Collaboration University – Day 2 Wrap up

Day 2 has been billed as “Marathon Day” at CU with 8 sessions running consecutively from 8 AM to 6 PM. Here is a summary of the sessions I attended today. Integration Strategies for Lotus Quickr, Quickplace, Domino and Sametime – Jerald Mahurin Jerald covered integration points between the different products in the Lotus product family, mainly focusing on integration of Sametime and Quickr (or Quickplace). The actual steps to integrate awareness and meetings in to Quickr are fairly straightforward, but there are 2 gotchas to be aware of, first the versions of Quickplace or Quickr need to match up against specific versions of Sametime, Quickr 8 requires Sametime 7.5.1 CF1 and for those following along yes that is correct CF1 is not due out till later this month. Without CF1 awareness will work, and a chat window will launch, but you can type all day, your message will not be sent to it’s intended recipient. LDAP Configuration for Lotus Software – Chris Miller Try to keep up as Chris plows through LDAP terminology and Architecture, with a focus on how your LDAP performance will impact your applications that depend on it, definitely some takeaways to check out on my LDAP servers when I get back to the office. Lotus Quickr Development: Leveraging Template Code in your own Applications – Troy Reimer Yesterday Troy and Viktor demoed the new templates that will be available soon from Quickr. Today Troy demoed taking the comment functionality in QPresent and adding to an existing place to let users comment on a document without leaving the document. Of course this once again prompted the most popular question of the week again, when will the templates be available (the answer is still soon). The templates alone are a great value added to Quickr, however seeing how they are built and how you can take an entire template or pieces of the template and easily add them to an existing place makes them even better. Firewalls, Proxies, and Other Stuff in the Way! One of the biggest issues in getting all the pieces of Sametime to work is making sure that all of the components can communicate on the required ports, Sametime 7.5.1 introduces many new challenges with Voice, Audio, Video, and the Sametime Gateway adding a number of new ports that need to be accessible between different parts of your network. Of course the one thing Chris can’t help you with is convincing the firewall admins to put all your rules in (though he did suggest bribing them with chocolate). Bandwidth and Capacity Planning, Monitoring and Managing your Sametime Servers – Gabriella Davis An in depth look at how new features in Sametime can impact your network, File Transfer, Audio, Video are all bandwidth intensive applications. A new Sametime server install will default video to 512Kbps, this will consume bandwidth very quickly, this can be lowered all the way down to 16Kbps though for performance it is not recommended to go below 64Kbps. Gabriella also reviewed the audio codecs (G723 6.3Kbps and G711 64Kbps) it is a trade-off of quality verse performance. Probably the best recommendation was to determine what your network can support, turn off services that will not function properly over your network, run what you can support and introduce new tools only when they will deliver the desired user experience . Sametime Links – Develop Your Own Queuing Application – Carl Tyler Carl showed how to use STlinks to have presence that is a front end for a defined group of users, great for enabling a live chat on a web site or a help desk queue, without having the presence tied to a single individual. Having been to a number of Carls STlinks sessions I really need to make some time to play with STlinks. Lotus Quickr Services for Websphere Portal: Development Overview – Rob Novak Rob explained the differences between Quickr services for Domino and Portal, then went in to development techniques for Quickr on Portal. Interesting content, but some of the portal development was a little over my head, and right now I am focused on Quickr on Domino. Hopefully if I do find the time to play with Quickr on Portal one day, something will ring a bell. Top 10 Support Issues for Lotus Sametime – Carl Tyler and Chris Miller Carl and Chris presented their top 10, many of which were issues I have seen or worked on over the last few months (or maybe that is issues I have pinged Carl or Chris about over the last few months). Office integration or lack of was a big topic of discussion among the crowd. I brought up a very odd issue I have with my Sametime gateway where AOL and Yahoo users are being displayed with a red box instead of the appropriate community icon seen here no one else in the room has seen this one, and IBM has not come back with an answer that makes sense yet (will post a follow up when we resolve this one). Tomorrow is a lighter day with two presentations by IBM in the morning, followed by the final session where each of the speakers will present the best 10 minutes from their sessions, this will be a good oppurtunity to pick up some of the content from the sessions I could not get to. Then it is back to the airport for the flight home, with thunderstorms predicted in NJ tomorrow afternoon and evening should be fun to see what tomorrows airport delays are like.