Mobile Everything

The Lotus Mobility Portfolio session covered a lot of old ground that we've already blogged about at the LoLa conference last year, but there were a couple of interesting nuggets to make the 2 hours worthwhile...

There was an amusing* 6 minute clip that explains Lotus Mobile Connect better than anything I can write here. View it here

Also some good tools that the presenter uses that we should look at as we start to get more serious about mobile devices (is Col reading this?)

• www.testiphone.com - allows simulation and testing of many different devices
• www.mymobiler.com - iPhone simulator
• www.useragent.org - useful when developing websites that may be displayed on many different devices

One area that we haven't spent much time thinking about is that last one on the list. Let's take a real world example - www.MyMMs.com. Right now the site is optimised for 'standard' browsers on traditional deskops and laptops, and works great. But what if you're out and about? If someone suggests that it would make a great valentine gift? Try it on your phone now! You might buy if you can use the site right then and there, but if it's a frustrating experience would you always get onto a 'real' PC and follow though?

With the enormous growth of mobile devices and netbooks, are we missing out on impulse sales just because the site is inaccessible to mobile browsers? If this isn't a problem for us now I'm willing to bet that it will be - and surprisingly soon.

IBM has a solution for this, and I'm sure others do too. What's even better though is that tools exist to measure the number of site hits that don't result in a sale, and also to measure the browser configurations being used to access the site. But is anyone looking?

* this is the special definition of "amusing" that only applies after 2 hours of Security presentation

JMP202 - Exploiting Lotus Sametime Platform & SDK

This session revolved around integrating Sametime with other applications and environments. It was interesting to see what some vendors are doing with ST, usch as Walkie Talkie voice integration, or integration with virtual worlds.

One of the major pieces of interest is Sametime 8.5 will offer a Proxy Server, allowing HTTP front-end access to community servers. Coupled with that is a web-based Sametime client which is fully DHTML based.

In addition to the obvious application of publishing Sametime client to extranet/internet clients without the need for a VPN, the other possibilities would be to publish presence information and initiate chats from BlogCentral, Associate Search and such.

Lotus Domino & Notes Security A-Z

Well that was different! First presentation I've been to where the two presenters seemed to publically disagree about the content - and there was a lot of content!

Beyond giving me just enough knowledge to be dangerous (you have been warned), there was good coverage of some of the new features in versions 7, 8 and 8.5 that not only improve security but also improve the end user experience and ease some administrative burdens.

The ID Vault is still probably the biggest win, allowing us to remove some custom scripting and simplifying the initial configuration of the Notes client, but there was also information on setting up Active Directory as a "secondary directory" which we will need to look into soon.

There was also some good information on standard events that should be monitored to ensure security, and coverage of best practice configurations for all the new policies that can be configured.

One point that we will have to review is that apparently the Notes 8 client 'breaks' the roaming configuration we use at Mars (H: drive), but Notes 8.5 has the roaming ability built-in, again allowing us to remove more custom scripting

Something that was only briefly mentioned but triggered some thoughts was around categorisation of each database by Privacy and Security ratings, based on factors such as 'does the database contain consumer information' etc. We should make sure we do something around this in the upcoming database discovery work. I'm sure Jean-Marc will be thrilled!

I'll leave you with a telling comment from security professionals :

"Security is a trade-off between what users will put up with and what you need to protect your environment"

If our security colleagues are representing the side of "protecting our environment" in this trade-off, who is representing "what the users will put up with"? I don't think we have a clear answer on this yet, but i wouldn't be surprised if EUE are in the frame under the guise of the "Usability Centered Design" initiative. Expect to hear more about this!

I'll arrange for all the Lotusphere slides to be hosted internally so interested parties can view all the slides directly.

JMP205 - Integration of Notes and Domino with Office, .NET and Symphony

This session was predominantly on integrating various Office suites at the software (VBA/scripting level) - how to get information out of Notes and into other applications in various ways. Pushing data from a Notes app out to an application (controlled via COM) was covered, as was pulling data from VBscript or OpenOfiice UNO scripting.

One of the examples shown was how to do a mail merge in Word, but using data from Notes contacts address list as the data source.

At the server side, the general technique was to use a Notes Agent running as a web service either providing SOAP access or presenting data as XML.

XML was the most flexible - once it is available via a URL returning XML, data can be imported or connected into Excel, Word, an ASP web page or presented in Sharepoint.

As an interesting side note, if the data is rendered as a pseudo RSS feed in XML, it can also be brought into Google Docs spreadsheeting tool as well.

Most of the details were fairly low level, so I won't blog about each option in detail but if this is functionality you might need, let me know and I can talk you through it.

SHOW401 - Build a complete, autonomic IT Solution

This session was an introduction to Lotus Foundations, which is offered as a prebuilt appliance on IBM and 3rd party hardware, as well as VMware image.

It's a Linux (SLES10 by the looks of it) based appliance, but with the OS and management on a disk-on-chip arrangement, to allow booting in the event of a failed, or unconfigured , disk array.

It's designed as an all-in-one small office (5 to 5000 user) solution, and offers File sharing (Windows, rsync, NFS and Apple), web server (L.A.M.P.), firewall with VPN support, ftp and DNS as well as Domino - no Sametime at this point.

At the hardware level, it supports drives in a RAID1 or RAID5, as well as Lotus' own idb (Intelligent Disk Backup). There's an auto-update feature as well.

All in all, for a small business it looks like a reasonable option. Not necessarily suitable for a banch office of a larger deployment, but I'm told that there'll be some annoucements about that later this week.

LS2009 Day 0 : Who's attending what

Here we are, with our yellow badges round our necks, Lotusphere 2009 is officially open !

Quick trailer of what you can expect to be blogged following today's sessions.

Brian : The A-Z of IBM Lotus Domino Security Features (he did draw the short straw!)
Mike : Introduction to JavaScript for LotusScript Developers
Greg : Build a Complete, Integrated Autonomic IT Solution in Less Than an Hour with IBM Lotus Foundations
Me : Introducing IBM Lotus Domino Designer 8.5, Now with Eclipse!

Once Dai is here this evening, we will finalise who is attending which sessions and I'll post the full agenda so you can then post any questions you might want us to ask.

More tonight!

Lotusphere 2009

Almost all here! Greg & Mike arrived a couple of days ago and have been settling in. Karoona and I arrived yesterday on a very uneventful flight, and we'll be joined by Dai this afternoon to round out the EUT presence at Lotusphere this year.

So far we've had a couple of requests from the rest of the team to make sure we cover Email Archiving, Future of Quickplace, Sustainability and of course get the latest hints and tips in running our environment. Add a comment on this post to let us know if there is anything else you'd like us to make sure we cover.

With the upcoming Wrigley integration work we will also be putting special focus on tools and partners we can use to help make our two environments work seamlessly together and we will be investigating any offerings that we can use to cost effectively simplify our overall environment.

We have a full working Sunday ahead of us - unfortunately I drew the short straw so I get to start my day with "The A-Z of IBM Lotus Domino Security Features". I hope you're all as excited as I am ;-)