Yesterday I presented at MWLUG, and I want to share my presentation with both the ones attending and anyone who was not able to be there. I am posting two version, one with just the slides, and one with speaker notes, where I tried to capture the content, if not the exact verbiage of the session.
I hope to be able to post the demo database with the code later this week or early next week.
Tomorrow, August 8, you are welcome to attend my presentation “Elementary!” at MWLUG 2017. In about 45 minutes I will show how to easily incorporate Watson functionality in your own applications, both on the web and in your Notes client applications.
I will be using Node-RED and IBM BlueMix to do this, and I think many will be surprised how easy it is, and how little code is needed. For example I will implement translation from English to Spanish with two (2) lines of server side code. To call this from the web you just need another handful of lines.
I hope to see you tomorrow at 5pm!
It is less than 2 weeks left to MWLUG 2017, an outstanding Conference that I will be attending for the third year. This will also be the third year I will be speaking, and this time it will be a brand new presentation. My session, AD103, will be on Tuesday, August 8 at 5pm.
I hear that there are still a couple of openings left. If you have attended a previous MWLUG conference you are entitled to 25% off the registration fee of $100. But even at $100 this is a great deal, with over 50 sessions and much more.
So what are you waiting for? Register, and I will see you in two weeks in Alexandria, VA!
Richard Moy, organizer of MWLUG, has extended the deadline for submission of abstract submission another week, until Friday, June 2.
So if you haven’t gotten around to submit an abstract yet, you have a few more days to come up with a good subject to present at this years MWLUG conference, taking place on August 8-10 in Washington, DC.
Registration is also open. Don’t miss out on a great conference!
You have just over 3 days left to submit a session abstract for MWLUG 2017. The deadline is on Friday, May 26 at 5pm Central time.
If you don’t want to speak, registration is also open to this excellent conference. This year it takes place August 8-10 at Hilton Mark Center in Alexandria, VA. Expect a packed schedule with great sessions and speakers.
This is one of the must-attend conferences in the US for anyone working with the ICS (IBM Collaborative Software) family of products.
If you are using IBM Notes/Domino for application development, IBM wants to hear from you.
Fill out this survey, it only takes a few minutes. It will help IBM deciding what the developer community wants IBM to focus on for future releases.
http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/3508546/Notes-Domino-Application-Insights-Survey
I will be speaking at IBM Connect in San Francisco now in February. Rob Novak has resurrected “The Great Code Giveaway” and asked me to present it together with him. Who would turn down that opportunity? So some time between February 21 and 23 you can see Rob and me on stage at Moscone West. The exact time and location has not been announced yet.
I hope to see you in San Francisco and that you will find our presentation and code useful!
A few weeks ago I visited the town of Antigua in Guatemala for 5 days. My wife used to live in Guatemala, working for a non-profit organization back in the late 1990’s, and she wanted to show me how beautiful the country is.
The view from our bedroom window.
Of course my wife was absolutely right. The town was colorful and relaxing, people were very nice and the food was delicious. When I in the past heard “Guatemala” I thought of rain forests and hot and humid conditions. But in Antigua the temperature was perfect, about 70° F (21° C) during the day and 55° F (13° C) at night. We slept with open windows every night, with a view of one of the nearby volcanoes. No need for air conditioning, we could just enjoy the clean fresh air.
But what is really amazing is how resourceful people in Guatemala are. They reuse things in a very clever way, with the most striking being the “chicken bus“, the local transportation system between cities.
IC Bus CE-Series body on a mid to late-2000s International 3300 chassis.
Photo: H. Michael Miley. License: CC 2.0 BY-SA
When American school buses get old they are sold at auctions for a couple of thousand dollars. Many of them are purchased by Guatemalans who drive them down through Mexico to Guatemala. There they are fitted with upgraded powerful diesel engines (often the same ones used to power semi-trucks), repainted and outfitted with additional lights (sometimes neon lights), roof racks for cargo and plenty of chrome. Often they get a new hood from a semi-truck as well.
The US truck manufacturer International used to have a truck manufacturing plant in Guatemala, but it was closed down some years ago. This left the country with an abundance of very competent mechanics, especially diesel engine mechanics. They are now passing their knowledge on to the next generation. On an interesting note, IC Bus, one of the major manufacturer of the yellow American school buses, is a division within International and the school buses share much of the design with the International trucks.
And this is what the end result looks like:
Guatemalan “chicken bus” in Antigua. Photo: Karl-Henry Martinsson
So what does this have to do with IBM Notes and Domino, you may ask? Well, the same way as you can take a boring and generic workhorse like a yellow school bus and give it a second life by converting it into a colorful and useful source of transportation, you can modernize and update your old and perhaps a bit dated Notes application to something new exciting and attractive that your users would like to use.
Take your Notes application from this: 
To this modern web application:
Just like the mechanics in Guatemala replaces the old worn-out engine with a new powerful truck engine, your Domino data engine can be replaced with a new engine, for example from LDC Via, if you want to get away from Domino as a server platform. But Domino is a very competent and powerful NoSQL database/server and will work well for most users.
So like old worn out yellow school buses, your Notes applications can be given a new life as well and run for many more years, looking attractive and brand new again.
Do you want to modernize your Notes and Domino applications?
Let me and Demand Better Solutions help you!
As some may already know I was recently laid off after 14 years as a Notes and Domino developer at my workplace. I suspected for a while that some staff reduction would be coming soon, but I was a bit surprised that I was included since I am the only Notes developer in the company.
I had for a while considered to do consulting and freelance development. My wife as well as several friends have been encouraging me for years. So this was just the push I needed.
I am starting my own company, Demand Better Solutions, where I will focus on Notes and Domino Development, application modernization and migration as well as building brand new web applications and websites.
I realize that me being laid off is just a business decision. It is not personal. Several of the business critical applications at my former employer are developed using IBM Notes, but the executives have for years been talking about moving away from the platform. Of course they don’t realize the huge amount of work needed to do this, but never the less this was/is their ultimate goal.
The reason is that they feel (based on what they hear from other executives) that Notes is old technology. The fact that IBM has been slow in modernizing the interface, and that many of the templates still look like back in 1999 when version 5.0 was released does not help this perception.
Last fall all our email at my old job was moved to Outlook, and ever since I have heard users complaining about missing Notes and certain functionality they were used to. A lot of integration between Notes applications and Notes mail were also lost, and I had to re-create it in different ways. You often hear stories about people complaining about the Notes client, but most of our users wanted nothing but to get it back…
My old employer also uses Visual FoxPro, a product where the last version was released in 2004. It has officially been discontinued by Microsoft, but we use it for several important applications. So I don’t think that even a product being discontinued is driving a huge number of migrations. It is the perception of how modern the product is that matters. And that perception is almost 100% the way the product looks.
To a user the interface is the product.
Create a modern looking application and nobody will question (or care) what tool was used to build it.
The last 3-4 years I have been learning new web technologies, like jQuery, Bootstrap, Ajax, JSON. I have been able to use much of that at work, as well as in several side projects. I also started learning C# and .net. After the layoff I sat down and started looking at (among others) php and mySQL as well as researched frameworks like AngularJS.
As a developer I have to keep up with new technologies, or I will be left behind. But it is hard when you work full-time, have side work and then have a family and house to take care of. Having some free time the last few weeks enabled me to focus on learning some new things.
I don’t think the Notes client will be developed much more, almost everything is moving towards web applications these days anyway. But IBM Domino is something totally different. It is an very capable and powerful development platform. With some skills in web technologies and a good understanding of the Domino platform one can build some amazing applications.
IBM recently released FixPack 7 and announced that the current version of Notes and Domino will be supported for at least five more years, until September 30, 2021. New functionality will be provided through Feature Packs, not version upgrades.
But Domino is just one tool of many. I am looking at LDC Via as another data store, as it very closely resembles Domino with a MongoDB-based NoSQL backend. Salesforce also has many similarities with Domino. The transition would therefore be fairly easy. AngularJS is another popular technology, with version 2.0 soon to be released. And we of course have IBM’s BlueMix offering, where MongoDB is just one of many technologies offered.
As a developer we need to learn new things constantly, the language or tools we use does really not matter. We should pick the proper tool, whatever fits the project.
Do you want to modernize your Notes and Domino applications?
Let me and Demand Better Solutions help you!
IBM today announced that support for IBM Notes and Domino 9.0.1 have been extended until September 30, 2021, five years from now. Like many others I would have liked to see IBM use the wording “at least until 2021”, but I am sure IBM’s lawyers have something to do with this. It is important to notice that this is not an end-of-life announcement,
At the same time IBM also announced that they now will start shipping new features for the products in the Notes and Domino product line without changing the version number like before. In the past only bug fixes were shipped between version in so called “fix packs”. Any new features had to wait until a new version was released. But recently some new features have been added as well, causing some confusion. In the future IBM will shift to more frequent updates , using the name Feature Packs. Many cloud offerings don’t even do version numbers anymore (what version of Gmail are you using?), and Microsoft is doing the same thing with Windows 10, pushing out new features within the same version number.
Also today IBM announced Fix Pack 7 (FP7), probably the last fix pack version before the name change to Feature Pack. It can be download as of today. You can read more about what is new here.
In an upcoming feature release IBM is expected to update the JVM to Java 8, as well as add new functions needed for Verse on-promises which is planned for release at the end of the year.