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My friend Giuseppe Grasso of Dominopoint.it fame just created an interesting post in the OpenNTF forum.
Giuseppe accomplished the task of designing a rollover "stylish" style for Open NTF and has some good points on the OpenNTF look.
Maybe it's a worth read, go check how nicer look Giusppe created.
Comments (3)
Daniele Vistalli March 20th, 2010 12:45:21 PM
Ciao a tutti, sono a Lotusphere 2010 e stò seguendo, anche per voi la conferenza.
Per chi fosse interessato a una prospettiva "business" stò scrivendo una serie di post sul blog di Factor-y S.r.l. (la mia azienda).
Buona lettura
da Lotusphere
Daniele Vistalli.
Comments (0)
Daniele Vistalli January 17th, 2010 05:34:12 PM
On Thursday November 13 2009 the Italian Lotus Community gathered once again under the Dominopoint.it flag.
The venue this year was located in the Italian IBM headquarters. Many were worried about "rules" that could be imposed on us presenters but this actually didn't happen. We got complete freedom of "expression" and nobody complained about anything.
This year (for the third time) the number of attendees increased. If you check out the conference website (http://day3.dominopoint.it) you'll see that 571 people registerd.
Unofficial information confirms that more than 400 people faced up and stayed all day long at the event. I'm looking forward to official numbers soon this week. This is an awesome number for an european Lotus only event. If you also consider that being held in italian as a spoken language our target was "limited" this is ultra-awesome... more than 400 people attended from Italy only with a few coming from abroad and two international speakers (more later) participating in the event.
I was participating with a session about using Lotus products in Web 2.0 mashups. I'm looking forward to extend an tranlsate my presentation next week and share it on slideshare. I'll post an update when it's ready.
Also I was guest of Lotus' own presentation on Lotus Connections 2.5. Elena Sangalli (Lotus Technical Presale) held a great presentation and LIVE DEMO (the most risky thing you can do at an event) about all the integrations and plugins that Lotus Connections 2.5 offers to users out of the box. I completed the session with a show about how you can "customized & extend" Lotus Connections using APIs and extension points (eg. using Domino 8.5.1 iWidgets to extend the connections' homepage).
Finally ... the two speaker's dinner were great. The first with all the speakers and the second with those who could affort to stay in Milan after the event.
During the second dinner we've had the honor to have with us once again Franziska Tanner and Mary Beth Raven our two international speakers !!!
My favourite quote from Mary Beth twitter is:
" ... #Lotusknows that #dominopointday has the best free lunch
of any LUG ever! Stuff, fried olives- yum! ..."
The best italian technology: GREAT FOOD
Thanks to everybody for the time spent preparing for Dominopoint Day, for the time spent with the audience...
See you soon (next stop is LotusSphere) and thank you again.
Comments (3)
Daniele Vistalli November 15th, 2009 01:31:20 PM
Il DP Day 3 si stà avvicinando, la call for session è aperta e come al solito devo decidere cosa proporre alla selezione.
Ho fatto una breve lista degli argomenti che potrei preparare, che ne dite, c'è qualcosa che interessa più del resto ?
Commentate e fatemi sapere.
Possibili sessioni per il DPDay III
- Development
- Facciamoli a pezzi !!! I dati (con Lotus Mashups) - Integrazioni con Domino
- XPages a 360° (e oltre) - Web & Client 8.5.1
- Composite applications - Portal edition
- Composite applications - Lotus Notes Edition
- Admin
- Extreme Web Experience for domino - Ottenere un'infrastruttura web eccezionale con i prodotti lotus (Domino e WebSphere). (Performance, SSO, HTTPS, Reverse proxy, Logging)
- Usare le XPages con Domino 8, 7, 6, 5, 4... un ambiente ibrido per chi ancora non vuole/può migrare alla 8.5 ma vorrebbe le XPages
- Prodotti
- Sametime Conferencing 8.5 - Extreme conferencing
- Ri-Connessi (Lotus Connections 2.5)
Io sono abbastanza orientato verso Lotus Connections 2.5 (che esce il 28 agosto) o Mashups, però non mi dispiacerebbe un pò di feedback sugli altri titoli.
A presto,
Daniele
Comments (6)
Daniele Vistalli August 22nd, 2009 02:21:09 PM
I've not posted lately because I'm preparing something new that's changing my professional life.
Apart from this I've been following everything in the Lotus BlogoSphere and in particular the latest Lotus annoucements in the marketing initiatives.
I'm hoping... finally Lotus may get a real marketing plan. In my experience IBM/Lotus marketing has been inefficent or useless providing the market with messages that were "very IBM" and cryptic for the rest of the world.
I'm hoping... it appears Lotus wants to change this but I remember a long list attempt with no results
I'm hoping... Lotus has the most complete product-set around for collaboration but I keep listening to customers saying... "it seems IBM don't want to sell us..." (it's not a rant this is what customers tell me everyday).
So what I'd like to see happen (mine is mostly an Italian focused experience):
- Stop feeding useless "channel magazines" that are only of interest to vendors/distributors but that are useless to CIO/CEO and often drain marketing funds... (I think channel magazines are a place where everybody attempt to look better with almost no value for the readers)
- Start being aggressive on IT magazines with highest reading public. Maybe even magazines that are not (by nature) focused at Enterprises but to small medium business.
- Publish understandable and complete whitepapers with best practices on TCO reduction and product comparison (IBM vs Microsoft vs OpenSource).
- Engage universities and education institutes. Microsoft is doing this all the time.. IBM is not. Have partners do this for you. Consider this as the greatest investment you can do. I learned that universities love OpenSource but also that people in univesities loves to (and need to) learn from the real world. Nothing better than having IBM go there and explain the how and why of enterprise software and what's the difference...
- I've been following the DB2 on Campus initiative... that's great
I'm sure the guys over at LotusKnows have far more input thant these few lines... but believe me ... there's a tremendous amount of work Lotus needs to do to get back to earlier acceptance and presence.
Then, there's the way IBM sells/educate the market... but that's a completely different story ... ;)
Finally a couple of "Lotus Knows ..." messages....
- Lotus Knows you can't exchange a Microsoft mail system for a real Collaboration Platform
- Lotus Knows you can't exchange a system that allows upgrades with an Install&Migrate product and still keep your TCO low. (Domino upgrades, Exchange doesn't)
Other, for fun
- Lotus Knows you can't exchange a Ferris survey/report with a report that really addresses your TCO (check it out)
- Lotus Knows you can't exchange a Julia White post with something that doesn't need "correction" (check it out)
Comments (0)
Daniele Vistalli August 9th, 2009 08:45:40 AM
In the last couple of weeks I've been very quiet in my blog.
Outside my blog a lot is going on. I'm getting engaged in new projects, participating to IBM events around WebSphere Portal and of course preparing to unveil the experimental lab I begun to build on Amazon EC2 some week ago.
While preparing the new portal I faced a problem... Out of the box the themes provided by IBM with WebSphere Portal are "fair" but not good enough to have people (read customers) say "WOW I want that".
Over time IBM polished up the product and created some "not so bad" themes but today people tend to chose a product also for it's look, not just for the functionality. This means that if we want to "win" we've to show customers a good design that's functional and very pleasant to the user's eyes.
Since I'm not a designer and I wanted something "fast" I looked up in the internet and found a number of great resources you can use when you feel the need for something that's both nice to see and ready to use.
I found these sites, take a look and start improving your web application/blogs/sites experience for users:
- Open Source Web Design (http://www.oswd.org/)
- Open Web Design (http://www.openwebdesign.org/)
- Open Design Community (http://www.opendesigns.org/)
- Free Layouts (http://www.freelayouts.com/)
Just by browsing here you'll find a number of high quality designs that you can take and use for personal or commercial use.
After browsing two or three hundreds of themes I actually selected the Indigo theme for my next work (maybe I'll update my blog too)
I'll be soon implementing it on WebSphere Portal and prepare for the next step.
Finally I also bought Balsamiq Mockups, a great tool I learned about trough Chris Sparshoot's blog. It costs 75 $ but it pays itself in a few days if designing applications/websites is part of your work.
Here are the first studies for the UI of the new Portal:
Finally since I'm also working on an iGoogle like theme for WebSphere portal I also designed a mockup for it using the same tool. It's amazing how "visualizing" things improves the design work. (I first learned about this at Chris Blatnik sessions, but doing it for real is another story)
And here's the iGoggle UI expressed as a mockup:
Comments (2)
Daniele Vistalli March 8th, 2009 07:29:13 PM
Just a couple of weeks ago I started my study of cloud computing infrastructure. After IBM announced the availbilty of the new WebSphere Portal AMI on Amazon EC2 I couldn't wait to test the new toy so I got one.
My EC2 instance has been running for some days now
I can tell that as of today it costed to me just 29,66 $ for uninterrupted runtime plus some experiment (I created a temporary clone to test snapshots and volumes but kept them running just for a couple of hours).
This means that so far I've been exploiting this setup for as little as 2.5 $ / day (everything included, storage, power, network bandwidth).
Also I can tell I'm using the "small" instance that offers:
- 1,7 Gb of memory
- 160 Gb local storage (that gets destroy if the instance is terminated)
- 6 Gb of permanent EBS (elastic block space) storage that holds my db2 and websphere portal profile.
This is impressive, isn't it ?
But let's get technical.
I've been doing some experiment here's what I found out that may help you in your testing or may help the IBM team to improve the AMI.
AMI Installation process
At the first startup of the AMI everything works perfectly as described in the PDF guide IBM prepared for the offering.
The process is simple, straightforward and based on a SLES autoyast wizard:
1. Choose your root password
2. Choose your virtuser password (the default portal/was administrator for the AMI, stored in a file based WAS user registry)
3. Select which storage option you want (use local/non persistent storage or attach a new or existing EBS volume)
4. Wait for the "portal localization process" to complete the update for was/instance files
All of this takes at most 40 minutes, then you're ready.
So far everything is good
WebSphere Portal Running in development mode brings you "troubles"
Since the release of WPS 6.1 you can run a task (enable-develop-mode-startup-performance ) to enable portal startup to be faster for development.
My experience is that a list of applications that SHOULD be running (ajax proxy config, feed searchlist etc) are disabled and cannot be lazy-started by the portal.
I'm wokring to define a "better" inclusion/exclusion list that will make the portal fully functional even in development mode.
The solution at this time is either to disable fast startupt, to manally enable needed components in the was console or to start all the apps from the console after ther portal started.
IBM HTTP Server filesystem: could be moved to the "persistent storage"
The AMI uses a /mnt/portalfs directory to store all the content that could be made persistent across instance launch (instance creation).
At this time only the wp_profile and db2inst1 database directory are brought to this filesystem.
I would suggest (and I've done it on my image) to also move IBM HTTP Server directories (conf / htdocs) to this filesystem replacing the original directories with symbolic links.
This is allowing me to preserve custom configurations at HTTP server level (let's say ... changes in httpd.conf, static files in htdocs etc.)
I suppose such a "trick" can also help with WAS Plugin files.
I'll work a bit more around this.
The "Site Wizard", power to the users (but with care)
I've been playing around with the site wizard since it's release just after portal 6.1 has been made available.
For those who don't know it... the site wizard allows users to create their very own "virtual portals" without need of intervention from the IT / Portal staff.
This is going to be a great feature at some point but a few things to think about emerged during my tests.
The provided "templates" that are available in Site Wizard allow users to create basic portals with or without WCM functionality.
The process is pretty straightforward and it's based to a new API which allows the site wizard portlet to:
- Create a virtual portal using an XMLAccess file
- Eventually import WCM libraries to support the new virtual portal
- Setup groups and users for access control of the new site
- Offer the user a link to visit the new portal.
(there's a lot more but it would take a full article).
What I found out (and that's important for your "normal" portals too) is that if you share a "concrete" portlet in multiple virtual portals the virtual portal administrators can change the portlet "configure mode" data affetting all the instances in the portal and other virtual portals.
I suppose this is not something you want to happen so I'm looking into it to se if there's a way to create copies of the concrete portlet that are local to the virtual portal. This can be done for sure. It will just take some time to fully analyze the issue.
Finally... even if this feature is very interesting I'm thinking it's a bit "complex" to manage. For instance adding a new template requires a lot of work from technicall skilled people. I'm trying to figure out if a "scripting shell" can be created to manipulate and provision virtual portals in an easier way.
I'll keep you posted.
That's all for now.
If you're interested in Portals and Clouds please stay tuned.
More is coming in a few weeks.
Comments (4)
Daniele Vistalli February 25th, 2009 10:38:38 PM