DominoKeys.com

Right off the bat, I’m not going to go through a technical explanation about doing what the title suggests. That would take, like, more than this one post. Instead, I’m going to talk from more of a conceptual perspective.

The problem.

Our organization is no different than probably any other. We have really old systems, really new ones and everything in between. The level of integration that exists between all of them is never enough, despite anyone’s best attempts. We needed to find a way to deliver information to our customers via the web in an easy to use, intuitive way AND to re-consume some of that information along with much, much more for internal use. In short, we needed a one-stop shop that was role based, highly integrated with lots of back-end systems and had direct connectivity to additional detail which resided in the source system, regardless of what that was.

The technical problem.

From a software perspective, we were dealing with AS/400 (or iSeries, or SystemI or “I” – whatever you want to call it today) data in six different software environments; three major Notes applications and a number of other data sources, mostly Notes/Domino based. The data would present information to multiple countries and thus have to support multiple languages. Also, the security structures of most of these systems are unique and not highly integreated. — So… when we first started talking about this project, we often sarcastically said “good luck with all that!”

The solution.

Ext.nd! If you haven’t seen this, go check it out. In short, we’ve been able to ask our AS/400 developers to set up data warehouse tables that help consolidate some of the information across those systems. In the other areas, we’ve worked with them to use LEI activities to directly access the information. The Notes databases have all been “ext.nd enabled” and we’ve used a lot of XML to organize the data exactly how we want it. In short, there were plenty of ways to access the data needed in each unique system – we just had to carefully step through the process, organize it and get it ready for presentation in Ext.js or Ext.nd.

The result.

Ext.js starts (and ends) with a very nice, intuitive user interface. I feel strongly that the UI is part of the secret sauce to the project. We started putting together our application’s interface by looking through the gallery of examples that ext.js and ext.nd had to offer. We printed off many of these examples and drew lots and lots of whiteboard pictures to work on the layout.

The value-add.

Since the products we’re using have an established (and contemporary) UI, even some more boring reports (last screen shot) look really nice and updated. We’re able to show reports that previously printed in a standard AS/400 kind of style, on the web, with colors, and inside a layout that allows the user to turn on/off columns, change the sort behavior and move each column to a new position dynamically. Oh yeah, they can also search and page forward/back with the navigation at the bottom – or jump directly to a specific page in the report.

The icing on the cake.

What really put us over the top was integrating graphics from FusionCharts. These are Adobe Flash based, XML driven graphics which look outstanding. There’s just enough animation and interactiveness to them to make them interesting as they render on the screen. We re-consume the XML we’re presenting in tables and forms into these charts to represent the exact same data into different visuals. In the end, “yes” the data may be on the screen three times, but the three repsentations have very different purposes – and everyone agrees they all have value.

Attached are some screen shots of our new application. We branded it, purchased a logo for $35 from PixelLogo and launched it at our international sales meeting yesterday. The biggest compliement about the success and power of the application was when I overheard someone in the crowd say “this feels like something Steve Jobs would launch!”

… and I wasn’t even wearing a black shirt and jeans!

Kevin IT Management, Notes Development domino, ext.js, ext.nd, fushion charts, old systems

I. Can’t. Wait.

I’m not exactly certain, but I’m more excited about Lotusphere (2009) this year than any other year I’ve attended. I think its largely due to the amount of stuff from ‘08 that we’ve NOT yet implemented.

Yeah, you read that right.

My team and I came back from LS08 eager to deploy Notes 8.x; excited about the concept of an “all-in-one” box; anxiously awaiting the promised iPhone compatibility; excited about what looked like a strong update to Quickr; and super excited about the 8.5 beta for the Mac (yes, two of us helped cause the big slow down of that download the evening that was announced).

Nine months later: we’ve just begun testing 8.0.2 in hopes that the performance is finally good enough to launch across the company; DWA ultralite for the iPhone is nice, but not something that we can roll out; Quickr is a good update, but still has some odd quirks (personal folders – please!); and I stopped using the 8.5 beta for the Mac within a month.

Kinda sounds like a swing and a miss to me – and yet, I’m REALLY excited about LS09.

Lotus often does a good job of addressing the comments of their community; and everything I listed above has been talked about, blogged about, twitted (that’s a verb, right?) about, etc. quite a bit in the last year. I really would be shocked if Lotus hasn’t heard (loudly) the comments from all of us and I’m hopeful that LS09 will bring some new announcements on a number of these fronts.

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Here’s the other reason I’m excited: the Lotus community. By far, the most valuable thing to come out of Lotusphere last year was hearing from others in the community about what they are doing with Lotus products. In some cases (being totally honest here) you attend a session, hear a solution that someone put in place and realize: wow, we’re really doing well – that isn’t a problem we have at all! Phew!

In many more cases, you hear (or better yet see and get code examples) about really cool ways that people have used (or stretched) Lotus technology for their applications. This past year, the guys from Snapps put on a solid show (as always) and the amount of information we got (and were instantly able to use) about ext.nd was amazing.

So… while the product announcements may not have brought the value we had hoped (yet), connecting with the Lotus community has given us more tools than we dreamed of. That information has allowed us to deploy three new websites (one for customers, one for supply chain management and one for internal use), two new dashboard/graphing tools and build a toolbox of code that allows us to make application development advancements in 1/3 the time it did before!

And that’s why I’m excited!

Kevin IT Management, Mobile Phones, Notes Development, Notes and a MAC ext.nd, iphone, lotus, lotusphere, quickr

This week, I attended the “Lotusphere Comes To You” (LCTY) event in Minneapolis. I really like that Lotus does this type of an event. Even though I attend the “You Come To Lotusphere” (YCTL) event, I find the LCTY version is a great way to bring others from your organization to the event to get a quick sneak peek at the highlights from that year’s Lotusphere.

I’m also always impressed at how well they manage to focus on the true high points of what’s going on in the world of IBM/Lotus. Quickr, Connections and Notes 8 – its all in the agenda!

The only suggestion I have for the event (which I have given to Lotus) is that these events really miss out on the hype that exists at Lotusphere. You leave Lotusphere completely excited about Lotus products, energized and ready to get back to work applying what you learned. You leave LCTY a bit more informed but also feeling like something was missing (the hype).

You also miss out (at the LCTY events) on the polished, cohesive presentations. When you’re at Lotusphere, you feel like every detail has been thought of; everyone rehearsed their part of the “show;” and someone was keeping tabs on the entire event to make sure that overlapping content appeared to be intentional (example: slides at the end that say “Other sessions you might want to see are…”).

At the Minneapolis event, it was clear that a few of the presenters didn’t review what they were going to talk about with each other ahead of time (which, honestly shocked me). The result sends a disconnected message to the audience and feels like a waste of time.

So there you go… the good, the bad and the acronym of this event in MPLS.

Kevin Notes Development

I rounded out the week with a very interesting conference call. I asked out (new) IBM/Lotus account rep to setup a brief conference call to chat about Domino.Doc with the manager of our Design Engineering department (which handles so many HUGE CAD files on a daily basis, its frightening).

Before the call even started, it was weird. He informed me that he’s bring in a local IBM/Lotus business partner to the discussion – a guy I’ve know for a long time but hadn’t talked to recently. I realized that my IBM/Lotus rep’s “system” must have had this other business partner listed somewhere because many years ago we talked with him about the same product. Our IBM/Lotus rep assumed it was appropriate for him to be in the discussion – without asking about the dynamic of how that worked out last time.

That was a flaw in his logic, which I tried to point out ahead of time stating that there were people in our company who felt strongly that the project never got off the ground the first time as a function of some bad information and direction from other local business partners that were brought in to talk about the product. Regardless, the call went on.

The timer on my phone said 22 minutes had gone by before someone mentioned “Domino.Doc” (the purpose of having the meeting) and the only reason it was mentioned was because someone said “I thought we were going to talk about Domino.Doc, not Quickr.”

All that aside, its clear to me how Quickr really could be a better fit for us. Its also clear that IBM wants to use Filenet to provide the backbone to Quickr for people who need some seriously powerful document management utilities. Now that we have the latest verison of Quickr installed, we’re going to get more serious about evaluating it (the first time we tried, all of us ran into odd bugs within the first 5 minutes of using it — that’s been MUCH improved).

At about 45 minutes into the call, the IBM guys said “Quickr is really the perfect tool for shops using Notes 8.0.1.” That’s true! But we’re not adopting 8.0.1 any time soon because of the performance issues we’ve seen in testing. We mentioned this on the conference call, to their surprise. They said (and while this isn’t truly a quote … its a pretty close paraphrase):

‘Really?! You’re the first place that has EVER said anything like that! We’ve seen NO performance issues with Notes 8.0.1. Of course, you could use the “-sa”‘ switch run it without Eclipse, ’cause that’s the thing that slows it down. Eclipse is slow. Notes isn’t. I mean, anyone that has 2GB of RAM is going to see no problems with Notes 8.0.1 whatsoever!’

My problem? 95% of our systems don’t have 2GB of RAM. 65% of them don’t have ONE GB of RAM. And, oh yeah, the coolest part of 8.0.1 is the functionality that Eclipse brings to the table (side shelf, etc.) … so I just can’t justify the amount of time an upgrade would take when some of the biggest payoffs aren’t there.

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While this may seem like a vent, its not intended to be. Its intended to be feedback. I see a lot of IBM/Lotus blogs where people enlist the “what do you, the customer, want?” type of question. I think its important that blogs, like mine, exist to provide everyday insight into a sort of moment-by-moment recap of the challenges and thoughts we have about using the software that supports our business.

Kevin Misc. Info, Notes Development

Wait a second, I need to make sure that title makes sense… yeah, that’ll work.

I’ve been talking about my struggles with the Mac Notes 8.5 beta for some time and then I got quiet about it. I’ll admit now that I just stopped opening it and went into Paradows (Parallels + Windows) for all my Notes client needs.

But then I started to run into odd things with the Notes 8.0.1 client running a current mail template as well. First, it was slow… especially using the Outlook preview pane layout. Second, there were a number of odd behaviors, like deleting a message in the inbox and watching the highlighted message jump to the top of the list instead of the message just before the one you deleted.

So I downgraded. I went back to my Mac 7.x client and continued to run the 8.0.1  mail file. That actually worked quite nicely, until I worked off my local replica and noticed lots of inconsistencies between read/unread marks. There were a few other minor tweaks as well, so I restored my mail file back to the 7.0.3 template.

For the first time ever… this downgrade feels like an upgrade. I’ve never been so excited to go back to the way something was even though I know I’m missing out on new features, UI, etc.

Kevin Notes Development, Notes and a MAC

The company I work for is looking at a variety of tools that could be used to store information that doesn’t really fall into any existing system out there. The idea is to capture knowledge that is somewhat random, yet categorizable, in a way that allows people to easily search, learn and modify.

The first tool that came to mind was a wiki. The OpenNTF.com Domino wiki, to be exact. The tool allows for free-form entry of information, attachment of files, searching and versioning. Its CSS based, so changing the UI to fit into an existing system would be relatively easy. It also is RSS enabled, so when we launch Notes 8, we could include it as an RSS feed, giving people easy access to newly created/changed documents.

Really, the tool is a near-perfect fit. With one unknown: will people ‘get’ the WikiMarkup language that’s built into it. This tool is easy to find via the “Style Tips” button at the top of the page and allows you to use some common symbols to change your text appearance. Example (from editing/creating a new document):

As you can see, pound signs, asterisks, pipes, etc. all serve a purpose in the markup language. The concept is really pretty straight forward, but people who are used to a “B” button in MS Word might not get this type of “coding” to get your text to do stuff. There are a few “sandbox” type pages with examples that helps and once you save the document, the result is pretty clear and looks nice:

So that’s the big question: will people “get” the markup language or will all of the documents just look like a bunch of raw text. In all honesty, the answer to the question will be a big factor on the usability and adoption of the tool.

So now we’ll throw it in front of a few users and see what happens.

Kevin IT Management, Notes Development

Ever since I heard that IBM/Lotus was going to spend some serious time (and money) promoting Notes 8, I’ve been anxiously awaiting opportunities to see the results of those efforts in action. Anyone who’s talked to my lately might be surprised that I’m not posting something about my true feelings behind this ridiculous concept.*

But no, I’m living by the “if you don’t have something good to say…” rule.

While I was on Digg.com today I noticed a clever little ad on the side promoting Notes 8 (kind of). As you can see, its a nicely designed ad and I thought a pretty clever way of distributing those pieces of content.

Not bad. Not bad at all!

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* OK, so since the end of the “If you can’t say something nice…” comment in today’s world means “… then post a blog entry about it.” I felt it was appropriate to give an ever-so-brief reason for why I thought the link above is a bad idea:In short: Its a clever idea, but poorly done. It is apparently targeted at end-users but does very little to explain what the product does and why I need it … certainly not until I read the text on the cards shown after picking my “messed up animal of choice.” However, even once you read those short descriptions, you find comments like “… that’s almost as smart as Notes 8.”Now, I may be jaded on this one. So I did a study. I put that site in front of 8 people I knew that don’t work in IT and have never used Lotus Notes. I simply said “I want to show you this site about an exciting new product that you could use every day at the office to improve the way you do your job – and I want you to spend 3 minutes with it and tell me what the product is, what it will do for you and if you are interested in learning more.”

So far the answers are (summarizing common themes here):
- Um… Lotus Notes?
- Don’t know. But it has something to do with animals.
- No, not really. Why did you show me this?!
Still, I’m hopeful that other upcoming ads will be more informative and inspiring.

Kevin News, Notes Development

I’ve been very busy the last few weeks and find myself just now catching up. As I do, there’s a few articles and blog posts that grabbed by attention.

It all started with a few posts (like this one) about Lotus Notes 8 splash screens. What’s wrong with that? Nothing. Except that it made me realize its the closest thing to “marketing” that I’ve seen come out of IBM/Lotus on this new product.

Now, I’m a Notes 8 beta user and I can tell you that its a big advancement. I totally get the roadmap that’s inherint in this product. The use of eclipse is smart and the ability to have productivity editors (light versions of products like Word, Excel, etc.) built into the application is awesome! I think that one feature alone could draw some serious attention to Notes 8. — The problem: IBM/Lotus isn’t drawing attention to Notes 8.

Sure, blogs are talking about it. Sure, there’s a couple of news articles out there on it. But nothing on the scale of the “R5″ release … and there should be! This version has some huge potential for people. And when you add things like Quickr and Connections to the mix, Lotus quickly becomes a brand that IT Managers should be paying attention to.

Which brings me to this article from IT-Director.com. In short, the author thinks that IBM shouldn’t continue to use the Lotus brand because its not helping to draw attention to their new products. And yet, even though Information Week didn’t mention it, Lotus DOES have a strong cult following. And that probably started because people who worked at the original Lotus clearly had passion for what they were doing, be it 1-2-3 or Notes or whatever.

So let’s recap:

• Notes 8 = potentially one of the greatest versions of Notes in a long time
• Connections & Quickr = potentially great new additions to a company that IT Managers should pay attention to
• IBM = recognizing branding power of “Lotus” and continuing to use it
• Lotus = has a cult following

So … why aren’t there more ads? Maybe IBM doesn’t think that Lotus products (which fit in any organization but fit particularly well in SMB’s) aren’t attractive to small-medium business. No, that can’t be it.

I’m not sure why the only “hype” about this product is limited to blogs, trade rags and splash screens on Flickr. While the beta still “feels” like a beta, its very very promising. I say: hype it up! Let’s see some ads! Let’s see some TV time for Notes 8, Quickr and Connections. Remind IT Managers why they should continue to invest in Notes, or better yet, why they should ditch Microsoft (or other email programs … my wife’s office is still on GroupWise!) software and adopt Lotus. Its a great decision … you just need to explain to NEW customers WHY its a great decision. And it all starts with attracting their attention … in an ad.

I’ll even get you started. What about … “I am, 2.0″ – clever, eh?

Now … I’m not endorsing a redo of the “I am” ads, they had sizzle, but no steak. I think there ought to be a campaign that has some element in it that appeals to the existing Lotus cult following (thus the “I am, 2.0″ thing), but more importantly, the ads need to clearly tell NEW customers why they should consider Notes 8. Its got to have a balance of “hey this is cool and looks great” and “wow, this will make my organization faster, better and more powerful.”

Also … I know that Notes 8 is still in beta, thus running an ad right now might be premature. Then again, maybe not. There’s something to be said for hyping a product LONG before its ready to come out. If only I could think of an example of a company that does that… hmmm…..

Kevin IT Management, Notes Development

The Minnesota Lotus Notes user group met recently to discuss a migration from Domino to Exchange by RSM McGladrey. You can see the presentation for yourself here.

A couple of thoughts on this. First, the “problems” they identified for moving away from Domino included:

• Aging Lotus Notes solution did not meet the needs of a mobile workforce
• Need more flexible and web-based interfaces
• Anyplace, anytime access to email
• Integration with Microsoft apps
• 85% of workers are mobile most of them

The solution to these problems seems to be pretty easy to me: “upgrade to Notes 6.5 or higher.”

While we all know that Domino CAN do all of the things in the “problems” list above, that’s not the point I want to make. I think this is a GREAT example of why Lotus/IBM needs to do more marketing about Lotus Notes/Domino. Its clear through comments like this (from big companies, even) that there are basic features in Notes that people don’t know about.

Now, IBM is doing a good job of allowing this story to continue to be told because there are some good things for current and potential Notes customers to read about. However, I challenge that a stronger, focused marketing campaign that communicates the value of Lotus Notes in the enterprise would do even more good.

Think about it: if a company like RSM McGladrey, an existing Notes shop, can come to the conclusion to rip out Domino and replace it with Exchange based on the bullet points above … then doesn’t suggest that Lotus/IBM isn’t adequately communicating the value, features and power of their tools with each version release!?

Marketing. It works. – I’ve said before that the “R5 – I am” commercials were the closest thing I’ve seen to a strong marketing campaign. It was a good start, I wish they would have kept going.

Maybe in Notes 8?

Kevin Misc. Info, Notes Administration, Notes Development

Even though I’m bummed that IBM didn’t release a beta client for the Mac, I did download a copy for Windows and loaded it. So far, it looks nice:

A few things I’ve noticed so far that I didn’t expect:

• “Databases” are now called “Applications” in menus and such.
• All SmartIcons seem to have been changed/updated.
• The Replicator has a few new buttons that should help clear up things in that area.
• The only change in the Workspace appears to be the replica selection button is now a circle instead of a rectange. (I was hoping for some bigger UI improvements here.)
• Your Mail, Calendar and Contacts open by default. Handy!
• “Bookmarks” look the same. Blagh.

I’ll post more as I play around with it. I find that I’m excited to test it out, but really bummed to have to open Windows more often.

Kevin Notes Development, Notes and a MAC