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I am so sorry I did not get a picture of Troy Reimer to add here. He is now officially my God. I should create a shrine for him.
It goes without saying that he has the best sense of humor… ever. He even told me a French joke (that I didn’t get at first, sorry about that).
But more importantly we discussed a potential Quickr-project that I’m about to do and he came up with THE best solution. The way I first figured it out it would cost me a lot of coding.
And when I say a lot a mean create several agents that would do everything in order to create a place, a number of rooms, folders, pages, forms, etc…
It took us (read: Troy because I just sat there and … waited ) less than 30 minutes to come up with a huge time-saving idea. I’m not saying that I’m home free now and can sit back and relax but I do feel that it can be done! I will still take me a lot of work but not in the same league as before.
Hopefully the project comes through and I will be blogging about this because it will be my very first Quickr-project ever. And it will be big!

Because of our brainstorm session I had to skip the first session of the day (future of Sametime by Darren Adams). Sorry about that!
In the second session Miki Banatwala talked about Quickr 8.2 but also future releases (both Quickr next that will launch in Q2 2010 and the release after that that will probably contain XPages). He showed us what has been done to improve the performance of 8.2, modifications that have been done on the connectors and also future changes. It was a true privilege to hear him speak.
More about these connectors in a later blog because I feel they deserve a separate entry.

Finally there was a recap of all sessions that were given over the last couple of days. The Sametime stuff sounded a bit like Chinese to me. I think learning Mandarin in 4 weeks would be easier than understanding what Sametime was all about.
But maybe you should’ve been there to get the bigger picture. I will go through the presentations and see if they make any sense at all… I know we’ve had some serious issues with installing Connections so hopefully the slides will guide us through it.

After lunch we got the opportunity to play with everything we saw in the design sessions. Mainly Viktor but also Troy lead us through a rather realistic scenario. They did it step by step and gave away some extremely useful (and reusable) bits of code.
I have a message to everybody who attended either Viktor’s or Troy’s sessions and didn’t make it to the Workshop: Big mistake! You should have coughed up the extra dollars ’cause they were worth every penny!

So looking back on the three days, the quality of each session was a lot higher than I hoped for. The sessions at Collaboration University are being given by a great team and each speaker really knows what (s)he is talking about!
Thank you all for figuring this all out and then sharing this with the rest of us. I’m proud the be a 2009 CU-graduate and really hope to be back next year (I hope my boss is reading this too…)

So, day two has passed and it was a full day. After seven Quickr sessions I’m starting to feel the impact of all that information being cramped into my little brain. Everything still sounds logical to me right now. But I wonder what will stick around long enough until the time that I will actually be using it.
So what has passed the revue today? Or need I say yesterday because by the time I’ll be publishing this it will be Wednesday.

The first session I attended today was Quickr Performance Tips: Getting more from your server by Warren Elsmore. The one thing that I noticed about Warren is that he needs to draw when he speaks. I have this too. When I try to explain something I tend to draw it out as I go. Warren was the only one who actually created a drawing. All other presentations contained all the content.
In fact the presentation was not a big surprise but more of a nice recap of things to consider about your Domino and Quickr server. He did give away some nice ini updaters that can help tune the server. Basically this session was all about LDAP performance, network factors like DNS, firewalls, load balancers & proxies that can slow things down, the network stack, Domino performance, DAOS and off course Quickr Performance.

At 10:15 I attended Troy Reimer’s first session of the day: Quickr Data: In, Out, Everywhere. A wide array of approaches and tools. This session was all about interacting Quickr with other systems divided in 3 different levels.
The first is the top level (3rd party tools).
The second is the mid level (views/folder feeds, Place Feeds, REST service, web services & custom views).
The last level is the lower level which is native notes database access.

After that Viktor Krantz was back with the second part of Quickr Themes: Adding functionality with JavaScript. I really, really need to dig into DOJO asap! He showed us some code on how to add additional things to your pages or forms. This was such an interesting presentation! I really hope to get my hands on the final html file that he showed during the demo! That would be so cool!

Three sessions were passed when lunch was served. I was up to it. Halfway Viktor’s presentation my stomach started making all sorts of funny noises.

After lunch Warren Elsmore was back but this time with Sizing your Quickr Servers: load testing and deployment planning. I really enjoy listening to Warren. He knows what he talks about and has the gift to bring the message to the crowd. This session was very helpful for me. I really enjoyed the Load testing part. I’ll have to talk to my boss about this!

At the end of this session Rob Novak came in and talked about Going Mobile. He showed a slide with all sorts of functionalities that should be included in a mobile Quickr version. But then… right there in front of us he announced Project Jonathan: Quickr for iPhone.
He showed us the print screens and a small presentation. Everything is very new but there are already plans for the future (Domino, J2EE, Filenet & ECM support – uploading functionality from the iPhone, …) The entire project is based on REST. If you have never heard of it, start googling because it’s clear that REST will have a more important role than web services in the near future if you want data from Quickr!

Viktor Krantz was next with a session on REST and Web services APIs. All this was about getting Quickr data from the backend. He also showed us more about PandaBear and Flippr.
What’s next for these products? PandaBear will also support files from Connections. Everything else that we find in Connections (profiles, activities, …) will be in a third application. I already know its name. Please feel free to guess… It’s not GoldFish, I’ll give you that…
A cool announcement was that in a future release of PandaBear Viktor is going to include an option to sync a file or a folder. How cool is that?!?

The session Troy Reimer did about Quickr and Domino Apps was more of a Show ‘n’ Tell in order to get a grasp on the possibilities that are out there. It was in this session that I decided that Troy wins the award of most honest remark of CU2009. Before I show you I would like to tell that I have a colleague that goes crazy every time I launch certain things (or even worse turn of my laptop) when the HDD-LED is on all the time. I always tell him that it doesn’t matter because it’s just a LED that goes on and off to give us the idea the machine is working. It drives him crazy when I do. So, sorry Kevin…

And here’s the quote:

We’ve put the little animated gif here so it looks like it’s doing something because users are stupid

You see now? Us designers really think that way!! The mind of an admin works in a different way than that of a designer.

The last session of the day was Rob Novak explaining some of the top Quickr support issues. Based on years of experience he told us some very common things that you can do to prevent problems or how to solve some common errors. Even though this was very interesting I must admit that it was time to call it quits. My head was pounding.
Question is how much info can a person process in one single day?

I would like to thank all of today’s speakers. It was a great day. Sorry Chris Miller, Carl Tyler, Stuart McIntyre and Warren Elsmore for not being able to attend your session(s). As I said before I’m here with only Quickr on my mind so no time for Sametime or Connections but I will be going over your presentations!

I do have some questions left but I’ll try to launch them tomorrow before or during the labs…

Ok, so here I am in London attending my very first CU event. I came to this event with one thing on my mind: Quickr, Quickr and … well also a bit of Quickr. And guess what? During my first day I was able to attend 5 sessions that were Quickr-related.

The day started with the opening session by Darren Adams. He talked about the advantages of collaboration tools but from a very personal point of view. I always love it when a speaker can bring something from his personal life so it was very interesting to me. I felt very related to the story.

Then we had a speaker preview and that was without a doubt the hardest session to attend that day. Why? Because everybody was talking about the sessions to come and I could hear the most interesting things being announced about Sametime and Connections but I’m there for… Quickr, remember? I would love to attend Chris Miller’s Alphabet Soup session but unfortunately I won’t be able to make it… damn!

What I did see was Chris Miller’s session on Installing and configurating Quickr. It was a typical Chris-session. What more can I say. Everybody who has ever heard him speak will know what I mean. He cramps a 3 hour session in an hour and still has a few minutes to spare for Q&A… Impressive as always.

Then of to Louis Richardson who took us to the Quickr and ECM integration. I knew most of what he was talking but it was nice that the head developer of Quickr was there. He could fill us in on future releases. That means providing meta data when dragging attachments into the connector, Domino Quickr integration with Filenet thru web 2.O, …

The next session was from Troy Reimer. He showed us 3 solutions of what you can do with Quickr Development. He only just touched the surface. To me it was more of a teaser that a actual technical session but again very interesting.

Viktor Kranz presented the first part of custom themes and server-wide extensions. Damn! I did not know all of this was possible. I spoke to a guy after the session who has been working with Quickr for about 1,5 year and he did not know most of what was said. (Note to self: I need to ask this guy’s name and email address because afterwards I had a quick burger with him in a local pub and we started drinking Belgian Stella Artois and shared the funniest / embarrassing Domino-Consultant-war stories). Anyway, again very useful session!

The last one of the day was again Troy Reimer. This time he showed us the code and some tricks on how to done certain things. I love listening to Troy because he’s a designer. You can pick them out very quick! The have a different way of explaining things than a sales person. And as a designer myself I can reflect to his way of thinking. This guy just knows so much about quickr development! Very impressive.

After all of this we had a welcome reception and then we were off to the pubs.

This first day was great. There was a lot of information. I still regret not being able to attend all of the other Sametime and Connections sessions but that’ll be for another year I hope. More info will follow later!