Yes, True Believers, that's me on the front page of IBM developerWorks Lotus Developer Domain!

I was interviewed for a new segment called Meet the Developers!. Each month (I believe...), IBM will feature an interview with a community member. And with the release of Lotus Notes Domino Designer in Eclipse 8.5.1, I hope we all have the problem of needing to introduce the contributing members of the Lotus Online Community to new and eager developers!

Hopefully my interview isn't too boring -- hey, I got to mention Stormtrooper Zombies! -- and properly kicks off a great series that puts faces and personalities to some of the names that really make this product tick.

IBM Brings Lotus Notes and Domino Software to Full Spectrum of Web Devices

No Charge Option Available to Developers for Domino Designer to Extend Domino Business Applications

ARMONK, NY – October 6, 2009: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a major extension of Lotus Notes and Domino collaboration software for the full spectrum of proliferating mobile and Web-connected devices such as the Apple iPhone, Nokia smartphones, thin clients, laptops and desktops used to access corporate applications and business processes. To spur broader growth of Lotus Notes and Domino applications for the increasingly diverse range of devices in corporate use, for the first time, IBM will make Lotus Domino Designer tools available at no charge.

Lotus Domino 8.5.1 is the first version to natively support the iPhone via Lotus Notes Traveler software. This extends Lotus Domino automatic synching for e-mail, contacts and calendar data to the iPhone, helping address the growing user demand to access Notes and Domino collaboration software on the road. In fact, the IBM Institute for Business Value predicts two billion mobile Web users in the next decade, and a significant shift in the way the majority of people will interact with the Web.

The new features, which include push e-mail, contacts, and calendar, enable iPhone users to work off-line, while allowing confidential data to be erased remotely if an iPhone is lost or stolen. iPhone users can also take advantage of a corporate directory look-up feature which helps them find contact information behind their company firewall.

Updates for the Nokia Symbian platform include remote wipe, device lock, password management and external calendar integration. The IBM software provides all of these capabilities for Windows Mobile devices as well. With the iPhone, Nokia Symbian and Windows Mobile devices, and support for Research In Motion (RIM) BlackBerry, Lotus Notes and Domino now supports the vast majority of smartphones in the world.

"We are accelerating the delivery of millions of existing Lotus Domino applications to mobile users, and promoting the creation of a variety of new ones to help people work smarter on the go," said Kevin Cavanaugh, vice president, Messaging and Collaboration, IBM. "No charge Domino Designer will make it easier for organizations to adopt, acquire and manage IBM Lotus Notes and Domino software, and proliferate the development of powerful, new business apps for Lotus Notes and Domino."

Several hundred organizations globally have tested the new version of Lotus Notes during the past few months.

"Lotus Notes 8.5.1 is way more than ‘just email.’ It is an amazing piece of software. It helps facilitate a much more integrated work environment and allows our teams to share information wherever they are. During our recent response to H1N1 Influenza, we found having all of our collaboration tools integrated into one application enables our teams to work more effectively and cohesively. Lotus Notes 8.5.1 helps us work together in real time, enabling our employees to connect quicker and solve problems more effectively," said Tim Lorge, Software Architect, New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services.

"We are excited about the release of Lotus Notes 8.5.1, which we're planning to roll out to help improve communications among corporate and retail personnel," said Dale Sinstead, Director, I.T. , Pioneer Petroleums (www.pioneer.ca), Ontario’s largest independent gasoline retailer, which was recently honored for conservation work.

"Prudential UK beta tested this new Lotus Notes and Traveler software; it was quick and easy to download and use on the iPhone," said Neil Davis, Messaging Specialist, Prudential U.K (www.pru.co.uk), a life insurance and pensions provider with nearly seven million customers.

In addition, Lotus Notes Traveler software is also supported by numerous device manufacturers, including Nokia and Samsung. The software also works with carriers such as AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint.

No Charge Option for Domino Designer Software to Unleash Development of New Business Applications

Domino Designer enables Web developers, students, business analysts and other developers to quickly learn to build and extend existing applications for Notes and Domino. Beginning with version 8.5.1, the software development community can download IBM Lotus Domino Designer via IBM’s developerWorks software Web site, www.ibm.com/developerWorks/downloads.

"Domino Designer 8.5.1 and tools like XPages will make it much simpler and faster for us to create Notes applications," said David Leedy, New Penn Motor Express. A popular Domino Web application development tool, XPages allows IT professionals to create Web 2.0 and a variety of user experiences within their existing applications.

IBM is changing the way it licenses Lotus Domino client software. Users will now be licensed for functional needs rather than client types, with two simple access licenses replacing what were formerly 11 software products.

Domino Designer can help Web developers, students, business analysts and others to quickly develop and use business or productivity applications. These applications can operate within Lotus Domino applications, a browser on a desktop or on a smartphone, as well as directly within the IBM Lotus Notes client. This allows employees to access business information obtained through Notes and Domino, without needing additional software. New developers can join with the existing Lotus application community through OpenNTF.org, an open source organization focused on Lotus Notes and Domino.

"Designer 8.5.1 assists developers in building ubiquitous Web, Notes and mobile access to Domino applications," said Bruce Elgort, Elguji Software. "The new XPages capability allowed me to quickly extend the IdeaJam application out to the Apple iPhone."

IBM Lotus Domino Designer software is based on the Eclipse platform to provide a productive experience for a wide range of business applications. Developers gain a readily-available skill set to support any application strategy. Developers new to Lotus Notes and Domino development can enjoy the familiar look and feel of the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

"The new Domino Designer brings many welcome changes that help us develop software at a more efficient pace," said Corey Davis, founder of IBM Business Partner Conxsys.

"I like that Domino is an open environment based on Eclipse. Offering IBM Designer software for free will help my company help people work better together," Kjetil Andenas, development executive, Symfoni Software, an IBM Business Partner.

Developerworks is an IBM Web site for software developers and IT professionals. It contains how-to articles and tutorials, code samples and software downloads, podcasts, blogs, wikis, discussion forums and other resources. Subjects covered include open, industry-standard technologies such as Ajax, Linux, service oriented architecture, Java, Web services and development, XML and IBM’s software and services products. Launched in 1999, developerWorks serves several million registered users.

More than half of the largest global 100 corporations use IBM’s flagship collaboration offerings, Lotus Notes and Domino. They include the top nine aerospace and defense organizations; the top nine automotive firms; the top eight banks; the top four makers of consumer products; the top seven electronics firms; the top eight insurance companies; the top seven pharmaceutical organizations; and the top nine telecommunications carriers.

IBM also offers hosting services for Lotus Notes Traveler through its Mobile Enterprise Services. For more information on other new Lotus offerings announced today, including new packaging and pricing for IBM Domino Designer 8.5.1, visit www.ibm.com/software/lotus/notesanddomino.

In case you missed this IBM Press Release straight out of LoLA yesterday:

New IBM Lotus Connections Software Brings Consumer Social Networking Features to the Office

Clients Quick to Adopt New Micro-blogging, Wikis and File Sharing to Work Smarter

CAMBRIDGE, MA, September 22, 2009 – IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced an expanded set of social software tools and capabilities for enterprise collaboration that brings popular features like micro-blogging from the home into the business environment. Leading companies such as NEC Electronics (Europe) GmbH and Sogeti are among the early adopters of IBM's collaboration platform, Lotus Connections 2.5.

Realizing the benefits of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, IBM is bringing a comprehensive social software platform to businesses with the debut of Lotus Connections 2.5. The new software is being announced at an IBM worldwide collaboration summit in Cambridge, Massachusetts attended by hundreds of customers, partners and IBM experts gathered to discuss future developments in enterprise collaboration.

Today's Lotus Connections news is also taking place in conjunction with IBM's Center for Social Software Symposium this week, marking the one-year anniversary of the launch of the Center for Social Software. Lotus Connections, which originated at IBM Research, is an example of the types of technologies that result from the Center for Social Software's incubator for innovative technologies.

The new release of Lotus Connections expands on IBM's commitment to bringing a business-grade social software platform to the market. With the extranet, Internet and intranet collaboration services provided by IBM and IBM customers, Lotus Connections enables tens of millions of users worldwide to connect and collaborate.

For Lotus Connections beta program participant Sogeti, a Capgemini subsidiary specializing in technology services, there was a great need to connect the firm's 20,000 people spread across 200 offices in 14 countries. Following an extensive analysis, where all available options were reviewed, Sogeti turned to Lotus Connections for its social networking and collaborative functionality.

"Our people are our only and most valuable asset. We needed a powerful tool to connect our people all over the world, providing them with a social platform that would allow them to share information and collaborate," said Michiel Boreel, CTO at Sogeti Group. "We chose Lotus Connections because it is a powerful collaboration platform that goes way beyond simple sharing of documents and furthermore, it is people centric instead of project or document centric. We believe that this is the future of collaboration and we want to position ourselves in the frontline of this new trend."

Lotus Connections 2.5 includes an enhanced Communities experience with new features and capabilities. Community owners can now customize the appearance of their community and move widgets around on the community home page. Community owners can add activities, blogs, wikis, and file sharing services to their communities in addition to bookmarks, feeds, and forum capabilities. This significantly enhances the options for community members to collaborate on projects and content.

Additionally, the user interface of the community discussion forum now displays threads in a more conversational format with user photos. A statistics feature indicates the most popular discussion topics in a community and provides insight into which users are the most active participants. Important discussion topics can be highlighted with the capability to pin them at the top of the forum.

The new Wiki service allows designated users to create, view, edit and contribute to content that is uploaded to the intranet-style collaborative Web site. As many people may be editing a single page, the wiki has automatic versioning and a "show changes" view so that users can easily view the latest versions and edits.

The Profiles service is enhanced with a micro-blogging feature that allows users to post status updates on tasks they are working on. This enables users within their professional network to see what they are working on and offer comments. A new message board feature offers a place on a user's profile page where colleagues can post messages and comment on status updates. The combination of the message board and micro-blogging capabilities provides a simple and easy way for people to maintain active connections to their colleagues.

The latest version of Lotus Connections provides a new, Web-based file sharing library for users to easily upload and securely share content such as presentations and documents. Utilizing social software features such as tagging, ratings, recommendations, and the ability to comment, the solution offers an effective way for colleagues to share, view and provide feedback on content.

New integrated mobile support for iPhone and Nokia S60 devices allows access to the Lotus Connections Profiles, Activities and Blog services. Now professionals that travel frequently or work remotely can update their status and locate people in their profiles directly from mobile devices.

Additionally, the new Lotus Connections release offers a number of enhancements to existing services including Home Page, Blogs, Bookmarks and Activities offered in the previous version of the platform.

"With Lotus Connections, we have merged document sharing and social networking capabilities to create a comprehensive collaboration platform for businesses," said Jeff Schick, vice president of social software, IBM. "Today's announcement showcases how IBM is delivering easy access to a company's two most valuable assets – people and information."

NEC Electronics (Europe) GmbH expanded on an existing relationship with IBM, adding Lotus Connections to their line-up of IBM products, including Sametime and Lotus Notes.

"With rich social collaboration features such as profiles and tagging, our expectations are that our employees will be able to easily find topic experts and colleagues that are working on similar projects," said Dieter Peter, Senior Manager Human Resources, NEC Electronics (Europe) GmbH. "Lotus Connections offers knowledge sharing across borders. Everyone will adopt this technology sooner or later."

Since Lotus Connections is based on industry standards, it offers integration with Microsoft SharePoint. This integration allows users to perform Lotus Connections Profile searches from within Microsoft SharePoint, integrate Lotus Connections Business cards within Microsoft SharePoint and provides access to a Lotus Connections tag cloud Web part for use in Microsoft SharePoint.

Lotus Connections 2.5 is available now in 25 languages. For more information on Lotus Connections, visit www.ibm.com/lotus/connections or view a demo at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrxNSUxonjw.

One of the reasons I've written my Domino CMS engine - which I hope to demo sometime this week - was that I've been playing around with a new purpose if you will. Specifically, I want to take it from blog to online resource. Mind you, I'll still be running the site. And there will still be a weblog as a part of this site... but I want it to be more. I think - after all these years - it needs to be more. So I thought that I would outline a few of the features here while I'm adding them to the site (as well as ask for suggestions and requests).

First, the site - as mentioned - will run on my Domino CMS engine. What this means is that the website will no longer be viewed from a NotesDatabase (and this site is today), but rather maintained and generated from a NotesDatabase. Yep, the Domino CMS engine creates end-result files - such as XML, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. - based on the content and "configuration" of the Domino CMS NotesDatabase. This allows me not only complete control over what's rendered, but will infinitely speed up the delivery of content. At least... that's the plan.

The site will contain the following sections: my Weblog, Articles, Reviews, Examples & Downloads, Upcoming Events, and my Drawing Board.

My Weblog will continue, but I plan on expanding it. For those of you connected to me on Facebook, you'll note that I often post things to my profile (such as Lotus community news, upcoming Lotus community events, various geek-related content, etc.) that just don't quite make it to this site. I plan putting more content on the weblog, but specifically making it more my weblog than a community information and development tips repository. Hopefully that makes sense...

The more detailed content will go into the Articles, Reviews, and Examples & Downloads sections. Here I'll host My Gear product reviews, detailed topics and development deep-dives, and I'll be putting more demos, examples, and usable product out there for consumption.

The Drawing Board... that will be a microsite containing all of my one-off development endeavors and I wonder if... type of content. Sure, you'll see errors in your browser and all sorts of ugliness with these half-baked (or still-baking in most cases) solutions, but I think that will help a lot of people see how someone in their field does things...

Events. Simply put, this community is starting to have more and more online and real world/physical events to help spread the good/yellow word. The problem is, not many people know what's going on, when, where, etc. I plan on providing a simple click-to-add facility of community events using iCalendar as a cross-platform standard.

There was a concern from some of the early-reviewers of my Domino CMS engine regarding comments. Specifically, how would I handle a submitted content against a particular post if my CMS was not externally facing?

There were multiple options - the best being a specific NotesDatabase that handled a comment submission and proxied it to my Domino CMS, which I didn't like. So as I planned to use Google Friend Connect to allow you to join this site, I thought I would simply use their Comments engine. Why re-write the wheel, right?

A few other features will include some things that you see on other sites today: a mini-feed of my latest Twitter updates, various galleries, an implementation of ShareThis! and countless other nice-to-haves that I've been wanting to get on DominoGuru.com for a long time now.

Are there features that you would like to see in this space? Different categories that I might be overlooking? Make yourself heard in the comments (which are still a part of this NotesDatabase design)!

Great news on Yellow Day out of the OpenNTF Alliance. Looks like we have 5 new Alliance Members, which still means we're tracking ahead in the numbers!

Now, this was covered across the Lotus Online Community, but I thought that this comment that I came across on a certain blog was too priceless to not point out here:

And with that, John wins teh internets!!1!