Lotus Rock Star

01/27/2012

Yes, it was fun. And no, I couldn't see you.

Category LS12
I had the privilege of being called on stage at Lotusphere 2012's opening general session by Alistair Rennie to represent the IBM Champions for Collaboration Solutions. He gave me 5 minutes notice and apparently didn't tell OGS staffers (except a few required to get the photo right) during rehearsals for fear it might get back to me...

So at the opening, Alistair asked me "Demo or No Demo?" to which I immediately said, "As big a fan as I am of panels..." then crowd-sourced the answer. And there were demos. And I was relieved that there weren't any panel discussions later. That would have been awkward.

A picture named M2

Thanks to Tanya Delaney for the pics...I know there were some others from Mitch and Henry and I'm going to see if there's a good clip on the video replay.

Another check on the old bucket list!

Posted by Rob Novak At 5:04 PM Location SNAPPS Glactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)

01/09/2012

SnappFiles native app for iOS, Quickr, CM8 and Filenet updated

Category SnappFiles
Happy to say that we've just released SnappFiles 1.0.6 with some fixes to issues introduced by either Apple's iOS5 or IBM Lotus Quickr 8.5.1. For the new year, we've addressed all of the reproducible problems reported in Q4, leaving enhancements for the next round. Well, all but one!

What's been fixed?

Crash after entering password if no password was stored (iOS5 issue)
Crash deleting stored server information (iOS5 issue)
Crash opening attachment from checked-out document (Quickr 8.5 issue)
Documents with multiple attachments now displayed in folders (Quickr 8.5 issue) -- the "new" feature now that we have the right API doc!

Thanks to everyone who has provided feedback and helped support further development!

For more info on SnappFiles, visit http://snappfiles.snapps.com

Posted by Rob Novak At 11:24 AM Location SNAPPS Glactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/13/2011

Lotusphere 2012 sessions

Category LS12 Lotusphere
I'm pleased to be attending my 17th Lotusphere in just a month (gulp) and speaking for the 11th straight time. It's a little different this time around, with a new topic and speaking with a new co-presenter, but it should be a great time again. Last year I eclipsed my 50th session overall (pun intended), guess I've been slowing down in my old age!

Here's what I'm signed up for:

For You "Nonstructured" People: Getting Started with Analytics
Speaker: Rob Novak, SNAPPS
Abstract: A little more than four years ago, IBM acquired Cognos for nearly $5 billion -- 60% more than it paid for Lotus twelve years before! Then, IBM dedicated 4,000 consultants to a Business Intelligence practice. What's the big fuss over bits of data? In this session, you'll discover the value of analytics to all size companies, what tools are available from IBM, a getting started guide for non-report-writer people, and some great examples of integration possibilities.

Quickr for Domino Development: Best Practices for Today and the Future
Speakers: Rob Novak and Jerald Mahurin, SNAPPS
Abstract: After 12 years of developing innovative applications for Quickr and 18 years with Domino, we have a few things to share once again at Lotusphere! As many know, developing for Quickr takes a special combination of skills and an innovative, somewhat nontraditional approach. In this session we'll share team development methods, show you how we use our favorite development tools, and work through a number of time-saving samples. You'd be surprised what customers all over the world are doing with Quickr -- so we'll demonstrate a few of these enterprise solutions and share how the time-savers fit into the equation. Go away with these samples and start making your Quickr deployment rock!

I look forward to seeing you there! Now back to those slides...

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:36 PM Location SNAPPS Glactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

09/23/2011

From SNAPPS Labs: Introducing the evolution of Quickr templates

Category Quickr
Today I get to announce five new product offerings from SNAPPS, not really surprising ones but cool nonetheless. You may be aware that SNAPPS produced all the goods over at QuickrTemplates.com in 2007, and updated them through Quickr 8.2. These free templates were a big hit, and solidified IBM Lotus Quickr in many customer environments, as well as helped hundreds of IBMers sell Quickr. These business-focused templates were the key to success of Quickr in many organizations -- I've heard this repeatedly from customers as well as IBM.

The other thing I've heard repeatedly, of course, is "where are the 8.5x versons?!?!?!" and the answer is slowly making its way out. With hundreds of hours of re-factoring for new versions of Dojo, requirements for specific fixes from IBM, and blood sweat and tears, we've evolved some the free templates into packaged products. And, more are on the way. We're also going through a re-branding effort as you may have noticed to more closely align the offerings we have with our company brand, SNAPPS.

So first out of the gate are two of the most popular templates:

SnappImages^TM, formerly known as QPhotos, and
SnappContacts^TM, formerly known as QContacts

These two templates have been completely reprogrammed to take advantage of a new UI, native Quickr 8.5.1 Web 2.0 rendering, and optimized for performance on Quickr 8.5.1. Each carries over the same functionality you've become accustomed to in the free version, but with a cleaner, faster and more streamlined interface.

This was only the beginning of the work. There's more.

You may also be aware that way back in in 2006, SNAPPS built blog and wiki templates for then-named Quickplace 7.0. And, after we reprogrammed those and optimized them for translation, IBM licensed them from us for use in the 2007 Quickr 8.0 release. They're still there 4.5 years later, based on the original design and using the same rendering engine (8.2), made to work on an 8.5.1 server.

I'm pleased to announce today that we are making available new blog and wiki templates as native Quickr 8.5.1, Web 2.0, properly rendering templates. Each one has been programmed to use the new editor, native features when appropriate, and had the UI polished up to give your users a more consistent experience in Quickr. Last but not least, we've taken the extra step of creating a combination template -- a single template with a team place, blog and wiki all together. These three are now branded as:

SnappBlog^TM
SnappWiki^TM
SnappCombo^TM

All five new templates are available either out-of-the-box for new deployments, or as upgrades to existing templates (for an additional fee -- we had to write quite a bit of conversion code). The only one not requiring conversion is SnappContacts, it's going to just work in place of QContacts.

Keep in mind that some of these products I've announced CAN be combined. For instance, you can easily implement SnappMap or SnappViews or SnappWidgets, even SnappLinks in conjunction with the templates above.

The product pages will be up this weekend with pricing and more FAQ information -- and if you haven't seen the previously announced product pages, have a look at http://www.snapps.com today.

One (maybe two!) more announcements to come...keep an eye out!

P.S. A big thanks for the 118,000 downloads of the free templates and code over the years! It'll still be there...

Posted by Rob Novak At 1:11 PM Location SNAPPS Glactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (2)

09/09/2011

The Most Important Thing I've Written In My Life

Category Community

Blog post number Five Hundred Ninety-three.

This is it. It's also the most important thing I've ever written, anywhere, ever. Papers, presentations, proposals, reports, white papers, books, magazine articles, schoolwork, emails, blogs. Ever.

Fair warning, I'm going to ask you for something. Well, two things.

This is an awareness post, and a call to our community (and others to which I belong, I'll be cross-posting) for some assistance for one of our own.

Many of you know Troy Reimer, SNAPPS senior developer for 9 years, and one of my former instructors. Troy has been a quietly prolific developer (quietly as in, not as much on the social network as on the work), has been a speaker at Lotusphere for 9 years, of course Collaboration University, and various LUGs. He was co-creator of the Quickr Templates, created the JSONreader and JSONwriter open source projects, and has helped countless clients solve some of the most challenging problems and development tasks. Troy's contributions to the community - ours, his, his church, and more - are enormous, and (unlike me) he does not seek the glory, marketing value, or attention. He just gives.

Troy and his wife Emily are the proud parents of four beautiful, vibrant, active children. They've played at my house at Christmas parties, I've visited them at their home, and Troy is late if he leaves at 5:01 during the week to see his kids. He had the two older boys when he started at SNAPPS (of course I'd already known him since before they were born), and then in a twist of fate Emily was pregnant just as they were finalizing an adoption! So they decided to go ahead and adopt young Lucy from China and had young Matthew. That was eight years ago.

Matthew in particular enjoys swimming and is a member of the Ad Astra Area Aquatics swim team in Lawrence, Kansas. He's a bright, energetic boy who has healthy sibling rivalries, a disdain for all the appropriate foods we're supposed to hate as kids, and is particularly happy when daddy gets home from work.

In the times he has been at my home, Matthew has been a dynamo. At SNAPPS Christmas dinners when we have 13 kids in the house, he has always seemed to lead one charge or another up and down the stairs!

On February 5, Matthew had the flu. And through the night, it kept getting worse.

Only it wasn't the flu.

It was every parent's nightmare.

Matthew was eventually diagnosed with Childhood X-Linked Adrenoleukodystrophy, or "X-ALD" for short. Here's a short excerpt about the condition:

Dr. Gerald Raymond, director of neurogenetics at Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, said the classic childhood form of the disease occurs between ages 4 and 10. It’s the most severe and affects only boys. Symptoms may include visual loss, learning disabilities, seizures, deafness, fatigue and progressive dementia. The most common are behavioral changes such as abnormal withdrawal or poor school performance.

“There often is a rapid deterioration and often they are left in a vegetative state or die within a year or two years after disease onset,” he said.

There is no cure, but there are limited therapies including a bone marrow transplant, gene therapy and Lorenzo’s oil. Augusto and Michaela Odone developed the oil after their son, Lorenzo, was diagnosed with the disease in 1984. Their story was depicted in the movie, Lorenzo's Oil.

Raymond said there is significant risk with a transplant, and gene therapy is only being done in Paris and on a research basis.

The entire article in the Lawrence Journal-World can be found here.

If any hope can be found in the face of such news, it was that (after a couple months of research and applications and the ferociousness of parental love) Matthew qualified for experimental study and treatment at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore. His MRI was promising, he was still seven years old at the time (barely) and hadn't shown the neurological symptoms -- yet. So in July, Troy packed up his family and went to Baltimore for a week. And they will be doing this at least until Matthew is 13.

Matthew will quite likely require a bone marrow transplant in the future. Baltimore is the new "vacation spot" for the Reimers, if you can call it that. Experimental treatments, specialists, and a very special diet are now lifelong experiences for Matthew and his family. And the expense - beyond insurance - is and will be adding up for years.

So to my requests.

First, Matthew is registered with a bone marrow registry at www.marrow.org and the Reimers, I and all our friends encourage you to register yourself and your family as donors. You must live in the U.S. or Puerto Rico to do this, be in good health, make a commitment to donate if someone needs it, and there is an optional financial donation. Optional. They will send you a kit, you swab your cheek, and send it back. That's all there is to it.

Second, if you have the means, even if it's just a little, please consider donating through PayPal to Matthew's medical expense fund. Defraying these mounting costs will help significantly over the years as all of the unexpected but absolutely critical trips, physicians and treatments are undertaken by Matthew and his family. It's very simple, just visit PayPal.com, click "Send Money" (Family and Friends), choose an amount and payment method, and in the "To" email address type "miraclematt@reimerfamily.org" . Alternatively, I have pasted a preconfigured PayPal donation button below. Just click. This button will have a permanent place on the right very soon.

Thank you for reading.

-Rob Novak

Posted by Rob Novak At 10:45 AM Location SNAPPS Glactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (11)

09/07/2011

From SNAPPS Labs: Introducing SnappWidgets for IBM Lotus Quickr

Category Quickr
With the introduction of Quickr 8.5 came a massive change in architecture, implementing (as in other IBM products) a more current version of the Dojo JavaScript library. Not *the* most current, but a quite serviceable version 1.4.3. This opened up Quickr Domino for a new level of customization - no more hacking forms and subforms, susceptible to corruption and upgrade blockages. By extending Quickr with Dojo widgets (called "dijit"), one can accomplish what used to take a large effort faster, and do some previously "almost impossible" things like, say, a sitemap.

Well with more than a year of practice under our belts (and a few extra years of just plain Dojo), we're releasing some of the more helpful and useful widgets we've written as SnappWidgets^TM, and will keep adding to the collection as we continue. To start off, though, we'll bring out two widgets that have been some real productivity boosters.

Our attachment organizer SnappWidget adds sorting capabilities to the attachments area of Quickr pages, in addition to exposing the date of the attachment (hidden by default). This is quite useful when you have pages with date-sensitive files attached and need to find just one. Here's a screenshot of this widget:

A picture named M2

Our in-line PDF SnappWidget lets you preview PDFs using the Adobe reader plugin instead of the PDF-to-HTML conversion that can lose a lot of fidelity and print capabilities. By keeping the experience in-line, it's easier for end users to view, print, save, and work with PDF files. I detailed this widget's construction and some of the code in an earlier blog post. Now that it's a product, we're including the secondary script (and of course, support). Here's a look at this one:

What's next? We're working on a variation of the in-line PDF one with Quicktime movies at the moment, and other embedding options are on the horizon. After that, you let me know...we've written a couple dozen of these -- most of them more complex or tailored to a very specific need. Whether it's custom development just for you or something generic enough to benefit everyone, we're happy to entertain all ideas. That earlier blog post might give you some ideas. I can say we're working with another well-known partner on a joint product that will be quite a hit for all Quickr shops. More on that soon...and another announcement tomorrow.

By the way, all the previous product announcements now have pages on the website, so feel free to browse www.SNAPPS.com...see you tomorrow.

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:29 PM Location SNAPPS Glactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

09/06/2011

From SNAPPS Labs: Introducing SnappLinks for XPages, Quickr and (soon) Connections

Category XPages Quickr Connections
IBM has made a concerted effort in the past few years to standardize a few things - APIs, programming models, and toolkits to name a few. One of the choices IBM made in this effort was the adoption across several products of the CKEditor rich text editor. It's part of XPages, Quickr, and Connections, and we can expect to see it cropping up in web interfaces to other IBM products in the months and years to come. It's a pretty darn good editor, with lots of rich text options and really quite good copy/paste fidelity -- one of the hardest things to get right and a big complaint of other editors such as ActiveX controls, Dojo's editor, and more.

As is the case with some of the other editors, CKEditor can be extended, adding buttons and features. This little known and hardly documented fact (outside the PHP community) is at the heart of today's announcement.

You've heard IBM say "Get Social. Do Business." Well now you can, in a way that is natural and comfortable for your user community.

SnappLinks^TM for IBM Domino XPages, IBM Lotus Quickr and (soon) IBM Connections is the first social link plug-in for the CKEditor embedded in all these products. With SnappLinks, you can use your editor -- in your own applications with XPages or with IBM products -- to create and share the public social experience across Intranets, on the web with suppliers, and in teams. SnappLinks is integrated directly into the editor and lets you connect to several social (and useful!) public networks:

--Twitter*
--Facebook
--YouTube*
--Google Maps*
--LinkedIn*
--Tungle
--Wikipedia

*In-line APIs allow us to keep users on the page!

All these plus a nice email link generator allows your Domino applications, Quickr, and Connections to shine -- and your users to be more "social!"

Here's a screenshot of SnappLinks embedded right into the editor:
A picture named M2

And an example of a page that's been created using SnappLinks...In this case the mapping component has just been clicked:

A picture named M3

Our product page is on the way up, but feel free to contact me (through any social network!) for more information.

Cheers!

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:14 PM Location SNAPPS Glactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (3)

08/30/2011

From SNAPPS Labs: Introducing SnappMap Sitemap for IBM Lotus Quickr

Category Quickr
Back in the old QuickPlace days, SNAPPS had a great little product called AnyPlace Sitemap. It was an innovation in navigation, and we sold quite a few in a couple years. Then came Quickr in 2007, and without time to re-build and market, I decided to mothball the product and put it in the "free" category. It had a bit of heft and clunkiness, as it was implemented the only way possible at the time, as a form plus a document with options. But it was popular, as it could shorten end users' time navigating a place by minutes per day. Start doing math, and in one year a company with 20,000 users was saving hundreds of hours each month.

Now I'm pleased to announce that SnappMap^TM Sitemap for IBM Lotus Quickr has been completely re-factored and renamed, and is now available as a widget component without the baggage of forms, documents, or old Dojo code. What does this mean? One server-wide installation, no maintenance of places, no tie to a template, and your users will have a fast and easy way to securely navigate their places.

With an Explorer-like interface, SnappMap^TM expands and collapses Rooms, Folders (even the new secured folders), Libraries, Forums and Calendars. It's quite easy to drill down several rooms in a matter of seconds. Click on any resource, and the parent window goes straight there. No more "crawling" the site!

A picture named M2

SnappMap^TM is available immediately (product page publishing soon) for a low cost per user...be sure to check back for more of the SNAPPS Treasure Chest over the coming days!

Posted by Rob Novak At 2:22 PM Location SNAPPS Glactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (0)

08/25/2011

From SNAPPS Labs: Introducing SnappViews for IBM Lotus Quickr

Category Quickr
IBM Lotus Quickr has folders and a fairly good way of presenting them. Domino has views as well, which are quite customizable and have evolved over 20 years. Domino developers with Ninja skills have made views do things you never could imagine (believe me, I know...we did an entire Great Code Giveaway on it in 2007). But those views, our precious views, were not meant to be consumed by Quickr for Domino. Nope, in fact, you're really not supposed to mess with the back end databases in Quickr. Heck, even the folks at SNAPPS have told you that for 12 years.

Until now.

Introducing SnappViews^TM for IBM Lotus Quickr, a breakthrough in data presentation and layout. You may have seen glimpses of this technology in our Quickr Templates for Quickr 8.0-8.2. Now with new improved versions for 8.2 and an all-new 8.5x version, we are releasing SnappViews into the wild.

What are they? Basically a ton of JavaScript that separates structure, data and -- with some imagination -- even security and functionality from your business process, while putting "development" in the hands of technical (and not so technical) business users. Using a SnappView, you can easily surface data the way you want it, without the restrictions of Quickr's folders, in many ways:

--Build your own view and choose the columns to display
--Create a categorized view
--Bring in a view from another Quickr place
--Bring in a view from another Notes database (web-enabled or not!)
--Bring in relational or other data using DECS or LEI with Domino
--Choose columns to be clickable, columns to hide, columns to use as tooltips for other columns
--Choose what columns to show to what security level of users (try that in a regular view...)
--Decide how wide each column should be relative to the others
--Use pass-through HTML in your views to create checkboxes, images, and more (all you know how to do with views...)

With some imagination (or, perhaps, some help from some wonderful people who really know how they work...hint), you can build SnappViews that handle multi-document workflows, approval structures, custom security implementations, and more.

Watch in the next few days as we assemble screenshots and a video for the corporate website illustrating how flexible and powerful this method of data presentation can be for your collaboration spaces...! I'll have a follow-up entry pointing to these resources, graphics, and pricing soon...

Posted by Rob Novak At 3:45 PM Location SNAPPS Glactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (4)

08/24/2011

From SNAPPS Labs: Introducing TrashMan for IBM Lotus Quickr

Category Quickr
Here folks is the first of SNAPPS' ten product announcements coming fast and furious over the next two weeks!

The Trash feature added in Lotus Quickr 8.5 (detailed here) is a convenient way to remove unwanted or obsolete files from places and rooms with a "safety net" to avoid unintentional deletion. But unless manually deleted by someone with the proper authority, these files, folders, lists, attachments and more will remain in the Trash forever, getting backed up to tape, slowing down indexing, and eventually...impacting performance. Place managers aren't reminded there is trash to remove, and they may not even know. The larger the environment, the greater a problem this can become.

SNAPPS TrashMan^TM for Lotus Quickr adds automated deletion capabilities to the Trash, so it behaves more like the trash feature in e-mail systems. After a configurable number of days, Trash is emptied automatically.

It's a simple concept really, implemented in every major e-mail client. We've made TrashMan "smart" as well -- it already knows which places and rooms *have* Trash, so there's no unnecessary checking going on. We've already deployed the technology in environments comprising 3200 places and 25,000 rooms!

For more about SNAPPS TrashMan for Lotus Quickr, please visit the SNAPPS website -- here's a direct link to the product page.

Keep an eye out, too, as more products for Quickr, Domino, Connections and more are coming in the days ahead!

Posted by Rob Novak At 2:32 PM Location SNAPPS Glactic Headquarters | Permalink | Comments (1)