ESCAPE VELOCITY :: Eat, I mean, Meet... the Developers

Just starting at the Meet the Developers session. Let's see what happens...

Kevin Cavanaugh's specific responsibilities include not just the Notes business, but also Symphony and Lotus Foundations. Didn't realize that was included. Good to hear.

KC: I never was able to do this, Brett.... were you able to get Bob Balaban to update the LSX toolkit?
Balaban: (reads amusing legal statement)... YES! Looking to ship in 8.5 timeframe.

Mitch Cohen: Are you going to make sidebar apps Location-aware, so they understand online/offline?
Jeff Eisen: Yes... things are coming...
Mitch: proxies?
Jeff: huh? I believe it does.... the answer is yes.... some stuff in 8.5... some stuff beyond.

(missed the name): what are your impressions of stuff like IdeaJam, as a customer source for product direction? Are you looking at these ideas and using them?.... *APPLAUSE*
Brent Peters: "I get IdeaJam emails all the time.. and I send them on to development.... and the answer is YES.
Mary Beth: I love IdeaJam.... we pay attention with it... I'm working with Bruce to pull stuff directly in to the product.

Gregg Eldred: You guys brought the sexy back in the client. When are you going to revamp the Domino server?
Russ Holden: We're doing major revamps in 8.5 [Editor's note: have you been at the same conference as me?] We're doing major rework on some pains in the server.
Brent Peters: Were you at the 8.5 futures session?
Gregg: Yes.

Paul Mooney: "I'm an end user" *LAUGHTER*
Brent: "I thought this was an AA meeting for a minute"
Paul: Without additional product, are you planning to have Symphony be able to go "file save as..." to a Notes database, without something like Quickr?
(Dev who's name I missed): Yes.
Paul: to an NSF?
(dev): yes, we're working on that.

Nick (something): would IBM consider partially opening some of the Domino source code to business partners?
Brent: are there any IBM attorneys in the room?... I'll word it this way... we've been looking at things similar to this, and there's instances of it happening before... there's a great deal of talent among our business partners, and I can't make any promises, and we wouldn't make it true open source, but we're making considerations.

Michael Sheinbaum(sp?): what advice do you give to a company who wants to enforce a homepage without using the homepage database? We're using a 3rd party db that we'd like to force everyone to open.
Art Thomas: we've heard some issues with the homepage policy settings... we're going to go back to take a look, but this is an enhancement.
Jeff E: Clearly in 8 we made it easier because you can save window tab state... so the definition of what happens when you start in 8 isn't a single page, so the policies haven't caught up with that yet.

(unknown): I'm a Sametime admin. Sametime administration sucks. What are you doing about it? Sametimeadministrationsucks.com is still available. There's no Eclipse client for example.
(unknown): we here you. We get that feedback a lot. We've been focused on the client, and we haven't got to the admin capabilities yet...but they're coming.

Richard Moy: Pertaining to the Notes 8 Basic client.... a lot of our clients have slower machines... what's the future of the basic client? Are we going to see look & feel updates?
Jeff E: The future is... we're going to have the basic client until we get feedback that we don't need the basic client. Basic client is clearly not the strategic direction around Notes. Improvements in the basic client? To be honest... some improvement fall out because they're part of common code base, but in terms of major stuff in the look? Maybe a little bit here and there, but don't expect a ton.

Ludwig N: How can we find books on getting started with Domino, widgets, gadgets, and all these new complex capabilities?
Kevin C: I think that's actually a marketing question. We have a defined effort with marketing to go out and get authors and publishers to renew the book across our product line. (note: BRIBE O'RIELLY!!!) We're talking to the guys that do the "For Dummies" books -- partially because they do a lot of language translations. We kinda dropped the ball on that for a while.... we're trying to fix that.
Jeff E: Around publishing the world's clearly changing as well.... there's an opportunity for 50-100 page downloadable things from the web.
Brent: We're also working on a project around Wikis that we're starting internally to make our document more dynamic. (Note: I've seen this stuff and it's awesome.)

(unknown): Are there improvements coming in transaction logging?
(unknown): we're going to reduce the cost of txn logging by about 50% in 8.5 (YAY!!)

(unknown): There's no Redbook center in Boston anymore? What are you going to do?
Brent: we're trying to gear the resources that worked on Redbooks to working on dynamic documentation and assistance. That's where we want to spend the resources.
(unknown): So there's no more Redbooks?
Brent: that's correct
*audience boos*
Kevin: We're putting out product too fast for Redbooks as a process to work. We want the same content and that content has been great.... we just need to deliver that in a different form. The process doesn't move fast enough.... we're going to get those things out in a faster way.
Brent: look how fast we delivered Notes 8 and 8.5... we used agile development or the crystal method or whatever... we have to find ways for the documentation to catch up.

(unknown): Will we see Designer for Linux?
Brent: we heard that people want mac too. *CHEERS* It's a matter of prioritization... we're trying to figure it out.... we need to make sure we can be capitalist and make money from it.

(unknown): When we're migrating from Exchange to Domino *CHEERS* what improvements are being made to handle cross-platform migration tools during co-existence?
Art T: What would you want to see?
Calendar tools.
Get me offline and we'll talk about it.

Scott Hooks: It's great to see the resurrgence of NOtes/Domino as the flagship of Lotus... are you going to make the newer capabilities accessible from Domino platform instead of WAS/DB2, etc
Doug Wilson: No. *BOOS* The point is probably more that it needs to be easy to deploy.... and you will find in the next year that we make strides to make that portfolio stack as easy to install and work with as Domino. (Doug... I'm holding you to this. Expect blog entries about it.)

***took a break to ask a question about LAYERS***

(unknown): We have been waiting for a formula debugger coming?
Maureen: Not in 8.5.... our plate is pretty full... we know people want it, maybe you could write one as an Eclipse plug-in? (ed note: that's not unrealistic)

(unknown): What actions are taking place to build a Notes express client so we can win the hearts and minds of kids?
Kevin: When I was in development I always hated it when people as this question. Now that I'm in marketing, I think it's a great idea. *APPLAUSE* The whole point of Lotus Foundations is to go into small businesses in a way we haven't done before. The development team has a heck of a lot to do... it's a question of priority.

(unknown): when will we see Symbian support for Traveler.
(unknown): next release.

(unknown): we run into roadblocks with customized templates. Are there plans to allow upgrades to happen with incorporated customizations?
Mike O'Brien: we understand the pain that's involved with that. We're actively working on a new model to allow your customizations to be continued. I assume you mean changes to OUR elements, because if it's just YOUR elements, you can use inheritance to manage that. We've actually built a prototype to help with that. But we're still figuring out the model.

(unknown from Denmark): Are you going to make a Sametime connector to the Messenger community?
Sametime guy: there's a fair amount of technical progress... but the business arrangements needed to conclude that aren't done.
Ed Brill: Another way to put that would be tell Microsoft you're interested in this, and that will help.

Tim Tripcony: DXL roundtrip and complete fidelity? *APPLAUSE including Balaban standing on stage*
Balaban: As soon as you let us, Brent.... as soon as you let us.
Brent: that's high on the list.

I'm out of battery power, so I'm off for a while.

Comments

1 - Nice coverage. Designer on Linux was me Emoticon

Posted by Rich Waters At 10:22:39 PM On 01/24/2008 |

2 - @4 Gregg: I don't recall your exact words, but I'm afraid that if that was the intended point of your question, it just didn't come across. I think everyone was distracted by your mention of "sexy", which is much associated with cool new stuff rather than fixing annoyances.

Posted by Richard Schwartz At 10:34:51 PM On 01/24/2008 |

3 - This years Lotusphere seems like the sphere of promises.

Can't wait for N/D 8.5 :D

Posted by Tommy Valand At 03:15:52 PM On 01/24/2008 |

4 - @Nathan: Maybe I wasn't listening during the Admin sessions, but I saw AdminP, Router, and other improvements. What I was specifically asking are about those annoying little things that have been 'plaguing' the Domino server for years. Like SMTP features that are in nearly all other mail servers, an upgrade to the Java version on the server, etc. Little, nagging things that developers workaround and admins just shrug.

Does that help? Emoticon

Posted by Gregg Eldred At 05:56:18 PM On 01/24/2008 |

5 - Thanks for the question/answer stream - that's fabulous - makes me feel like I'm right there with everyone Emoticon

Posted by DianeP At 05:47:58 PM On 01/24/2008 |

6 - Thanks for providing the the play by play coverage! Emoticon

Posted by Bob Knieff At 04:24:22 PM On 01/24/2008 |

7 - @7 Charles - it is not a matter of can it be done, it is a matter of testing. There is so much new stuff in 8.5 that they can not get everything everywhere. What do they give up for XPages to work in the Notes client? Calendar Overlays ... I have customers that would tell you No F'ing Way.

Posted by John Head At 12:30:16 PM On 01/29/2008 |

8 - I asked a question about XPages in the Notes client. The answer from Maureen Leland was "as soon as Brent allows it." Since the JSF layer is already written, and they have live preview of XPages available in Designer 8.5 I don't see what the big deal is. They've got the bulk, if not all, the code already written. Surfacing XPages in the Notes client truly would meet the promise of "write once, deploy everywhere".

Posted by Charles Robinson At 04:04:29 PM On 01/28/2008 |

9 - Just a note to let you know you are among the rare to spell my name right. Thanks for the great work.

Posted by Michael Sheinbaum At 05:08:33 PM On 02/12/2008 |