The more I play with IBM Lotus Workplace Web Conect Management the more I can see how powerful this product is. One strong point that I have to commend the product on is the ability to create page templates with most of the default fields filled in and hidden so that endusers who need to create new content can just select the correct template and their document will appear in the correct portion of the site.

As I have said before documentation is very thin on the ground so I’d recommend that you spend at least three weeks just putting together mock sites and get used to the methods used within the application before starting any serious projects.

LWWCM was created during a time when using tables for layouts was the done thing but I have found that if you turn off the automatic table generation and switch items like navigators and menus into freestyle mode then you can easily do your layouts in CSS. One 3 column CSS layout that I have found to work perfectly with LWWCM is the one described in the A List Apart article called Creating Liquid Layouts With Negitive Margins which includes a footer section that always clears the longest of the 3 columns.

One thing I would love to figure out is how to integrate a site with my Single Sign On infrastructure. If the user is logged in then display certain things but if not then either display nothing or display a login box. I’m sure this is possible using a Conditional Block using LotusScript to figure out if the user is logged in or not but without documentation I don’t even know where to start…

The new version of ILWWCM is now available on the PartnerWorld website with a hefty download size of 265Mb for the Domino based edition.

I can’t see a lot of changes over the previous version apart from the fact that there are a lot more languages available for it. now. Unfortunately all the languages are in separate database templates which is a pity as with the globalisation features of Domino being so powerful that you can have multiple languages within the same database it would be nice to offer a native language interface to my endusers using just a single database. Looks like they will be stuck with English for the time being.

We are currently investigating this product as the replacement system for our current CMS. So far it has been easy to setup and there are a few things in the setup that could be automated via agents but getting your head around how all the page design components fit together is another mater.

ILWWCM does need more documentation so you can get up to speed as quickly as possible otherwise it will become a product that will be purchased as a good idea and then end up sitting on a shelf until somebody goes on a few training courses. Simple instructions for creating common components would be nice. Fortunately I still have the IT Jumpstart database from Aptrix which basically contains a fully functional website and using that as a starting point is a great way of learning how ILWWCM works. It’s a pity that IBM have gotten rid of this offering, even for licensed deployments like mine.

Expect to see the rest of the WorkPlace V2 products appearing for download really soon.

Oh, and talking of globalisation… I’ve been using the Global Designer Workbench for the past few weeks to globalise a few databases. It crashes a lot unfortunately so lots of time wasted in restart Notes. I’d love to see this functionality built directly into the designer client. set the reference language, being able to set in the design element’s properties if the element should be tagged and having a built languages button that strips out the non-reference language elements and then rebuilds them within the same template… Is it too late to add this to the R7 wishlist ?