Friday, May 29, 2009

Why it would be hard to go back to the Corporate World

Today is a beautiful spring day in Chicago.




It has been 18 years since I left the corporate world. Of course, I am dating myself. It has its ups and downs being on my own. There have been years when we did extremely well and years in which it was a nightmare. My parents thought I was nuts to run my own business, but after many years in the corporate world I was tired of the bureaucracy and incompetents. Even with all its ups and downs, it has been a wondeful experience so far.






There will be ups and downs in the future, but today as I biked to our office in shorts and have yogurt on the shores of Lake Michigan, I thought about what was really important. It is not about the fancy house or car, but having a wonderful family and a job that you enjoy. If I was in the corporate world, I would not be able to come into work in shorts and a t-shirt at odd hours or be with the family as often as I like. Yes, I work many hours each day, but I set the schedule. Oh yes, there is that call or emails from customers at 4:30 AM in the morning, but life is not perfect.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Windows 2003 64bit Terminal Server and Notes 8.5 Basic client

I know this is not supported, but has anyone try using Notes 8.5 Basic client with Windows 2003 64bit Terminal Server.

Midwest Area Lotus User Group at LinkedIn

We have created a new LinkedIn group in conjunction to the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference 2009. Our goal is to continue the collaboration between Lotus professionals in the Midwest Region of the United States even after the conference is over with. If you are interested in joining here is the link.

Midwest Area Lotus User Group at LinkedIn

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Presenting at the June 8th GRANITE Lotus User Group Meeting

I will be presenting at the next GRANITE Lotus User Group meeting, June 8, 2009, on the topic of resurfacing UI interfaces of Domino applications using with Adobe Flex. My friend David Charney from Illumen Group will also present on Understanding the Basics of UI Design. In addition, there hopefully will be a presentation on best practices of virtualizing your Domino and Lotus environments.

Announcing the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference Green Project

The Midwest Lotus User Group Conference 2009 Green Project focuses on the development of signage and fixtures for the conference using designs that incorporate recyclable and renewable materials. This site follows the progress of the design team comprised of Industrial Design students from the University of Illinois and staff from Illumen Group and Phora Group. The final design and fixture will be unveiled at the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference 2009, August 27-28, 2009.

To follow the progress of the Industrial Design students on developing their design go to: Midwest Lotus User Group Conference Green Project

or

you can access it from the main MWLUG Conference 2009 site.

Monday, May 11, 2009

Rich Internet Application Conference

Last Friday was the second annual RIApalooza conference here in Chicago which I attended. It is run by a number of Chicago user groups including Adobe User Group and Flex User Group. They did a great job. Hats off to Correy Miller from Magenic for a great presentation on applying UX principles in developing applications. All the food was provided by Microsoft.

There are now great tools out there to create Rich Internet Applications (RIA) including Adobe Flash and Flex and Microsoft Silverlight. Google now is starting to roll out their toolkit. However, one audience asked about IBM's contribution to providing development tools and support for Rich Internet Applications. The only mentioned was the Expeditor platform that most attendees have not hear of or disliked because of how big and bulky it is compared to Adobe's and Microsoft's solution. Unfortunately, the perception is that IBM does not seem to be involved in RIA at all.

It then hit me, what is IBM's strategy when it comes to RIA. It seems to be everywhere. There is Websphere Portal with it tools, now XPages for Domino and we have Lotus Expeditor which includes the Notes 8 client of which the development for the Lotus Notes 8 client seems fragmentated. There must be others that I missed. The question that I raise, will Xpages become the coherent toolset similar to how Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight has become. It seems that IBM needs to have one consistence tool that developers can use throughout all the different development platforms. In addition, that tool needs to work with open source back-ends. If IBM is interested in expanding it presents in the cloud computing and internet social environment, they need to start marketing to this crowd most of which really do not have idea what IBM is doing. If Lotus represents the user facing part of IBM, it need to move forward quickly to be seen as the provider of cutting edge RIA solutions for developers.

Friday, May 1, 2009

Domino Web Pages and Blackberry Bold

I got my new Blackberry Bold this week. It is great. However, there is one problem I that cannot seem to resolve. Web pages from a Domino server that has the home page defined using Internet Site Document will not show up on the Blackberry Bold browser and I get "connection refused." On my old 8700c this was a not problem. If I type in the URL directly, I can display the web page. Has anyone encountered this problem?

CollabSphere 2022 Presentation: COL103 Advanced Automation and Cloud Service Integration for your Notes/Nomad Applications

Our presentation for CollabSphere 2022. Learn how to quickly add workflow automation into Notes/Nomad applications using No-code tools that ...