Mitch Cohen

Stop Sign, Yield Sign, Take Turns Sign?

Mitch Cohen — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:29:54 +0000

Take a look at this short TED Talk video on the cost of Stop Signs, and the proposal for a new road sign the "Take Turns" sign

I Will be Speaking at Admin2010

Mitch Cohen — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:36:14 +0000

I am happy to announce that I will be speaking at this years Admin2010 Conference in Boston. Admin2010 which is co-located with Developer2010 runs from May 12 to 14. A ticket to either conference entitles you to attend sessions at both the Admin and Developer conferences.

Registration is open, and the lowest rate is available until March 12.

What am I speaking about? Here is my abstract:

Expert techniques to customize Lotus Connections Profiles

Populating Populating Profiles with the right data is vital to any successful Lotus Connections deployment. This session provides an overview of Tivoli Directory Integrator (TDI) and an in-depth look at the scripts provided out of the box with Connections. Learn the inner workings of how Profiles is populated from LDAP as well as how to integrate with other data sources, including demonstrating TDI's ability to connect to practically any data source. Find out how to customize Profiles to display the correct data for your organization and how to add and remove fields, add custom fields, and control which fields can and cannot be edited by the end user. In addition we will teach you how to display different profile data for different types of employees.

The Dangers of Running a Live Webcam

Mitch Cohen — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:33:27 +0000

So the Snow Cam (now offline) has been running out my window for the last couple of days. You have to be careful when running a live webcam or things like this happen.

Yesterday I got in trouble for going outside with out a hat. Today Carl felt the need to capture some video and come up with his own interpretation of the activities outside my house. Thanks Carl!

Making Google Analytics and Lotus Connections 2.5 Play Nicely Together

Mitch Cohen — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:56:00 +0000

The other day I was working on integrating Google Analytics with an instance of Lotus Connections 2.5. This should be a relatively simple exercise as you can easily customize the Lotus Connections Footer, and embed the Google Analytics code there, as the footer is rendered on every page.

Once I did this I found that Files and Wikis no longer loaded, they instead rendered as blank pages. Removing the Google Analytics code from the footer restored Files and Wikis to a working state.

I put the question out on Twitter, and Jan Farnstrom was kind of enough to respond that he had the same issue, and had worked around it with some Javascript to exclude Google Analytics from Files and Wikis. He was further kind enough to share his script.

Before I had a chance to work with his script I had a reply from Luis Benitez who had another solution. Google Analytics recently introduced a new way to implement their tracking code Asynchronous Tracking.

"Asynchronous tracking is an improved way to track website visitors with Google Analytics. Unlike a traditional installation, asynchronous tracking optimizes how browsers load ga.js so its impact on user experience is minimized. It also allows you to put your Analytics snippet higher in the page without delaying subsequent content from rendering."

After implementing the Asynchronous Tracking code Files and Wikis worked just fine.

Responding to Comments on What is the Future of Domino as a Blogging Platform?

Mitch Cohen — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:24:00 +0000

I started responding to comments on yesterdays blog entry in-line but it started to get long for a comment so I decided to make it a new post.

@1 Nathan - In the typical enterprise the typical end-user does not have access to create databases on a server, why would an enterprise dedicate a resource to blog creation on Domino servers, especially since a great percentage of blogs are created, used once or twice and left to die. In a Connections environment once you have the system up and running it is a user self service environment to create a blog, and the ones that die have virtually no cost associated with them. Steve touched on this in @14 as well. I don't know how widely it would be used, but a tool to create and manage blogs in Domino would be a welcome addition

@9 Kathy @20 Ferdy - when I started blogging I felt very much the same way, I am blogging about Lotus technology my blog should run on it. I am not sure I still feel that way now. Ferdy says it well not every technology blogger is on the platform that they evangelize, in fact those of us in the Lotus Community hosted on Domino are probably the exception not the rule

@7 @10 Johns, @8 Ben - I was going with what I was told, while it appears that technically BlogSphere could be put back on OpenNTF the reality is that it is not there. Declan made some excellent points in his post yesterday Where Are All The Open Source Developers? It should not fall on one person to support a project, but based on the post and the comments it certainly appears that this has become the case. While there are some great projects on OpenNTF today it is clear that they are based on the work of a few inidividual contributors, and while being used, not being actively contributed back to.

@12 John - excellent idea to have a place to list and prioritize feature requests for Domino Blogging since OpenNTF has it's own instance of IdeaJam can we get an IdeaSpace for Domino Blog?

@15 @18 Mat - yes there is so much more to Notes/Domino then just going off line, but specifically in the area of Blogging the off line capability is particularly strong in Notes compared to other options.

@21 Ferdy - yes you have hit the real point here, it is a numbers game, and blogging is being done on a much greater scale on platforms designed specifically for blogging, which drives the innovation and development of plugins, themes, and mobile solutions. Technically Domino is an excellent platform to develop and host blogs on, it just does not have the user base for this functionality.

I think I covered everyone I wanted to respond to. I would say the overall consensus is that people in the community want to continue to use Domino as their platform for blogging, I know I would like to keep my blog hosted on Domino and continue to blog via my Notes client, we will see if the tools continue to develop to keep me here, or if I will choose functionality over platform for my blog. (note: functionality as in what applications are developed not capability of Domino)

Related Blog Posts:

Ben Poole: Is there value in Domino as a ’blogging platform?
Declan Lynch: Where are all the Open Source Developers?
Mat Newman: Content IS King, and Lotus Notes is THE ultimate Content Manager

What is the Future of Domino as a Blogging Platform?

Mitch Cohen — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:33:00 +0000

This has been on my mind (and in draft) for a while, I thought I would throw it out there and see what others had to say on the subject.

Throughout the community there are a large number of blogs hosted on Domino Servers, including mine. While a couple of people are running their own personal Domino blog template, for the most part Domino based blogs are based on one of two templates.

Option number one began as Project DX created by Steve Castledine, it later became the Domino Blog Template and if my memory is correct shipped with Domino beginning in R7. While the Domino Blog template continues to ship with Domino 8.5.1 it is also now available on OpenNTF.

Option number 2 is the BlogSphere template created by Declan Lynch with contributions from many other individuals. Unfortunately the BlogSphere template is no longer available for download. BlogShere was removed from OpenNTF during the time when they were sorting out licensing models (Apache vs GPL), and unfortunately does not meet the guidelines to be resubmitted under the new submission guidelines.

For those of us running the BlogSphere template, this kind of leaves us at a dead end. Having upgraded to the 3.0.2 build a while back, that is the end of the road for BlogSphere development, and there is no real path to migrate a BlogSphere blog in to one based off of the Domino Blog template.

So now we have the state of the options available for Domino hosted blogs, lets take a look at what else is out there. A few blogs that used to be based on Domino have already migrated off of Domino to Squarespace or Wordpress. Lets take a look specifically at Wordpress and what it has to offer

Themes - thousands of free (and for purchase) themes that are easily customizable are available for Wordpress, and changing the theme on a blog is drop dead simple. (Yes the BlogSphere template supports Movable Type themes, but there are no where near as many as freely available themes, and it takes work to change a theme).

Plugins - over 8000 plugins freely available for Wordpress, to be fair I have yet to find anything I was not able to integrate in to my BlogSphere based blog, but not as simple as installing a Wordpress plugin

Mobile Applications - this is what I think is the real killer, while the themeing and plugins mentioned above are "nice to haves" mobile is a must! Wordpress provides mobile applications for content creation for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.

Squarespace offers many of the same features, the fundamental difference being that Squarespace is a paid service, while Wordpress is available free with some limitations hosted on wordpress.org, hosted for a fee with premium features or self hosted. Sqaurespace offers an iPhone app today though I have not seen any indication of support for other mobile platforms yet.

There of course are other options like Blogger, Tumblr, Posterous and others (I am not even getting into BleedYellow or DeveloperWorks as options for Blog Hosting here even though they are both viable options), but my intent is not to spend all day reviewing blogging platforms.

So what is next?

I really like having my blog hosted on Domino, and I especially like having the local replica of my blog database, it makes it very easily available to me, and I tend to littler it with drafts of blog posts, some of those drafts see the light of day, others are simply deleted, but whenever I have an idea for a blog entry it takes me 2 seconds to create a draft as a reminder. I know some of the options I mentioned above have some off line capabilities, but nothing like a local NSF.

I should also mention that I have nothing but appreciation for Declan (who has helped me with my blog personally on more then one occasion) and all of the other contributors to BlogSphere, but as that seems to be a dead end now, I feel the need to figure out what is next for me. Beyond my blog however lets get back to the original question, what is the future of Domino as a blogging platform?

While Domino ships with a Blog template I don't really believe enterprises are using them on any large scale internally, yes I know the template is being used but it has not tooling around it to manage an enterprise deployment, an enterprise would be much better served using Lotus Connections as an internal blog platform. So I think that leaves us with at most a couple of hundred active Domino based blogs. Is that enough to drive someone to create projects for mobile content creation, plugins, simpler customization, and probably some migration tools to move off of unsupported blog designs. Is there enough interest/demand to generate these tools or will myself and others move our blogs to other platforms that will support these features?

As for me, I have made no decisions yet, I consider myself a consumer in this space, don't look at me to be developing any tools. My goal is to allow myself to focus on generation of content, and ease of publishing, not worry about the tools themselves. I wonder what others are thinking on the matter?

Google CEO Eric Schmidt: The Correct Term is to Replicate!

Mitch Cohen — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:56:00 +0000

I finally got around to catching up on Google CEO Eric Schmidt's address to the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week. Pick it up at the 7:11 mark when he talks about cloud computing and says:

"people always say I want to copy from here to there it's the wrong terminology the right terminology is to replicate"

I couldn't agree more, replication has been a feature in Lotus Notes for 2 decades now.

This Must Have been Invented by @jrobichaux

Mitch Cohen — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:39:00 +0000

This is the latest innovation to appear in the bathrooms at the office, I had never seen these before, but I bet Julian has had them installed in his house for years now :)

Here is an image of it

Purleve hygienic door handle

Adding a Custom Profiles Field to Advanced Search (InfoCenter is Wrong)

Mitch Cohen — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 11:46:00 +0000

This blog post answers a question that was posed to me during my session at Lotusphere.

First a little background, SHOW303 was about customizing Lotus Connections, among other things we showed you how to add your own custom fields in Profiles, as well as use a custom resource bundle to add a nice label (and optionally add multi-language support to the label) for your custom profile fields. For the complete overview you can view slides 113-128 of the presentation.

So now the question. One of the people who attended the session had successfully added a custom field, and labeled it, but when added to advanced search it looked like this:

Not exactly the nice field label you want to display. In our demo the actual label we used was "Real Name"

Off to the Lotus Connections 2.5 InfoCenter, where the section on Configuring Advanced Search tells us to use the following syntax to extend advanced search with a custom field.

In our demo that would translate to a line that looked like this

Unfortunately this is what led to the result above.

The missing ingredient is the linkage to the resource bundle and the label key which was used when adding the custom field to the profile layout, when adding them the new line looks like this:

Save this and restart Profiles and now Advanced Search looks a lot more friendly

Much better :)

Lotus Knows Mitch Cohen

Mitch Cohen — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:25:35 +0000

This was filmed back at the LoLA event in September 2009