Friday, January 25, 2008

Lotusphere: Last Two Days

The days down here are very long, I'm not staying in the center of the Lotusphere universe and I don't have wireless. All of that makes it hard to do timely posts. Anyway, here is what I saw that I haven't summarized yet.

SpeedGeeking was really good. I don't know what the selection process was but Rocky may need to get some help because a couple of the presenters I talked to said they found out very late that they would be presenting. The presentations were done well but it was hard to hear and see sometimes because there was such a large number of people. Maybe small stages for the presenter tables? Or larger monitors? Or just elevate the computers? Not sure what to do about the sound though. Coming up with 12 small speaker/mic systems (even if USB-powered) could be tough but is a thought.

Andrew Davis and Brian Leonard did a nice (and humorous) session on widgets and live text. Widgets are a cool addition in the Notes client and will help make the client even more "sticky". I'm anxious to see what happens in our environment since we're behind a proxy and I have had trouble in the past configuring the client to get past it.

Messrs. Buchan and Mooney were themselves in their "Best of" Worst Practices session. At least until the end. Duffbert came up and roasted them about some of the things they did getting ready for ILUG 2007. It was obviously uncomfortable for them but they handled it well. Face it, we all know what to do but we all know there are times when we don't do what we should.

Using Web Services Features in ND8 was a little bit dull in the presentation but still had some good information, including a nice explanation of the message type and SOAP format. I'm looking forward to trying out consuming a web service.

I was hoping for so much more from the session on Bridging Customer Data into Notes 8 with Lotus Symphony. It had a lot of information on WHAT they did but I was more interested in the HOW. I'm sure that will develop over time.

Chris Blatnick and Nathan Freeman did they usual magic in Advanced UI Design Concepts. Even though I had seen about 1/3 of the ideas before, the new stuff they showed gave me a few new ideas. I love the thought of using an editable column to cause documents to be deleted and I can't wait to try it out.

I got a couple of good ideas from Bernd Hort and Thomas Bahn in their Object Oriented LotusScript session. This is a concept that is hard to teach in an hour because it is very different from traditional LS programming. And there are some "gotchas" to be aware of. I plan to download their demo and dissect it and am sure I'll get some ideas there.

The last session I went to was using XML and DXL in Notes design programming, given by Andre Guirard. He is so knowledgeable and creative but it is sometimes hard for him to bring it down to a simpler level, at least when talking (his writing is generally detailed enough). Some good ideas though and he has some tools I know I can use.

To me, nothing too earth shaking happened in the Ask the Developer session. Everyone seemed to be having a good time.

More on the closing session and an overall wrap up later.

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