Domino Interface

It is funny that Gregg Eldred is now getting solicitations from AARP since I have been getting them for the past two years. I was first offended, but unfortunately I have reach the age where I should expect this. This year has been full of milestones and I would say turning points in my life. First, I recently turned the big 5 0. Since most of my family live to the mid 90s to 100s, I guess my life on this earth is half over. Second, about every ten years since graduating college, I have shifted directions in what I do professionally. I was an electrical engineer for about 10 years, I did training sales for 10 years, and have done Lotus and business consulting services for about 10 years now. From what I see happening in the Lotus world compared to the rest of the industry, I see myself slowly making a new shift. What that is, I do not know? I still see Lotus in the picture, but the environment is so fluid. So this coming Lotusphere 2011 will be interesting for me. I am hoping ...

I just started to read "The Ten Faces of Innovation." An interesting book by Tom Kelley of IDEO.

It is the end of the year and I was cleaning my desk and I found Lotus Domino's worst nightmare, CDs for Lotus Workplace. I thought I got ridden of all my Workplace CDs but they seem to keep showing up. Kind of like how Workplace is showing up in Domino. I made sure I got ridden of ALL of them this time. Crushed them into little pieces. Hopefully never to be seen again, but some how I have a feeling that is not going to happen given the direction of Domino.

After 3 years as President and 2 years as Vice President of GRANITE, I am happy to announce that we have elected a new president and vice president for GRANITE. Bernie Leung from Mesa Technologies will be the new President and Mike McGarel from Czarnowski will be the new Vice President. Congratulations to both of them. They will definitely provide new ideas and direction for GRANITE. I will still be an active participant at GRANITE, but this will give me more time to focus on the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference in which the next one will be in Milwaukee, WI in late August 2011.

Reminder that the December 2010 GRANITE Lotus User Group meeting will be held next Monday on December 13, 2010. Meridian IT/Plantronics and Kroll Track will be presenting. In addition, Bernie Leung will talk about Lotus Security. So come join us for this meeting which includes our December Holiday lunch

I was in the process of signing up for Lotusphere 2011. Since I didn't plan to go to the Wednesday party nor Thursday I thought I would sign up for the three day conference badge which is $200 cheaper. I was surprise to find out that as an IBM Business Partner we are not allowed to sign up for the three day pass. It sounds like IBM squeezing money out of the partners again.

On November 29, 2010, Geoffrey Baer will be presenting his latest in his series of shows covering the history and culture of Chicago. The new video will air on WTTW Channel 11 and is called "Biking the Boulevards." If you are in the Chicagoland area don't forget to watch it and donate money to WTTW.

This hold Lotus Foundation non-announcement has once again have me shaking my head about IBM's understanding and focus on the SMB market. As I said on Christian Tillmanns' blog. "IBM have some of the best solutions for the SMB market, but never seem to understand the importance of this market not just in the revenue perspective, but the impact it has on the enterprise market. Remember that Microsoft’s and Google’s primary focus initially was in the SMB market. And now look where are they. If you have a good foothold on the SMB market you will gain in the enterprise market. What IBM needs to understand is that every individual consumer is a small business and they grow to become enterprises by number. Good example is what Microsoft did with Outlook. Google has done with Google Docs. IBM still does not get it. For example, if you want people to adopt Lotus Symphony DO NOT, DO NOT require people to fill out a super long form or any form at all. I told a customer to try it, b...

I having been doing research for the past couple of months on how I can create an file uploader control for my UX Pages Project which now has involved to become the iPhora Application Designer. Again Jake Howlett's Codestore.net and a couple of other blogs were great starting points. There was four different ways I could create a Domino file uploader: - Embedding a traditional file upload control into a Domino form - Creating a separate HTML form and referencing in the name of the Domino FUC on a traditional Domino form - Using XPages and create a FUC - Set DominoDisableFileUploadChecks=1 in the Notes.ini file and create a HTML Form that does a ?createdocument on a traditional Domino form (that I learned from Jake Howlett's blog) All these techniques will work in creating a Domino File Uploader control. However, each of these techniques have limitations that I do not like. Since I am a strong believer of the total separation of form and data the use of traditional Domino FU...

I will be presenting a session at the LTAP 2010 virtual conference this week. My session is entitled "Introduction to Dojo for Domino Developers". It will introduce Domino developers who are not familiar with Dojo and how you can used it with Domino as a data store. I will provide a few demos including how you can create a Domino file uploader with Dojo that resolves many of the problems that have existed in the past. I will discuss this technique in my blog tomorrow.

Recently a couple of our clients added iPhones to replace their Blackberries in their operation and we installed Traveler for them so that they can access there mail and calendar from their iPhones. Everything is working fine with the one exception. Using BES with your Blackberry you have the option of whether the handheld or the desktop has control on the deletion of messages. So if you set it to the desktop (default) when the user deletes the message from their Blackberry to remove the clutter of messages, the messages remain in their mail file until they delete it using their Notes or iNotes client. This is very handy. However, with the Traveler Exchange ActiveSync there does not seem to be a similar option. Has anyone encountered this issue and found a resolution?

Just a reminder that the GRANITE Lotus User Group October 2010 Meeting will be on Monday. One of the things that we will be covering is Lotus Quickr 8.5 and all the new features and API associated with this new version. Also we will be presenting sessions on E-mail discovery customer experience and using Dojo with XPages. GRANITE Web Site

This past Tuesday I was fortunate enough to attend a presentation by Geoffrey Baer of WTTW Channel 11 at the brand new Glenview Library which is located a few miles from my house. Geoffrey is the host of the extremely popular Chicago architecture and history series that have been running on WTTW for over 15 years on the same Gateway computers. Geoffrey presented a shorten version of his North Shore tour focused primarily on Glenview. Glenview's new library is very nice. I believe it is a bit smaller than the Evanston, IL library which has won many awards located just about a block from my office. Both are very impressive. Geoffrey described in his talk how he became the host of the series. He was working as a producer at WTTW while he was giving Chicago architecture tours to visitors. A couple who attended his tour kept following him along even after the tour and asking him many questions. The couple was extremely impressed. The gentlemen happen to be the new appointed cha...

The GRANITE Lotus User Group October meeting will be held next Monday on October 18, 2010 at the IBM Center here in Chicago. We have a great lineup for this meeting. The topics for the meeting includes: - Email Management, Archiving, and E-discovery - Exploring Dojo with XPages - Lotus Quickr 8.5 - MWLUG 2010 Summary and MWLUG 2011 So come join us and learn more about these topics. Breakfast and lunch will be included. Meeting are free for members. But non-members are most welcome. For more information and agenda for the meeting go to GRANITE site at: GRANITE Lotus User Group

With the great weather we had this past weekend, we decide to go to Holland, Michigan for our anniversary and enjoy the fall colors in Michigan. I have been married to the most wonderful lady for 12 years. We visited and hiked the sand dunes of Saugatuck Dunes State Park and P. J. Hoffmaster State Park. It was great exercise climbing the 300 foot sand dunes. You really feel it in your legs later. Both of them have beautiful beaches, but are not crowded especially in the fall. We tried getting a cabin, but they were all filled. This weekend gave me time to relax and enjoy the most important thing in my life, my family. As you can see the Lotus Software Cap make a good sun shade.

I have not been blogging at all recently. I have been so busy for the past month with projects and this weekend was the first time is a long time in which I had a chance to work on a server replacement project. The old Windows-based File Server was finally replaced with a new box running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on VMWare ESXi 4. The new version of Ubuntu is even nicer than 8.04 LTS which we were using for some of other servers. With Quickr 8.5 now available on Linux, I will be able to retire all my Windows servers and be all Linux server shop(Ubuntu). Busy so busy it was not good that my T41 hard drive bit the dusk a week ago and with some critical files that I was working on that I did not have a chance to back up. So next week I will be performing surgery on the hard drive to recover the data. The hard drive platters are in great shape so the data is there but the drive has issues. I brought an identical drive and will hopefully be transferring the platter to the new drive. Instead ...

The signage for MWLUG 2010 was quite different then last year. The entire signage was put together with Legos. Thanks to Gregg Eldred's son and Richard Moy'son for their hard work and fun in creating the MWLUG 2010 signage. http://www.flickr.com/photos/unknownbrick/sets/72157624698764665/with/4934131046/

Adobe Systems was gracious enough to donate a copy of Flash Builder 4 Premium for our MWLUG 2010 Giveaway during Justin Hill's Flex and Domino session. Mark Davenport from Share Logic is the lucky winner. There were many who were hoping to be the winner of this product. If you are recently unemployed and looking into learning a new technology that is in demand, Adobe System has a program for currently unemployed developers to get themselves a copy of Flash Builder 4 Standard. More information can be found at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/free/index.html. There will be more news to come about MWLUG.

MWLUG 2010 was a lot of hard work, but it all came together thanks to all the hard work of the volunteers, sponsors, speakers, vendors, and attendees. It was much better than last year. We had about a 20% increase in attendance this year. The session layout that the XPages speakers came up with worked great. Everyone like the approach of starting from the basics of Web development all the way up to the advanced XPages topics. The flow about collaboration for the opening session done by Scot Rourke, David Via, and Kris Synder worked out very well. Thanks to Avon Printing and Rebecca Leedy for their quick turnaround on the printing, conference bags, and T-shirts. Unlike last year's bags which were so small, the MWLUG 2010 bags can actually use for carrying groceries now that the conference is over. All the printing, bags, and T-shirts were done locally in the Midwest. The lunch buffet on Friday was better than I imagined when I placed the order. Wish we had the money to have do...

I am back home from MWLUG at Cleveland and just as I was almost home, the transmission for my Ford Windstar craps out. Luckily, I have AAA to tow the car to my mechanic and that I was close to home. If I was on I-90 this would have been bad. I looked on the Web and all the signs points to the transmission. It seems that Ford Windstar all have problems with transmissions going out because of the torque converter or the pump. Of course, Ford has refused to recall it. But the end results, is you need a new transmission. I was a fan of Fords until now. This is the last time I am buying a Ford.

It has been a year in the making and MWLUG 2010 is already to go. It is going to be bigger than last year. We have an incredible conference with 45 technical sessions, a networking event on Wednesday night, a networking event on Thursday night with a comedy show to top it off. The MWLUG 2010 sponsors have been wonderful and the sponsors are giving away lot of high tech gadgets including cameras, iPads, hard drives, and Kindle. Hope to see everyone starting tomorrow. Stop by the Taishan Works/Phora Group table and say hi. Now I just need to drive the 6.5 hours to Cleveland tomorrow with seven of us packed in a mini van, create a opening session presentation, and oh forgot my own presentation for my session. I guess sleep is not an option.

Today was the first time we set up Lotus Traveler with the Apple iPhone. It took us a bit to find the documentation that we needed. However, I was surprised to how smooth it went. The Lotus Traveler team did a good job.

If you are interested in tracking each of the 45 sessions and speakers at MWLUG, the MWLUG 2010 Mobile Guide for Blackberry is now available to download from the MWLUG 2010 web site. With the MWLUG 2010 Mobile Guide you will be able to track and search sessions, speakers, review the agenda, and provide feedback on how you like MWLUG 2010 on your Blackberry Mobile device. We would like to thank our Gold Sponsor, Kryos Systems, for donating the time and resources to create this mobile application which is created using their Kryos Velocity technology. To download the MWLUG 2010 Mobile Guide goto: http://www.mwlug.com/mwlug/mwlug2010.nsf/uxpages/mobileguide.uxp

More and more companies are now using soft phones especially as employees are becoming more and more mobile. Since voice and data has been merging into one and the same, it is important to have reliable solutions since most of us do not have a second solution except for our cell phones which many times you have to ask "Can you hear me now?" My sister who currently is managing a global team on 4 continents from home relies heavily on her soft phones through Sametime to communicate with her team. She has been using a Plantronics headset and I tried it and it is very nice. Since our old PBX is slowly dying, this finally gives us a reason to upgrade our Sametime installation. We are giving everyone attending MWLUG 2010 a chance to win a Plantronics headset. Our MWLUG 2010 Event Sponsor and continuous supporter of MWLUG, Plantronics, will be giving away two of their headsets during the Thursday breakfast before the MWLUG 2010 Opening Session. In addition, Plantronics is co-spo...

If you are coming to MWLUG 2010 or not, one of the nice gems of Ohio is Put-in-Bay, OH on South Bass Island. Put-in-Bay is the site of Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial commemorating Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry's September 10, 1813 naval victory over British ships in the War of 1812. The island has a lot of camping and beautiful caves. To get to the island you need to take a ferry. Car traffic is terrible since the ferry only runs at certain times and cars are lined up like crazy and there are only so many car slots. When the ferry ends for the day and you are not across, then you are stuck on the island until the next day. I suggest you leave your car at the parking lot. It is beautiful this time of the year. I am hoping we have enough time to visit the island after MWLUG 2010.

MWLUG 2010 is coming in two weeks and it is packed with sessions. What little money Lotus user groups get comes from the generously of IBM Business Partners or their members. Like last year the money we raised from the attendee donation goes to the participating user groups. Also, like last year we are having the MWLUG 2010 Donation Sponsorship Program. The money we raise from this sponsorship is divided among the participating Lotus User Groups to help run their group meetings. So if your company is interested in being a MWLUG Donation Sponsor, please contact me at richard.moy@taishanworks.com. Your logo and information will be part of the MWLUG 2010 web site and in the conference brochure. Also your company will be mentioned at the user group meetings. In addition, if you are interested in donating to the MWLUG 2010 Community Outreach Program to get a chance to win a free weekend at the Hilton Garden Inn - Cleveland Downtown plus breakfast go to: http://www.mwlug.com/mwlug/mwlug2...

There is a new job opening for anyone who has done Websphere and Websphere Portal Administration. The job is posted on our GRANITE Lotus User Group web site. GRANITE Lotus User Group

(Cleveland, OH) August 4, 2010. We are proud to announce our MWLUG 2010 Networking Event will be held at the Pickwick and Frolic Restaurant and Club. The Pickwick and Frolic Networking Event gives everyone at MWLUG 2010 the opportunity to network with your peers and other Lotus professionals. We will be providing food and drinks. After the networking event at Pickwick and Frolic, comes join us at Hilarities 4th Street Theatre Comedy Show for an hour of comedy and fun. This event is free for attendees and all made possible by the generous sponsors of MWLUG Conference 2010. Please take the time to visit our generous sponsors at the MWLUG 2010 Sponsor Showcase during your time at MWLUG 2010.

(Cleveland, OH) August 4, 2010. We are please to announce the MWLUG 2010 Agenda is now online at http://www.mwlug.com. MWLUG 2010 is bigger than ever with 45 presentations, Show-N-Tell, and Labs covering topics including XPages, Cloud Computing, Sametime UC and Telephony, Quickr, Websphere Portal, Server Management, Security, and UI Design. The MWLUG Committee has worked very hard this year to bring attendees one of the best educational and social events for Lotus professionals. This event is made possible by the generous sponsors of MWLUG Conference 2010. Please take the time to visit our generous sponsors at the MWLUG 2010 Sponsor Showcase during your time at MWLUG 2010.

(Cleveland, OH) August 3, 2010. We are extremely please to announce IBM Innovation Center Come to You will be part of the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference 2010. IBM Innovation Center Come to You provides an unique opportunity for both IBM customers and IBM Business Partners attending MWLUG 2010 to experience and learn some of the latest technologies from IBM. The IIC team will have Show-n-Tell sessions, live hands-on labs, and session on Cloud Computing security and architecture not found anywhere except. We would like to thank the IBM Innovation Center teams from Chicago, Dallas, and Atlanta for their support and participation to make this possible at MWLUG 2010.

(Cleveland, OH) - July 30, 2010. Some of the brightest and most knowledgeable experts on Lotus technology, Cloud Computing, XPages, and everything else you need are IBM Business Partners. Today we are announcing our "Ask an Business Partner Expert Event." This one-hour event will be held on Thursday afternoon at the Showcase Pavilion, August 19, 2010. Here is an opportunity for attendees to ask technical questions from our sponsoring Business Partners related to their top 5 area of expertise. Attendees will be provided a list of expertise for each Business Partner. So take advantage of this event to ask your questions without worrying about any sales pitch.

The agenda and sessions for MWLUG 2010 will be announced next week along with a few other major announcements. MWLUG 2010 this year will consist of 45 presentations, show-n-tell, and labs. So if you are looking for two plus days of intense exchange of knowledge this is the place to be plus it includes a whole lot of fun. Desk registration starts on Wednesday evening, I suggest you arrived before 6:00 PM on Wednesday. Hint Hint.

The weather so nice in Chicago especially with all the recent humid and rainy days that we have had. I rode my bike to the Northwestern University lagoon. Northwestern University has their Thursday music festival so it was nice to have my lunch while listening to 80's rock. Afterwards, I rode for 10 miles along the Lake Michigan. However, it was back to reality with four scheduled conference calls and customer discussions.

As Domino developers, we are always switch ids to test applications for your organization or work on different customer applications. As a results, you normally need to switch ids in order to check your own emails or calendar. With the latest version of iNotes, there is no need to switch back to your own id. The iNotes interface is coming inline with the Notes client and I must say is a very good application. By eliminating the time you take to switch back and forward you are saving a lot of headache and time thus providing more time for development. Yes, I can check my email on my blackberry and calendar, but I still can't get the same experience that I have with a full screen client. In addition, I get attachments that I cannot open on a Blackberry or any mobile device. Compared with other web-based email client, iNotes is one of the best. Hat off to the iNotes team.

It is very beautiful in upper Minnesota this time of year. Spent a week up there. Here are a few pictures from my trip. Minnesota has some incredible State Parks. Unfortunately, we did not stay too long at Great River Bluff State Park because of all the mosquitoes. Last time I was here, I was stuck overnight in Duluth when the engines of our plane froze up. Silver Creek Cliff Gooseberry Falls State Park Split Rock Lighthouse Split Rock Lighthouse State Park Town of Grand Marias Cascade Falls State Park Duluth Jake Cooke State Park Great River Bluff State Park

If you are interested in going beyond just what XPages has to offer and understand how the guts of Dojo works a great site to visit is http://sitepen.com. Their blog is very good in covering the basic and advanced understandings of Dojo. Here is a great discussion on their site on how dijit widgets work. http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2010/07/12/dive-into-dijit/ They have also great tutorial on the basics of Dojo. http://www.sitepen.com/blog/series/dojo-quick-start-guide/

We are please to introduce to everyone the MWLUG 2010 Platinum Sponsor, Vox Mobile. We would like to thank them for their support of MWLUG. As Platinum Sponsor for MWLUG 2010, Kris Snyder - President & Chief Executive Officer of Vox Mobile will be presenting at the opening session on "Mobility as an Enabler of Collaboration". His presentation will follow Scot Rourke, OneCommunity.org and David Via, IBM. Along with their presentations, Kris' presentation focuses on community and collaboration all inline with our MWLUG 2010 theme "Building a Community Through Collaboration" Gerald Hetrick their CTO will cover later in the conference on Managing Mobile Diversity. About Vox Mobile Vox Mobile delivers mobile technology device and server support, as well as consulting services for Fortune 1000 companies. Vox Mobile was the first company to become a certified BlackBerry-systems integrator partner. Headquartered in Cleveland, OH, Vox supports over 100,000 mobil...

(Cleveland, OH) July 26, 2010. We are please to announce that the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference 2010 Corporate Sponsor is none other than IBM. As the MWLUG 2010 Corporate Sponsor, IBM is providing the Midwest Lotus Community not only funds but unique speakers and resources that makes MWLUG 2010 an incredible LUG conference that is free to attendee with a $35 donation to your local Lotus user group. We would like to thank Nick Wilson and Gerald Glore of IBM plus the rest of the IBM team in the Midwest for helping make this possible. As MWLUG 2010 Corporate Sponsor, David Via will be the opening session IBM speaker and will be covering the future direction of IBM collaboration and collaboration technology.

Dojo 1.5 has now been release. It includes a new Claro UI theme, mobile support, more HTML 5 and CSS3 support, and an improved API. I like the new theme. http://www.dojotoolkit.org

I am back from vacation. We had a wonderful time in Minnesota. We visited my son who is interning in Minneapolis this summer. Afterwards, we went up to Duluth and Grand Marias near the Canadian border. It is very beautiful up there and peaceful. The last time I was up here was for a client meeting. We did hiking at Gooseberry Falls State Park, Cascade Falls State Park, and Jake Cooke State Park. It was refreshing compared to the terrible traffic of Minneapolis. Construction delays were amazing. The traffic was equal or worst than Chicago and we are very bad here. Maybe next time, I will bring my bike and bike the 120 miles between Duluth and Grand Marias. Being on vacation, gives me time to reflect on what is important. It is not the Lotus technology and what is the coolest technology, but family. It amazes me every single day how wonderful my wife and kids are. It is with their support that make my professional life possible. Anyway, now that I am back from the wilderness,...

Something that I have been following is CouchDB from Damien Katz, the former IBMer. CouchDB 1.0 is now released. It is the first fully production-ready nonrelational database and now also available for Windows. http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-management/couchdb-releases-nosql-database-runs-windows-229

Everyone who is a small business owner or runs their own consulting needs to read this article. Big government making small business owners life more miserable. Imagine the paperwork we now have to deal with. http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/21/smallbusiness/1099_deluge/index.htm

We are fortunate enough to have two great sessions on integrating and developing Adobe Flex applications with Lotus Domino and Lotus Notes at MWLUG 2010. Justin Hill from Prominic.NET and Jerry Carter from Teamworks Solution will cover both beginning and advanced topics on using Adobe Flex with Notes and Domino. In addition, thanks to our Contributing Partner, Adobe Systems, we will be giving away two copies of Adobe Flash (Flex) Premium which retails for $700.00 at each of the sessions. We would like to thank Kevin Hoyt from Adobe Systems for this generous donation to MWLUG 2010. So if you are interested in learning more on how to work with Adobe Flex and Domino and get a chance to win a copy of Adobe Flash Premium come to these two sessions. Register at http://www.mwlug.com. Domino Applications with Adobe Flex Speaker: Justin Hill - Staff, Prominic.Net Notes and Domino provides a RAD environment that is like no other tool. However, creating Notes/Domino applications that competes ...

The integration of Dojo into my UX Pages Project has been moving steady along for the pass few months. The current version of Dojo in Domino 8.51 is 1.32 and has certain limitations that hopefully will be eliminated in Domino 8.52 with a version upgrade of Dojo. This has been a huge learning curve for me with many dead ends. I have added Dojo objects and Dijit form, field, comboBox, check button, radio button, spinner box, filteringSelect, and button widgets into the UX compiler engine. A Dijit widget control can now be represented by a simple UX xml tag. For example, for a simple field, when compiled will become: It will automatically add the dojo.require("dijit.form.TextBox") statement into the html and add links to the Dojo, Dijit, and Dojox javascript library. Domino data is now surfaced as Dojo objects using XML and JSON using Domino agents. Long terms wise, I would like to create a Dojo Domino data store object that can create JSON and XML data stores directly from...

Over the past few months for one reason or another, I have been accessing our email more and more using the iNotes 8.51 client instead of the regular Lotus Notes client. From my experience, I must said that I am very impressed with the performance and functionality of the iNotes 8.51 client. The iNotes team has done an impressive job in making the experience is some ways even better than the Lotus Notes 8.51 client. For one thing it sure comes up much faster.

MWLUG Opening Session IBM Speaker is not other than our local home town IBM Executive from Ohio, David Via. David Via is the IBM Business Unit Executive for Worldwide Messaging and Collaboration Sales and will be presenting on the direction of IBM collaboration. David will be presenting right after our opening session speaker, Scot Rourke from OneCommunity.org. In addition, David will be updating everyone in a separate session on the status of Project Vulcan and Project Concord.

RIAPalooza 3 is currently opened for registration. If you are interested in interface design and would like to see some really cool stuff, come to RIAPalooza. The cost of the conference is $20.00. I missed the early bird registration of $10.00. Too busy with MWLUG 2010 and customers. The conference is a one day event in Chicago on July 23rd. This conference will open your eyes on what the world is doing in user interface design and how advanced some of the user interfaces are. And unfortunately, it also shows how behind some of the Lotus technology really is. http://www.riapalooza.com/index.html

Thanks to Mike McGarel, we now have MWLUG News on Twitter. The url is http://twitter.com/MWLUGNews. You can check here for the latest things that are happening not only for the conference in August but also for future events through the year for the different user groups that are part of MWLUG

The first round of MWLUG 2010 sessions are now posted on the MWLUG 2010 Web site. http://www.mwlug.com/mwlug/mwlug2010.nsf/uxpages/sessions.uxp . There is about another dozen sessions still to come including two additional session tracks. If you are looking to learn XPages, this is the conference to come to. We have over a half of dozen sessions on XPages. We will be announcing some exciting events and surpises very soon.

Now that we have made our session selections for the MWLUG Conference 2010, we will be posting most of the session on the web site, www.mwlug.com, hopefully today. Unfortunately, my Domino Designer 8.51 totally crashed last night as I was setting up the session page. The Domino Designer 8.51 now needs a total rebuild.

The MWLUG 2010 Session Committee will be sending session selections today. For every session slot that we had we had about 2 abstracts submissions. There are so many good presentations it has been hard to decide. The committee will be meeting this morning to make the final selections and emails will be sent out to submitter afterwords.

We will be completing the MWLUG 2010 Abstract selections this weekend and announcing the sessions. Thank you everyone for submitting their abstracts. We have so many good abstracts it is bit hard to decide. We will be having a great number of sessions on XPages starting all the way from basic XPages to extremely advanced topics. So if you want to learn about XPages from the experts this is the place. We will also be having sessions on Cloud Computing and LotusLive, Mobile Application development, Unified Communication and Sametime, and a whole sort of administration sessions and business development. If you are a fan of Adobe Flex with Lotus technology, make sure you attend we have a couple of surprises for you. We will be making a number of other announcements starting next week with a number of interesting surprises and fun. It is going to even better than last year. Attendance is beginning to full up so make sure you register and we only have a limited number of attendee slo...

We will be having out June 2010 GRANITE Meeting next Monday, June 14, 2010. So if you what to learn more about LotusLive for Notes, Dojo, or integration of Domino with Active Directory that come to our meeting.

If you are interested in learning more about creating Domino applications using Dojo, I will be presenting at the June 2010 GRANITE meeting on June 14, 2010 at the IBM Center in Chicago. I will cover what is Dojo and how it works. I will be demonstrating and using my UX Pages tool in creating Domino applications live. Dojo is the core to XPages. If I have time, I will talk about that. My colleague, Rob Burton will be provide a short technical demo ADODB for Domino. See everyone there.

SpaceX this afternoon successfully launched with Falcon 9 rocket with the dummy Dragon capsule. Congratulations. http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/06/04/spacex.rocket.test/index.html?hpt=T2

As everyone celebrate this Memorial Day weekend, please take the time to remember the true meaning of Memorial Day. It is not about picnics, barbecues, or sport games, but the honoring the over one million men and women who have given their lives to make this country possible and what it is. They are the true heroes. As Abraham Lincoln said in the Gettysburg address. "that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

As I was looking for some Javascript stuff, I ran across this web page on best practices for Javascript. Since XPages now depends on Javascript, this is a good place to start if you are new to Javascript. http://www.javascripttoolbox.com/bestpractices/

Abstract submission for MWLUG 2010 will be closing on June 1, 2010. There is still time to submit your technical abstracts. We already have a great list of submissions that include a number of great presentations for developers, administrators, and managers.

Couple of days ago, Phil Salm asked about recommendations for a CRM for Domino. There are a number of ones available on the market. Some have amazing features for the enterprise organization. However, for a small business most of the features are not needed. We are working on a project and would like to know what key features that one needs in a CRM besides basic contact management, tracking calls and appointments, and managing an email campaign.

RIAPalooza 3 has just been announced. It is going to be on July 23rd in Chicago. What is RIAPalooza? It is a one-day conference in Chicago on the latest of Rich Internet Application design, user interface design, and user experiences. So if you are interested go to their web site. Registration is not opened yet, but soon. http://www.riapalooza.com/

I have been using the Domino Designer 8.51 for the past few months as I have been developing my UX Pages tool. Domino Designer 8.51 seems to crash on me at least once a day. It seems to be happen when I am opening up a javascript file resource. Has anybody encountered this issue?

MWLUG 2010 is three months away so I have set a goal of losing 5 lbs a month to get myself back into shape. I will be at about how I was when I graduated college which does not seem to be that long ago. I might be close to the same weight, but there will be a little bit of gray hair, wrinkles, and aches. I have a goal of riding about 1500 miles on my bike this year to help the weight loss. So far I am at 50 miles so I have a ways to go. When I was younger, I could have easily done this in a week or two.

Our Community goes beyond just our Yellow Bubble. As members of the Lotus community, we are all an important part of our local community. Everyone at MWLUG encourages you to participate in helping your community. As part of the MWLUG Conference 2010, the goal of the MWLUG Community Outreach Program is to raise money for organizations that help the local community. Our host Lotus User Group, NEOLUG, has selected the Cleveland Foodbank who provides nutritious meals every year for thousands of individuals and families throughout the Cleveland area. Hilton Garden Inn - Cleveland Downtown has been gracious enough to provide us with a gift certificate for deluxe accommodations at their hotel that includes a two night stay for two plus breakfast in the heart of downtown Cleveland. We will be raffling off the gift certificate at the MWLUG 2010 Opening Session on August 19, 2010. The raffle will benefit the Cleveland Foodbank and help hundreds of individuals whom have been hit hard by this econ...

The registration for MWLUG Conference 2010 will be opening soon near the end of this week. We have a number of surprises and events coming up for this conference. Our MWLUG Committee is working very hard to bring this together.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is now available after a small delay. This is the Long Term Support version. The full version of the Ubuntu Server is free. I have been moving all my servers to Ubuntu. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS includes new features like Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) that allows you to build your own private cloud at a relatively low cost. I will be testing it out with Domino 8.51 in the near future and will let you know how that went. I am still waiting for Quickr Domino for Linux. When that comes out I can then phase out all my Windows servers.

Last Thursday I attended the Chicago Flex User Group meeting and the topic was Adobe Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4. The Flex 4 framework brings the development of user interface to the next level. With Flex 4 the skinning and layout process is now separate from the individual objects and containers like HBox and VBox no longer exist. The container is replaced with layout definitions that is part of the skin class. It is fully integrated with Adobe Catalyst so applications can quickly be developed. I see a big potential for Domino applications running with a Adobe Flex or AIR interface. As a result of the big announcement that Apple refuses to support Flash on the iPhone, there was definitely an anti-Apple sentiment at the meeting. A couple of Flash developers I know are switching from iPhones to Android because they are that pissed off at Apple. I personally use a Blackberry.

Today is Misericordia drive day. There are hundreds of volunteers throughout the Chicago area on street corners collecting donations. So if you are in the Chicago area make sure you donate your change or what you can to them. For their appreciation they will give you a small sample of Jelly Belly and the Heart tag. So you do not have to drive all the way to Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin like Alex Kassabov did to get the sample Jelly Belly bags. Misericordia Heart of Mercy Center is a wonderful organization that help developmental disabled individuals. For more information go to www.misericordia.org

Knowing technology is great, but knowing how to apply technology to grow your business is more important. We are please to announce that the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference 2010 Keynote Speaker will be Scot Rourke, President and CEO of OneCommunity. Scot will present on how collaboration technologies have help OneCommunity build their organization and made it a success. About OneCommunity OneCommunity connects Northern Ohio’s public and nonprofit institutions to each other, to the world, and to leading technology vendors via their fiber-optic network – one of the largest and fastest in the world. OneCommunity enables innovative connections and collaborative solutions with an emphasis on education, health care, government, and workforce development. Utilizing information technology, they are transforming Northern Ohio into a globally competitive region. For more information about Scot go to: http://www.mwlug.com/mwlug/mwlug2010.nsf/uxpages/keynotespeaker.uxp For more information a...

If you are developing for IE 6 and IE 7 and using base tags make sure you define the base tag URL as an absolute path instead of using a relative path. Test and test even with the old crappy browsers. What a waste of time.

As we started the abstract submission for MWLUG 2010, we ran into a problem with our site on IE 7. Of course, the base tags does not get picked up correctly in IE 7. So if you are trying to access the site using IE 7, switch to IE 8, Firefox, Chrome or any other browser. We are working on resolving this annoying issue.

Following the April GRANITE Meeting on April 12th, we will be continuing our XPages training session at the IBM Center. Mike McGarel and Roy Rumaner will continue going through Declan Lynch's Xpages training lessons. If you are not on the GRANITE mailing list and would like to attend please notify me as soon as possible since we need to send in the list of attendees to building security. If not, you will not be able to get in.

Our offices are located in Evanston, IL home of Northwestern University and a number of other businesses including Taishan Works. Evanston is a great place to work and live with all its culture and activities. Evanston rallying on becoming one of the cities that Google will be wiring high speed fiber as part of Google Fiber for Communities program. Here is a short video of Evanston.

If your are interested in sponsoring the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference 2010, please contact me at richard.moy@taishanworks.com or Gregg Eldred at gregg.eldred@ns-tech.com. We have an exciting conference planned with many technical sessions, workshops, and activities drawing Lotus Professionals from all over. For more information about the conference go to MWLUG 2010

Last year I was working on a new thing that I called the UX Pages and DLEX Engine. It was based on the XML declaration language used by Adobe Flex. UX Pages is similar to the approach now used by XPages but has a number of advantages. I did not have the time to devote to it last summer given all the work that had to be done for the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference plus my full-time job. So I never moved forward on developing the technology any further. However, this has changed. This year, NEOLUG is handling a big portion of the effort for MWLUG 2010 so I have more time. In addition, I needed it for building a number of customers applications. Therefore, I have a major incentive to develop it further especially since we are developing more and more Web applications and moving away from developing Notes client based applications. Does this mean that I will not develop using XPages. Not at all. I would like to have developed the Web applications using XPages, but the applicat...

Midwest Lotus User Group Conference 2010 Web Site is now online. We are planning a number of events and activities for this year. We are trying to out do ourselves from last year. The conference will be held on August 19-20, 2010 at the Hilton Garden Inn - Cleveland, Ohio. The NEOLOUG team is working hard on planning this event. The web site is Midwest Lotus User Group Conference 2010.

Today is the first day of spring. However, it does not seem like it. It has been snowing since early this morning and it is in the 30's. It is the wet type which I hate the most. Yesterday was beautiful with the temperature in the 60s.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day. If I have time tonight, I will be watching "The Quiet Man" and drinking a few beers.

After all these years, can anybody explain to me why png files are not supported as an image resource in Domino. I know I can put them in as file resources, but why not as an image resource?

As the President of GRANITE, I would like to thank PSC Group for hosting the XPages workshop that we had yesterday. Again and again, IBM Business Partners play a key role in growing the Lotus ecosystem. We would also like to thank Roy Rumaner and Michael McGarel for presenting. The next XPages workshop session Part 2 will be on April 12th follow the April 12th GRANITE meeting. The first workshop was free for anyone. If you are not a GRANITE member the next workshop session is $15. However, if you become a member for $35.00 you get all workshops, food, and 5 technical meeting per year. Remember, the XPages workshops are FREE FREE to all Lotus professionals currently looking for a new position. If you did not attend the first workshop and would like to attend the next workshop, made sure to go Declan Lynch's site and learn the first 10 lessons. The second workshop will cover lessons 11 through 17. We are looking at possibility doing a XPages Workshop at the Midwest Lotus User...

The Detroit Lotus user group, Detroit Notes Professionals, is now part of the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference 2010. The MWLUG 2010 Committee is excited that another Lotus user group has joined us and be involved into this unique event. The MWLUG Conference 2010 now including nine different user groups throughout the Midwest including: - Central Ohio Notes/Domino Users Group - Detroit Notes Professionals - GRANITE Lotus User Group - Minnesota Lotus User Group (MNNOTES411) - Northeast Ohio Lotus User Group - Northeast Wisconsin Lotus User Group - Southern Wisconsin Lotus User Group - Western Michigan Lotus User Group - Western PA Lotus User Group If your Lotus user group is in the Midwest and would like to join us to be part of this event let us know. You can contact myself or Gregg Eldred. Planning for MWLUG Conference 2010 is almost complete and we are expecting a great event.

Reminder, today is the start of the free GRANITE Lotus User Group XPages workshop. The workshop is overbooked, so if you have not registered please do not show up. If you did register and will not attend, please let us know.

Until recently I was using the Domino Designer 8.02 client because it is smaller and faster. However, the new eclipse-based client has one key feature that I have always wanted in the old client that was not available. Why it was not available I do not know. The Domino Designer 8.51 client automatically sorts the functions for a script library into alphabetic order. For years this has irritated me when searching for a function. I glad they finally have this built in. Unfortunately, I am still getting Java errors when I go to preview mode, but I guess I will have to live with it.

This coming March 14-16 is the International Home and Housewares 2010 Show here in Chicago. As part of the show, the association has the 17th annual student design competition. This year 283 students throughout the United States submitted their designs. I am proud to say that my son, Brian did pretty well and got an Honorable Mention Award and got a small sum of money to pay for school. Brian and his colleague designed the MWLUG 2009 fixture that greeted attendees last year. Starting with the MWLUG Conference 2010 we are hoping to make it an annual competition similar to what the IHA has done for the past 17 years. The winning designs will be built for the conference. The design competition will be divided into two categories, one for graphics and the other for design. International Home and Housewares 2010 Student Design Competition

Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to attend a presentation by Michael Hugos who has written a number of books on supply chain management. It is interesting on the simplified approach that he preaches. It is very similar to what our philosophy has been towards developing our business applications for our customers. All these business applications that we have developed reside on the Domino platform. The flexibility of the Domino platform is idea for managing these processes for a small to medium organization. Domino is not idea for a high transaction environment, but that is not necessary for small and medium size companies which makes up most of the companies in the world. Domino provides multiple ways of integrating with other environments, some of which is simple like email or a CSV file and some more complicated like Web services. In an every changing business climate, companies need to be extremely flexible in how they architect their solution and Domino give us that. The f...

The theme for the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference 2010 is "Building a Community Through Collaboration". This reflects the goals of this conference of building our Midwest Lotus community. With the addition of the West PA Lotus User Group our community has gotten a bit larger. Lotus Quickr has been so far a great tool for us to plan this conference. It has many things that I do not like and will change as I customize the template, but it has helped us bring together all the different user groups who are involved. The number of tasks that is required to make this conference happen is enormous. Since everyone is a volunteer, the more tools we can use the better.

We are please to announce that the West PA Lotus User Group has joined and will be participating in the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference 2010 that will be held on August 19-20, 2010 at Cleveland, Ohio. We are now up to eight participating Lotus User Groups that include: - Central Ohio Notes/Domino Users Group - GRANITE Lotus User Group - Minnesota Lotus User Group - Northeast Ohio Lotus User Group - Northeast Wisconsin Lotus User Group - Southern Wisconsin Lotus User Group - West Michigan Lotus User Group - West PA Lotus User Group As Gregg Eldred mentioned last week will are moving forward in finalizing the location and activities of the event. That is a lot of things planned so stay tune.

Has anyone installed Sametime 8.5 entry server on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server. I am getting the message "This operating system is not supported" message. Is there a work around to bypass this check?

As Roy Rumaner and Alex Kassabov blogged, GRANITE is having a technical seminar that will be graciously hosted by PSC Group at their offices in Schaumburg, IL on March 15. This XPages training is part of our GRANITE technical series that we have started. This first session of the series will be available for both members and non-members at no cost. For non-members we normally charge $15.00 for each event. If you were recently laid off, the entire XPages series will be free of charge. I strongly encourage everyone to join GRANITE since it provides many benefits to the Lotus community. GRANITE is put together by volunteers whom like myself devote our time to help the Lotus community. With the recently layoffs at Abbott of their Notes developers and layoffs at other organizations, this is a good time to get yourself some training on the newest Lotus technologies. We will be also working with the IBM VIC in downtown Chicago to provide addition technical seminars in addition to our bi...

This Sunday which is Valentine's Day is also Chinese New Year, the year of the Tiger, Metal Tiger to be exact. Our family celebrates on New Years Eve and we have a feast of food that includes some of my favorite bakery goods that my mom makes. In China, Chinese New Years is traditionally celebrated for the entire month.

I guess Chicago is now getting its share of the snow. There is about a foot of snow so far and we are expect to get another 5 to 6 inches where I am. After that the cold and wind comes. I wish I was back at Lotusphere. I really did not get a chance to enjoy the weather in Florida.

Today was our February 2010 meeting for GRANITE. We had the largest number of attendees since 2008. Hopefully we can continue building our membership through 2010. We were able to sign up two new members today. Thanks to John Head and Mike McGarel for their Lotusphere 2010 wrap up of Project Vulcan, Project Concord, and XPages. Mike also did a presentations on using OpenNTF templates to develop your own intranet. Our thanks to Mac Glore for getting us the meeting place at the IBM Center at the last moment. I think we need to switch away from deep dish pizza for lunch at the GRANITE meetings. I can feel the cheese building up on my veins. Looks like an evening of exercising after this blog posting. We have a new GRANITE event coming up, but I will let Roy Rumaner or Alex Kassabov talk about his up and coming event. We are planning a new GRANITE web site so look forward over the next couple of months to see what we have done.

Planet Lotus went down yesterday and it is going to take sometimes to come back up. I hope everything was backed up because Planet Lotus has become a great technical resource that I search for answers very often. I can get answers to my questions sometimes better than anywhere else. I hope it comes back online soon. I feel so disconnected to the Lotus community.

Yesterday, I attended the BOF session on Lotus user groups. I am glad that the interest for Lotus user groups is growing. As the president of the GRANITE user group, I know how hard it is to run a user group. From what I heard, IBM is attempting to be more active and provide help for Lotus user groups. We are fortunate here in Chicago that we have a great IBM team that helps us in our meetings that we have every other month. For the MWLUG conference last year they played an important role in making that happen. Hats off to the IBM team in Chicago and the Midwest sales reps. Reach out to the IBM sales and technical sales rep. Business Partners play a key role in the success of a Lotus user group. However, it is important that the creation of a user group involve multiple BPs so that it is viewed not a benefit to only one BP. Sometimes this worries Lotus customers. Many in the BOF were interested in restarting or starting a Lotus user group. There are many of us who are passionat...

We had a great time at the ESPN Club at the Boardwalk which included the consumption of many beers. We met at the Rotunda in the Dolphin and went over to the ESPN Club while some met us there. I blame Jim Anderson from EasySoftware for my headache.

No more hot breakfasts at Lotusphere only continental breakfasts. After three days of pastries and bagles I could not take it anymore. So I went to McDonald's this morning. I needed the fats after standing at the booth for two days. The breakfast at McDonald's was healthier compared to the pastries.

From January 1, 2010 to June 30, 2010, ReCor is offering to registered and qualified IBM Business Partners, a 20% referral fee on referrals of qualified ReCor training products to their customers that result in a sale. This program is designed to help IBM Business Partners generate additional revenue by recommending ReCor training solutions to their customers. By providing training during the migration or deployment process, you help your customers maximize the return on their investment in Lotus technologies. For more information about ReCor products visit our web site at www.recor.com. For more information about the Extended IBM Business Partner Referral Program please contact Richard Moy at (847) 424-8700 x 229 or email him at rqmoy@recor.com. This offer is not valid for referrals of Lotus customers that have purchased products from ReCor with the past two years or who are currently under the ReCor maintenance/upgrade program.

Twice I tried getting into the competitive session on Microsoft SharePoint and twice the session was full. You would think that with the push by Microsoft on SharePoint 2010 that they would have a larger room. I was told that the slides will not be available. It would be nice if they have this session in the future either as a special session at Lotusphere Comes to You for Business Partners or have it in a business session at one of the IBM Centers.

Business cards and brochures packed, laptop set up and configured, got my boarding pass and I am ready to go. Oh clothes, I need that too.

It is has been a crazy day today getting for Lotusphere 2010. I still have allow of things to do on my list. It seems that the list of things to do keeps growing. See everyone there.

It is a new year and ReCor have just completed their new web site. Take a look. Along with the new web site, ReCor has just released the updated new Lotus Notes 8.51 training courses that include training for: - Notes 8.51 Standard client - Notes 8.51 Basic client - iNotes 8.51 client If you are going to Lotusphere, visit their booth, #704. In addition to the interactive simulations that they have had for many years in their courses, they now have started to include interactive videos into their products.

So whether you participated or not at the MWLUG conference or you arr part of the seven Lotus users groups that make up MWLUG come join us for the MWLUG Get Together at Lotushpere 2010. We will be meeting on Tuesday, January 19, 2009 at 7:00 PM at the Dolphin Rotudon. Look for me and the MWLUG banner. We will then go to the ESPN Zone for dinner. We had a very nice time last year. If you are coming, please let me know by sending an email to richard.moy@taishanworks.com.