I am pleased to announce that Derek Punaro has been promoted to IT Information Architect, a new job title created for the Sharewaves07 Collaboration Support team. Derek’s strong technical and business analytical skills make him an excellent fit for this position. In this role Derek continues to report to me.

Derek is instrumental in the continued success of our Sharewaves07 application. He is responsible for designing content and document management solutions. He works closely with business clients to gather requirements, design navigation hierarchies, metadata structures and user experience designs. He serves as a champion to promote the use of Praxair’s standard document and content management tools across the enterprise. And he assists in the development and delivery of training classes and self-study materials.

Starting with Praxair’s IT organization in January 2000, Derek began as an original member of Praxair’s first eCommerce project. Since then, he has been involved in many web based IT projects, including Airwaves and QuickPlace. Derek was a key participant in the SharePoint Document Management Project. He has been a member of the Collaboration Support Center since July, 2007.

Derek holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Information Technology from Rochester Institute of Technology. He is an IBM certified Application Developer and has expertise in a multitude of web technologies.

We look forward to Derek’s continued contributions to ITS. Please join me in congratulating Derek on his achievement.

It’s interesting for me, after spending 6 years working with Lotus Notes/Domino to now be involved largely with Microsoft technologies. It really opens your eyes to seeing what’s hype and what’s substance. But that’s a whole series of other blog posts there.

Today, however, I launched something that’s as close to cutting edge as we get at Praxair – an RSS feed for Praxair.com.

Many of you I’m sure don’t know what RSS is, or how it’s useful. I know this because many people in IT don’t know what RSS is, or how it’s useful. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a different way for websites to distribute their content, and more importantly a different way for you to consume it.

Bloggers and blog readers will love this as soon as they start using it. Almost all blogging software automatically creates an RSS feed for a blog’s content. Most bloggers not only write, but read a large number of blogs. Having a huge list of bookmarks to click through and check to see if there’s anything new isn’t a very efficient way to keep track of your favorite sites. This is where RSS helps out. When you subscribe, or add a feed to your RSS reader, it keeps track of what articles you’ve read and which ones you haven’t. Depending on your reader, you can click a button or even schedule it to automatically go and check all of the feeds you’re subscribed to for new content. This makes it very easy and very quick to see if any of your favorite bloggers have posted anything new.

I use the Sage RSS Reader plugin for Firefox. This enables me to never have to leave my browser. Firefox’s built-in Live Bookmarks feature is also a way of viewing RSS feeds. Internet Explorer 7 provides the capability to subscribe and manage feeds in the browser as well. Alternatively, there are several websites that will let you keep track of feeds, such as Bloglines or even the My Yahoo portal. Using Sage, I easily track about 75 different websites. If you use multiple computers, you can easily export and import your feed list, or choose to use one of the web hosted services.

For the Lotus geeks out there, for Praxair.com I implemented an agent to dynamically create the feed. For now, we’re only supporting one feed, but the way the agent is constructed I can dynamically pass in the name of a view and a feed will automatically be rendered for the documents in that view. The feed title is also passed in, but the number of documents in the feed (at this point) is set in the agent. For now, we’re only providing excerpts of articles since the content is stored in Rich Text and rendered dynamically by Domino. We’re looking to provide the full HTML of the articles in the future, which makes for better usability for mobile devices and low-bandwidth connections.

It’s pretty exciting for me to be able to 1. work on something fairly close to the cutting edge, and 2. actually have something that I can show people outside of Praxair. So I did.

My supervisor is on vacation this week, so it is a particularly good time to NOT cause any major catastrophes. As I eased into the morning, I needed to take a glance at our agent log database, where I noticed that a particular agent was still logging quite verbosely, and bits of information that the rest of the world probably shouldn’t see. I checked the ACL (that’s Access Control List, for you non-Lotus geeks) and noticed that by default, everyone could look at the database. Figuring that improving security was a good way to start off the week, I locked that db down so only the good guys had access to it.

A short time later, someone noticed a problem connecting to our job posting system, which had changes made to it on Friday. Since that’s primarily my supervisor’s area of responsibility, he was already notified and on the phone, not particularly happy to be in a conference call on a Monday morning of his first day off. This particular system is a third-party site which we provide single-sign on to via an agent, a form, a servlet, and some key info from the address book, so it’s a bit complex. Adding to that complexity was the fact that it was working for some of us, and not for others. Logically, we first checked the things that changed last week, then checked for differences between the servers in our cluster, then differences in the physical locations of the people having the issue, then on to the things we didn’t change, all the while trying to understand why the agent, which hasn’t changed since January, was suddenly spewing cryptic “Object variable not set” errors to the server console.

You know that sinking feeling you get when all of a sudden you realize the problem… and it’s your fault? Yeah. Me too. Turns out this particular agent ran with the permissions of the individual who clicked the link. This agent also needed to get a handle to the log database in case something went wrong so it could log it. Turns out that object variable that wasn’t set was due to the fact that nobody (except us developers) had access to the log database anymore. One small step for security, one giant leap backwards for my ego.

Luckily, my troubleshooting prowess only needed an hour to nail down the issue (how’s that for positive spin?) and the world was right once again. Still feels more like the agony of defeat, though.

So, while at Lotusphere this year, I talked to a developer in one of the labs about suggestions on rewriting it. He said that doing a comparison between the org chart document and their person document would be a lot faster than wiping the whole thing out and rebuilding it. So I put that project on my to-do list and it promptly got buried by a number of other things.

Well, last week the old org chart agent started failing more frequently, and we were tossing around some stopgap measures to fix it, when I decided that it wasn’t worth spending any more time on the old bastard and I was going to rewrite it. I struggled a bit with some of the logic to try and capture all the possible changes, but after three days of reprogramming and testing, my sinner agent has been reformed! Now, the initial building still takes about 2.5 – 3 hours, but the daily updates only take between 15 – 30 minutes! And since the database isn’t being wiped out every time, you can continue to use the org chart while updates are being made.

When I told my customer that the agent was born-again, their response was, “Hallelujah!”

I’ve been to Lotusphere in Orlando three times, and I’ve never seen that kind of advertising. Seems like something more out of SEMA than Big Blue.

This causes problems for a lot of companies’ applications, including some of the Lotus products I support. Generally, I’d just chalk it up to another reason to use Firefox instead of IE, but that doesn’t fly in our corporate environment where IE is standard software and Firefox isn’t technically allowed. And while I can modify any code that I’ve written that uses this method, I can’t fix code that’s rendered by third-party software packages. We’re stuck waiting for a patch, and then waiting for someone to be able to install it, test it, and then roll it out. Depending on the vendor, the required change, and the potential impact of the changes, this process could take anywhere from a day to next century. And the people who suffer are the end users and the poor helpdesk analysts.

We need to get intellectual property laws and what can and can’t be patented straightened out in this country. How many more Amazon 1-click ordering process, NTP’s Blackberry poaching, and now this Eolas making-life-harder-for-you patents do we really need? There’s always going to be a grey area between what constitutes intellectual property and what’s just logical, but that bar is set way too low at the moment. We need to stop rewarding companies that rush to be the first to file a patent so they can sue everyone else (like Amazon) or buy patents to sue existing technology companies (like NTP). There are enough real barriers that stand in the way of progress. We don’t need to construct artificial ones.

And even with it being in operation just a couple days, I already have ideas for improving my automated tasks. For instance, I have an agent that will email me if the person who originally requested a place is no longer in the address book. The idea is that I will then investigate to see if there are any other managers I can assign to deal with renewals, or whether the place should be archived and removed from the system. Well, since the place catalog lists all the managers of the place, I should just be able to update the document in my request database with a different manager and not bother me at all, unless there are no other managers. Cool idea, huh?

I also got a bit of a surprise to find out that even though my testing showed otherwise, a lot of the existing places got the updates to the theme that I put in the placetypes. There must have been some modifications to the theme in the test place I was using that caused it to not get the updated theme. That’s kind of good, but might slightly surprise some people.

Looks like I’ll be spending tomorrow pasting this agent into each place, running it, and hitting delete. About 250 times. I’m very much open to better suggestions!

But no longer! This is the weekend where it’s finally going to happen. I’ve got two new servers. I’ve got a Notes Admin helping out. I’ve got a LAN support contact making the necessary DNS change. And I’ve got a three day weekend that will be completely blown by me sitting in front of the damn computer for two-thirds of it watching, waiting, and testing. Rejoice!

People are quick to criticize things of which they have little to no firsthand knowledge.

I can’t even begin to count the number of opinions and debates I’ve read, geek or non, that I’ve felt that way about.

Regardless, here’s my take on geek week:

Non-techy stuff:

1. Jason Alexander was my favorite opening session speaker of the three I’ve seen (Patrick Stewart and Ben Stein being the other two). His views on how technology has influenced Hollywood were interesting and tied into the conference. Plus, he’s funny.
2. Made a new friend (who happens to be a blogger) and kept running into him over and over again throughout the conference, which is pretty amazing when you consider that there are 6000 people there. Chris deserves a lot of credit for organizing the JamFest Wiki, which was then promptly ignored when the amps were fired up.
3. I said this in my other post, but I’ll repeat it here. JamFest was cool, but a little more organization can help it flow better. Standing “backstage” I heard several comments about musicians that wanted to get up and play, but didn’t feel comfortable just butting in. I ran open mic nights for a few years in college and learned there that sign up sheets are a necessity.
4. Welcome reception was great as always. Poker tables were cool!
5. I only got up for one 7am BoF session, but I was extremely appreciative of the fact there was coffee and doughnuts there, since I never would have made breakfast that morning.
6. I never did find the CLP lounge.

Techy stuff:

1. I was surprised that Notes/Domino “Next” or Hannover or whatever you want to call it was going to get us so close to the convergence of the Notes and Workplace product streams. I was a bit underwhelmed by what I saw available in ND7, but Hannover looks hella cool!
2. The labs were awesome, as always. Having direct access to the developers and gurus of the various products and the ability to ask them questions is one of the main benefits of Lotusphere to me. Sometimes, I’d walk into one of the labs with no question in mind, and as soon as I’d start talking to someone, they’d help pull a question out of the back of my brain.
3. XML, DXL, AJAX, RSS – I was glad to see so much focus on these. These are today’s technologies and as a developer, I got to see a lot about how to implement and make better use of these in our environment.
4. QuickPlace Next is going to rock! Seeing actual working demos of the future technology that’s going to be integrated into it gave me a lot of renewed hope. I was disappointed and a bit worried that there were so few sessions on QuickPlace, but after seeing what’s coming I have no more fears. Hats off to the QuickPlace team for staying on the leading edge of innovation!
5. I sat in on the BoF session on search (BOF204) and was a bit disappointed that there appears to be little to no innovation on the search front. Ground control to IBM – domain search may have worked fine in 1998, but you need to put some renewed emphasis on improving search. Tweaking the indexer and adding new attachment filters doesn’t cut it for companies like mine that has an intranet of over 100 databases. Domain search needs to be more customizeable, needs the ability to control what’s bubbled up to the top of the list based on the search term entered, and needs more control over how relevancy is calculated. Google has raised the bar. At least make an effort to reach for it.
6. WiFi coverage was outstanding. If you could please figure out wireless power, then I could use my laptop for more than two sessions.
7. The session technical level needs to be added to the pocket guide. I really don’t like walking out of sessions, but sometimes the description of a session is more enticing than the actual content.
8. All star presenters: Jaime Magee/Kevin Marshall and Bill Buchan/Paul Mooney! Too many sessions were just too dry and monotone. These two pairs had outstanding rapport with each other and the audience, and informative sessions as well! As for the snoozers… you’ll know who they are from the session evals.

Overall, another great conference. Looking forward to the next one!

This was my third trip to Lotusphere, having previously gone in 2002 and 2004. There’s always a great kickoff party Sunday night with tons of free food, drinks, music, and even [fake money] gambling this year! JamFest was a new addition this year, which I was able to be a part of (see link for photo). It was pretty cool, but it definitely has room for improvement. A few notes to the organizers next year – first, believe it or not… music can be enjoyed at levels beneath 135 decibels. Volume is no substitute for talent. Second, go with the sign-up sheet method so that we get more variety than “every tune that follows a 12-bar blues pattern.” I know there were some talented musicians out there that didn’t get much of a chance to play because of the format. If you leave something like that open-ended, some people are always going to get more than their fair share of stage time. On the plus side, overall I thought the talent level was pretty good and it did keep everyone up and dancing the whole night. I missed the second night due to a dinner with coworkers and Amanda flying in.

Post conference, we jammed as much as possible into a 2.5 day vacation as possible, including hitting all four Disney parks, Downtown Disney, and Pleasure Island. And that was with me hitting an early conference session Thursday morning and then switching hotels before heading off to the Magic Kingdom. Amanda introduced me to my new favorite Disney restaurant – Boma in the Animal Kingdom Lodge, I finally convinced her to ride BOTH Space Mountain and the Tower of Terror, and we had a blast at Pleasure Island before collapsing back at the room around 1:30am and needing to catch the bus back to the airport at 8:00am today.

I’ll have a more detailed geeky Lotusphere wrapup later in the week and will be back to normal blogging sometime shortly as well. Have a magical day!

It’s Lotusphere week, and this year’s keynote speaker did not hail from the Star Trek universe, moreso from the pop culture universe – Seinfeld’s own Jason Alexander. Honestly, I thought he was a much better speaker than Patrick Stewart. Of course, for a crowd of 6000 geeks, humor trumps Shakespeare every time.

What is Lotusphere exactly? It’s IBM’s annual conference showcasing the Lotus product line – Notes, Domino, Workplace, Sametime, QuickPlace, as well as the other technologies that tie into them, such as Websphere. This is the realm that I work in on a daily basis. I’m an IBM Certified Applications Developer for Notes/Domino 5/6/6.5. I’m one of Praxair’s key developers for www.praxair.com as well as our Global sites, Intranet, and collaboration tools. But enough about me.

In an effort to expand readership of Punaro.com, I’m going to start blogging a little more in depth about technology and the work I do. Hell, I spend a third of my life doing it, so why not. I’ll always make an attempt to try and ground the geek-speak into something the non-techies can understand, but feel free to tone-out the geek content if they’re not for you. Amanda does all the time.