An Update On My Involvement With OpenNTF

Posted on August 24, 2009 by qtzar

If you follow my blog you’ll know I have
been very vocal about the changes that OpenNTF announced a while back.
 One of my biggest areas of concern was that OpenNTF was moving towards
only supporting the Apache Public License which would, in my opinion, leave
a lot of open source developers with nowhere to go if they wanted to create
and release projects that used any other open source license.

Thankfully, after much discussion, the
IP Working group put together a set of proposals that would give GPL and
similarly licensed projects an equal place alongside the APL projects on
OpenNTF. When presented to the OpenNTF Steering Committee the proposals
were accepted by the majority of the members and in the past few weeks
on OpenNTF the catalog link has changed to ‘Downloads’ and you’ll now see
the ‘GPL Catalog’ listed in there.

The GPL Catalog is currently empty because,
until last week, there has not been anybody in the role of GPL Committer.
This has now changed and I am pleased to announce that I have volunteered
to take on this role. As the person who made the most noise about supporting
GPL and similar licenses I decided that taking on this role would be one
way to show my appreciation of all that OpenNTF has done in the past for
open source projects of all licenses and also show that I’m not ‘all talk
and no action’ but that I stand by my conviction that all Open Source licenses
need to be treated equally on OpenNTF.

So if you have any OpenNTF projects
that fall under the GPL/LGPL license and you’d like to get a release made
for the new GPL Catalog on OpenNTF then keep any eye out for the procedures
that will be announced very soon. I’d like to try and get a few of the
bigger GPL licensed projects on OpenNTF into the catalog as soon as possible
and I’m looking for a second person to assist as a GPL Committer ( mainly
because I can’t commit my own GPL projects ).

I was going to title this post "OpenNTF
: I Tried, You Failed, You Fixed Some Issues, I’m trying again."

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Lotus Knows It Has A Lot Of Work To Do

Posted on August 23, 2009 by qtzar

So the Lotus Knows Ideajam is over. In
the three days that it was running there was nearly 1000 ideas submitted
to the site and over 20,000 votes were counted. All this adds up to one
hell of a headache for the folks at IBM Lotus’s marketing department as
they review all the ideas, cut out all the fluff and spam and obvious troll
entries and whittle the contents down to something that is usable in their
‘Lotus Knows’ advertising campaign.

Personally I submitted two ideas to
the IdeaJam site, the first one was an idea that the advertising teams
needs to market to the right audience, this idea did not gain a lot of
votes however my second submitted
idea ended up being the 14th most popular idea on the entire
site. This idea had 113 promotes and 4 demotes. The idea was simple and
one that has been echoed in the Lotus Community for a long time, that IBM
Lotus need to start showing and using products and their names in their
advertising.

This is an idea that I and many others
are very passionate about and the voting on the LotusKnows IdeaJam website
shows this and I’m glad that the idea ended up very high on the list of
most popular idea on the site. Maybe now IBM Lotus will take this idea
on board and do some real adverts that don’t leave you scratching your
head wondering what the heck they are trying to sell you.

I’ve seen Microsoft adverts on TV for
Microsoft’s Office Communicator, detailing how a company has saved money
by not having to fly people to meetings across the world, saving money
and helping to reduce the companies carbon footprint and I’ve seen IBM’s
adverts on TV for IBM’s Smarter Planet which details… Actually I have
no clue what it details. There are no ‘smarter’ examples of using something
like IBM Lotus Sametime to do the same money saving, carbon footprint reducing
that the MS advert shows, there are no ‘smarter’ examples of using IBM
Tivoli to show more efficient IT Support teams maintaining servers all
around the world, there are no ‘smarter’ examples of using something like
Lotus Protector to reduce and eliminate spam from corporate emails systems
which would lead to a more efficient workforce that doesn’t need to deal
with the spam emails and the more efficient mail servers that don’t need
to process and store that spam.

Imagine an apple advert for the iPhone,
it’s a busy New York sidewalk, lot of people walking in each direction
and one person is talking on an iPhone but you can’t really tell because
the shot is so wide the iPhone in the persons hand is too small to make
out and then the screen fades to black and you just see an apple logo (
no mention of iPhone, just an Apple logo ). That would not sell many iPhones.
Instead Apple shows the iPhone on screen and shows some of the cool apps
and things that it can do. People see the apps and it makes them want to
buy the iPhone so that they can also do the cool things the iPhone can
do. To me the Smarter Planet adverts are very much like my imagined Apple
advert, a wide vague shot of something you can’t get a grasp on and then
fade to the company logo without telling you what you were trying to achieve.

Lotus Knows… It has a LOT of work
to do.

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An Update On xTalk For Domino

Posted on July 31, 2009 by qtzar

A while back I announced a project that

I had been working on called xTalk. It is an XPages Discussion Forum application

similar to the many forums you may find on community websites. The initial

version of the code and basically the core functionality was written in

about three to four days but since then I have been polishing it up, putting

in additional features and generally getting it ready for release when

IBM Lotus Domino 8.5.1 is also released, but I just wanted to give everybody

an update on how things are looking in the app.

The first important aspect of xTalk

is that there is no Notes Client interface. It is designed to be 100% xPages

driven. It has been announced that xPages in the Notes Client will be coming

in 8.5.1 and this is the reason I wanted to do everything in xPages. When

you are logged in as the application owner you will see lots of extra buttons

appear in different places. For example on the homepage you will see the

options for configuring the application and for creating new forums categories.

A picture named M2

Clicking the configure button allows

the application owner to set all the options that they want to enable/disable.

A picture named M3

When you do create new forum categories

and/or forum areas you can set the security for the area which will allow

you to create hidden forums that are only visible to certain people or

groups. To do this I have a nice name picker component and I’m making use

of Reader Fields to provide the security. The name picker still needs a

little css work but as you can see it consists of two lists and a ‘move’

button. Select the name on the left, click the button and it moves to the

list on the right. You can also double click names in the list, kinda like

the name picker in the notes client.

A picture named M4

If you have been setup as the ‘Category

Owner’ you will have full rights to all the forums in that category, even

if you are not set as the owner of the forum area. These top down rights

will ensure that you can manage the forums areas under your control but

no other ones. As the Category Owner you can also Create, Edit and Delete

forum areas in your category. Another nice feature I have added is the

ability to re-order the forums as they appear in the category using the

up and down arrows you can see in the following screenshot. As mentioned

each forum area may have it’s own set of security controls and readers.

This will allow you to create hidden forum areas within a category. The

‘lock’ icon you see will also allow a owner to lock down the forum area

so no new topics or replies can be made.

A picture named M5

Inside a forum area the forum area owner

or the category owner has the ability to lock individual posts or even

make posts into ‘sticky threads’ that will always appear at the top of

the list of topics in that forum area. Again everything is done within

the xPages interface.

A picture named M6

One more feature I’ll be adding before

xTalk is released will be to allow the forum area owner define a list of

people who are allowed create new topics and who is allowed reply to topics.

This would be useful if you have a forum area for announcements where you

want to control who can make the announcements and if people can reply

to the announcements or not.

Another feature I have just finished

adding to xTalk is the ability to use BBCode to format your replies. This

special code is normally found in many other discussion forums and is considered

by some as a better option then allowing HTML to be entered directly as

you can somewhat control what is allowed.

A picture named M7

A picture named M8

The above screen shot also hints at

another feature that is just about finished and that is the ability to

quote replies. In flat forums like xTalk this is an important feature.

The forum area owner will also have

the ability to remove and edit  individual posts within a topic for

moderation purposes. Authors will have the ability to edit their own posts

for a certain amount of time before they become permanently locked down.

I hope this little update has whetted

your appetite for what xTalk will be able to do for you when it is finally

released. I think I have all the basics covered and everything should be

completed in time for the 8.5.1 launch. The code will be released as an

Apache Public License V2 product and if openNTF keep moving in the right

direction it may even show up there as a project.

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OpenNTF Licensing Discussion

Posted on July 29, 2009 by qtzar

There is an interesting discussion

over on OpenNTF right now on how license files should be included in projects

in the future, it is hoped that from the discussion that a set of policies

can be created. I have expressed my opinions over there and I would encourage

everybody else to do that same.

Even if you don’t write open source

code the discussion is important as with the Apache license you could conceivably,

and legally, use code from openNTF in your commercial products and if you

do you would then need to include the license files that came with the

code you are using in your applications.

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