results to be exceptional in such a short time, I needed really good tools with modern web 2.0 capabilities.

The following are some lessons learned from this project:

Keep it simple.

You can make an XPages project as simple or as complex as you like.  It is tempting to create a fancy application that is completely dynamic and uses very few XPages components.  If you are new to XPages, this approach will cause you to waste hours of time and curse your choice of using XPages.  Create one XPage for each page in your website and use custom controls for the components that will be on each page (e.g. menu, footer, etc).

Use the XPages References

The amount of good examples and reference material for XPages has grown enormously in the last year.  Don’t waste too much time figuring out how to do something, look it up!

Be careful with Scoped Variables

Scoped Variables are a great way of storing information about the user as they click through the website.  You may want to store the value of the last page opened in a variable so that the user is returned to the correct tab after opening a dialog box, for example.  If you store the variable in the wrong scope (e.g. viewScope instead of requestScope) you may find that the value is used by many user sessions on different PCs.  You should test for this.

Get your custom controls finished before you create too many XPages

You will save a great deal of time and make site maintenance far easier if you create your custom controls wisely.  A good rule of thumb is that the XPage is simply a container for custom controls.  There should be little or no content directly on the XPage.  It may take a couple of iterations to get the custom controls designed the way you want. You don’t want to create your custom controls, put them on ten different Xpages and then make a fundamental change to your custom control design.  You will then have to delete all of your XPages and create them with your new custom controls.  For example, I used the following custom controls in my design of the home page:

•  ccBanner (used for banner at top of page)
•  ccLoginControl (used to allow user to login/logout)
•  ccMenu (used for top navigation menu)
•  ccStaticContent (used for displaying static content that can be edited by an admin)
•  ccNews (used for displaying a news/alerts feed)

I am very happy with the speed that I was able to create the project, and the Dance Studio is thrilled with the look and control features available on their site.  The website will be live by the end of April at http://www.sevenhillsdance.com.

Davalen offers custom XPage development classes that teach users how to create the most powerful websites on for their business needs.  Send us an email if you would like more information.