My Journey with XPages

Well, this Xpages thing is running in mind for quite some time. I had attended a training conducted by Stephan Wissel a.k.a Singapore Lotus Guru some time ago. During one of my chat sessions with him  i was discussing with him about a simple task management sytem and told him i make use of some of the free wiki based tools for the same.
He told me that why don’t I write a Xpages application for the same for which I responded that after the training I will give it a try. He was kind enough to tell me that he could host the app for me in his server.
Work kept me busy and didn’t find much time to read and learn Xpages stuff. Yesterday, i was in a mood to learn and write some code and play with it. So I started learning Xpages. My usual way of study is I read a lot of theory first before start doing anything with it. Somehow I fel t that I should not follow the same for Xpages and started doing it and within a day I manage to put a simple application.
I learned Xpages and applied it for a simple task management system. This may not be a full fledged application but contain all the ingredients to make use of it rightaway.
My objective is very simple. I need to store personal tasks that needs to be done and the priority. Also a brief description of what needs to be done. I should be able to update it any time if I need to change (for eg. Changing the priority etc).And I can also delete the tasks if I don’t want it. Since the need is not complex, i want all this to be done in a single screen in Web2.0 fashion
Here we go, in traditional LND development, you will have a form to create the task list with the fields inside. If you build it will look like this,

You can start creating task documents using the above Task form. Then you need a view to show the task documents. Then build a view to show the list of tasks. It will look like this,

For a simple application, that’s all we need. With this one can perform all the CRUD operations using LN client. Now Domino does quite well in translating this and you could make use of this from the browser too. Wanna see that,

Upon clicking the link, it will take you the document itself

You can actually edit the document and update from here. Not so pretty but you can make it pretty by making use of custom HTML, CSS and a bit of Javascript. That will take some time though.
With the advent of Xpages, this is kind of breeze. How do we do that? I will show the output first before I go in to the details. This is how it looks at the end of it,

Much neater, isn’t it. The magic behind this is Xpages in Domino which is available from LND 8.5 Remember the first form we built in the beginning, now you need to build a corresponding Xpage and assign a data source for the same in this case it’s a Domino document. Once you are done with it you will have to do a simple data binding. Data binding is an important thing where for every element in the Xpage you match that with the corresponding field element in the Notes form. Let’ see how,

There are plenty of controls that is available with Domino 8.5.1 and using which you can built a nice looking pages as shown above.

Drag and drop the controls based on your needs, and finally place buttons for submit and delete. Since we have already defined the data source as Dominodocument before, clicking the submit button will create documents in the database.

Ok next thing is the equivalent of Notes View in Xpages. For which build a Xpage and define the data source as Domino view this time and choose the view you want to use. You can drag and drop the view columns from the data palette that is shown there, the output will be like this.

Notice the page navigation a.k.a pager has been added automatically. Now comes the best part, using Xpages you can tie this both in a single screen by making use of the container controls panel, table, include page and view. I have imported the style sheet that is provided in the training class Styles.css which and the image resources.
So I build a new Xpage called xpIndex which will include the above,

After that it’s all about just configuring the delete button so that all the things will happen in a single screen itself when you hit the URL http://localhost/tms.nsf/xpIndex.xsp

Upon clicking the task, it will be populated in my new task page and I can modify and submit. The changes will go in to the database automatically. Similarly, I can delete the document, for eg
Selecting a task New will be added in the new task page and upon clicking ‘Delete’ the system will prompt for the confirmation

and if you say Ok the task will be deleted,

That’s it. One more thing, until now you view this in browser and you just don’t have to do any more thing to use it in Notes client. Wanna see the Notes client view,

There lies the Xpages beauty…
Considering the fact, I have not done much coding lately, most of my work is related with Project Management, customer handling, team management and selling technical solutions to customers this is quite reasonable. Learn Xpages in a day’s time and building a simple app.
I will learn more from here and might just give it a try to build the same using .NET

Lotus Notes Domino App Development Wiki

I wonder, why am i not able to the screenshot images in the above mentioned wiki. As far as i remember, i don't encounter this problem in any other web sites. Do you see this as well?
In chrome, i get this

In Firefox it's even worse i won't even know that there is a image in between the text

In IE 7.x it look like this,

What could be wrong here?

IBM Lotus - This last 2 weeks

Originally i started writing a comment in Volker site and since it was slightly bigger i wrote a separate blog entry itself
It started with Volker in his typical way followed by Jake and John Vaughan. I read through almost each of the comments and it was definitely enlightening to go through each of it and how each one of us perceive about Notes software and i must say i thoroughly enjoyed it.
I have made comments on Jake's blog and from then on to read all the rest of the comments took a long time and digest. Every now and then Lotus community face this sort of discussion and i remember once i too have written along these lines in the past.
http://senthilkumars.blogspot.com/2006/02/laug-1st-meeting.html
Each time, i want to write comments in Volker site, there is whole lot of things running in mind and don't know exactly how to write about. That's what writing experience is all about. If you start writing on a daily basis, your writing will get polished and you know exactly what needs to be communicated and to be able to do that with just few words yet powerful. IMO, that's why Volker is able to sum up in a nice way and others like me think but whole lots of things comes to mind and stop and then again lots of things comes to mind while you sleep etc.
Before i start i have to say "I just love IBM". Even though i have never worked there, i am just attracted by Big Blue IBM. I get excited every time i hear that IBM makes software for big corporations and they are massively scalable and nothing comes close and simply not comparable to other vendors. They have just about everything for a big company to be their customer and even smaller ones. Am bought by the IBM brand much earlier somehow.
After i completed my Engineering i was selected in a campus interview to join a IT services company and it was there i was first introduced to Lotus Notes R4.5 in the year 1998. In my team we were 12 trainees who started reading through Lotus Notes CBT and were given training on the platform by our senior employees in the team. And it's about 12 years now. All this while, i have been working in Notes and Domino and until 2006 its very much Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino, LDDM, Lotus Workflow.
After that, the market started slowly dipping in SG for Notes. Not much new development in Notes. Singapore Gov is a very big customer of Notes and every Ministry, Stat boards, and Agencies associated with Government uses Notes for Email. Not only for mail and plenty of applications in Notes and lots of services company has made huge money until one day the Gov said: We are going to standardise our operating environment (SOE) and the following are the software that will be available in each of the civil servant desktop and the list doesn't include Lotus Notes. It's a massive deal SGD 1.5 billion (atleast from outside it looks so). The consortium that won the deal includes Microsoft who are the key software supplier. And that means, its Exchange over Domino for mail. And the project has officially started in the year 2007 and its still on going. Not sure how successful will be but analyst like Gartner predicted it will not yield much gains though.
http://senthilkumars.blogspot.com/2010/04/soeasy-is-not-so-easy.html
Anyways for people who built their skills around Notes and Domino, they have to move on and in my case, out of 12 people in my team there was no one doing Notes except me at that point in time (team mates were smart and they changed careers am not repenting though) and i for one continued with IBM but its just that i shaped up skills in Presales and started in WebSphere Portal technologies and WCM. As a IT services company, it made a lot of sense to them that they can make more money in Portal and WCM rather than just Notes in which applications can be done usually 1/10th of the cost and even IBM reps were pushing for the Portal and WCM than Notes purely because they cannot add any new licenses in Notes and only by selling new licenses they reach their target. Because majority of the Notes systems are not very complex systems and usually 10 - 15 apps can be maintained by a developer and administrator, it's not visible to C-level management.
May be IBM should have delivered things like Lotus Connections in Domino platform as Nathan very rightly stated or i wonder why not a SharePoint like system is delivered in Domino platform. I just wonder, why IBM has not capitalised on a opportunity like this. They had 140 million seats during year 2004 or something and if they had polished Domino and built a system like Sharepoint on top of Domino wouldn't they have increased the business to double. IMO, Domino had everything what Sharepoint is doing today and i wonder what would have taken to built a system like that. May be IBM perception of collaboration was different and they wanted to make it more of a process centric rather than document centric.
Volker has asked a very genuine question why IBM has acquired Lotus in the first place and how Domino is perceived by other divisions of IBM. To find out answers, I digged through some of the interviews by Steve Mills to understand what can i make out from the statements. That has given me some broad level understanding. I will quote some of the items here
Excerpts from
http://www.information-age.com/channels/management-and-skills/features/313746/an-interview-with-steve-mills.thtml
IA: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are building huge data centres across the US and Europe with a view to offering software-as- a-service, storage-as-a-service, email-as-a-service and more. They see themselves as the new large utility companies, delivering application services. So does IBM see that as something it would want to replicate?
SM: For the consumer, no. We have made it clear in the market that our orientation is not toward [the consumer]. It is not that we won’t help others serve the consumer, we are happy to do that, but we don’t want to be consumer facing. That is not our forte.
IA: Acquisitions have become a central part of IBM Software’s expansion strategy, and that has moved the portfolio up the stack from middleware and systems software into the applications layer, with FileNet and Cognos products. Can you give us an idea of whether there is a clear applications line that you do or do not want to cross?
SM: So I am the guy that makes these decisions, and [I can tell you] there is a clear line. However, the line is more related to an understanding of the ecosystems in which we participate.
Take FileNet as an example. Clearly, there are people who look at FileNet as an application. But most of the code, by weight, is infrastructure not application code, even though it has application-like characteristics.
He goes to say that
What this comes back to is that we are not afraid to deliver applications, but we are clearly very selective about where we do it. It is in spaces which are highly exploitative of infrastructure.
Even though this interview was done quite some time back, we can still see the mind set and we will have to definitely take this as voice of IBM. The above answers some of the questions that were asked by the Lotus community and that is IBM is not interested in consumer facing because that is not their forte and they are very much in to providing infrastructure software and services than applications.
That's why IBM never shows product in their marketing because they are not consumer oriented where as MS and Apple are.
And that's why IBM don't want to produce good looking and nicely polished UI because they are marketing to end users.
Their market segment and the areas of focus are very different from others and that's why IBM is hugely successful company and know what they are doing.
So if you are working with Lotus technologies it is expected that they may not carry a UI like Apples or Microsoft's and it's up to the consultant to build up nice UI's with the software because IBM is not selling to end users.
So to come to a conclusion, my take is as a consultant we can love a particular technology or product but still has to keep options open, we definitely have to pickup different skills and need to apply when it is needed. In my case since i love IBM, i managed to move to WebSphere Portal, WCM, OmniFind, along with LDDM, Quickplace/Quickr, Sametime etc. Besides development i also do presales and project management.
When i write this, in Singapore there is only a handful of Lotus Notes jobs and to be precise its only 5 from the job site and WebSphere Portal is also very less.
J2EE and .NET openings are quite a lot and nothing wrong in picking up .Net / J2EE and infact IBM wanted us all to know J2EE and if one fine day Domino is consumed by WebSphere which is their home grown and not acquired as in the case of Lotus, they don't want people to loose out jobs.
Ok now what, go back and think about what you could do  to make yourself more marketable. Learn Xpages or .NET? Am going to learn both and other technologies too. Happy learning...
Update : This post is not supposed to be meant as Negative. IBM has done a great deal to Lotus Notes without which Lotus wouldn't have come this far. All am trying to convey here, IBM probably have a different strategy and may be it doesn't gel with what we think. Project Vulcan is a prime example for that kind of commitment. IMO,if we understand the technology fundamentals my take is it's not very difficult to apply and learn new technologies right? That's how i want to view and move. Life has to go on.
Long Live IBM Lotus

del.icio.us Tags: IBM,Lotus,Notes,Domino,Community

SOEasy is NOT SO Easy

Singapore government's plan to standardize the desktop and network components is underway and we all know the analyst firm Gartner has some doubts on the feasibility of achieving the kind of savings that government is trying to achieve (SGD 500 million).
Part of this initiative is also the migration of Lotus Notes to MS Exchange platform. I am very keen in exploring this area to see what would such initiatives finally bring to the table.
If this portion of the project is successful that will mean the government agency users will start using Outlook as their email client instead of Lotus Notes. As such it's only messaging nothing beyond that and this part is not difficult.
But Lotus Notes client is much more than a email client unlike MS-Outlook through which all the business applications can be built and accessed. Now the issue starts there, to convert all the Lotus Notes applications / Domino web based applications to MS platform.
There is no easy way to convert these applications to rival platform as much as MS touts (even it does at the end of it you are going the same functional application in the MS platform). Recently, i have encountered a customer scenario where they want to convert a Lotus Notes document repository application to MOSS and expect to work in the same fashion. The LN application contains lots of rich text data and MS architect team tried to convert this application using the MS Transporter suite but failed miserably. Not much of the information is transported and is not up to the team's expectation. After trying several rounds, they came to Lotus team for assistance.
So the point here is the government will have plenty of such applications and custom workflow applications, tracking applications, content management applications etc. MS team has to basically rewrite all the existing apps in MOSS platform ( not all the apps can be built in MOSS there are quite a no. of apps that need to built in .NET) and even to move all the data from current Lotus Notes to MOSS they need to work closely work Lotus consultants.
Just wondering if all the applications has to  be rewritten from the scratch what is the ROI we are talking about or the cost savings we are talking about.
I would welcome any thoughts or debate in this...

Lotus Top Gun

Last year, around this time i was selected as one of the Lotus Top Gun in the class. Its really a nice moment indeed :) This time IBM is not having the Top Gun classes in Singapore and is happening in KL. I just saw a Tweet from Stephan Wissel, he has just returned from KL after Lotus Top Gun 08.

Effective Team Collaboration in On-Demand Work Place

Attended a half-day seminar on Effective Team Collaboration in On-Demand Workplace conducted by IBM. It was a very good and different from the usual ones. IBM has started doing some great things around Lotus marketing and it is evident in these events. The crowd was pretty decent in number and for the first time i have got DVD's as take away with lots of IBM software evaluation copies.

The presentation was indeed good by Scott Bain - Manager IBM Software Technology Group followed with nice demos from Mark Moore. The presentation was well organised and started with Domino v7 and Sametime integration and explaining the newly introduced Web services in Domino. Got some very interesting points including the free presence awareness, and IM.

This particular feature is available from v6.5 but the sad thing is not many know about this and hence haven't tried in their environments. I don't know of anyone who is using this in Singapore. Initially, i assumed that i require a Lotus Sametime server component to make this work but after taking some time with the speakers after the presentation i found out that its just a matter of turning ON the feature while installing and configuring Domino. Now i am convinced to give it a try in my notebook to begin with.

So then the presentation moved to extending Domino to Portal infrastructures. They covered some of the features of Websphere portal and how it can work with Domino and several other transaction oriented apps. They were explaining how collaboration could extend to portals and will in turn help the customers.

Till that stage, they were explaining about tool based collaboration like E-mails, IM, Discussions, Application databases which we are doing today. In the future there is going to be "Activity based collaboration" which is also called Contextual collaboration.

What it means is this : For a particular goal/activity to be accomplished users are using various tools like Emails, Chats, Word docs to generate artifacts. And the common thread which connects all these is that particular "Activity". The thread which links everything is called an Activity thread which is what Activity centric collaboration all about.

The users might have used various tools, interacted with various users and would have prepared various artifcats like word docs, spread sheets so on so forth. But at one shot, the system will show the users about all the things which has happened on that particular task and what is happening currently.

Sounds exciting!!! Today this technology is available in the form of Lotus Workplace and customers can make use of it straight away. But if users want to stay in the evolutionary path who is currently using Domino v6.5 upwards or Websphere Portal they can wait till "Hannover" time frame and Domino Next which will have Workplace technologies sowed in everywhere.

I look forward to "Hannover". Meanwhile i will start exploring about Workplace :)

Change in the blog title and content

Lots of early morning thoughts made me wake up again from the bed which leads to a title change for my blog. Yes, i am renaming my blog to "The Power of IBM Lotus Notes/Domino".

This decision is made keeping few things in mind. Earlier i thought of writing of whatever i feel but mostly on Lotus Notes and my own personal feelings, thoughts etc and hence named as Mirror Image.

Now i have decided to get a step ahead by keeping myself positive and focus more on positive side of me rather than just this is not good, that is not good. May be i am finding a bit hard to explain it but i do hope i would do better in the times to come.

So from now, i would write on Notes/Domino of whatever i know, i understood, i experience, i read for the benefit of myself and largely to my customers, friends, colleagues et all.

I hope i am going to enjoy of whatever i have chosen to and i sincerely hope other too will feel the same.

After a long time

I am writing this after a long time. Its about 1:15 AM here and i was not able to sleep.. i thought i would read some thing good about my platform before going to bed again.

I wanted to read the article in the developer works web site on How to manage mail boxes in Notes/Domino but till now i haven't opened that at all.. I have been browsing for the last 1.5hrs. That is the drawback when i sit in front of my Laptop.

I will see something and start reading forgetting about the one originally i had in mind. I somehow feel like reading many Lotus geeks writings on whatever they write about Lotus technologies. There is whole lot of people whom i watch. In particular Ed, Nathan, Stan, Alan, Rocky, Tom, Ben Rose, Ben Poole, Jake, Julian, Jon, Joe, Mike, Bob to name a few.

I have been working in this technology for the last 7 years but i still feel that somewhere am lacking. I don't know whether that feeling is only a mind set or something else. One possible reason could be here in Singapore not much applications are built around Notes/Domino. So what am doing now is to maintain the old age apps built in 90's.

Its interesting at times and challenging too because of the production related issues. As the application data grows, because of the way the application was developed it would have all kind of issues.

Poorly architectured, poorly written code Domino apps are running in my customer places.. Not to say i would do a 100% good job but am sure that i would have taken lot more points in to account before i do something.

I should say not many people would know Notes/Domino to that extent. Even an experienced Notes programmer knows just to write an some Lotus Script code to solve the problem. Absolutely no thoughts what is the impact when its rolled out to say 1000 users at a time.

The customers are also not willing to share clearly how many users are going to use this application. They would say some small number or in many cases the vendors are not even asking for actual no. of users who use the application.

Vendors think that they might lose the deal if they quote high and they quote less.

And i should say when it comes to Domino, people take everything for granted here. They just deploy the applicaiton in the server and that's all, they assume the app would run for ever and in many cases there would not be a Domino administrator. Even if they claim they are, they are at best their network administrators or mail administrators and not real Domino admins.

When it comes to Domino, there is this next thing - they want everything at a very little cost cause somewhere they would have heard this jargon RAD.

So all in all it frustrates me what to do on all this.. I wouldn't have constructed things nicely here but i hope that i'll improve in the days to come..