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It’s time for "Lotus Foundations ISV Developer Toolkit" Beta - Phase two (testers wanted) 


Hey guys, it's time for a new beta !!!

Many now already knows about the great Lotus Foundations product that IBM introduced.

Over the last few weeks a number of announcements and increasing coverage surrounded the new toy:
In the press release IBM is unveiling the second phase of ther beta program around the "Lotus Foundations ISV Developer Toolkit".

The first phase was very restricted and I was lucky enough to participate. I'm now inviting interested partners to run and nominate themselves as wanna-be beta-testers.

The "nomination process" is open and you can access it here:

https://www-304.ibm.com/software/earlyprograms/surveys/cust/nomination.wss?id=484

Obviously you're required to:
  • Have an IBM id to login (or you can get one on the fly)
  • Confirm you're INTERESTED to participate and you assure you'll be ACTIVELY testing and reporting back about the product.

It's particulary important the "ACTIVE" role you must play. Once you get access to the beta program you can report errors, problmes, ideas back to the beta / development team.
It's important many partners actively participate. Participating just to get "the new toy" is going to be useless for you and for IBM.

Now, what's the "ISV Developer Toolkit". I cannot say more than is already officially known (you know... NDA) but...

The Lotus Foundations ISV Developer Toolkit is the magic software tool that will help you, an IBM Lotus partner, who built over time a product based on the domino platform to transform it in a self-deploying, self-configuring package that can be easily delivered to your customers as a Lotus Foundations package.

The tool is very well built and allows to manage license agreements and translations, group a number of domino DBs and map your application ACLs and Roles to Teams/Groups in the lotus foundations platform, this means you control your application just using groups in the Lotus Foundations web console (remember that in foundations it's the autonomic engine who can write groups for you).

It's great stuff, doing the first beta phase I met Nathan Freeman of Lotus 911 in the beta forum. He's also doing the beta test and we pointed out a number of extra requirements. Also Nathan discovered some glitches with the tool in the highly-organized Lotus 911 development farm. The tool is taking some assumptions about the development environment in which you build apps. Nathan explained those assumptions have to be double checked.

My suggestion is... if you're an IBM BP developing domino based applications and you want to get your product to the new Lotus Foundations "market" you'd better get in touch with the toolkit ASAP. It's very well designed and built, it will surprise you for how well designed it is in terms of "covering the domino developer needs".

Also I'd suggest to IBM BPs to consider the potential of selling their apps in the new way. I mean... as Foundations gets spread around many new smaller customer may be interested in your app, without knowing you face to face. In this case if you're ready you can easily sell your products all over the world. Once again the toolkit will help you.

If you want more ... Join the program.

Bye, and ... see you there.



Comments (0)
Daniele Vistalli August 8th, 2008 18:41:13