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| Clippings March 2008 (html) | |
Clippings March 2008
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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: |
Newsletter archive! The Clippings newsletter archive is available here.
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| PROGRAM MANAGER'S NOTE |
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The Lotus Education Certification web site is on the move!
That's right, all your IBM software certification needs can now be found under one IBM certification web site for a one stop, certification shop! Lotus, Rational, Tivoli, Websphere and Data Management are together for one complete IBM software certification source!
Go here to view the content information you rely on in a new format with ease of search functionality and other added features.
IBM — continuing to improve your education experience.
Regards
Bob
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| SPONSORED BY: TLCC - Check out our Notes Domino 8 Update Courses! |
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Learn Notes Domino 8 at your own pace and at
your place!
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Domino 8 Application Development Update covers all the new features including composite applications, DB2 Access and Query views, the new web services consumer feature and more!
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Notes Domino 8 System
Administration Update will enable you to take advantage of
Domino 8 including how to setup and control the new Notes 8 client,
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An expert TLCC instructor is a click away!
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Click here for more information on
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| GURU GUIDANCE |
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This month's article is provided by Warren Elsmore, a senior architecture consultant for BE System, based in the UK. He's been working with Notes and Domino since release 3 and is a regular conference speaker throughout the world, including Lotusphere. His expertise covers Lotus Notes, Domino, Sametime and Quick Administration and especially mobile devices.
With the increase in mobile and remote workers, Domino web applications are becoming more and more common around the world. Most of these applications can be quite happily served by the Domino web server itself. But what if your security team doesn't want to make an application server accessible from the web? Or what if you need to integrate your web application with another web application? Perhaps you want to remove the overhead of SSL encryption from your Domino servers? In all of these cases, you may find the answer to your problems by installing a Front End server.
So, what are Front End servers, anyway? Well, to convert your forms, pages, agent results and outlines into web pages, Domino includes its own HTTP stack. This not only converts the elements, but also manages the client HTTP requests, authentication and SSL encryption (amongst other things). The Domino HTTP stack does a very good job at this, but it has to be run on a Domino server - unlike, for instance, the Sametime MUX, which can be separated from the Sametime server. Using a Front End server, however, allows you to do just that. You can have a separate web server in front of your Domino server, transparently passing through the users requests.
There are a number of reasons why you might want to deploy a front-end server, but the primary reason is usually security. Deploying a web server in the DMZ, whilst leaving your Domino web server in the inside network, will give you greater security. Also, when using a Front End server, Domino will allow that server to perform user authentication. So by using IIS in front of Domino, you can authenticate your users using Active Directory - without ever touching your Domino configuration. Of course you could achieve some separation by replicating to a separate domain, but that would require replication and storing your data in the DMZ. This method leaves no data in the DMZ.
The second main reason for using a Front End server is usually to offload some of the Domino processing to another server. SSL encrypting your data is obviously a good idea, but it can place a significant load on the server itself. By using a Front End server, this load can be moved somewhere else. Finally, by integrating with another web server, you can achieve some very interesting integration results. How about displaying a single web page with your Citrix application icons and DWA email, seamlessly authenticated as you open the web browser? It all becomes possible.
OK, so a Front End server may solve your needs, but how does it actually work? Well, although the ability to do this has been around since R5 (9 years ago!), it has changed dramatically since the early versions. I'm not going to cover the R5 configuration, as I wouldn't ever suggest you tried back then (lots of things didn't work). But Domino 6, 7, and 8 all work in the same way.
When implementing a Front End server you install either IIS or IHS (IBM's version of Apache and part of Websphere Application Server) onto a server and then add a plugin to that installation. It's the plugin that does all the hard work. The plugin tells the web server to redirect any Domino web server requests back to Domino. Everything else stays the same, so the Front End server can still serve up HTML pages, JPGs, GIFs, Javascript, etc. In fact, it's just the Domino parts that you define that are redirected. So you can define some HTML to be served from the Front End and some from Domino. You can even define the front end to use HTTPS, while the connection back to Domino uses just HTTP.
One of the nice side results of using a Front End server such as IIS, is that you can take advantage of any other integration IIS can provide you. So, perhaps you have a two-factor authentication mechanism integrated to IIS, or Windows/Internet Explorer integrated authentication? Using a Front End server makes all these available to Domino as well.
So, how do we set this up? Well, the complete setup of a Front End server can be quite lengthy and involved. Fear not though! For those of you trying this with IIS, I've written a document on exactly how to do this, and it is available on my website. I'm afraid I haven't done this for IHS yet, but the steps are largely similar and the Domino 8 document covers all the differences very well.
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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:
- Lotus Domino
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See how your messaging servers are performing. See your productivity improve. But most importantly, see your family again. Learn how.
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| FROM LOTUSUSERGROUP.ORG |
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Leading speaker, author, and Lotus Administration expert, Chris Miller of Connectria, is providing LotusUserGroup.org with a 3-part article on server monitoring and reporting. In Part 1, Chris discusses what needs to be monitored and detailed with step-by-step instructions on setting alerts (including a sample instant alert that monitors the Domino Directory for any ACL changes and notifies all the domain administrators). Each part of this 3-part article is an article within itself. Check out part one.
ADMIN2008 and Lotus Developer 2008 are two of the most critical events of the year for the Lotus IT professional community and LotusUserGroup.org is bringing these events to our members along with some activities, contests, and fun. Whether you're going to Boston for these events or only wishing you were, LotusUserGroup.org has special features for you to participate in. Check it all out.
Look for features like podcast interviews recorded live from the conferences (2 Minutes With the Gurus, 2 Minutes With Lotus, 2 Minutes With our Members); Blogging From Boston, contests, and more.
Going to Boston for the conferences? Sign up to be interviewed as part of our "2 Minutes With our Members" podcast interviews. To sign up, just email us.
Not going? Check out Live From Boston to see new features we'll be adding, reports of what's going on, contests for non-attendees, and more.
What's a Virtual User Group Meeting? Think about all the things that a live user group meeting contains — a presentation, some time for networking and questions, and perhaps a snack. Well, we can't vouch for the snack, but we are providing the presentation and the networking. LotusUserGroup.org's Virtual User Group meetings include a Webcast presentation and a moderated topic forum/chat.
Our latest online meeting was held on February 11th and included a presentation from Rob Axelrod on archiving best practices. Rob discussed 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 detailed tools and methods for analysis of your systems and methodologies for managing the massive amounts of email data that reside in our environments. Check out the recorded version of the presentation and uncover proven best practices for where to put data (local vs. server), setting up and managing archiving rules, and controlling the end-user environment. You'll also get tips for managing and troubleshooting policies and learn how archiving affects server performance, the impact of local archiving, and more.
The Virtual User Group Meeting and the recorded presentation are made possible by Sherpa Software, leading providers of world-class products that address archiving, compliance, email management & e-discovery requirements. Please show support for our sponsor by visiting their web site.
Don't miss our week-long, expert moderated topic forum, "Managing Certificates, IDs, and Keys," moderated by Rob Axelrod of Technotics, Inc. Each week we present a different topic, moderated by a world-class expert on the subject matter. The forums let you get assistance, share your own expertise, collaborate with your peers, and provide feedback to the community.
During the week of March 10 - 14, join Rob Axelrod in this expert moderated topic forum on how to optimize the administration of IDs, certificates, and keys. Need to know how to properly weigh the risks and advantages of PKI? Not certain on it is crucial to use the certificate authority and set up password/ID recovery? Discovered some certifiers that have been compromised over time and want to know how to deal with it? Here's a tip: ask Rob to tell you how the inner workings of certificate and ID architecture are crucial to ensure that your Domino environment is able to stand up to Sarbanes-Oxley and other audit requirements. Join in, share your thoughts, and ask your questions.
The forum is made possible this week by PistolStar, Inc. — Strengthening Authentication to Adapt to Changing Circumstances
This month, Lotus sends new case studies on four companies that have implemented an array of IBM solutions. You can use these case studies, and the past case studies IBM has provided us, to get ideas for your own environment and applications or to support your company's use of Lotus software products.
The four latest case studies include Duke Medicine, a world-class academic and health care system; Tri-Search, providers of online services to legal practitioners; Healthways, Inc, one of the nation's fastest growing healthcare companies; and Zobrist Consulting Group, a small firm that specializes in building Internet applications for entrepreneurs running business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) Web sites in industries as diverse as retail, insurance, distribution and manufacturing.
Check out the full case studies for these four companies and for all our past case studies on our Case Studies Page.
THE VIEW Technical Solutions Supplement is a widely read compilation of articles from leading Lotus solutions and service providers. It serves as a communication platform that allows you to hear directly from the source about offerings that can enhance the Lotus environment, and about the successful deployments of these offerings at customer sites. This year the publication includes three bonus articles from The Sphere technical journal. The 2008 issue saw its debut at Lotusphere 2008 and mails to THE VIEW Subscribers in March but LotusUserGroup.org members can download it now.
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| EDUCATION NEWS |
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Available to Solution Developers and Service Providers.
Technical skills enablement workshops are being delivered both in-person and virtually worldwide. These workshops are intended to provide valuable technical skills to build solutions and deploy services.
Workshop descriptions and registration is now open on the public IBM Internet, click the links below for details.
| Location |
Date |
Workshop |
| AP |
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| Bangalore |
Mar 5-7 |
Lotus Quickr 8 |
| Bangalore |
Mar 11-13 |
WebSphere Portal Enable V6.0 |
| Bangalore |
Mar 18-20 |
Lotus Notes 8 Domino 8 |
| Bangalore |
Mar 25-27 |
Lotus Sametime 7.5.1 |
| EMEA — SW IOT |
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| Paris |
Mar 4-6 |
WebSphere Portal Enable V6.0 |
| Paris |
Mar 18-20 |
Lotus Sametime 7.5.1 |
| Paris |
Mar 26-28 |
Lotus Quickr 8 |
| Paris |
Apr 1-3 |
Lotus Connections |
| Barcelona |
Apr 16-18 |
WebSphere Portal Enable |
| Barcelona |
Apr 21-23 |
Lotus Quickr 8 |
| Barcelona |
Jun 3-5 |
Lotus Connections |
| EMEA — NE IOT |
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| Hursley |
Mar 4-6 |
Lotus Notes 8 Domino 8 |
| Warsaw |
Mar 12-14 |
Lotus Expeditor Client & Toolkit V6.1.1 |
| Hursley |
Mar 17-19 |
Lotus Connections |
| AG |
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| Virtual |
Mar 11-13 |
Lotus Quickr 8 |
For any questions, please send e-mail to Lotusedu@us.ibm.com.
Available to Clients, Business Partners and IBMers. New Self-Paced Technical Skills Workshops are now available. Self-Paced workshops enable the student to download the workshop presentations & labs, then execute the labs remotely, all on their own schedule with no travel required. The presentations have synchronized narration (English only) and allow the student full control to pause, forward, repeat or navigate the slides. Students reserve a 1-week period to run the labs on a remote live environment. Support for questions or any assistance are provided through a monitored forum. After enrolling, the student is sent an e-mail with details on how to proceed. To enroll in this no-fee offering, send a note to Lotusedu@us.ibm.com with the name of the workshop requested, your e-mail address, and one or two preferred 1-week times to run the labs. NOTE: an Internet connection is required.
The Self-Paced workshop content is the same as the in-person workshops that are currently being delivered. Here are links to the workshop descriptions:
For any questions, please send e-mail to Lotusedu@us.ibm.com.
Keeping your skills current and building the right level of technical expertise for your job responsibilities is a continual challenge in today's fast-paced environment. IBM can make it easier by delivering the right training to your doorstep with customized content for your organization's needs.
What's your training challenge?
- A class brought to your site or to multiple sites within your company
- Finding a training facility to hold a class for your own organization
- Making changes to a course by eliminating topics or combining topics from multiple courses
- Varying skills levels on the team
Let IBM bring the training directly to you and tailor a solution to meet your specific goals and challenges. By reading one of our case studies, learn how we helped other customers achieve great success with IBM onsite training.
Learn more
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| RESOURCES/PUBLICATIONS |
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The Learning Continuum Company (TLCC) has announced new packages for both developers and administrators on Notes Domino 8. These will prepare you for the IBM/Lotus exams to get certified on Notes Domino 8.
Special Offer for Clippings Readers!
All 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 and will be shown once you add a course to your shopping cart.
For New Developers:
The Notes Domino 8 Certified Developer Package has the three courses you need to get certified plus practice exams to get ready for the tests to become an IBM Certified Application Developer - Lotus Notes and Domino 8. This package contains the following:
These three courses will prepare you for all three required exams to become an IBM Certified Application Developer in Notes Domino 8. Both courses and the practice exams sell for $2,700 if bought separately! Save over $1,000 by buying this package!
- Notes Domino 8 Application Development 1
- Notes Domino 8 Application Development 2
- Developing Domino 8 Web Applications
- Plus the practice exams (three!) from CertFX to help you get certified!
For New Administrators:
The Notes Domino 8 System Administrator Package will teach you how to administer Notes and Domino and become an IBM Certified System Administrator in Notes Domino 8 for up to 70% less than the cost of typical classroom training. TLCC's highly acclaimed Notes/Domino training lets you download the courses to your office or home computer and learn Notes Domino 8 administration at your convenience. The Notes Domino 8 Certified System Administration Package contains the following courses:
- Notes Domino 8 System Administration 1
- Notes Domino 8 System Administration 2
- Plus the practice exams (three!) from CertFX to help you get certified!
These two courses will prepare you for all three required exams to become an IBM Certified System Administrator in Notes Domino 8.
Both courses and the practice exams sell for more than $1,600 if bought separately! Save $500 by buying this package!
For Experienced Developers and Administrators:
TLCC offers update courses for experienced Notes and Domino 7 developers and administrators. These update courses concentrate only on the changes in Notes Domino 8 and will prepare you to take the update certification exams to become certified on Notes Domino 8. The update courses are:
- Notes Domino 8 Application Development Update
- Notes Domino 8 System Administration Update
Special Offer for Clippings Readers! All other 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.
For more information on TLCC's Notes Domino 8 courses and this special offer go here.
The Lotus Notes Domino 8 Upgrader's Guide is a new technical publication co-authored by several members of the IBM Software Services for Lotus team (Tim Speed, Bennie Gibson, Joseph Anderson, Brad Schauf, Barry Rosen, David Byrd, and Stephen Hardison). This guide is intended to help Notes users, administrators, and application developers better understand new functionality and the implications of upgrading to Notes 8. Topics covered include Notes 8 features and tools, upgrade approaches, integration considerations, and much more. The book is available published by Packt Publishing and also available from several book sellers like Amazon.com, Softpro and others.
In this developerWorks article, IBMers Abhishek Singh and Georgiana Avram describe the new builders in WebSphere Portlet Factory V6.0.1 that facilitate creating, retrieving, updating, and deleting content in IBM WebSphere Portal Document Manager. The Integrating IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory V6.0.1 with IBM WebSphere Portal Document Manager article also provides an overview of Portal Document Manager and illustrates how to incorporate new Portlet Factory builders by describing the process of adding them to a sample portlet application. You can find the article here.
The Introduction to the JavaScript API in IBM Lotus Forms V3 developerWorks article, written by IBMers Yi Gu and Yi Ting Sang, provides an introduction to the JavaScript API in Lotus Forms, describes the mechanism of the API, and provides examples of how to use the API. The new JavaScript API in Lotus Forms V3.0 allows you to manipulate and control the behavior of embedded Lotus Forms with simple HTML and JavaScript in a browser. See this article here.
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| EVENTS |
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Click here for a complete listing of upcoming events and meetings.
This month's event spotlights include:
- Lotus Notes and Domino 8 Development Seminar
Meeting Date: March 19 — 21, 2008
Meeting Location: Rio All Suite Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas, NV
- Lotusphere Comes to You, Ohio
Meeting Date: Tuesday, March 20, 2008
Meeting Location: Hyatt on Capitol Square, 75 East State Street, Columbus OH
- Lotus Notes and Domino 8 Upgrade Seminar
Meeting Date: March 31 — April 2, 2008
Meeting Location: Copenhagen Marriott Hotel, Copenhagen, Denmark
- Lotus Notes and Domino 8 Development Seminar
Meeting Date: April 9 — 11, 2008
Meeting Location: Falkoner Allé 9, Dk- 2000 Frederiksberg, Copenhagen
- Admin2008
Meeting Date: April 30 — May 2, 2008
Meeting Location: Boston Sheraton Hotel, Boston, MA
- Lotus Developer2008
Meeting Date: April 30 — May 2, 2008
Meeting Location: Boston Sheraton Hotel, Boston, MA
- UKLUG Conference 2008 Announced
Meeting Date: September 19, 2008
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| INSTRUCTOR'S CORNER |
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On January 20th instructors from around the world gathered in Orlando, Florida for this event. Not only were IBMers from Lotus Education, IDC and Lotus Regional on hand to facilitate conversation and answer questions; but Lotus Training Partners joined us for the first half of the meeting. As per usual, this event was high energy. Many of the presentations sparked lively discussion and debate, which spilled over into Element K's networking reception afterwards.
Highlights of the day include the Custom Content Assembler demo by Michael Beaver and the presentation of the 2008 Instructor Program Priorities by Sara Nicklin. Unfortunately, due to an attempt to pack too much into too short a time, the latter presentation had to be cut short and we had to miss Kasten's Best Practices altogether. Throughout the day, feedback was gathered and incorporated into a deep-dive discussion surrounding communication, compliance and collaboration.
For those who could not attend, PDFs of the presentations have been posted in the LE Instructor Forum; as well as a list of the initiatives discussed and action items raised. Any instructor may comment on the action items listed in the forum if they so choose. The more instructors participate, the greater the program becomes!
If you still do not have access to the LE Instructor Forum, please send an email with the subject "Request access to the Instructor Forum".
The Instructor Program would like to thank everyone who attended this meeting. A special thanks goes out to Ginny Fitzpatrick, who took the time to present her take on how an Independent Instructor can forge relationships with both the direct and indirect channels and thrive while doing it.
Once again, Instructor Awards were presented in Orlando, Florida during the 2008 Certified Lotus Instructor Day. For those who could not attend, your awards have been mailed out to you.
Selecting recipients of the awards from the nominations received is always difficult. The instructor community has an abundance of technical talent, professional skill and infectious energy — which makes the selection process all the more challenging.
Only one instructor worldwide can win the Dr. Jim H Adair Award for Instructor Excellence. The recipient must embody the unique qualities exemplified by Dr. Adair such as demonstrating personal and technical integrity in his or her instruction, seeking out opportunities to meet individual student learning needs and receiving consistently high instructor evaluations.
This year, it was the Program Manager's privilege to present this award to Daniel Baber of Kasten.Concepts in Germany.
For a complete list of award recipients, log onto 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.
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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 e 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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