Monthly Archives: March 2015

IBM Verse – Features I would like to see

Posted on by Posted in Cloud, IBM/Lotus, Verse 1 Comment

I have been testing IBM Verse Preview a little now, and I have compiled a list of some features I would like to see implemented. I have not included things in the UI (User Interface), because it is clear that part is still being polished/developed, and have some ways to go. I am going to focus on actual functionality, the UI items I will wait with until we are closer to the official March 31 launch date.

 

Connect IBM Verse to GMail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail

This is needed for several reasons. First to import existing calendar entries, contacts (including pictures, e.g. in Google Contact) and even existing email. Say the last 3 months or 6 months or even 12 months of email.

The connection should also be used to retrieve any new email coming to those acounts and display them in Verse. This way Verse can act as a federated email client, replacing the need to login to 3 or 4 different webmail systems. This requires one more function: the ability to change the sender address to match the account it was sent to. For example, if I get a mail delivered to texasswede@gmail.com and it get imported into IBM Verse, when I respond to it I need to be able to select that texasswede@gmail.com is the sender, not karl-henry.martinsson@ibmverse.com. Outlook Express could do this this 15 years ago…

 

Signatures (including graphic elements)

Nobody will be taking Verse serious if you can’t create a signature for your outgoing email. Even for personal mail that is pretty much required today, and if you are trying to showcase a product intended for enterprises, don’t cripple it like this.

New email message in Verse (left) vs GMail (right)

New email message in Verse (left) vs GMail (right)

 

Allow custom usernames and aliases

In all/most other systems I use the nickname TexasSwede. In IBM Verse I have to be karl-henry.martinsson, which is longer, harder to remember (and to get right for people) and also annoying to have to type every time I login. Talking about login, the login screen does not remember my username and I have to enter my username as well as the domain. Not fun, especially when the mailbox times out every 30 minutes. If you like to keep your mail open all day, that is not useful.

While we are on the subject of account/user settings, it would be nice to be able to change the password…

 

Make Verse freemium, not crippleware

Nobody will bother testing IBM Verse if you are limited to 25 emails per 24 hour period and a 500 MB mailbox. Even GMail had 2GB at it’s launch in 2004 (if I recall correctly). I am sure there are many other things in the full version that have been removed in the preview version (if it has been developed yet). From what I understand, there is quite a bit of work left on the full (paid) version as well…

 

Mail Rules

For any kind of corporate/enterprise email you need rules to sort incoming mail into folders. With the integration of Watson in IBM Verse, this should be easier than ever. We should be able to get the most accurant and most powerful email rules ever seen. Of course, with a 25 email per day limitation, nobody will have enough mail in their Verse account to eventest the analytics part of the product.

 

Support more browsers

At least Internet Explorer 10/11 should be supported. Many companies are still standardized on IE, no matter what you think about that product. I know that as late as last year, certain security certificates for banks in Sweden required even older version of Internet Explorer

In addition I have also heard reports that Safari did not work because the version installed with the operating system wasn’t supported. IBM requires pretty much the latest versions of the browsers for Verse to work. They do some fairly advanced browser sniffing, but the error message you get just tell you that your browser is not supported. That message should be much more precise. If you have Firefox 31 and Firefix 32 is needed, that should be explained.

 

Mail sent to non-existing users

If you send a mail to a non-existing user (for example of you type the address wrong, perhaps dropping one s from my last name) you get a non-delivery notification saying “User john.doe@ibmverse.com does not exist in Domino Directory”. We are all happy that Verse is built on top of the reliable and robust .NSF infrastructure from Notes and Domino, but it would be nice to use more descriptive and less confusing messages. What’s wrong with “The user john.doe@idmverse.com does not exist, please check the email address.”

 

IBM dropped the ball on IBM Verse

Posted on by Posted in Cloud, IBM/Lotus, Verse 6 Comments

At IBM ConnectED in January IBM promised that all attendees would get early access to the next generation web-based email presented at the conference, IBM Verse. Jeff Schick initially promised it for february, but after several emails where the attendees were offered to sign up, it got very very quiet. Today the real invitation finally arrived in my mailbox, and I signed up. After signing up I was told it would take up to a day before my mailbox would be setup and available, but after about 30 minutes I got the welcome email.

What I noticed is that there are a number of functions not working or not available yet. This is something one would expect of a beta product, so not something I react negative to, even if it would have been nice to see a more polished product being introduced, even if it just labeled “IBM Verse Preview”. Among the functions missing is a way to create a mail signature. There is also a limit to 25 emails in a 24 hour period, as well as no more than 10 recipients for any email. Storages is limited to 500 MB.

According to a response in the support forum, IBM have dropped the Freemium idea. IBM Verse Preview replaces it, and will be just a demo version to try to get customers to buy the full version, where signatures and other features not present in the crippled Preview version will be available.

If you want to hear Jeff Schick announce the Freemium version (and personally invite ConnectED attendees to get early access to Verse Freemium), watch this video (starts at 42 minutes in):

In my opinion, IBM need to drop the 25 email and 10 recipient limit, increase the mailbox to at least 2 GB and add at least the functionality GMail offers, which include signatures (with graphics). Then there is quite a bit of polish left, if you mail a non-existing user you get the message “User XXX not listed in Domino Directory”. Yes, we are all happy that IBM Verse actually uses Domino and .NSF for mail storage, but it should probably be hidden from users.

There are also parts that look totally different, a lot of Connections stuff like profile settings, inviting users to your network, etc. Finally, Internet Explorer should be supported. Not that it is my favorite browser, but many companies are still standardized on that browser.

In my opinion, IBM dropped the ball. As my instructors in the Swedish army would have said: “Do it over, do it right”.  IBM Verse has potential, but not as crippleware.

Microsoft and jQuery Ajax calls – not using standards

Posted on by Posted in .NET, jQuery, Microsoft, Web Development 3 Comments

I recently started using C# and .NET for the first time to build a web application. It is just a proof of concept application where I am trying to implement CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) though jQuery and Ajax calls from a simple webpage. The application should let me retrieve a list of all companies in the database, get information about a specific company (based on a company id), update an existing company (and create a new company in the database if it does not exist) and finally allow a company to be deleted.

I been doing these things for years using IBM Domino as the backend, simple reading the query string and parsing the name-value pairs before performing actions based on the values. So when I started using Visual Studio I naturally thought things would work the same there.

But I found out that ASP.NET is using a different method to address web resources. It uses the concept of routes, so instead of adding information passed to the server using the query string, the data is passed in the actual URL:
To get a list of all companies you would call /api/Company, and to get information about a specific company you add the company id (/api/Company/Q1234). If I want to pass two arguments to the server, for example to get all companies in a specific city and state, you would call /api/Company/TX/Dallas.

In my opinion, this gives you much less flexibility than if  you pass arguments in the query string. You must put the arguments in the correct order, and it is much harder to use optional arguments. One example of where I used optional argumenst is for sort order. In some cases I want the companies to be returned in descending order, instead of the default ascending. Or I want to sort on a specific column/values. In those cases I pass along a special argument, but normally I don’t. Less data to transfer that way, and cleaner code. But it still works.

It is when you want to perform a POST of form data to the server that it get really complicated and annoying. This is the sample code using the ASP.NET Web API generated by Visual Studio 2013:

// POST: api/Company
public void Post([FromBody]string value)
{
    ... do stuff here
}

As you perhaps can tell, this function only take one argument, which is pretty useless in a real application. And you can’t just add additional arguments in the declaration. One way to do it (as described here) is to use a data transfer object containing all the arguments, which then is used in the function:

public class CompanyDTO
{
    public string CompanyID { get; set; }
    public string LegalName { get; set; }
    public string Address { get; set; }
    public string City { get; set; }
    public string State { get; set; }
    public string ZIP { get; set; }
}

// POST: api/Company
public string Post(CompanyDTO Company)
{
    return Company.LegalName + " in " + Company.City + ", " + Company.State;
}

The issue here is that you need to put the arguments in exactly the same order in the Ajax call (and hence the query string) as they are declared in the code. You also can’t (as far as I understand) send only updated values, you need to always send all the fields, even if just one field has been changed.

So what should one do? The best solution I found this far is to pass the data from the browser as a string, containing JSON. Not as a JSON object, as that will not work.

So do not do this:

$.ajax({
    type: "POST",
    url:  "api/Company/",
    data: {'city':'Dallas','legalname':'Test Company, LLC'},
    contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
    dataType: "json"
});

The browser will just convert the JSON object to name-value pairs, and you end up with null in your code. Instead, change the jQuery code to this:

$.ajax({
    type: "POST",
    url:  "api/Company/",
    data: "{'city':'Dallas','legalname':'Test Company, LLC','Owner':'Karl-Henry Martinsson'}",
    contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
    dataType: "json"
});

Now it will work! Notice the small change, I added quotes around the JSON. An added bonus is that you don’t need to pass along all fields, just the ones you want/need in any order. And if you pass along a field/name that is not defined on the server, it will simply be ignored.

You probably don’t want to build the data string manually. Perhaps you want to loop though certain fields and retrieve the values to pass to the server. You would do something like this:

// Create a new empty object
var Company = { };
// Loop through all elements with the class 'dataField' and
// build an object with the ID of the element as the name.
$('.dataField').each(function() {
  Company[this.id] = this.value;
});

$.ajax({
  type: "POST",
  contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8",
  url: "/api/Company",
  data: JSON.stringify(Company),
  dataType: "json"
});

I use JSON.stringify to convert the JSON object to a string before sending it to the server.

So this is what I found out. Hopefully it will help someone. I am still a bit frustrated that Micorosft once again decided to do things a different way than the rest of the world, but I guess one should not be surprised at that.