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The Lotus portfolio has many solutions which can help both individuals and companies collaborate and work smarter, but the focus of my message this month is not on our products but on conferences and how attending an upcoming conference lends itself to working smarter, not harder.

Last year, Lotus technical conferences were launched to complement the pre-existing Portal conferences. In 2009, we are continuing these offerings and have nine Lotus Collaboration and Portal conferences scheduled for this year. The main difference is that, this year, certification will be available at all of our conferences at a heavily discounted rate. Regardless of geography, for all candidates, the first test is free and the second test is 50% off. This means that if a conference attendee in the United Kingdom takes advantage of two testing opportunities, he or she saves the equivalent of $300USD. Not only does this help defray the cost of the conference, but it also reduces the cost of certification significantly.

In some cases, there is no cost at all. For example, Pat, certified in Lotus Notes and Domino 8 System Administration, wants to upgrade to 8.5 System Administration and needs to take an update exam. If Pat takes that exam at a conference, it will cost her nothing, a savings of $200USD. That is money back in her pocket to spend on training, additional certifications, or other areas of professional development.

Aside from the technical conferences, certification exams are offered at 50% off at the upcoming Admin2009 and Lotus Developer2009 conferences in Boston, happening April 15 - 17. The $100USD-per-exam savings can help defray the cost of attending, giving you one more reason to register for these events.

So take some time to view the list of conferences and events, listed herein, to see if there is a Lotus or Portal technical conference you can attend or if the Admin2009 or Lotus Developer2009 conferences make sense for you. Not only will you gain up-to-the-minute information on our latest technologies and the opportunity to network with peers, but you will also be able to get more for less in terms of your professional investment... and that is working smarter!

Sara Nicklin
IBM Lotus Professional Certification Program Manager

Learn All the New Features of Notes and Domino 8.5!

Our next online meeting is on March 12 and will feature a presentation on Mail Journaling and Compliance by Denny Russell, technical support specialist for Sherpa Software, and Grant Lindsay, product manager for Sherpa Software.

Compliance can seem like a vague word. Translating outside laws and rules into real electronic management, archiving policies, and capture procedures can prove challenging for any Domino administrator. Add to that the current economic strain on budgets and limited resources to execute IT initiatives and you have what most see as a tough challenge.

Join us for this Virtual User Group Meeting, including an online presentation that explores compliance from an IT perspective, and learn what is available out of the box with Domino. Take a close look at how Domino's journal mechanism works and its potential shortcomings. Explore real-time message capture and some tools that take compliance-related mail journaling and filtering one step further.

The presentation is free for LotusUserGroup.org members but requires pre-registration. Register today!

Lotusphere Comes to You Online is a premier online event series featuring newly updated presentations from Lotusphere 2009. Designed to bring anyone who couldn't get to Orlando the critical information and the excitement they missed, this FREE online series will help you get more from your existing IT investment and boost collaboration across your enterprise.

Join us online for these Webinars to learn more about the latest exciting news and announcements from Lotus. Sessions begin in March. There are 16 different sessions in all:

All the online sessions are free to LotusUserGroup.org members (and membership is free), but pre-registration is required. Register today!

Avaya and IBM define Unified Communications as orchestrated communication and collaboration across locations, time, and medium to accelerate business results. It can improve customer service by simplifying the interaction between customers and the enterprise, and by making workers more available and responsive. Productivity can be increased, measured not just by the seconds or minutes it can save an employee to execute a task, but by the compression of overall business processes measured in hours or days. It is achieved through the convergence of real-time, near-real-time, and non-real-time business communication applications, including calling, conferencing, messaging, contacts, calendaring, collaboration, and rich presence with voice, video, text, and visual elements. These communications services are increasingly designed to be embedded into structured and unstructured business processes.

Unified Communications by its very nature will change behavior and the way people communicate and work. A Unified Communications solution does not have to be implemented as a single project. Rather, it can be implemented as a series of initiatives, all based on a single vision. Avaya and IBM are helping customers to move toward Unified Communications to support complex and flexible work environments. The consultative process begins with a business assessment to understand the communication patterns within the organization and to identify where business processes slow or bog down. Unified Communications can help to improve business processes where latencies exist due to human interaction and communication.

A new whitepaper, hosted on LotusUserGroup.org proposes concrete, practical steps that customers can take to leverage Unified Communications to improve their businesses. Visit our Whitepaper Archive today to read this compelling whitepaper from Avaya.

Admin2009 and Lotus Developer2009 are two of the most critical events of the year for the Lotus IT professional community. Once again, THE VIEW is co-locating the two events in Boston, kicking off the conferences with a jumpstart day on April 14, which leads into the full conferences from April 15 - 17. And, LotusUserGroup.org is bringing you coverage of these events online — including some activities, contests, and fun — with our presentation of "Live from Boston." Whether you're going to Boston for these events or only wishing you were, LotusUserGroup.org's "Live from Boston" has special features in which you can participate.

Part of the "Live from Boston" presentation includes coverage of the BlackBerry Evening of Entertainment, which will feature an entertaining, live game show on stage called "The Last Geek Standing." The game show features a panel of attendees pitted against a panel of the presenters for the chance to win some great prizes. Attendees can sign up in advance to participate in the game. This is followed by Lotus Jam, a live jam session featuring a Boston-area band, The PCI Compliants, who will open the stage for audience members to join them in jamming.

Check out all the details of "Live from Boston," as well as more information about signing up for "The Last Geek Standing" and Lotus Jam.

This month's article is provided by Warren Elsmore, a senior architecture consultant for BE Systems, based in the UK. He has been working with Notes and Domino since release 3 and is a regular conference speaker throughout the world, including at Lotusphere. His expertise covers Lotus Notes, Domino, Sametime, Quickr administration, and mobile devices.

One of the most under-exploited features of Notes is the client itself — and particularly the tools available to customize the installation to your particular environment. This time around, we're going to look at the InstallShield Tuner for Lotus Notes. As stated above, this is for Windows-client installations only, so if you're a Mac or Linux user, then I'm afraid you'll have to pass this one by.

In all recent versions of Notes, the installation itself is accomplished through an MSI package. MSI packages are a standard Windows way of distributing applications. The setup.exe that you run simply gives the MSI package some parameters and then asks the Windows installer service to do the install. The benefit of this is that you don't have to run setup.exe to pass through those parameters — you can create a custom installation yourself.

Let's say your standard Notes installation installs into c:\Lotus\Notes (not the default directory); you don't want to install the modem files; you want a multi-user installation; and you don't want to install Activities. You can do all this automatically with the InstallShield Tuner.

To obtain the tuner, the first thing you'll need to do is download it from Passport Advantage. It's a separate download to the Notes client, and don't worry if there isn't a version available for your particular revision of Notes. Next, you'll need a testbed PC. If you don't have any spare PCs (without Notes on them), then try creating a virtual machine using VMware Server, which is free! Download this program and install it onto your testbed workstation. You'll then have a new icon called "InstallShield Tuner for Lotus Notes".

When you run the tuner, you'll be asked to open an 'itw' file. This is the file that contains details of the install options available. Browse to a directory where you have downloaded and unpacked all the Notes installation files, and click OK. To create your own custom installation, you will need to create an MST file — an MSI Transform file. Click on 'Create a new transform file' and fill out the options as in the following figure. It's always a good idea to pick a separate directory.

Here's the clever part. Select Response Transform and then click OK. You'll see the Notes setup appear. Don't worry — just go through and make your amendments and finally click OK. By doing this, your specific amendments will be recorded into a new MST file and Notes won't be installed! You'll then see a great big screen, as shown in the following figure:

Now, you can use the InstallShield Tuner to configure anything else you want about the Notes client. How about changing the help text to include your Support-Desk phone number? Or the IBM URLs to point to your intranet URLs?

There are many, many things that you can do with the InstallShield Tuner to configure the Notes client exactly the way you want it to be. Not only can you amend settings and select items not to be installed, you can also replace files within the deployment. Why would you want to do this? Well, what about deploying a customized pernames.ntf with your build? That's easy to do with a transform file — and very hard to do otherwise. Or how about deploying a standard set of RSS feeds into the client reader? This is also easy to do with a transform file.

Of course, there are a number of items that can't be setup during startup, user preferences for instance. But by using a combination of a scripted setup and desktop policies, I find it's usually possible to reduce the setup time of a new client build to almost nothing.

Keep in mind that you have to tell the installer to use your new transform file when you install. To do that, you do need to run a slightly different command line. It will vary according to your environment of course, but the general syntax will be something like:

msiexec /i LotusNotes8.MSI /t mytransformfile.mst /qb+

This would install the LotusNotes8.MSI file, using your transform file and showing no interaction other than a status bar.

And here's a really interesting tactic. You may or may not know that the Notes client setup (i.e., the second part where you specify your username, server, and so on) is also scriptable. Notes supports a configuration file, typically called setup.txt. Rather than ask users for their details, the setup.txt file will be read and answer those questions for them. So new users simply run Notes, enter their password, and click OK when they see "Notes Setup is complete."

Running through all details of a scriptable setup isn't possible this month (though I might come back to that next month if you are interested), but it can be triggered by a custom installation. To make a scriptable setup work, you need to edit the Notes.ini file before setup starts. By adding the value configfile=setup.txt, the Notes client will look for setup.txt instead of asking your users questions.

Using the InstallShield Tuner for Lotus Notes, we can edit the Notes.ini file that is installed by the standard install. It's easy to make the install look for that file on every setup. With both of these modifications in place, your new client build can be completely automated — no prompts at all!

After only a couple of weeks after the product release and a couple of days after the certification release, unprecedented numbers sat for either the Application Development or System Administration update exam. In fact, both of these tests made the top-five list of exams taken at Lotusphere 2009.

Top 5 Exams Taken at Lotusphere:

Many professionals wonder why new designations were assigned to release 8.5, why this release was not handled like version 6.5 where the certifications were merely added onto 6. The simple truth is there are so many new features and complexities associated with this release, a new certification was necessary in order to do both the product and the expertise of the professionals who work with it justice.

Detailed information on these release certification paths can be found on the Lotus Certification public site. But for quick reference, see the quickest route to 8.5 shown below.

If you're certified in...

... Release 8?
Take the applicable upgrade exam: Application Development or System Administration

... Release 7?
Take an upgrade exam from 7 to 8 in Application Development or System Administration, and then take the applicable ND8.5 upgrade exam: Application Development or System Administration

... Release 6/6.5?
Though there is an option to take the three core exams to obtain certification in release 8.5, it makes more sense to take the update tests to 7, then to 8, and then to 8.5. Yes, there are still three tests involved, but instead of achieving one professional-level certification, you will achieve three: one in each release.

But you must act quickly in order to take advantage of this path. Both the Application Development and System Administration upgrade tests from 6/6.5 to 7 are retiring at the end of April 2009!

The IBM Multimedia Library for Lotus Notes is a comprehensive, new training solution featuring more than 1,000 short video tutorials in 11 languages. The IBM Multimedia for Lotus Notes focuses on key skills development areas for new Notes users and advanced users with targeted content for end users, remote users, administrative assistants, and help-desk support.

The IBM Multimedia Library for Lotus Notes is a key offering with cost-effective "no-travel training" options.

Watch the Multimedia Library demo on YouTube.

Learn more about the IBM Multimedia Library for Lotus Notes.

The retirement of these exams has been extended!

Test 701: IBM Lotus Notes Domino 7 Application Development Update and Test 702: IBM Lotus Notes Domino 7 System Administration Update are available until April 2009. The corresponding certifications will also be available until April 30th, 2009.

Please click here for more information.

The following exams are available.

Exam 951: IBM Lotus Notes Domino 8.5 Application Development Update
Exam 952: IBM Lotus Notes Domino 8.5 Application Development Foundation Skills
Exam 956: IBM Lotus Notes Domino 8.5 System Administration Update
Exam 980: IBM Lotus Notes Domino 8.5 System Administration Operating Fundamentals
Exam 981: IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 Building the Infrastructure

The Certification Paths for Notes Domino 8.5 have been released and can be accessed via the public site.

In the developerWorks article entitled "Working with components in IBM Lotus Quickr (Part 1): Creating a news component," Amit Pareek and Yogesh Karekar (IBM India Software Labs) provide step-by-step instructions explaining how to create a news component (i.e., news list) in IBM Lotus Quickr for WebSphere Portal. Lotus Quickr provides a set of list components that are used to display sets of structured content, such as project tasks, announcements, and contacts. Users can use any of these predefined list components to store information relating to a team or project in a teamplace. This news component supports the typical features of a news item: title, summary, body, and type (normal and important news). This is the first installment in a multi-part article series on this topic.

To read the article, click here.

In the developerWorks article, "Working with components in IBM Lotus Quickr (Part 2): Creating a personalized view of the announcement component," Amit Pareek and Yogesh Karekar (IBM India Software Labs) explain how to create a personalized view of announcement items across all of the teamplaces to which a user belongs. Lotus Quickr services for WebSphere Portal 8.1 provide a list composite application that is used to display sets of structured content, such as project tasks, announcements, and contacts. Users can utilize any of these predefined list components to store information relating to a team or project in a teamplace. This article shows you how to create a personalized view of the announcement. The personalized view in the article has been implemented using the Lotus Web Content Management application in Lotus Quickr.

For more information, click here.

In the developerWorks article, "Your Co branding for IBM Lotus Sametime 8.0 and later using the connect client," Shannon Pixley (IT Specialist, IBM Software Services for Lotus) describes installing and modifying a Lotus Sametime branding plug-in, using the branding plug-in of a fictitious company, Your Co. The Lotus Sametime Connect client user interface can be customized with images, icons, logos, slogans, design schemes, and more — allowing companies to provide a unique and personal experience that all employees can see when they use Lotus Sametime.

To learn more, click here.

See below for new podcasts in the ISSL ExpertBriefing series.

Podcast: Optimizing Lotus Messaging and Collaboration
In the ISSL ExpertBriefing: Optimizing Lotus Messaging and Collaboration podcast, David Bell (Solution Architect, IBM Software Services for Lotus) and Bill Polymenakos (Director of Professional Services, Permessa) discuss ways to measure and maximize Lotus messaging and collaboration system performance and how to better monitor, manage, and optimize your Lotus infrastructure.

To listen to the podcast, click here.

Podcast: IBM Software Premium Support
In the ISSL ExpertBriefing: IBM Software Premium Support podcast, Kim Killam, Doug Bruce, and Tony Cusato from the IBM Software Premium Support team discuss the challenges facing organizations and the value that a proactive, personalized support model can provide in terms of avoiding common IT pitfalls and ensuring that mission critical applications run smoothly.

For more information, click here.

The ISSL ExpertBriefings podcast series on ibm.com gives you the chance to hear the technical practitioners and solution experts at IBM Software Services for Lotus discuss Lotus and Portal technology topics and share what they've learned working on a variety of projects for companies spanning different industry segments. For more information, see the ISSL ExpertBriefing Center Web site.

One or two days out of your schedule will move you to the next level with Lotus Collaboration and WebSphere Portal technologies. The technical content delivered at a Lotus Technical Seminar will provide strategies and a clear framework for success.

Tracks cover the most important aspects of Lotus software development and administration. Content is based on real-world best practices and is delivered by IBM's Lotus Software Services experts in your local language.

Bookmark the Lotus Technical Seminars home page for the 2009 WW schedule.

The Symposium on Government Transparency and Web 2.0 Tools has been added to the Lotus Technical Seminar series. IBM is a recognized leader in business transparency and has effectively used innovative Web 2.0 tools to foster better communication.

The symposium will provide an overview of Web 2.0 tools and the opportunity to meet with members of the IBM Corporate Communications staff and practitioners who have developed policies and procedures for the use of Web 2.0 tools.

Washington, DC: Wednesday — March 18, 2009, 9:00AM - 4:30PM

Learn more and register today!

Get certified to teach the first IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5 course available: D8730: Exploring New Features in IBM Lotus Domino 8.5 Administration. Though the final exam in the ND 8.5 System Administration core path is not yet available, instructors who hold certification in Lotus Notes and Domino System Administration 8.5 can take advantage of the upgrade path to attain the professional credentials necessary to teach the above — and subsequent — Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5 System Administration course(s).

The certification path for IBM Certified Instructor — Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5 System Administration:

Once these steps have been completed, you will receive certification as a Lotus Domino 8.5 System Administration Instructor. An email notification listing the authorized course(s) added to your portfolio, as well as a softcopy certificate reflecting your new certification title, will be sent to you.

Note that you must pass this exam to be certified to teach all ND 8.5 System Administration courses, including D8730. Detailed information on the certification paths for IBM Lotus Domino 8.5 can be found on the Lotus Certification pages.

If you have upgraded your certifications, need to add courses to your portfolio, or have a general question related to teaching Lotus courseware, contact the Instructor Program Administrator for your region/geography:

Most of these are located on the Certified Lotus Instructor Private Site.

Only Instructors with an IBM ID can access this site.