Lotusphere Agenda Database for PDA Synching and Session Planning
by Volker Weber
It never ceases to amaze me how Ben outpaces Lotus by providing a useful session reference:
Genii Software's 7th Annual Lotusphere Agenda Database for PDA Synching and Session Planning
Back by popular demand, we have built a Journal database containing all the sessions listed on the official Lotusphere site. This database is based on the personal R5/ND6 Journal with a few added views, so it should synch with the Palm Pilot, but it also contains a wealth of useful information for planning out your schedule.
Comments
If I may play the devil's advocate here...
This valuable tool has become synonymous with Ben over the last few years, and the Domino community has taken the idea, run with it, and extended it beyond what Ben probably ever envisioned. If IBM came out with their own version now, Ben would probably not have a problem with it, but I'm sure others would complain that IBM was trying to take credit for an idea that was part of the community. Either that, or there would be endless comparisons of the style, utility, etc.
So long as IBM acknowledges Ben's work and gives him the links and kudos for it, that's probably the wisest course they can take. If Ben ever stops doing this and no one else in the community takes it up, then I think IBM needs to take over the concept...
For right now, it's "owned" by the attendees, "extended" by the attendees, and it's a powerful piece of software that draws the Notes/Domino community together.
Duffbert, a few questions:
What would you think, how many of the thousands of Lotusphere attendees know about this database?
Why is it that Lotusphere.com does not link to it?
And why is it that the session slides still insisted on 8 char names in 2006, after we had longer filenames for a while? :-)
Me thinks, it is not intentional ...
Hi, Volker...
#2... You're right, they should... It would show commitment to the community and partnership.
#1... Would be solved by #2.
#3... Off-topic for this, but I always thought that using the session number as the slide set name was a good way to keep everything consistent and organized. It'd be nice to place the year in there (like 2007AD101BW.pdf), but I can live with that. I don't see it as a restriction to an eight-character name... just a decision on a format that happens to be eight characters or less.
ad 1) It would help.
ad 2) I think it was you who read this commitment into the lack of such database from IBM.
ad 3) JMP101 IBM Lotus Domino Administration Jumpstart.pdf would be so much more useful than just JMP101.pdf, don't you think? :-)
To be fair, although it winds up taking quite a while, there has been a link to the sessions db page from Lotusphere.com for at least the last two years. I wish it were not buried so low or added so late, but given that the last version of the 20006 sessions db was downloaded by 3684 people, and several people said they shared it with colleagues, and that it was available to others via Blackberry or web services add-ons, I think it reached most of the Lotusphere attendees.
As for IBM taking this over, I've talked about it with them, offered free use of our Midas Rich Text LSX (which I use to create the layered one-page views), and so on. Many within IBM would love to take it on, but given that it would have to be vetted and given the blue rinse treatment and run by legal, etc. etc., chances are they wouldn't have it by February and that it would be so sanitized as to not be worth it. The best we can hope for is that they will link to it sooner or more prominently, but even that remains in doubt. Mostly, the people in charge seem so certain that I will load it down with advertising or otherwise take advantage of the access, they hate to mention it, except Ed Brill and Alan Lepofsky and people such as that who know me and know I wouldn't do that.
As for the filenames, I am an old curmudgeon and use the command line regularly, so I like 8.3 naming, but I can see that it seems a pretty unreasonable requirement in 2006.
Would I like the longer names? Yes. But knowing the habits and idiosyncracies of developers and speakers, I'm sure that you'd get a variety of spellings, formats, capitalizations, etc. Then they'd all have to be scrubbed and reviewed before inclusion on media/databases (which takes more time and resources.
From a workflow process, I'm OK with the session number only.
Duffbert, the rule is pretty simple: Session number, followed by session title. Looks to me like instructions that intelligent speakers as seen at Lotusphere could follow. :-)
From a workflow process, you can either fix this once at the source or n thousand times at the recipients.
But you're assuming intelligent speakers... That may be why I'm not speaking this year... :)
You're not? Too bad. :-)
But Paul Mooney and company didn't learn their lesson, so I do have a stage in May 2007. :)
Just an update. There was a problem with dates set on sessions so you couldn't add sessions to your calendar. It is fixed in Version 1a, which is available now.
