Daniele Vistalli's Blog

My last blog post dates back to december 2012, almost 12 years ago.

As I was talking to a friend today about things we are doing the topic of "blogging again" came up. Here we are.

My original blog is stored in this NSF database and I'm going to use Domino to host my blog and to adapt and evolve this database to be its container.

First of all... a quick recap of things.

In the last 12 years a few things happened. Factor-y S.r.l. my company has grown to be a 30 people team, our customer set has grown and we are able to continue to have fun with enterprise technology we have mastered over time.

Today in my CEO (and technical lead role) I work with a team implementing complex projects on:

* HCL DX (Digital Experience)
* HCL Domino, Notes, Nomad and the family of enterprise producs
* HCL Volt MX (including Leap)
* OKTA Identity Cloud
* Auth0 from Okta

Yesterday IBM released Notes / Domino 9.0 Social Edition in the first public beta.

The amount of information made available to the public is astounding and the quality of the release notes is just great.

At my company (Factor-y S.r.l.), we're an IBM business partner, we were waiting for this new beta to to the right thing ... Upgrade.

Just a few hours after Paul Mooney announced his upgrade we completed our.

We updated:

• The mail production cluster to v. 9.0
• A separate 9.0 server beta we used for testing
• The traveler server

• Embedded Experiences
• Integration with Connections 4.0 activity stream
• Deploying the new SBT SDK
• Create an SBT Applications using the new playground ... (I'm targeting a "basecamp" clone built with XPages and Connections 4.0 services)

My friend Giuseppe Grasso of Dominopoint.it fame just created an interesting post in the OpenNTF forum.

Giuseppe accomplished the task of designing a rollover "stylish" style for Open NTF and has some good points on the OpenNTF look.

Maybe it's a worth read, go check how nicer look Giusppe created.

Ciao a tutti, sono a Lotusphere 2010 e stò seguendo, anche per voi la conferenza.

Per chi fosse interessato a una prospettiva "business" stò scrivendo una serie di post sul blog di Factor-y S.r.l. (la mia azienda).

Buona lettura

da Lotusphere
          Daniele Vistalli.

On Thursday November 13 2009 the Italian Lotus Community gathered once again under the Dominopoint.it flag.

The venue this year was located in the Italian IBM headquarters. Many were worried about "rules" that could be imposed on us presenters but this actually didn't happen. We got complete freedom of "expression" and nobody complained about anything.

This year (for the third time) the number of attendees increased. If you check out the conference website (http://day3.dominopoint.it) you'll see that 571 people registerd.
Unofficial information confirms that more than 400 people faced up and stayed all day long at the event. I'm looking forward to official numbers soon this week. This is an awesome number for an european Lotus only event. If you also consider that being held in italian as a spoken language our target was "limited" this is ultra-awesome... more than 400 people attended from Italy only with a few coming from abroad and two international speakers (more later) participating in the event.

I was participating with a session about using Lotus products in Web 2.0 mashups. I'm looking forward to extend an tranlsate my presentation next week and share it on slideshare. I'll post an update when it's ready.

Also I was guest of Lotus' own presentation on Lotus Connections 2.5. Elena Sangalli (Lotus Technical Presale) held a great presentation and LIVE DEMO (the most risky thing you can do at an event) about all the integrations and plugins that Lotus Connections 2.5 offers to users out of the box. I completed the session with a show about how you can "customized & extend" Lotus Connections using APIs and extension points (eg. using Domino 8.5.1 iWidgets to extend the connections' homepage).

Finally ... the two speaker's dinner were great. The first with all the speakers and the second with those who could affort to stay in Milan after the event.

During the second dinner we've had the honor to have with us once again Franziska Tanner and Mary Beth Raven our two international speakers !!!

My favourite quote from Mary Beth twitter is:

Il DP Day 3 si stà avvicinando, la call for session è aperta e come al solito devo decidere cosa proporre alla selezione.

Ho fatto una breve lista degli argomenti che potrei preparare, che ne dite, c'è qualcosa che interessa più del resto ?
Commentate e fatemi sapere.

Possibili sessioni per il DPDay III

1. Development
   1. Facciamoli a pezzi !!! I dati (con Lotus Mashups) - Integrazioni con Domino
   2. XPages a 360° (e oltre) - Web & Client 8.5.1
   3. Composite applications - Portal edition
   4. Composite applications - Lotus Notes Edition
2. Admin
   1. Extreme Web Experience for domino - Ottenere un'infrastruttura web eccezionale con i prodotti lotus (Domino e WebSphere). (Performance, SSO, HTTPS, Reverse proxy, Logging)
   2. Usare le XPages con Domino 8, 7, 6, 5, 4... un ambiente ibrido per chi ancora non vuole/può migrare alla 8.5 ma vorrebbe le XPages
3. Prodotti
   1. Sametime Conferencing 8.5 - Extreme conferencing
   2. Ri-Connessi (Lotus Connections 2.5)

I've not posted lately because I'm preparing something new that's changing my professional life.

Apart from this I've been following everything in the Lotus BlogoSphere and in particular the latest Lotus annoucements in the marketing initiatives.

I'm hoping... finally Lotus may get a real marketing plan. In my experience IBM/Lotus marketing has been inefficent or useless providing the market with messages that were "very IBM" and cryptic for the rest of the world.
I'm hoping... it appears Lotus wants to change this but I remember a long list attempt with no results
I'm hoping... Lotus has the most complete product-set around for collaboration but I keep listening to customers saying... "it seems IBM don't want to sell us..." (it's not a rant this is what customers tell me everyday).

So what I'd like to see happen (mine is mostly an Italian focused experience):

• Stop feeding useless "channel magazines" that are only of interest to vendors/distributors but that are useless to CIO/CEO and often drain marketing funds... (I think channel magazines are a place where everybody attempt to look better with almost no value for the readers)
• Start being aggressive on IT magazines with highest reading public. Maybe even magazines that are not (by nature) focused at Enterprises but to small medium business.
• Publish understandable and complete whitepapers with best practices on TCO reduction and product comparison (IBM vs Microsoft vs OpenSource).
• Engage universities and education institutes. Microsoft is doing this all the time.. IBM is not. Have partners do this for you. Consider this as the greatest investment you can do. I learned that universities love OpenSource but also that people in univesities loves to (and need to) learn from the real world. Nothing better than having IBM go there and explain the how and why of enterprise software and what's the difference...
  • I've been following the DB2 on Campus initiative... that's great

• Lotus Knows you can't exchange a Microsoft mail system for a real Collaboration Platform
• Lotus Knows you can't exchange a system that allows upgrades with an Install&Migrate product and still keep your TCO low. (Domino upgrades, Exchange doesn't)

• Lotus Knows you can't exchange a Ferris survey/report with a report that really addresses your TCO (check it out)
• Lotus Knows you can't exchange a Julia White post with something that doesn't need "correction" (check it out)