Our community mourns the loss of Jens-B. Augustiny

Today I received the following email from Jens-B. Augustiny’s son Herbert:

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

Last Saturday my father, Jens Augustiny died. You are entered in his
address database and because of this you are receiving this sad news. For
details please refer to the attachment.

Since we are not sure whether we can address all friends, business partners
and customers, we ask you to forward this message to other people which had
contact with Jens.

Best regards

Herbert Augustiny

I was deeply saddened by the news of Jen’s passing. My heart felt condolences to the Augustiny family.

jens1

jens2

Cool trick for parsing URLs without JavaScript libraries

 

Ryan Baxter tweeted this out earlier and I wanted to share it with all you JavaScript developers out there as it is a nice and elegant way to not have to use a library such as URI.js:

var parser = document.createElement('a');
parser.href = "http://example.com:3000/pathname/?search=test#hash";

parser.protocol; // => "http:"
parser.hostname; // => "example.com"
parser.port;     // => "3000"
parser.pathname; // => "/pathname/"
parser.search;   // => "?search=test"
parser.hash;     // => "#hash"
parser.host;     // => "example.com:3000"

Enjoy and thanks Ryan!

Part 1: What has Bruce been up to?

The last year has been a total absolute blur. Between teaching at Clark Collge, working on projects at Elguji, volunteer work and more has consumed every available minute of my time. I have also been quiet on a few fronts on purpose. Let me first start with Elguji.

Elguji Software

Elguji has been very fortunate to have a loyal (and still growing) Notes and Domino customer base. While sales of our flagship IdeaJam for Domino have slowed down a bit, we are still serving dozens of customers around the globe. In fact, we are hard at work (and have been for some time) on IdeaJam 2.0. IdeaJam 2.0 is not simply an upgrade to IdeaJam 1.9.2 but, a complete re-write of the core application made to be “mobile first”. Yes, it will still be a great web application that will blow your mind and we are very excited at the progress we have made. For now just know that we have done our best to include the feedback we have received from our customers. Stay tuned for more on IdeaJam 2.0.

Where Elguji has really transformed and rolled with the times is with our “event-based” IdeaJam cloud platform. We are now providing customers around the globe with what we call “event-based” jams. These jams can be provisioned in 60 seconds or less. Jams run anywhere from 1 day to 3 months. It’s whatever the customer needs. Some of you may have seen that we are running jams for IBM Rational, IBM Websphere and IBM developerWorks. In fact, we just completed a project directed by IBM CEO Ginni Rometty. Our customer work also includes colleges and universities, branches of the US Government and many other global institutions. We couldn’t have done with without the professionals at The London Developer Co-Op.

You might ask “who is driving all of this business to Elguji?”. Let me tell you that there are two primary product evangelists for Elguji 1) IBM and 2) Existing customers. IBM is constantly referring customers to us, primarily for our event-based jams. One of the worlds largest financial institutions who will go unnamed has also sent us plenty of new customers. We are very fortunate to have such great relationships with IBM and our customers.

Elguji is also cooking up a brand new product that frankly, I’m super psyched about. It’s 1,000 times bigger than IdeaJam and I am lucky to be working with some of the brightest people in the world on it.

OpenNTF

In October I departed the world of OpenNTF and not longer after that the community which I was part of for over a dozen years gave me the most wonderful send-off I have ever seen. Dozens of blog posts, tweets and more – all with the #thanksbruce hash tag. I wanted to thank everybody sooner but as usual, life got in the way. Thank you to all my friends and colleagues for their heartfelt love on Wednesday, November  2, 2013. I owe much of my success in this world to many of you.

I am now wrapping up the development of a new website for OpenNTF with Niklas Heidloff, Per Henrik Lausten and Martin Rolph (Oval Systems). A new website was long overdue for OpenNTF and I felt compelled to see the project through it’s fruition. It will be a few more weeks before you see the new site. We are now in the user acceptance testing phase.

Once the website launches, I will remain an Honorary Board Member and continue to help support the efforts of the open source community. I do however wish that the IBM Connections team would embrace OpenNTF more than they have. It’s important for the overall IBM Collaboration Solutions app dev community more than ever. </getting off my soap box>

Part 2 coming on Monday.

Jive: Partner Communities IdeaJam

jive_idea_jamI’m so glad that we named our product IdeaJam and also trademarked the name. Notice that Jive uses “Idea Jam” and not “IdeaJam”. Ninety percent or more of the prospects that Elguji sees lately think that IdeaJam is an IBM product. It’s actually quite fascinating and we are very blessed. Our event-based IdeaJam cloud services are booming.

From the OpenNTF Way Back Machine

While cleaning up my Mac today I found this oldie but goodie from 2002:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 

OpenNTF.org Releases OpenNTF Mail V1.0 for Lotus Notes 6

 Vancouver, WA – October 15, 2002 – OpenNTF.org has announced OpenNTF Mail Version 1.0 for Lotus Notes 6.  OpenNTF Mail is based on the standard Lotus Notes 6 mail template and adds many additional enhancements.  These enhancements include:

  • Quick Mail – A feature that allows the user to quickly compose a new memo to predefined recipients
  • Quick Forward – A feature that allows the user to predefine recipients, and using drag and drop, quickly forward a message
  • Reply and Forward indicators added to views
  • Follow-Up – Ability to flag messages for Follow-Up and, using drag and drop, place them in a
    Follow-Up folder
  • User Interface – Modified the Mail and To Do user interfaces to more closely resemble the Calendar color scheme
  • Productivity Actions
    • Added a Send/Receive action to the Mail outline
    • Added a Find Memo action to the Mail outline
    • Added the Outbox action to the Mail Outline
    • Added a Resend Memo action to the Sent view

Other features include an Advanced tab in the Tools | Show Delivery Information dialog to show additional message header information; a feature that lets the user stop the sending of a Return Receipt on a message; added a Message Size indicator within a Memo; modified views and folders to contain date and time; modified the size column to show kilobytes instead of bytes; and added a key icon indicator to the Inbox to let you know that a message is encrypted.

After meeting on the OpenNTF.org web site, a small group of OpenNTF.org developers or “cooks”, from Norway, The Netherlands, Australia, The United States, France, Chile and Canada, came together to collectively add features to the Notes 6 mail template.  The group used the OpenNTF Project Management Template (developed earlier this year) to manage feature requests, task management, bug tracking, documentation, discussions, news and other application development tasks.   Bruce Elgort, an “Iron Chef” for the OpenNTF Mail template, says “Working with a team of developers whom had never even met, many living in different time zones, is simply amazing!  We went from specification to a deliverable in two weeks.  Using email, Notes replication, Sametime Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing we had all the tools we needed to work as a global team.  Can you say collaborate?”   Vince Shuurman (Oirschot, The Netherlands) who is also an “Iron Chef” on the project says “We were able to work separately and replicate the portions of the template we were responsible for.  We simply refreshed our local mail templates and were then working with the latest build.  We also used the new Domino Designer 6 “design-element-locking” feature to control edits to design elements.”

The OpenNTF Mail Template V1.0 will be available on the organization’s web site at http://www.OpenNTF.org within 7-10 days.

About OpeNTF.org

OpenNTF.org was formed in December 2001 by Bruce Elgort and Nathan Freeman.  The mission of OpenNTF.org is to provide applications for Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino as open source which may be freely distributed, in order to increase the awareness of the power of Lotus Notes and Domino.

Contact:

Bruce Elgort
Co-Founder, OpenNTF.org
Bruce.Elgort@OpenNTF.org

Nathan Freeman
Co-Founder, OpenNTF.org
Nathan.T.Freeman@OpenNTF.org

Do you remember this?

Coming Soon – Bruce and Steve’s Coding School

Sometime in February 2014, Steve McDonagh and I will be launching an online coding school. I hear you saying “Bruce, there are tons of these available already. Why would you do this?”. Well, let me tell you why. Our school will hold one class at a time and will be limited to twenty students. Ten of them will work with Steve and ten of them will work with me.

Our first course “Introduction to JavaScript and jQuery” will be ten weeks in duration. We will be using an online Learning Management System and there will be homework (lots of it), quizzes, graded discussions and a final project. Let me tell you, the course won’t be easy but, if you work hard you will come out with an awesome set of foundational JavaScript skills. Steve and I will be there every step of the way for extra help via online meetings, Skype calls etc. Whatever it takes for you to succeed in our course – we will be there along the way.

Upon completion of the class, attendees can make a $50 donation that will be given to charity if they wish.

Enrollment will open starting in January. Stay tuned for more information and for a list of other courses we plan on offering.

A Book on IBM Connections: What’s Possible?

One of the major challenges with getting people in organizations to adopt new collaboration tools – or social business technologies – is helping them to understand what their work would look like if they were to shift to the new way of doing things. Often vendors talk about their products through the lens of features and functions, which is definitely helpful but not enough by itself.

As an independent collaboration strategist, one of the ways Michael Sampson works with clients is to help them understand what’s possible by developing scenarios of how work would be different. Michael’s first book, Seamless Teamwork: Using Microsoft SharePoint Technologies to Collaborate, Innovate, and Drive Business in New Ways (2008) took this approach for conveying how people could use Microsoft SharePoint for running a project. It starts with Roger who works at Fourth Coffee who is given a project to run, and is expected to use SharePoint 2007 for that. Michael’s most recent book, Doing Business with IBM Connections (2013), takes the same approach for IBM Connections 4.5, but covers ten different collaboration scenarios.

Those are:

  • Co-Authoring Documents
  • Managing Meetings
  • Holding Discussions
  • Distributing Team and Organizational Updates
  • Capturing Ideas for Innovation
  • Running a Project
  • Sharing Learning and Best Practice
  • Making Decisions
  • Finding Expertise
  • Achieving Individual Coherence

The book is set in a fictitious company called Albreto, and the adoption and use of IBM Connections starts in the Marketing Department and works its way out from there. Michael’s book is designed as an adoption resource, and is much more about the business and human things that need to work in each scenario rather than just focusing on where to click in Connections. For example, in the Document Co-Authoring scenario, there are specific steps given for how to co-author a document, but there is also reference made to the human dynamics of writing a first draft that allows scope for collaboration, and there’s an advanced concepts discussion at the end of that chapter on how early stage collaboration can reduce the quality of input. This style of approach is followed throughout Michael’s book.

If you are using IBM Connections, it would be a great resource to have available for your users. If you are not using IBM Connections, it would be a great resource to review for the approaches in each scenario. Those approaches are very transferable.

(With Thanksgiving just around the corner, Michael is running a special offer at the moment on his book. You can get 20% off the price of the paperback editions, or the corporate licensing fee for the e-book version. All the details are here – www.michaelsampson.net/thanksgiving.html)