Yellow is the New Blog

One of several new offerings Lotus 911 unveiled at Lotusphere was a new product called Crowded Wisdom. To quote our shiny new website:

Crowded Wisdom™ is Lotus 911's social idea management and business decision support solution. Featuring a sophisticated Web 2.0 interface, Crowded Wisdom allows employees, customers, vendors and partners to share ideas that can then be quickly and easily evaluated on multiple criteria by the defined community. Ideas can be contributed by anyone at any time, and become immediately available for other users to add to their personal Wishlist.

But the wisdom of crowds doesn't end there. Participants can organize their wishlists by ranking and rating ideas with simple drag & drop gestures. By sorting ideas in order of priority, users can express not simply that they like an idea, but where they rank it among other ideas they like. They can also rate ideas independent of their ranking, creating a deeper understanding of priorities and preferences.

Site administrators can group ideas together into Scorecards, which are then made available to crowd participants. Scorecards can be limited to a preset collection of ideas, or be open-ended. Once participants have submitted their scores, administrators can see rankings and ratings for all the ideas. Administrators can also assign weighting values to participants, which will differentiate their scoring, allowing key customers and users to have a stronger voice.

For example, imagine you are a major fast food chain and want to seek ideas from your customer base about what products or services to offer. You could start by having an open collection of ideas, letting people feed off of and rate each other's ideas, building a loyal community of interest. Then you can create a targeted Scorecard of the highest rated ideas that are actually feasible and publish that to the community to prioritize and rate ideas AGAINST each other, giving you valuable market intelligence about what changes you could make that would have the highest impact to your community. That is the power of Crowded Wisdom™.

The site then goes on to describe how much it would cost you (spoiler: surprisingly little) to run this in-house or hosted on our servers, but you can try it out for free and simultaneously improve BleedYellow by submitting suggestions - and adding suggestions from others to your wishlist - at http://wisdom.bleedyellow.com.

This post isn't specifically about my impressions of Lotusphere as much as it is about version 8.5 of Domino.

Imagine you're at a movie with a friend. It's well-written, well-acted, perhaps a little slow at the start, but intelligent, innovative, and just... well, different from all the crappy movies Hollywood is fond of making these days. The plot advances steadily, and as it builds to a thrilling climax... your friend gets up to leave.

"What? You're leaving now?"
"Yeah, the Jonas Brothers movie is about to start. I think I'll go see if it's any good."

Seriously, if you know anyone who uses Notes/Domino and they're even thinking of migrating to another platform, your response should be, "you're leaving now, are you crazy?" The 8.5 client has all the pretty of 8.0 with noticeably less overhead - and is solid on Mac and Linux (heck, they even ship both .RPM and .DEB installers... they're really getting the hang of this Linux thing lately) - Domino Designer is FINALLY based on a proper IDE framework, and XPages... oh my goodness, XPages. When I first heard about them, my reaction was, "hm, sounds interesting". When I actually started developing with them, my reaction rapidly changed to, "holy crap, this changes everything". I've spent a ridiculous amount of time on them since, and my excitement about them continues to grow.

Is DDE a bit buggy out of the gate? Of course it is. My biggest pet peeve at the moment is that on Vista (yes, I know, I should be using the version of Windows that came out around the same time as Notes/Domino 5, but the Thinkpad tablet I use at work has no optical drive, and I'm not sure I feel comfortable reimaging my work PC via a thumb drive like I routinely do with my personal laptops), drag-select is broken almost everywhere... I guess Cinderella was right: you don't know what you got 'till it's gone. But honestly, compared to the myriad of functionality they could have completely hosed while porting this beast, if that's the most glaring bug I've found so far, in my opinion they executed brilliantly. There's plenty more that can be done with it - OOB SVN support, for example - but that's the whole point: now that Designer uses Eclipse for its core engine, the extent to which it can be further extended is downright silly. I expect we'll be seeing some amazing changes to it in subsequent releases. The hard part's done... now the real fun begins.

Call me a fanboy if you like, but far more than any preceding release, 8.5 doesn't merely give me hope that the product will survive, it's reminded me of the thrill I felt when I first encountered it 11 years (and 14 days, but who's counting) ago. Abandoning this platform now would be an act of sheer madness.

One of the highlights of Lotusphere for me this year was presenting at the Speedgeeking event. I was asked to present on performance optimization of Domino applications through zero-index design... in other words, designing applications that contain NO views. As I mentioned during the presentation, this may seem antithetical, because if convention is any indication, a Domino application is required to contain at least 300 views in order to be of any use. Trouble is, views are expensive: the more you add, the slower the application becomes; in fact, an entire server's performance can be degraded by the number and complexity of the views in the applications the server hosts. Zero-index NSF design, then, is structuring applications such that we can take advantage of the knowledge that a document's UNID is read-write.

As promised (to those who attended... and a few who didn't), the slides (both of them, in fact) and example database have now been posted.

By the way, if you've guessed that this approach has something to do with why nearly everything in Squawk ignores indexes entirely (and if you haven't seen it since we first announced it, you might want to take another look), you'd be right... though I'm not allowed to say much more than that, of course...

IBM did something rather cool this year in connection to the BOF sessions at Lotusphere: they created a LotusLive group associated with each, which includes a discussion forum allowing the BOF to continue in virtual mode indefinitely. If you're a DXL fan - or would like to be but don't quite trust it yet - please join the DXL in the Wild group.

Urs Meli asked if there's a list of known bugs, missing features and workarounds. I started a thread in the group discussion forum in the hopes of consolidating such a list. As time permits, I'll be adding the items I'm already aware of as responses to that thread; if you have any to add, please drop by and post them.

In response to: DXL Erros

Urs, I'm not aware of any consolidated list of known bugs, so I created a discussion topic on LotusLive within the "DXL in the Wild" group associated with the BOF I co-moderated with Mac Guidera: https://apps.lotuslive.com/contacts/groupprofiles/groupForum/18083 As time permits, I'll post to that thread a list of the issues Lotus 911 has become aware of in our use of DXL. In the meantime, remember that setting the ForceNoteFormat property to True when exporting gives you the raw format, which is "round-trip" safe; in other words, although the output for most design element types is impossible to parse, it at least allows note archival and restoral without any loss of fidelity.

After months of living in the source pane of various XPages (drag-n-drop is intended to ease development, but for some reason I find it's still faster to just edit the source XML directly), riding the bleeding edge of the latest (and, yes, greatest) release of Domino, it was fun to briefly return to my roots tonight.

I'm not much for slides (even in Symphony), so for my Speedgeeking session, I decided I'd rather just show y'all an example database... live demo, baby. Don't worry, it'll run just fine locally if need be. As I was coding it tonight, I made a very deliberate design decision: other than a sprinkling of necessary LotusScript, all the code in the demo is our old friend, Notes Formula. No Java, no JavaScript, no XML... in fact, everything in there has been available to us since 6.0. And if you're still running version 5, (6 years and 5 major releases later), we would be happy to lend a helping hand in getting you upgraded. The point is that Formula can still do extremely useful things. It's nowhere near as powerful as SSJS, of course, but I can create a full-blown CRM (with multiple sort options for contacts despite not having created a single view) from scratch in a couple hours using a few lines of a scripting language that is almost identical to VB3 and a 19-year old macro language. In what other development platform would that be possible?

Like Declan, I too have been asked to present at this year's Speedgeeking session. In case you're not familiar with the format, it's 12 speakers per track (this year they're splitting it into separate development and admin tracks), but instead of all the speakers on one stage speaking for 5 minutes each, we'll be at "stations" throughout the room ( for those who have been to 'Sphere before but not to Speedgeeking, picture a miniature Product Showcase, with each speaker having their own "booth" ). Each speaker then presents their 5 minute session... 12 times in a row. Attendees start off at one station, and when the emcee announces the 5 minutes are up, everybody hurries to the next station. In one sense, the result is the same as if you'd sat in a chair and watched 12 speakers on stage: you learn about 12 topics in a single hour. But the station format is more interactive: during each segment, you're only a few feet from the presenter.

My topic will be "zero-index NSF design". In other words, no views. In under 5 minutes, you'll see firsthand how easy it is to structure an application that performs better, is easier to maintain, and is more intuitive to end users than the all-too-common 200-view alternative. Declan is presenting on "Global Multilingual Applications" and, rumor has it, a couple of my coworkers will be presenting as well. So swing by the Dolphin Pacific Hall at 6 PM on Tuesday for a rockin' good time.