On March 30th 2002 I posted on 11TMR for the very first time. Seven years later and the posting frequency may have gone down thanks to the Twitter, but I’m still here and have no plans on going anywhere else.
That being said that’s all for this post!
The big switch has been flipped this morning and the spangly new UKLUG Site has been opened up.
So if you want two days of great sessions, networking, sponsors and maybe a bit of fun then head over to uklug.info and sign up. Once you are approved then you’ll also be able to submit session abstracts if you’d like to speak, or sign up as a sponsor if you want to get more involved.
See you in Edinburgh in October.
You’re not meant to apologise for radio silence on a blog, so I shan’t but things have been very busy. I’m working on several really cool projects at the moment so time for the blog has rather fallen to the bottom of the to do list.
What is really great news from both my own business and from IBM’s point of view, is that three quarters of my work at the moment is doing development for 8.5 servers, and not just that, but doing development on XPages. It looks as though the latest refresh of the server and Domino Designer has given the development market for Domino web apps the kick up the backside that it really needed.
As always one of the things going on is the next version of IdeaJam. A couple of weeks ago we posted asking for input on what people want to see on the new home page that we are designing. That’s still a work in progress, but we’ll definitely keep you updated. The other area that we want to concentrate on (at the behest of various customers) is the statistics page. Currently we use the JFreeCharts java library to build the charts, they’re cool and everything but require a lot of processing on the server and aren’t very “live”. So we’re planning to move back to some flash charts and are looking for views of what you want to see:
In other news, I’m off to Sweden next week with Tim Clark to do another repeat of the XPages course. Looking forward to getting back over to Stockholm as I haven’t been for a few years. Then it’s back to the UK for a day before heading off to Morzine for a long stag weekend. I don’t mind telling you, life is pretty tough at the moment. 😉
It looks like Tim and I will be heading over to Stockholm, Sweden next month to give another version of the XPages Workshop that went so well here in the UK at the end of last year.
The dates are the 10th and 11th of March and you need to go here for more details. I hope to see you next month if you can make it.
This video was played in the Closing session at Lotusphere and it got a great response in the room. I think it’s exactly the sort of thing that Lotus advertising should be doing, specific products are mentioned in a real world context. Also good to see Mr Novak in there.
Julian was kind enough to pass on a beta invite for chi.mp this morning. Basically, it’s a website that will aggregate your entire online presence into one site, so all of my Blog postings, photos, tweets etc can now be found at mattwhite.mp and, if you really have no life at all, then you can subscribe to an RSS feed of them all together at this link.
A great service I think, that is easy to set up, looks nice. As with a lot of these internet startups, I have no idea how they plan to make money so it may not be around for long. But for the moment, it’s the best place to follow my online activity in one place.
I haven’t yet got any invites to pass along, but if you want one, just comment on here with your email address and I’ll pass them along as I receive them.
Bruce has posted our slides for BP105 – Building a World Class Web 2.0 application With XPages:
The download of TaskJam is at taskjam.net. You can also watch the warmup video that we put together here on YouTube.
The slides for my other session, BP109 – Lotus Domino Web Development – How to do the right thing with the wrong design element can be downloaded here:
And the download of the sample app is at 11tmr.com/dotherightthing (just add a .zip” to the file that comes down and the nsf is inside).
Lotusphere 2009 was my tenth, so you’d think I’d be used to it by now, but my view of Lotusphere this year was as a “booth babe” and speaker rather than a session attender, I didn’t get to see any of the great technical content which is hugely disapppointing as there were probably 15 or 20 sessions I would love to have gone to. Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up with the slideware and session downloads that a lot of people are offering. I also had to take the parties a little easy, so I even got 5 hours sleep one night.
In terms of the announcements we’ve already seen great coverage from the guys who were on the official blogger program. I have to say I’m not a huge fan of spreading the big news out during the week, I’d rather have all of the goodness in the OGS and then tailor what I want to find out about based upon that, but I understand the reasoning from IBM’s point of view. In fact the OGS’ generally were much slicker that previous years, even though they both overran quite significantly. And with The Blue Man Group, Dan Ackroyd and Benjamin Zander the guests were back up to excellent all round.
Gayle and Bruce had warned us that working on the show floor was harder than it looked, they weren’t lying. By Wednesday evening we were all pretty well knackered with very sore feet and legs from all the standing and demo-ing. But both Kitty and Mark really went above and beyond in the amount of effort they put in for us. I can’t tell you how much it is appreciated. Largely due to their work, the traffic to the stand, number of demos, trials and so on were far in excess of what we were expecting, it’s going to be a very busy couple of months now I suspect.
Of course, as always the best thing about the week is the people, catching up with old friends, making new ones (there were a lot of new people attending this year which is great news for everyone). Volker’s photo of the bloggers on the main stage after the closing pretty much sums it all up for me:
The dates for next year were announced, so see you in Florida from the 17th to 21st January.
Blimey, things just get better and better. In the Opening General Session we got some more great news that we won the CTO Award and were finalists in the Best in Show Award, so now we have two enourmous crystal awards on the stand and couldn’t be happier.
I guess I should probably apologise for the lack of posts in the OGS liveblog, the other guys did a great job but Dec and I had serious network issues so couldn’t really do anything.
I also spoke at Lotusphere for the first time, it was a great experience, and the room was pretty much full even though we had some serious competition in the same time slot.
The last couple of days have been absolutely unbelievably great. Best. Lotusphere. Ever.