It was a busy week in Chicago for Collaboration University. I presented two sessions, one on Installing & Configuring Lotus Connections 2.5, and the second Stuart McIntytre’s session on Customizing Lotus Connections. I am pretty excited about the level of interest in Lotus Connections that I experienced at CU this year, there was lots of good discussion and questions both during the sessions and afterwards. Great to see so many people working with Connections. While I went to CU to present on Connections I also found the time to sit in on some of the other sessions, and as always walked away with a few good tips that will make my life easier back in my day job… and that is really what Collaboration University is all about – practical hands on knowledge you can take home and use. This wraps up Collaboration University for me, but most of the Collab U team is on their way to London to do it all over again next week for another audience. Stuart McIntyre will represent Lotus Connections at CU London, and while I have my serious doubts about his ability to get the Brooklyn accent down, I know he will do a terrific job with the sessions.
As previously announcedStuart McIntyre and I will be teaming up to deliver session on Lotus Connections at Collaboration University. No the presentation will not be 500 slides, probably won’t even come close to the 400 slides that Show302 consumed at Lotusphere, but we will deliver some great content around best practices, configuration and customization of Lotus Connections. If there is a specific area of interest you would like to see covered by all means let us know we will do our best to work it in to the content. If for some crazy reason you haven’t registered for Collaboration University yet what are you waiting for? Don’t miss out on the best technical content for Quickr, Sametime and Connections register today. The dates for Collaboration University are Chicago: September 14-16, 2009 London: September 21-23, 2009 Follow Collaboration University on Twitter for all the latest news. See you in Chicago
Registration for Collaboration University 2009 opens on Tuesday May 12 with a special Day 1 only registration discount ( and the first day special is on top any early bird or alumni discount you might already be entitled to). Collaboration University 2009 will take place: September 14-16 in Chicago September 21-23 in London Both locations are back in the same venues as 2008, at the same prices as 2008 and it looks like there will be some great deals on hotels in Chicago. For great technical content on Sametime, Quickr, and a little Lotus Connections too, don’t wait take advantage of the discount and register for Collaboration University, registration opens tomorrow at 12:01 AM US Central time. Follow Collaboration University on Twitter for all the latest news
I am back home after a busy few days in Chicago for Collaboration University, not sure where all the time went, somehow I managed not to blog anything while I was there.. On day 1 of CU I presented with Chris Miller on Installing and Configuring Lotus Connections. The keynote address was delivered by Ed Hackett a retired Marine Colonel, titled “Collaboration When it Counts”. Julian Robichaux has a good write up on his keynote address. On day 2 of CU I managed to attend a number of sessions, specifically Warren Elsmore’s clustering sessions, and Gabriella Davis’s session on administering Sametime Advanced. When CU wrapped up for the day Carl Tyler, Warren, and Libby Ingrassia took a nice ride up 103 stories to the observation deck of the Sears Tower, on a nice cool clear day we had a great view of the entire city of Chicago, including this photo of the building where CU was held. (and for the record, pay no attention to Carl, the good photos were all taken by me) Day 3 was two sessions detailing the futures of Sametime and Quickr, you can see a write up on the sessions by Handly Cameron on his Blog. After CU wrapped up Handly and I found ourselves some lunch and I then headed back to O’Hare for the flight home, I was a little nervous about my flight since Continental would not allow me to check in on line. When I got there they informed me they cancelled my reservation because I did not fly to Chicago on the first portion of the round trip ticket. Despite the fact that I was standing in O’Hare it took a few minutes to convince then that I was actually in Chicago, fortunately the flight was not full, so I got my seat back on the plane, and amazingly we landed in Newark Airport 30 minutes early.
Newark Airport appears to be a ghost town on Sunday morning, I made it from my house to the gate in about 35 minutes. With any luck I will be in Chicago on time and even be able to catch some football today. I am looking forward to Collaboration University which kicks off tomorrow morning. More to come this week from CU
The final day of CU started with two presentations from IBM first up was David Marshak on the future of Unified Communications & Collaboration (yep a very long way of saying Sametime). David showed some of the integration of telephone and video being done by IBM and partners. Sametime 8 was mentioned, though it seems that Sametime 8 will mainly be fixes and support to run on Domino 8. Next up was Jelan Heidelberg to talk about the next steps for Quickr, So if I heard this all correctly there will be a fixpack around October, with a point release in time for Lotusphere which should include the Quickr personal edition. The last session was each speaker from the week giving a 10 minute presentation with the highlights from their presentations over the three days of CU. Carl was nice enough to drive me back to the airport, where I would be for a while. We finally took off a little after 8PM central time, and I made it home about 12:30 this morning. Rob Novak and the rest of the SNAPPS team along with Carl , Chris , and the rest of the presenters put together a great event. CollaborationUniversity is really different then any other conference I have attended, since the event has 50 attendees over the course of three days you get to meet the other attendees as well as spend time with the speakers outside of the sessions. The content presented was excellent and very relevant to projects I am working on, I know I came home with a list of things to follow up on. Check out the CU web site for their upcoming Notes and Domino 8 version of CU In September.
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.
Following a long night of travel to Kansas City ( it is a pleasure living close to the perpetually delayed Newark Airport) it was a busy first day, starting with Mike Rhodin’s Keynote and then six content filled sessions. Lotus Installation Services for Domino Installation and Configuration – Jerald Mahurin – main points of interest to me at this session was the differences between a clean install of Quickr as opposed to upgrading an existing Quickplace instance. In an upgrade places remain in the familiar Quickplace directory, in a clean install they will be in the LotusQuickr directory. Jerald also covered a bug with switching themes in an upgraded Quickr environment caused by a hardcoded reference in HaikuForms.nsf to the LotusQuickr Directory, there is a hot fix pending for this issue. Finally of interest is that hot fixes for Quickr are being posted publicly on IBM Fix Central where there is already one fix for Domino and a bunch for Websphere. Deploying Sametime in your Environment – Chris Miller – Chris covered quite a bit of ground in an hour, here are some of the key points In 7.5.1 Hyper threading will still cause meetings to not go active – turn hyper threading off on all server where meetings occur. There is a buddy list conversion tool that must be run or people will lose their privacy settings (Tech Note 1242317) 7.5.1 offers the ability to offload the conversion service for slide display to another server to improve performance, conversion server is on the second CD or a separate download Developing Sametime Connect Plugins – Carl Tyler – Carl presented an overview of the Eclipse framework which is the foundation for Sametime 7.5.1 and Notes 8, as well as the components of a plugin. Carl wrapped up with a demo of editing plugins in eclipse as well as a demo of the plugins that ship with the SDK. Carl of course spent time on his greatest accomplishment, running Space Invaders or Asteroids as a Sametime Plugin. Deploying Sametime Connect Plugins – Chris Miller – following Carls session on developing plugins Chris explained how to use the update server to deploy the plugins to the clients. One point highlighted was a bug in 7.5.1 which does not allow different update sites, for different policies. Chris also talked about the Update Site template shipping in Notes 8. Chris also emphasized that while the Notes 8 Client will use the same technology this is only for Eclipse based portions of Notes 8, Smartupgrade (or another tool) will still need to be used to update the core nlnotes.exe etc.. in Notes 8. Lotus Quickr: Introducing and Understanding the New Templates – Viktor Krantz, Troy Reimer – Viktor and Troy demoed live the functionality of the templates being developed by Snapps for Quickr. So far the most popular question of the day is “When will the new templates be available for download” (the answer is soon). Check out Viktor’s blog for links to all of the template demos. Sametime Gateway for Public IM Installation and Configuration – Chris Miller – nothing like ending a short day with a simple topic like the Sametime Gateway. I have been working with the gateway for a few months now, will save this for a full post on my experience with gateway another time.