I think the thing that makes our community (that is, the Lotus Online Community at large) so successful is the fact that we readily adopt new technologies that allow us to connect to and collaborate with people that can make our day-to-day that much easier. This community is filled with subject matter experts, ranging from those who know absolutely everything about a particular niche feature in a given Lotus product family to expertise that resides outside of the Lotus product family. A simple tweet to asking for suggestions for a XHTML, XML, CSS, etc. editor for Windows - yielded many awesome suggestions and a confirmation that Aptana was the product to go with!

So I was interested (to say the least) when I heard the news from Lotusphere 2009 about LotusLive.com, and decided to check it out. I was surprised to find that it's more than yet-another-social network for the online community! Formerly Bluehouse, LotusLive showcases some of the latest Lotus tech in the Business 2.0 product space, giving us hands-on demos of the integrated Communities, Forums, File Sharing, online Meetings (powered - from what I can tell - by Sametime Unyte/Webdialogs), as well as Instant Messaging via Sametime. Now, being both a BleedYellow and Greenhouse user, I'm used to public community-based Sametime - but using this in combination with the Unyte features makes this a killer community solution. But I might be getting ahead of myself here...

The Good

• Lotus Connections + Sametime Unyte
• Hands-on playground, where I can not only learn just-how-useful this particular Lotus technology can be, but something that I can showcase to my customers.
• If you've signed up for Bluehouse, your login credentials have been ported!
• Registration, and usage, is free!

The Bad

• Works great in Internet Explorer and Firefox, but Google Chrome (which I use as my day-to-day browser) and by extension Safari... not so much.
• The Activities Sidebar widget doesn't appear to work with LotusLive.com. Perhaps it's a versioning issue...
• I have near 400 people that I'm connected to on Facebook, 250+ following me on Twitter, and with BleedYellow and Greenhouse... adding new users to my contact list for another social network is becoming tiring.

So, how can we make it easy to get connected? Well, here's a quick tip! Post a URL to your LotusLive Profile!

From My Dashboard, simply click on your name under the My Account. This will bring to you your publically-accessible LotusLive.com Profile. From there, you can either tweet, blog, or otherwise communicate that profile by it's URL. For example, my LotusLive.com Public Profile can be found at https://apps.lotuslive.com/contacts/profiles/view/11739.

Once you've opened, someone's profile - provided you've authenticated to LotusLive.com yourself - simply select the Get Connected option on their profile, and you're all set!

And you Sametime Client users can quickly add the LotusLive.com Sametime Server to your Server Communities list: im.lotuslive.com.

So if you haven't checked out LotusLive, or haven't been back since it was Bluehouse - give it a spin. I have a feeling (</wink>) that this is just the beginning of many cool and useful community initiatives coming from IBM/Lotus, so get in there now and start playing!

I had a request from a manufacturing customer who was asking for a document library, which would be used to store CAD files (read: too-large-for-logic drawings). I immediately didn't want to store these mammoth files in a Domino database container, as 1) the Full Text Index really wouldn't do any good for CAD files and 2) well - duh - there's a long list of reasons not to bring 500MB files as attachments into a Domino database container - and that's not what I'm getting at here... so I'll move on.

After some questions, I found that the customer was asking for a "document library" because they wanted to track specific drawings against specific projects and other categorizations that the standard File Store architecture would no longer facilitate. They wanted to be able to apply category labels to grouped files. All things that you'd want to do in a typical "document library" - but I again didn't want to store these large files in Domino. So I thought about using some sort of embedded, programaticaly-accessible Windows Explorer widget - which would allow me to display the "linked" documents, while storing the labeling information on the actual "container" UI document. Simple enough right? Now to just find a Windows Explorer widget... that I could modify within the Lotus Notes client container... in release 6.5.

Got some good feedback from people via my Twittering the question (thanks Steve and Andrei!!!) but me being the stubborn me, there had to be a simple way of doing it... and possibly with the Microsoft Web Browser Control (which was the closest thing that I could find to a Windows Explorer Object). So I googled "Microsoft Web Browser Object" + Lotus Notes...

Now, I should have known that...

1. I was getting the idea that this was possible from somewhere.
2. That someone like Tommy Valand would already have done it!

The good news? Well, using this approach, I was able to give my customer a quick-since-it-was-already-written solution:

I simply modified their current "project" Form Design Element and added (on a new tab called File Resources) a field called url and am embedded Microsoft Web Browser Object (Control).

Pretty simple right? Yeah - the only this that was missing was the logic to control the embedded object - which I added to the PostOpen event:

Sub Postopen(Source As Notesuidocument)

 Dim browser As Variant
 Set browser = source.GetObject("Microsoft Web Browser")

 If (Len(Source.FieldGetText("url")) > 0) Then

  If (browser.width <> 400) Then
   browser.width = 400
   browser.height = 400
  End If

  Call browser.navigate(Source.FieldGetText("url"))

 End If

End Sub

So pretty basic stuff all around - when the "project" document is opened, I check to see if there's a value defined in the url field. If so, launch my embedded "File Browser" of sorts and show the contents!

If there's an interest in having an example of this "approach", let me know and I'll put one out here.