When I started the 8.0.2 client on a colleague's machine after installing it on top of an old version 7 data directory the basic client like IM contact list was displayed with the user logged in to Sametime. The Sametime client in the sidebar, however, said the user was not logged in to Sametime. After specifying the connection data again I saw this message in the status bar which made me giggle:
From the IBM® Workplace Messaging® homepage
Effective January 11, 2007, IBM is removing Workplace Messaging from market and entitling existing customers to equivalent offerings from the IBM Lotus Domino® portfolio. Customers who hold current licenses for Workplace Messaging will renew to the following:Via vowe.Effective September 30, 2008, IBM will withdraw from service the IBM Lotus Workplace Messaging Passport Advantage offering. Customers will no longer be able to receive support for this offering after that date.
- One (1) IBM Lotus Domino Web Access license for each licensed Workplace Messaging user
- One hundred (100) Value Units of IBM Lotus Domino Messaging Server for each one thousand (1000) Workplace Messaging users. 100 Value Units of Domino Messaging Server is equal to One CPU.
Via Chris Reckling:
Check out this great new article "Introducing IBM Workplace development tools" outlining the tools which are available for developing Workplace applications. The article defines three groups of developers and gives a brief introduction to all the tools available for each group.
Technorati tag: Workplace
For our Lotusphere comes to you event next tuesday a collegue of mine (thanks, Indro!) tried to install IBM Workplace Designer 2.6, as we are going to show this new version. We thought that this would take only some minutes, as we already mastered this challenge for version 2.5...
But the installation failed, on every machine we tried: after installing the Workplace Managed Client the system failed with the following (german) error message (that the operation could not proceed without destroying the configuration):
"Fehler im Installationsassitenten
Die angeforderte Operation kann nicht ausgeführt werden, da sie die aktuelle Konfiguration ungültig machen würde.
Ferner Verweis
'file:/c:/..path../Wmc.Designer/updateSite/features/
com.ibm.rcp.eclipse.gef.nls1.feature_3.0.0.0500.jar' kann nicht aufgerufen werden ..."
and pointing to an "inaccessible" jar file (which is present at the directory which is mentioned in the error message's "details").
Nothing in the knowledge base and (at first) at Google.
Only by searching for the name of the jar Indro found something at developerworks. Currently the only fix is to switch your OS country setup to English US. After installation you can revert back to your country setting.
Thanks to the danish geek "gabebega" who found out and shared this information!
Technorati tags: Workplace
Jim Ryan gives a great overview of all that is Workplace documents. I have played around with WSE and documents a bit so I have a basic understanding of the feature. But this session (and also the presentation) saves a lot of time when you want to get into Workplace documents.
The second part of the presentation was a demo. It featured a scenario with several different users (user types). To help avoid the confusion which usually arises in the audience when you switch between several roles/users. His users were Mickey, Minnie, Pluto and Donald and he brought according hats he wore whenever he adopted one of the users. Unfortunately some parts of the demo didn't work so he couldn't avoid a certain confusion to come up despite his really great idea.
Nevertheless the session did help me to get a better overview of Workplace documents and I think the users who have not seen Workplace documents before did get an impression of how they look and what's possible (and what not).
Technorati tags: Lotusphere2006, Workplace
After about half an hour of introduction Philippe Riand got to the actual API programming in Workplace Designer. I remember at last year's Lotusphere many Domino Developers asked for the implementation of LotusScript in Workplace Designer. I didn't think this to be a very good idea since LotusScript (as much as I like it) is not a standard language in web development. What I have seen today though seems to be a great solution for the dilemma. The Workplace Designer Document API offers much of the functionality of LotusScript using server-side JavaScript, together with XPath. You can even call Java code from the LotusScript code if you want to. That offers a great flexibility whilst providing a familiar IDE to the Domino Developer. And of course many of the @Formula functions have been implemented in JavaScript as well so I can easily use @UserName to get the current user.
Philippe showed some great samples based on the Workplace Designer blog template. I hope he makes them available for download. He covered a lot of the areas of the API and got my mouth watering to try it all out.I am really looking forward to using the Workplace Designer. It can be the tool to push Workplace further in the market since many Domino developers now do not need to fear the complexity of J2EE environments anymore when they just want to develop a simple or medium complex application.
I think one of the key factors to the success of Domino is the possibility for rapid application development using Domino Designer. If Workplace Designer can become for Workplace what Domino Designer is for Domino this might really make a change. Even better if Workplace Designer can combine the advantages of Domino Designer and Eclipse / Rational Application Developer that would really be a great IDE. Of course I know that RAD has by far more capabilities than Workplace Designer. But if Domino Designer, Workplace Designer and RAD are going to "learn from each other" we all could benefit a lot from that.
An interesting information I learned in that session is that the next release of Workplace Designer will have the Workplace Managed Client as a target platform.
The Workplace Designer Document API is (as announced by Chris Reckling on the IBM blog) available as a poster. So is the Domino 7 Object Model. So if you are at Lotusphere make sure you get your copy. No Domino developer cubicle or office is complete without it 
.
Technorati tag: Lotusphere2006, Workplace
After an eventless flight we arrived at Orlando yesterday, just in time to register for Lotusphere but a little too late for the Turtle's ESPN get-together. So we just grabbed some junk-food at the Caribbean Beach food court and had some sleep. Which is good since we will need it .
We have just been to the jumpstart session JMP302 IBM Workplace Designer 101. Excellent stuff. The Workplace Designer really has grown up since last year. Unfortunately I was not able to play around with it in the past year so I was glad to see that the developers have done a good job at it. For a Domino developer (with a thorough knowledge of web development) it is really simple to develop portlets for Workplace using the Workplace Designer.
The presentation was pretty good, loads of information for the experienced Domino developer/Workplace Designer newbie. As always the time was just too short to show everything Martha and Eugene wanted to show. The major part of the session were demos which is good since it showed the real potential of Workplace Designer. I was also impressed by the speed of the tool (and also the deployment process. The Workplace server allegedly ran on Eugene's laptop and everything was pretty fast.
One thing that might lead to some confusion though is the naming of the workplace document in the Workplace Designer API. You can use this API when writing JavaScript code to be executed on the Workplace server. The "document" object in this context is the workplace document. For Domino developers this can be translated to the NotesDocument object in LotusScript. Since this is JavaScript the "document" might easily confused with the "document" object in the JavaScript DOM (when writing JavaScript code for the browser.
Hans-Peter suggested to Eugene Louie (who did the presentation together with Martha S. Hoyt) to rename the "document" to avoid this confusion. Eugene suggested "workplacedocument". I am not sure if I am happy with that long name but I definitely think that renaming it is a good idea.
Another thing I don't know yet is how I can write portlets which are pretty. That means not specifying a lot of in-line formatting in the forms (as it has been done in Notes applications) but to use Cascading Stylesheets and to simply apply CSS classes to the elements in the form (and of course the form itself. I have seen some controls which might let you use existing style sheets and classes but I have not yet seen where to store the CSS files in my Workplace application. I will hopefully learn more about that later since this is a key element in the separation of layout and content (and of course accessibility).
After talking to Philippe Riand after his session I have learned a bit more about that. Currently you can use the CSS classes defined in the standard Workplace CSS files. You may alter and expand them and the added classes should be available in Workplace Designer. In the next release (3.0) of Workplace Designer you will be able to have CSS files als shared resources (just like in Domino Designer) to further extend the standard portal stylesheets for your application. Obviously the styles defined in the additional CSS files should match with the standard portal styles for a consistent look & feel.
Technorati tags: Lotusphere2006, Workplace
Ambuj Goyal announced in the Lotusphere spening session that every Passport Advantage customer is entitled to a free 20 user license of IBM Workplace Services Express. It has been hard to get any information at all about this offering from IBM and the distributors. Declan F. Lynch posted some more information on this today in dec's dom blog.
While preparing for 
our"Lotusphere Comes to You" event, I stumbled across the "Using and Administering IBM® Workplace™ Services Express 2 Tutorial". I have looked into it only briefly but it seems to me that it provides a good overview and introduction even for end users and for the most common administration tasks.
The IBM Workplace Services Express homepage also has two nice Flash demos and a lot of other useful information in different technical levels.
