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Clippings is the official newsletter for Lotus Certified Professionals.
This monthly newsletter is your ideal source for news, certification
and exam updates, and technical resources NOW brought to you jointly
by LotusUserGroup.org,
THE VIEW, and
IBM
Lotus Certification.
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| In This Issue: |
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Newsletter archive! The Clippings newsletter archive is available here.
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| PROGRAM MANAGER'S NOTE |
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The latter half of 2008 will be an exciting time for the Lotus Certified Professional. Indeed, the first two exams of 2008 have already been released and more information can be found in this issue of Clippings.
Taking into account feedback from certified professionals both inside and outside IBM, we reviewed the 2008 plan with the goal of molding it to more accurately reflect the dynamic nature of our product portfolio. As a result of rebalancing and reallocating funds and resources, we are pleased to announce the development of two brand new certifications in the fourth Quarter: one for Quickr and one for Connections. Both will be in the System Administration stream. As more information becomes available it will be posted on the Certified Professionals Private Site.
In the third quarter, all six core Lotus Notes and Domino 8 exams will be added to the popular You Test, We Pay program at Partnerworld. This offering helps Business Partners offset the expense of building technical skills and enables companies to build IBM product skills by reimbursing some or all of the test fees when an employee achieves eligible certifications.
New this year, Lotus Education is pleased to sponsor a series of Technical Seminars. These powerful one-day seminars will provide an opportunity for developers, architects, and administrators to supercharge their skills. Though still in the planning stage, we have identified six tracks: Portal Administration, Portal Development, Domino Development for the new millennium, Performance management and upgrade strategies for Notes Domino 8, Lotus Collaboration and Social Networking, and Web Content Management. If you have given permission for IBM to contact you directly, you can look forward to receiving a personal e-Invitation to attend a Lotus Technical Seminar near you. If not, all information will be posted on the Certified Professionals Private Site as details are finalized.
Sara Nicklin
WW Certification Program Manager — Lotus Software
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| SPONSORED BY CertFX |
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| FROM LOTUSUSERGROUP.ORG |
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On Friday, June 6th, Dwight Morse, Product Manager, Lotus Notes, confirmed that he will be presenting the Lotusphere Comes to You ONLINE session titled “Desktop of the Future.”
In this session, to be held on June 23, Doug addresses the topic of strategy discussions in many organizations where optimizing innovation and controlling cost is important. IBM Open Collaboration Client Solution (OCCS) brings together the industry’s richest and broadest collection of collaboration and content services to connect people to business processes and information in an open, standards-based environment. You can start with Lotus Notes, Lotus Symphony, and the integrated Lotus Sametime, and then add the Web 2.0 innovations brought to you through Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, and WebSphere Portal. You can run it on Linux (Novell, RedHat, or Ubuntu), Windows, and Mac OS. This session will focus on the flexibility and choice provided to you and the time-to-value options that you can leverage. Morse will discuss a user segmentation strategy that empowers heterogeneous environments and supporting migration capabilities available. He will also share best practices based on customer adoption and quick hits in retail branch offices and contact centers across different industries. Come experience how you can get started on desktop of the future, today, using a security rich and cost effective Microsoft desktop alternative.
Lotusphere Comes to You ONLINE sessions are free. If you haven't signed up for this session yet, visit us here and sign up for this and other sessions designed to help you get more from your existing IT investment and boost collaboration across your enterprise.
Best practices, regulatory requirements, and litigious concerns underscore the need for email retention and storage, speedy accessibility, and easy retrieval. Yet, steadily increasing email volume makes it a challenge for organizations to manage vast amounts of email on their mail server and primary data stores. Huge mail file sizes are a universal frustration for system managers and mail file size quotas are a source of aggravation for users.
Get solutions for solving these issues and more. View the LotusUserGroup.org exclusive presentation on archiving best practices, presented by popular Lotus expert Rob Axelrod of Technotics, Inc. In this previously recorded session, Rob discusses how to reconcile the user's business needs for expanded mail file sizes with your disk management needs and most importantly with your corporate document management needs. Rob talks about tools and methods for analysis of your systems and methodologies for managing the massive amounts of email data that resides in our environments. Uncover proven best practices for where to put data (local vs. server), setting up and managing archiving rules, and controlling the end-user environment. Get tips managing and troubleshooting policies. Plus, learn how archiving affects server performance, the impact of local archiving, and more.
The recorded presentation is free to LotusUserGroup.org members. View the recorded presentation.
One of the many benefits of membership in LotusUserGroup.org is the exclusive discounts available to members. New discount programs become available periodically, and we've just recently added a few. For example:
60% off all Technical Reference Anthologies from THE VIEW
15% off all books from Packt Publishing
There are many other discounts available too. If you're already a member, go here to check out all the discounts. If you're not a member yet, membership is free, so go here to sign up today.
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| SPONSORED BY GSX GROUPWARE SOLUTIONS |
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Perform comprehensive monitoring of your unified enterprise communications ... and still be home for dinner. |
Thousands of administrators at 2,000+ installations rely on GSX. Our products automate monitoring and maintenance tasks on:
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See how your messaging servers are performing. See your productivity improve. But most important, see your family again. Learn how.
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| GURU GUIDANCE |
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By Julian Robichaux, http://www.nsftools.com
In Notes 6, Lotus introduced a feature called LS2J that allows you to call Java classes from LotusScript. Even though it's a feature that's been around for a while, it doesn't seem to be very widely used. Why? Don't see the point? Performance fears? Lack of examples?
Let's take a look at LS2J and see where it might be useful.
Why Use Java at All?
Folks often ask, “Why use Java in the first place,” and “What's wrong with just plain LotusScript?” The answer is that there's nothing wrong with LotusScript. I still use it every day for most of my Lotus Notes programming needs. However, Java can have some significant advantages, including:
- Network sockets. Java can easily and natively perform platform-independent network communications - HTTP requests, FTP transfers, pings, etc.
- Image manipulation. There is good built-in support for cross-platform image file manipulation in Java, as well as a number of third-party libraries that enhance the native functionality.
- Threads. You don't often have to use threads in your programs, but when you need them, you need them. Java allows you to spawn new threads very easily.
- Libraries and sample code. Even though blogs and Web sites like OpenNTF have made LotusScript examples more accessible, the enormous amount of Java examples available on the Internet is staggering. Plus, there are Java code libraries out there that do almost anything you want.
These are just the tip of the iceberg. There are all sorts of things you can do in Java that are difficult, if not impossible, to do in LotusScript (certainly LotusScript can call external DLLs to do many of these things, but those are Windows-only and often require installation on client and server machines).
In addition, the new Notes 8 Standard client has a number of extension points (like Composite Applications and Sidebar Apps) that you can only take advantage of with Java programming.
The beauty of LS2J is that you can combine the power of Java with the ease and familiarity of LotusScript. The syntax might be a little tricky at first, but once you get used to it you'll find that it's quite easy to mix your Java and your LotusScript code and libraries together.
What About Performance?
A common fear about using LS2J is that the performance is bad or there are stability issues.
Certainly, there are some bugs that have been fixed since the early days of LS2J. You should also be very explicit about freeing Java resources that are called from LS2J, because Java doesn't "clean itself up" as well as LotusScript does. In addition, you'll notice that the very first time you launch an LS2J agent on a workstation it may take several seconds to start up. This is due to the fact that the Java JVM usually needs to be initialized before the first run of an LS2J agent.
That said, the performance of Java and LS2J itself (after the JVM is up) is comparable to regular LotusScript, and is sometimes even faster for some operations like large String manipulation. Don't be afraid of running it because it's slow. Yes, there is a certain amount of overhead involved with going back and forth between LotusScript and Java, but it's very unlikely that you'd notice such a thing in real-world user testing.
As with everything, test like crazy before deploying into production. With Java and LS2J I don't tend to worry about performance as much as I do about memory usage (yes, those are two different things). As with any programming language, there are things you can do in Java/LS2J that could cripple or crash your client or server. Likewise, I can crash a client or server with LotusScript in about three lines of poorly written code. Despite that, there are very impressive things you can do with Java and LS2J that are worth the effort of testing and debugging.
How Can I Use It?
Here's some example LS2J code so you can see what it looks like:
This code calls a custom “JpgImage” Java class from the “JpgImage Library” script library (which is a Java library) and uses it to modify a JPG image file. For the most part, using the object that was created from the Java class is very similar (if not identical) to using a native LotusScript class object. You have access to the class methods, and you pass parameters and access return values the same way.
If a Java method or constructor is “overloaded” (meaning that there are different versions of the same method with different parameters — a nice feature that Java has), you have to use some unusual syntax, as we see in the CreateObject line with the “(Ljava/lang/String;)V” parameter. There is information on this in the Domino Designer Help.
The big advantage to an LS2J agent like this over a LotusScript agent that calls a DLL is that all the code required is in the database, so there are no external dependencies required. Also, the code is completely cross-platform, so it will work on a Windows client as well as a Linux/Unix server. (N.B.: Macintosh clients didn't get Java support until just recently.)
So, there you go; another fun thing for you to play with if you're not familiar with it already. Also, here are some examples to get you started:
http://www.nsftools.com/tips/NotesTips.htm#ls2jexamples
http://nsftools.com/tips/NotesTips.htm#zipfilemanager
http://www.convergens.dk/C1256BB3004BB983/0/AAB236D45A9E7CE1C1256F3F002CFE2D
http://www.thenorth.com/APBLOG4.nsf/Threaded/D1AAF414346C43CB85256F00004B3365
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| EDUCATION NEWS |
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Exam 803: Using LotusScript in IBM Lotus Notes Domino 8 Applications
Exam 804: Using JavaScript in IBM Lotus Notes Domino 8 Applications
More detailed information can be found here.
Lotus Certification announces the retirement of three IBM Workplace exams. The following exams will no longer be available as of October 15th, 2008:
Test 821: Implementing and Administering IBM Workplace Collaboration Services 2.5: Messaging
Test 823: Implementing and Administering IBM Workplace Collaboration Services 2.5: Team Collaboration
Test 833: Creating Application Components Using IBM Workplace Designer 2.5
Consequently, the corresponding certifications will also be retired on October 15, 2008.
Should you wish to schedule one of the above tests while they are still available, click on one of the links above to go to the test objectives page and, from there, you can access Prometric's Web site.
New Self-Paced Technical Skills Workshops enable students to download the workshop presentations and labs, and then execute the labs remotely, all on their own schedule with no travel required.
NOTE: An Internet connection is required
XKW10 — IBM® Lotus® Expeditor Client and Toolkit Workshop
XKW17 — IBM® Lotus® Expeditor Client and Toolkit Workshop
XKW20 — IBM® Lotus® Expeditor for System Administrators Workshop
XKW27 — IBM® Lotus® Expeditor for System Administrators Workshop
QRW10 — IBM® Lotus® Quickr™ 8 Solutions Workshop
QRW17 — IBM® Lotus® Quickr™ 8 Solutions Workshop
CNW20 — IBM® Lotus® Mobile Connect Solutions Workshop
CNW27 — IBM® Lotus® Mobile Connect Solutions Workshop
CNW10 — Social Networking with IBM®; Lotus® Connections Workshop
CNW17 — Social Networking with IBM® Lotus® Connections Workshop
Please go here.
Keep your skills up-to-date and choose from hundreds of courses, dozens of technical conferences, certification prep classes and exams, and role-based roadmaps to make sure your training stays on track. Invest in your future by attending a class or conference today. Check out our online catalog or request a printed copy!
Please go here.
DOMINO WEB ACCESS USER COURSE
Users can now learn how to use Domino Web Access (for Release 8) right in their office with TLCC's newest user course for Notes and Domino 8. This course can be taken using a Web browser or a Notes client. “Using Domino Web Access 8” is one of five courses available with TLCC's site license for Notes 8 users. All five courses are easily customized to suit the organization's exact needs. Lessons can be modified or removed. A customer can even add their own lesson on in-house applications to provide a complete tailored learning experience for everyone in the organization.
Use the new Notes 8 Sidebar to Display a Lessons Navigator
TLCC's Notes 8 user courses can now display a list of lessons in the Notes 8 sidebar. This lets your users easily see the topics from the course and quickly navigate to a topic they might want to learn more about. This feature is easily deployed using Widgets, introduced in the Notes 8.0.1 Standard client.
The Learning Continuum Company (TLCC), the leader in distance learning courses for Notes and Domino, also has courses on Notes and Domino 8 for developers and administrators, as well as previous versions of Notes and Domino.
Special Offer for Clippings Readers!
All TLCC courses and packages from TLCC qualify for a 15% discount! (5% for any course/package already on sale.) Your discount will be automatically taken off your order.
Try a FREE course — TLCC has free demo courses for both Notes 8 user and developer courses.
Click here for more information on TLCC's user courses and this special offer!
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| RESOURCES/PUBLICATIONS |
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In this developerWorks article, Jim Dewan and Jennifer Wales describe the development of a port checker application (called HealthCheck) that, when combined with Lotus Sametime, can instantly notify system administrators of outages. This article discusses the reasoning behind the application, provides code samples, and describes how Lotus Sametime toolkits can be used to create customized applications.
Read the article here.
For a complete list of technical materials authored by members of the Lotus services team, see the Resources and Reference page on the IBM Software Services for Lotus Web site.
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| EVENTS |
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Lotus technical conferences are designed to give you a forum where you can learn about new technologies, network with peers, and hear about new products and services directly from IBM technology experts. Lotus conferences are essential for skills development. Who should attend a Lotus Technical Conference? IT professionals, including business executives, technical staff, developers, content managers, and IBM Business Partners who want to explore current and emerging technologies. Register to build your skills at a conference in Malaysia, Australia, China, India, Germany, and Nashville, USA.
Malaysia
08 - 10 July 2008
Australia
16 - 19 September 2008
Germany
06 - 08 October 2008
Nashville, TN
October 13 - October 16, 2008
Developers, architects, and administrators, attend a powerful one-day seminar where you can supercharge your skills with in-depth training. Dates and locations coming soon.
Bookmark the page and visit often to find a Lotus Technical Seminar near you.
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| INSTRUCTOR'S CORNER |
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For the last two years the IBM Certified Instructor Program for Lotus Software has been managed and administered from head quarters. While all policies and some initiatives will still originate at the global level, the administration of the program has been decentralized. In this new model, each geography is responsible for approving, upgrading, and enabling instructors.
Now more than ever it is crucial that all instructors have a valid, complete profile and instructor application in Partnerworld. This feeds into our database and is the key to enabling us to communicate with you — whether it is via email, the private site, or the forum. All channels depend on a valid Partnerworld profile. At the bare minimum, you need to keep your full name, place of employment, contact information, email address, and IBM ID current in your profile. You also need to ensure that your primary candidate ID and only your primary candidate ID is listed in Partnerworld. As always, your approved instructor application form must be associated with your most current employer/profile.
You may still contact us with any Instructor Program related concerns/queries. Or, you may contact the Instructor Program Administrator for your region/geography:
Americas
Kevin Wilmeth
ASEAN
Cheryl Gan
Australia/New Zealand
Kerry Trevethan
Europe
Ralf Beckhaus
Greater China Group
Jin MJ Ma
India
Pradip Sharma
Japan
Yuki Yoshimura
Korea
Tae-Hyung Kim
Note: The contact names above can also be found in the LE Instructor Forum and on the Instructor Private Site.
Most of these are located on the Certified Lotus Instructor Private Site. Only Instructors with an IBM ID can access this site.
IBM Certified Instructor Program for Lotus Software
IBM Certified Lotus Instructor Day 2008
Sneak Preview: Upcoming Courses and Instructor Certifications
Purchase Instructor Guides
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| Masthead & Subscription
Information |
LOTUS EDUCATION
LOTUSUSERGROUP.ORG
Editor: Scott Treggiari
For information from LotusUserGroup.org:
Clippings@LotusUserGroup.org
LotusUserGroup.org supports the worldwide community of Lotus technology professionals. We provide support and tools to encourage:
- Communication and collaboration to facilitate the sharing of ideas and experiences among Lotus professionals
- Technical expertise in Lotus software
- Growth of community via local and virtual user groups
- Collaboration between community members and the Lotus software organization and other vendors/business partners
Membership in LotusUserGroup.org is free. Click here and register to become a member
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