I have recently attended a 4 days class on Lotus Expeditor in IBM. I must admit it was a wonderful (both personal and professional) 4 days in the recent past. All the days were absolutely fantastic in terms of learning and hearing lots of good things about Lotus. The trainers were absolutely awesome in engaging us in some whiteboard discussions where we had enough chances to put forth most of our points :) and get answers too. And the mates who attended the session with me were real good guys - most of the them from TechSales and absolutely have a flair for selling and joining in some excellent debates. The other group is from Technical services - fantastic guys who plays with WAS (Websphere Application Server) and WPS (Websphere Portal Server) every day.
The interesting point to note with these Tech Services guys is they are able to see everything from 100% technical point of view. These guys are having some real cool discussions in terms of really implementing the concepts with Java programming. I must say that i am really motivated after seeing their working style for these days. Thinkpad is a must for every employee in IBM and almost 80% of the workforce is mobile so that they can work anytime, anywhere. They don't have to come to office everyday to be productive and can work from home too if they want.
So many things happened and i am digesting whatever i have heard now.
Lets come to Lotus Expeditor. What is that and how is it useful for an organisation?
Lotus Expeditor comes with 3 components viz client, server and toolkit to build Composite Applications. They say "Universal client" because it runs everywhere - Desktops, Laptops, Devices like PDA, Mobile phones etc, and KIOSKS and can work in connected and not so connected and completely disconnected environments as well.
Lotus Expeditor is the common run time based on Eclipse RCP (Rich Client Platform) on which Lotus Sametime 7.5 (already running) and Lotus Notes/Domino 8 is going to run. It is basically Eclipse RCP plus other services like layout, managed browser, security, synchronisation etc etc. Some say that Expeditor provides client runtimes and applications run on top of it. The reason to say this is because of the fact that Expeditor itself can be deployed from a centrally managed portal server (and hence the name server managed clients) and applications can be pushed to the Expeditor client desktops or any of your devices from a central server.
The true business value of Expeditor comes from the fact that it gives the users flexibility to work in both connected and disconnected environments. The classic example would be the Insurance agents where they have to travel to locations with no Internet/GPRS connections.
And here are other reasons:
Server managed clients so applications can be automatically pushed when its available.
Composite applications - Simply put it is the portal which can work offline. The huge value comes from the fact that it makes the users productive in the context of the business process of what they do. They don't have to switch to multiple applications when they work with the customers. And the best part is they can even do this even when they are offline. These things will be of immense value if you are J2EE customer or portal customer today. Such things were non existent in the J2EE world.
If you are Notes/Domino customer things like offline data/applications, replication is something which we do traditionally and hence the value would come from the fact that you could build composite applications based on NSF data alone or if they want they could mix with the data from all other sources like Portals or other J2EE applications or even Microsoft applications. Behind the scenes it is going to be WSDL and other Web Services components which is what makes the whole on-the-glass aggregation happen. Plus because the whole thing now is going to run on top of Lotus Expeditor (which is also the underlying architecture for Lotus Sametime 7.5) plugins you develop for Sametime and Notes/Domino can work interchangeably. I was sitting besides Stephan Wissel (the Lotus guru in Singapore) during the session and picked up lots of things when i talk with him. He is truly a great person. Whenever i speak with him it will always be enlightening for me and actually it motivates me to learn and talk.
There are just too many different combinations that one could think of with Lotus Notes Domino 8 and Lotus Expeditor. I will put down as and when i read more about the subject.
It was tempting for me to say that Lotus Notes for the first time can also serve transactional applications if you code your composite application that way. For instance, you could have a composite application like BankTeller application runs inside ND8 client but serves the transactional data. I am not sure exactly whether it is possible and i leave this part to subject experts :)
All in all i thoroughly enjoyed the complete 4 days and very much look forward other training sessions. Thanks all people.