MN Lotus Notes User Group Meeting
| Time: | Wednesday, February 16, 2011 4:00 - 5:30 PM |
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| Cost: | Free, as always! |
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| Location: | Perficient
100 North 6th Street
Suite 850B
Minneapolis, MN 55403
Please register here for the meeting. |
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http://www.perficient.com/about/contact_us_minneapolis.asp
Parking can be done in Ramp B and other surround surface lots. We are one block from the 5th Street/1st Ave light rail station.
We are going to try something new for this meeting. Please try and attend this event in person, but we will also be presenting on-line using Perficient's LotusLive Meeting account and Conference Call number.
To get to the LotusLive on-line meeting:
The agenda is:
- a small panel of Lotusphere 2011 attendees will discuss what they learned, liked or disliked about this year's IBM extravaganza.
- Jonathan Distad and Rick Carriveau will show a little more about Lotus Sametime including screen shots and some of the WebSphere interfaces.
- Discussion and demos of Lotus Connections
As always please message
with any comments or suggestions for the group. If you are interested in planning a meeting or helping manage the group please let me know.
Meeting Notes
We had about 20 people attend the meeting (4 people on-line)
*These notes were written by Tom Hillebrand as he observed the presentations.
We began the meeting with a few of our members that attended Lotusphere 2011 in Orlando making comments about their experience. Thanks to Randy Nelson, Tom Hillebrand, Don Lewis and Jonathan Distad for speaking
Next, Jonathan Distad walked us through a demonstration with screen shots of the various Websphere Application Server (WAS) screens that a Lotus Sametime administrator would work with when they implement a Sametime 8.5.1 infrastructure if they go beyond the basic Sametime Community server. Don Lewis from Blue Cross Blue Shield of MN chimed in on occasion with real-life experience as he is working through this process currently.
Notes about Jonathan's Sametime & Connection presentation
- The directory you use (Domino LDAP, Active Directory, or other LDAP) must be prepared and cleaned up before doing ANYTHING.
- If you plan to ever introduce high-availability within your Sametime Infrastructure you have to plan for it NOW by building the correct foundation i.e. using the Sametime rollout server. If you don't plan for it now, you will basically need to create a brand new environment later.
- There is tool provided by IBM that you can fill-out and send to IBM and they will help you with sizing your environment. This is well worth your time. Take their recommendation with a grain of salt.
- Jonathan mentioned that his company, Perficient, has plans to provide Administration Training for Domino Admins looking to begin working with Lotus Connections or Sametime. These session will be at multiple locations throughout the country and hopefully in the Twin Cities this summer.
What's new with IBM/Lotus and things everyone should consider
- Get an account at Lotus Greenhouse and try out technologies like Lotus Connections, Sametime, and others without the need to build the multi-server infrastructure internally. You can integrate your Greenhouse account with your in-house Lotus Notes 8.5.2 client and experience the integration.
- Goto OpenNTF.org. This is how IBM/Lotus will be rolling out enhancements to templates, new design components like XPage controls and other items because it can be published faster than it takes them to push a new release of Notes/Domino through the process. This way we do not need to wait for new releases of Notes/Domino. There are also boat loads of great applications, such as the fileSendr application by Declan Lynch that I threw on my server yesterday to deliver the following file.
- Want to get all the Lotusphere 2011 presentations? Download the NSF here. You will need to enter the access code: 1k0g7tzwqbif4
- Do you want to participate in suggesting design enhancement to Lotus Notes/Domino? Try this IBM forum.
- Training and one-pagers: There is a plethora of training, videos, 1-page sheets you can print out for training the user community. I will list some of them here, but first you should take Mat's advice about Sharing the Love.
Suggestions for future meetings
- Allow vendors to demonstrate their solutions because we can learn what is out there and what is possible. SalesPlace.com for example.
- Invite people at companies like Blue Cross Blue Shield MN that have gone through an implementation such as Sametime and Connections to present and demonstrate their solution and discuss their implementation experiences.
- Real world company example of using Lotus Connections
- One member wanted a forum and discussion in the community for areas of Lotus Notes/Domino that we would like to see improved or enhanced
- More about XPages, their usefulness and how to development them. How can we use XPages to give our Lotus Notes/Domino apps a quick face lift to make them relevant again? Why not invite GBS to present the GBS Transformer and SalesPlace.
- Widgets in the sidebar. What's possible? How do we distribute them to the user-base?