Lotusphere 2006

Well that’s it, Lotusphere is over for another year.

Bruce’s OpenNTF session was well put together, hopefully it will encourage a few more people to get involved. They are always made very welcome, I know I have been all week.

The rest of the sessions today have become pretty traditional but they’re always good fun, the Beat the Developers produced the usual round of feature requests from the floor that "will be taken back" to the development labs.

The closing session was much slicker than in previous years, every time the "official" content gets less and less and the comedian gets more time, this is just what people want. That being said the slides that were running as we all filed in had quotes from the blogging community which received great reception from the rest of the room. Again there are a few photos up on Flickr.

I think I’m going to leave it there until I get home when I’ll write a proper review of the week. Everything happens so fast while we’re here that it’s often difficult to see the wood for the trees.

Until then, I look forward to seeing everyone here next year, and if you couldn’t make it for 2006, maybe you’ll be free for the week of 21st January 2007 when we’ll be back to do it all over again.

About 5,000 of us headed on down to Seaworld last night. It’s a bit of a strange park with only a couple of rides (I just stood with beer in hand chatting with a few of the other non-riders). The rest of the park is devoted to penguins (don’t trust them as Paul says) and of course Shamu. I’ve uploaded all of my LS photos so far, with a few of the killer whale show. I’m glad we got there late and so couldn’t sit at the front, those guys get very wet and it was beginning to get a bit chilly.

So we’re into the last day, but there are still some good sessions to get to including the annual Guru-paloozer and Harass the Developers. But before that everyone has to get to Bruce’s OpenNTF session (of course wearing your spangly new OpenNTF t-shirts).

The second Bill Buchan session of the day, he’s always an entertaining speaker. I would say this is not an area is spend a lot of time in, frankly if you’re wanting to get into OO then you may as well go the whole hog and learn Java, which was designed for this from the ground up. I know that LotusScript can do it, but just because something can be done, doesn’t mean it should. Maybe a little controversial, but there you go, an opinion none the less.

That being said I went to the session because I still derive some dirty pleasure from jumping into LS every so often and bashing out some code in two minutes flat, and Bill as a real script guru always has some great tips to take away.

Mac put together a really neat overview of the most acronym heavy area of develpment – AJAX, XSLT, XML, DXL, DTD etc etc. He explained the background and history really well and gave a really cool demo of a notes.net search tool which I guess pretty much everyone is going to download from his site when he puts it up (thanks to Julian for bullying him there!).

Generallyt this is a real area of growth, sometimes when these flvours of the month come along they disappear just as quickly as the arrive, but I don’t think this will be the case here. If you’re a developer (doesn’t matter if you’re into Domino or not) you owe it to yourself to get into this stuff. And even better it’s great fun because you’re seeing visual results almost immediately.

As ever Ed was on good combative form. The emphasis of the presentation has changed over recent years, in the past there have been hints of slight exasperation creeping in that not everyone agreed with Big Blue, but this year (and in the whole conference mood in general) everyone seems to be really happy with the way things are moving forward. Of course there are areas where there is slight confusion, there can’t not be with such a vast array of products on offer, but in the past where aggression was used to maybe try and cover up the confusion, now the message is in line with the offerings and the aggression is just good honest competitiveness.

If I were in Microsoft’s shoes I would be worried about how I was going to try and win new customers in the corporate space, let alone dislodge existing IBM houses.

Bill Buchan and Paul Mooney put together a really excellent presentation of 12 of the wors things that you can do in Domino admin and development using real world examples. It struck just the right note of humour and useful commentary. It’s always stunning the number of places which don’t have dev and test environments set up, for such little outlay of a standalone box it just makes sense to do.

Anyway, I would guess that from the reviews it will not be last time that they’ll be invited back to give sessions at Lotusphere as they seemed to think.

Two BOFs which are always repeated and good for a laugh are the Blogging Community and the OpenNTF sessions. I only ojust made it to the OpenNTF session as it was a late night and it started at the inhuman hour of 7am. Even so the attendance was excellent, if a little quiet. Once again, if you use Notes or Domino in any way you have got to go over to the site and have a look at what’s on offer. Hell this site is even making use of the Blogsphere template from Declan.

The most interesting question last night in the Blogging BOF was whether the blogging community is too insular and inward looking, we do tend to link to each other in ever decreasing circles. All I can say is that if you’re out there lurking and wondering whether to start your own blog, or even whether just to post a comment here or one of the bigger blogs like Ed or Rocky, just go for it. Even though it can seem clique-y it’s really not, noone will bite (unless you ask them too). Hell anyone who knows me, knows I am not the most outgoing guy in the world and if I can be accepted into the fold then so can anyone.

I had been wondering how much activity would be needed to get onto the front tags page of Flickr. Now I guess we know:

It’s also hilarious that we are more popular than "naked conversations".

Good stuff.

ID111 – Tuning memory usage on your Domino Server
This was a really good deep dive into memory management on the Domino server. I learned a lot of stuff which I didn’t know and will be able to head back to the office with some immediate ideas about performance tuning an application which we are having problems with at the moment.

The presenter did a really good job of explaining a complex area.

INV106 – Innovations in Search Technology
It’s always humbling when you see the blue sky sessions from IBM Research. This one covered where things are going with search technologies within the enterprise. For once consumer technology (i.e. Google et al) is leading the way in this area of technology, but the enterprise space is catching up. We have already seen the Google Desktop plugin for Lotus Notes but if this session is anything to go by we are going to see a lot of much cooler stuff. Rather than just searching for specific terms it’s beginning to be possible to look at the meaning behind a search and then direct the user to pages which contain what they are really looking for rather than the actual words or phrases they have typed.

The cool tools which we saw demo’d are called Dogear and TamNoon, well worth a look as they move towards the production world.

INV101 – Hannover and Beyond
This was really more of a marketing exercise than any good technical content, even so there was some useful stuff…

• There are already 3 million ND7 users
• There will be a Notes 7 Plugin for the Workplace Managed Client on Linux
• There will be a Notes 7.0.2 client for the Mac… that works on Tiger (10.4.4)… that works on Intel as well as PowerPC!
• Sametime 7.5 is actually based on Eclipse so it is extendable by developers

And what I suppose was the real point of the session is that everyone needs to be clear…

HANNOVER IS NOTES
I am not sure it could be any clearer than that. You will not need to do anything to your Notes / Domino applications for them to run in Hannover. My biggest worry had been that URL structures would alter, the guys in Meet the Developers assure me that is not the case. From an upgrade point of view, it will be no worse than 5 to 6 or 6 to 7.

That being said they are adding a whole pile of stuff into Hannover (this is where the blurring between Notes and Workplace begins in my view). Hannover will contain the Activity Explorer (or some version of it), a Document Management capability, support for Composite Applications (a la Websphere Portal), and most intriguingly a Java / Eclipse Development Environment.

This could (and it’s still early days) be an Outlook killer in terms of the UI, it does look really good.

ID102 – Domino 7 Server and Beyond
It’s strange but sometimes you don’t want really polished, slick presentations, it makes me feel happy when the true geeky stuff is hard going. This was just a barrage of information but you know that the quality is good and reliable because these are the guys that right the code down at the coal-face.

So some more bullet points (which seem to be turning into my theme for the week):

• A new feature being worked on is called "Resilient Views" that is views which can cope with a response heirarchy which has been broken (due to copying and pasting or document security). Doesn’t sound like much but it could be really useful.
• Mail Recall – this is one I don’t like, it encourages sloppiness in my view. But anyway it’s a new server feature for Domino Next.
• RSS and Atom feed generation is going to be made easier.
• Development are looking at removing the dependency that the server has on the NAB. That is allowing Domino to work with an LDAP directory instead of the NAB. Now that sounds cool, especially as they also mentioned virtualisation so that Notes apps still think the NAB is there.
• There will be native 64 bit support in the future but 32 bit will still be supported in the Domino Next timeframe. 64 bit versions of servers will be treated as new platforms in the same way that Linux or AIX etc have been.

CS104 – Reach out and Blog
After their success last year this was another panel session. To be honest there’s nothing new here but they are great fun. The panel was cracking: Rocky, Ed, Volker, Libby, Declan, Jack, Chris and for a brief period Julian are some of the most well known bloggers in the community and they provided great entertainment.

Today I have been mostly attending AJAX sessions. And they have been pretty interesting all round. To make my head swell I got a shout from both Lance Spellman and Scott Good for past work on the Name Picker sample code.

By coincidence both myself and Kevin Pettitt ended up going to the same sessions this afternoon, always good to catch up with people who I only see once a year in Florida.

For the single most useful tip from the afternoon sessions, during a performance tuning session we were pointed to an Alpha Works tool called Page Detailer, obviously not had a chance to look at it yet but if it is as good as it sounds it could prove invaluable. Basically it profiles the performance of a web page as it downloads, you can see where the time is spent and then deal with improving performance in code, network, graphics or whatever is the source of your bottleneck.

I have just popped up to my room to drop off the (overloaded) backpack and then head out again to see what exhibitor parties I can crash.

Onwards.