Lotusphere 2007 - Day 1

I'm taking a break between festivities, so I'll try to make this short.

My first session was JMP102, a Domino Domain Manager Jumpstart, and it was awesome. DDM was introduced in Domino 7 and it's an extension of the events4 database. It gives you the ability to send targeted probes if, for example, the ACL on your server's names.nsf changes. Very, very cool stuff. I had read the Redbook about it, but never had a chance to really try to piece it all together. This session did an amazing job of putting the pieces together. (That was a theme that would be repeated throughout the day.) At one point the presenter made the statement "Here the view icons proceed from calm green, indicating everything is okay, to oh-my-goodness red!" Take that, Notes 8 design team. ;-)

My second session was JMP403, a Java jumpstart. For the past couple of months I've been trying to wrap my head around Java and I've been stuck just trying to get a handle on Eclipse. Once again, this session did an incredible job of putting the pieces together. Now I get it, and I'll be able to take what I learned and apply it directly to my work when I get back. I have to say, Eclipse is pretty freaking amazing.

Next was lunch, and other than a total failure in planning it was fine. Believe it or not lunch was overflowed. I had to hike from the Dolphin to the Yacht & Beach Club, which was about 1/2 a mile, then stand in line with about 300 people. I barely made my next session, and I'll be stopping by the Lotusphere Information booth to let them know what kind of crap I think this is.

After lunch I attended JMP301, an AJAX and Javascript jumpstart. And once again, a lot of what I had read was put together and the pieces all clicked. I could seriously stop today and be so far ahead of where I was when I came here. The only question I still have is regarding running an agent and returning the results to the browser. I know it's possible and I know I've read some techniques, hopefully now that I have a better grasp on what's going on I'll be able to apply it. This is seriously huge for my company.

Last up was JMP104 - Domino Security A to Z. This was a good session, but in a different way than the others. It was a lot of tips and hints, and while it was mostly geared toward larger installations there are some things I'll be doing very soon. Like taking myself out of the Full Access Administrator field on my server documents, removing */org from Run Unrestricted Agents, and setting up a special signing ID for databases. I'm debating creating a separate ID to use for development, too.

After the last session finished at 6:00 I had time to run back to the room, freshen up, then head over for the welcome party. The food was mediocre to poor, but it was pretty cool to see all the people. I'm not much of a crowd person so I either stood by myself or wandered aimlessly for a while.

I finally worked up the courage and asked someone in a Lotus911 shirt if he knew where I could find Nathan Freeman. Lo and behold, Nathan was about 5 feet away. The next hour or so after that was a surreal and uplifting blur. I met Chris Byrne, Andrew Kelly, Jon Von, Bruce Elgort (and wife Gail), Chris Miller, and Bill Buchan. All of them are extremely nice guys and those who had seen my blogging were almost immediately supportive. That was a tremendous relief, actually. It's one of those things where I don't really know what people are thinking. I put my ideas out there and I don't get much feedback, so I don't know if people are silently nodding or sitting there thinking "what an ass". It's good to know there are some people who are like-minded.

I have to say that Bill's response to meeting me was a little overwhelming. Today was Bill's 4oth birthday and while the cake was served at the welcome party (pictures of the mayhem forthcoming), the real party is going to be at Jellyroll's. Bill was sincerely concerned that we were having our Over the Rainbow meeting tonight at Jellyroll's. He said that while the "culture and class would be a welcome departure", he didn't want to spoil our event. When he found out it wasn't tonight he was insistent that I come to Jellyroll's. I'm tickled that Bill was concerned about intruding, but even moreso that he was aware of our little group. I guess some people actually are reading this. :-)