NotesBerry

Category UKLUG

Last week was the excellent UK Lotus User Group conference and there was a BlackBerry session presented by Jen Ortiz of RIM. Jen is Global Technical Account Manager but will shortly be moving back to Canada to take on Valerie Wang's role of Product Manager For IBM Technologies (you may have seen Valerie at Lotusphere or ILUG).

Jen's presentation emphasised RIM's good relations with Lotus and mentioned that there were now 13,750 Domino BES servers worldwide.

Interestingly Jen stated that BES virtualisation was growing in Europe (though less so in the USA) and that RIM's developer were working to help this process. She also mentioned that RIM are considering other platforms for the BES.

RIM are also working on Quickr for BlackBerry and would like to hear from organisations who are interested in the potential of this combination. If you are then please drop us a line here at Notesberry and we will pass it on to RIM.

UKLUG also had a "Gurupalooza" where all the speakers climb onto a stage and get asked questions. One question asked was their view of the iPhone and interestingly Paul Mooney said that while the iPhone was a great device in his view it was not ready to be a corporate mobile solution. Paul has already commented on this in his own blog here.

When asked about the iPhone outside her session Jen Ortiz gave an interesting view that the iPhone is a cool personal phone that people are trying to enterprise while BlackBerry is an enterprise device that they now need to personalise. And just to back that up she had a very nice BlackBerry Bold, a new flip-top Pearl and an all pink Pearl on show.

Posted by Mike Smith At 13:36:45 Location London | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Category UKLUG

Once again BlackBerry are sponsoring the UK Lotus User Group 2008 conference on the 18th and 19th September. The guys from RIM will also be presenting and have a stand in the sponsor section.

Its worth noting that UKLUG will again be free thanks to the generosity of sponsors like RIM. But more than that RIM's significant investment in sponsorship both at UKLUG and elsewhere (the Irish Lotus User Group conference comes to mind) does reflect a consistent commitment to Lotus.

Of course some of Notesberry's contributors will be at UKLUG too - including Bill Buchan, Paul Mooney (Bill and Paul are both presenting) and Tim Davis. So if you see them be sure to say hello.

If you want to see more about this year's UKLUG conference you can got to:

http://www.uklug.info/

Posted by Mike Smith At 10:25:17 Location London | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category BlackBerry Device OS BES 4.1.6

Dear reader,

This post isn't typical for NotesBerry in that it is not about providing a solution to a problem you might be experiencing.  Rather I'm highlighting a problem that you may be suffering but is out of your control and out of my control.  

The recently released BES 4.1.6 will hopefully resolve issues that, anecdotally, some Domino customers were experiencing with 8.0.1 and BES 4.1.5.  Good news! In addition there are numerous other bug fixes in that release. The server team have obviously been busting a gut to fix issues.  If that weren’t enough 4.1.6 adds a number of really cool features for Domino customers:

Supports Notes and Domino 8.01

HTML and Rich Content in Mail

Support for Sametime 8

Support for doclinks and hotspots

...

Now Whilst these new features are very very welcome I have a concern and that's the availability of device software to get the most out of those new features.

Carriers like O2 and AT&T are responsible for distributing device operating systems.  Just like Notes and Domino the cutting edge features of BES and the BB Device are to a greater or lesser extent dependent on each other.  This is true of the new HTML and Rich Content features of Mail which require BES 4.1.6, device OS 4.5 and Domino 7.0.2 or better.  Cool.  I can upgrade from 4.1.5 to 4.1.6. I’m already running Domino 8 something and my device is running the latest OS available from O2.  So you'd think I’m all set…..

No.

O2 currently offers device OS 4.2.2.181 and not the required OS 4.5.  Despite suggestions of new software being available in April 08 O2 cannot tell me when a newer release will actually be available or what version will be released. It’s almost August 2008!  

So whilst we can all blog about the new features and how nice it would be to have them the reality is that they are only available via emulators and development environments.  There’s not much point evaluating those new features when I have no idea when they’ll be available for real.

Is this RIM’s fault? I doubt it. Carriers, as I understand it, pretty much rule the roost as far as the QA and GA of software on their network goes.  I wonder if that’s true for the Apple, does anybody know if Apple is in control of the OS or the carrier? Anyway I abhor blame, let's just fix the situation.

In my opinion, and this may or may not be born out by Paul Mooney's experience of iPhone ownership, the BlackBerry has some technical advantages over the iPhone for Domino customers. With the features available in BES 4.1.6 we could make a stronger cases to our lines of business that the BB is the better platform for now.  I'm saying 'could' in place of 'can' because the carriers are not responding quickly enough with the device OS or communicating effectively what we can expect going forward.

So in lieu of a solution I'm simply saying that if you are running a BlackBerry OS software earlier than OS 4.5 because it's not available then call your account manager and politely ask what they are planning to do about it.

Jason

Posted by Jason Hook At 15:59:35 Location | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Thunder

I see that Stuart McIntyre and Andy Donaldson have found some pix of the BlackBerry "Thunder" aka the 9500, the planned multimedia champion in the faceoff between the iPhone and BlackBerry. Its a very handsome device with a big screen and access to a music library.

Personally I am trying to keep a balance between the emotional and the rational when looking at new devices (OK, I admit its not easy). If you strip it all down to basics a handheld device is a tool for a specific business purpose, and its only the tip of a multi-layered process that delivers your mail and applications to you. Beauty might be skin deep, but practicality goes to the bone.

Posted by Mike Smith At 09:42:21 Location London | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Bold iPhone

A new 8800-sized BlackBerry - the Bold - is due in July. And so is the iPhone 2. Specification for specification, how do they stack up? Check this out.

Conclusion:
• Processors, screen, wifi, mobile specs are nearly exactly the same. Though the Bold has a twice as fast processor than the previous Curve, Pearl and 8800 - so it feels fast. The iPhone 2 still has the same processor as iPhone 1. And the screens are the same resolution.
• Memory wise, the Bold has 1gb onboard, and expandible to 16gb. The iPhone has 8gb or 16gb. Realistically, the majority of the iPhone memory will be used as an iPod. Most BlackBerry users dont yet use their BlackBerries as MP3 players (though this became possible). I guess there's not a 'sync my BlackBerry to iTunes' option.
• Of course, the BlackBerry includes full mail/PIM sync with Domino, Exchange, Groupwise, whereas the iPhone 2 does full mail/PIM with Exchange and MobileMe (the new name for .mac). The MobileMe subscription costs an additional fee.

Interesting times ahead, indeed. Given the BlackBerry dominance of corporate mail, and Apples amazing entry to the mobile phone market just a year ago, its all to play for.

Posted by Bill Buchan At 09:09:09 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Category ILUG

ILUG went off very well last week, and that is a credit to the team who spent so much time setting it up - hats off to Paul Mooney, Bill Buchan, Warren Elsmore, Rob Novak, Julian Woodward, Kitty Elsmore, Matt White, Eileen Fitzgerald, Tom Duff and all the crew. There were hundreds of attendees (from 24 countries), the speakers were great, the organisation was brilliant, but more than that they delivered a relaxed and friendly event that had the "Lotusphere buzz" that is so hard to generate outside Orlando.

RIM were Platinum (that's the highest level) ILUG Sponsors again, in other words they really helped make ILUG happen. They also sent key people to Dublin including Valerie Wang, Jen Ortiz and Lizzie Hancock, Senior Manager Technical Marketing EMEA. For me that's pretty hard evidence of RIM's stated commitment to the IBM Lotus community and they too are due some applause.

Valerie Wang, Product Manager for IBM technologies at RIM, presented "Taking Lotus Collaboration beyond the office on your BlackBerry Smartphone". Valerie underlined the close relationship between RIM and IBM and outlined how they are mobilising the Lotus range of collaboration tools. As at Lotusphere Valerie emphasised the value of going beyond messaging to make your enterprise apps mobile and gave some good pointers to successful development. Valerie also covered the forthcoming BES 4.1.6 release - including the increased use of Sametime presence, emoticons and support for Sametime 8.

Jen Ortiz, RIM Global Technical Account Manager, and Valerie also took part in the "Speedsponsoring" - The Idea: Each sponsor presents on one cool thing in a five minute timed demo - then repeats it 16 times as a new audience clusters round! The Result: A sort of manic double-speed IT streetmarket and a lot of fun. Jen and Valerie presented a neat little BES tool called "Pusher" that lets you centrally emplace and manage a browser bookmark icon on all the BlackBerrys in your organisation.

One last bonus was that Jen also had the new BlackBerry Bold which looked very cool. Hope to have more about the Bold soon.

Posted by Mike Smith At 15:09:33 Location London | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category ILUG

Packing my bags ready to get going to ILUG 2008 in Dublin, and really looking forward to what should be another great event. Can I just say kudos to RIM as they are shiny bright Platinum Sponsors again this year, in other words they really help make ILUG happen.

OK, looking  at the agenda the BlackBerry highlights to catch are:

Wednesday - "Automating User and Group Management for Domino, Active Directory and BlackBerry. Or 'how to save a buttload of work" - Bill Buchan will take you through how HADSL specialise in the automation, integration and delegation of all user and group management across Lotus Domino, Active Directory and BlackBerry. This means that you can delegate all your day-to-day user management to someone on the helpdesk (or even HR!), confident that only what YOU allow will be implemented, whilst increasing security.

Thursday - "Taking Lotus Collaboration beyond the office on your BlackBerry Smartphone" - Valerie Wang, Product Manager for IBM technologies at RIM will be talking about how you can use the BlackBerry development platform to mobilise your enterprise applications as well as how the close collaboration between IBM Lotus and RIM have led to even more Lotus collaboration and communication tools such as Sametime and Connections, available for BlackBerry smartphones. I saw Valerie present at Lotusphere and she was very good.

Friday - "Ask the BES Adminstrator" - Jen Ortiz of RIM will be back at ILUG again this year for a highly interactive session which will give you the opportunity to ask questions, hear about Best Practice and see a BES in action - so bring along your questions and devices.

And of course some other Notesberry people will be there too, like Paul Mooney and Tim Davis. Plus a crew from RIM too.

So hope you can make it, and see you there if you can.

Posted by Mike Smith At 11:40:45 Location London | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category BlackBerry Domino Doclinks Connections Sametime8 BES 4.1.6 BES4.1.6

Hello folks, whilst browsing the interweb I came across a couple of BlackBerry related stories:

It sounds (unofficially) like BES 4.1.6 is in the pipeline and for Domino folks Doclink support, Sametime 8 and Connections Client are the current highlights.  There's no official announcement that I know of (and not being a RIM Business Partner I don't know any more and wouldn't say if I was and did...)

Go and check out the article I found on BlackBerry review:  http://www.berryreview.com/2008/05/15/bes-416-beta-is-out-to-blackberry-partners-html-email/

Now do you want a free BlackBerry Wallet/Datavault application that  goes beyond the bog standard password keeper application?  Then have a look at this article on BlackBerry cool:

http://www.blackberrycool.com/2008/05/15/007236/

I'm hoping that one of us will blog about the (cool) BlackBerry Bold phone soon.  It might even be me, I'm not a iPhone fan (more accurately I'm-not-a-fan-of-tiny-touchscreen-devices-that-will-not-work-if-you-have-chunky-fingers-like-me) but I do like the look of the Bold.  I'll be in the queue for one almost certainly

Posted by Jason Hook At 11:29:40 Location | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Category BES. 4.1.5 Domino

We all had to wait a little while (ahem) for BES 4.1 Service Pack 5 and following it's release we've been looking for confirmation that 4.1.5 is certified compatible with LND 8.01.  

That confirmation has arrived and you can view it  here (along with information about getting 4.1.5):

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/services/server/domino/dominosupport.jsp

Additional information about the release, including upgrade guides can be found here:

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/support/docs/subcategories/?category=BlackBerry+Enterprise+Server+for+IBM+Lotus+Domino&userType=2

We (NotesBerry.org contributors) have been running 4.1.5 and 8.0.1 for a little while and haven't seen any issues so far.

The next thing to look forward to is the BlackBerry device OS 4.5 (the OS formerly known as 4.3.1) which will unlock more of the cool features in 4.1.5 for our users.

For more details about BES 4.1.5 refer to the release notes http://na.blackberry.com/eng/deliverables/1405/Release_Notes.pdf

Happy upgrading

Posted by Jason Hook At 09:35:25 Location | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category ILUG

The agenda for ILUG in Dublin has now been published. Once again RIM are major sponsors of this excellent free Lotus technical event, and its good to see they have sent a key BlackBerry speaker.

Valerie Wang, RIM Product Manager for IBM Technologies, will be presenting "Taking Lotus Collaboration beyond the office on your BlackBerry smartphone" on the second day of ILUG. You may have already seen Valerie at Lotusphere in January where she presented the main BlackBerry & Lotus sessions. At ILUG Valerie will cover a key theme from RIM - how you can effectively mobilise your Lotus infrastructure and applications using the BlackBerry.

Posted by Mike Smith At 11:40:58 Location London | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Connections

Back at Lotusphere RIM outlined their vision to mobilise the whole family of Lotus software. Effective collaboration is critical to business success, so it makes sense that key collaboration tools should be to hand whenever and wherever you need them. So as part of this vision RIM have been working on a new BlackBerry client for Lotus Connections.

Its still currently under development but Darren Adams of IBM has been trying it out on his own BlackBerry and he seems pretty impressed with its immediate usefulness. You can see Darren's comments about it here

Posted by Mike Smith At 09:26:57 Location London | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Category BES

Latest news is that BES 4.1.5 is now being released tomorrow - I suspect that they are under a LOT of pressure....

Posted by Mike Smith At 10:12:23 Location London | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Development

Mike has already posted about our new free Shared Contacts BlackBerry application here, and I thought it might be nice to talk about the technical side of the development.

The basis of the solution is a fairly straight-forward 'persistent store & push listener' model. The idea is that the Notes database can push down contacts data, which is then stored locally on the BlackBerry. The BlackBerry app allows the user to search for contacts and to make calls and send emails directly from within the app.

The Notes database has some agents and scripts which handle the pushing of data out to the BlackBerrys. These make use of the Java Push Library that RIM so very kindly provided.

The key thing we wanted was for the app to be as generic as possible, with the idea that you could paste in the few design elements into your own database and with a tiny bit of tweaking make it grab your own contacts data. I felt the simplest way to do this was to get the data from a custom view. That way you can tweak the view to show your documents, and make sure the correct fields show in each column. The agent then works its way through the view, and builds up a string of pseudo-xml that it can push out to the BlackBerrys. This way, the agent needs no changes when integrating the push code into different databases. There are probably better ideas, but this seemed like a good place to start.

On the BlackBerry side, I also wanted to try and make the listener and persistent store as generic as possible. I have written a fair few persistent store apps, and while much of the code is reusable, I always find it irritating to customize it for each app.

What I did was build a generic database class library, and being a LotusScript programmer at heart, I designed it so that it behaved like a NotesDatabase, with 'NotesDocumentCollections' and 'NotesDocuments'. So I have nice familiar methods like db.openByID(), coll = db.getAllDocuments(), doc = coll.getFirstDocument(), doc = coll.getNextDocument(doc), doc.getItemValue("MyField"), etc.

I also built a pushlistener class which can accept the pushed data stream, which is in its own pseudo-xml, and then passes this stream out to any database objects it knows about in the app. The database class has an update() method which the pushlistener can call, passing the received data. The stream's xml contains a name for the destination database, so the database object can decide if the data is for it or not. It is a very simple observer pattern, which allows me to have several databases in one app all being handled by one listener. For example, in this app I have two databases (i.e. persistent stores), one is for configuration data, and the other for the contacts data.

Its all a bit raw and unpolished at the moment, but I am hoping that this will all make my next development much easier, and will form a nice platform for extending the app. (One thing I can think of is handling dates, as currently my field storage can handle only strings and numbers). Part of the point of this whole application is that it is simple, but can be extended to fit particular requirements, such as to mimic a particular CRM, for example.

I am now working on the next version, which will have a pseudo-replication model. I will keep a 'replication history' for each BlackBerry, and can then send out only the changes since the last successful push for each BlackBerry. Part of this will be a basic structure for two-way updates (I hesitate to call it anything as grand as 'replication'), which isn't really appropriate for this app, but will be useful for something else.

Mike has more details in our blog (see above), but if you are interested the links to the app and database are:

BlackBerry download: http://lotusphere.turtleweb.com/contacts.jad
Notes database: http://lotusphere.turtleweb.com/bbcontacts.zip

The install instructions are in the 'Using This Database' of the Notes database.

As always, we'd be very interested in what people think

Posted by Tim Davis At 17:51:12 Location | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Category Development

Hi, this is my first post on NotesBerry and its a technical tip I thought people might appreciate.

I get asked a lot about how to handle Notes views in the BlackBerry browser.

The problem is that the BlackBerry browser currently has trouble with embedded action hotspots on forms. This means that the next and previous links you put in your form, using @dbcommand( "Domino"; "ViewNextPage"), don't work.

I found that the best way to handle this is to code my own links using start and count url parameters.

For example, I have hidden fields on the form called Start and Count which are @TextToNumber(@UrlQueryString("start")) and @TextToNumber(@UrlQueryString("count")) respectively. I also have a hidden field called numdocs with this formula: @Elements(@DbColumn("":"NoCache";"";@Subset(@ViewTitle;1);1))

Then I can compute urls to put in passthru <a href> links like this:

For next -

newstart := start+count;
newstart1:=@If(newstart>numdocs;numdocs;newstart);
"/" + @WebDbName + "/" + @Subset(@ViewTitle;1) + "?openview&start=" + @Text(newstart1) + "&count=" + @Text(count)

For previous -

NewStart := start-count;
NewStart1 := @If(NewStart<1;1;NewStart);
"/" + @WebDbName + "/" + @Subset(@ViewTitle;1) + "?openview&start=" + @Text(NewStart1) + "&count=" + @Text(count)

Using this same basic idea you can build links to go to the top and bottom of a view, etc. The possibilities are endless

Thanks for listening.

Posted by Tim Davis At 10:11:32 Location | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Category BES Administration Training

A quick eMail from Ray Bilyk:

Love your Blog! Quick question... As a experienced Domino Admin being moved to support BlackBerry as well, what books/manuals do you suggest I get and read? Money IS an object (if you know what I mean).

Well, anything that starts off with 'Love your blog!' will obviously get our attention.

This is actually a really good question. How did we get to this level ?

From my point of view, it all started when one customer of my company - HADSL - asked that we incorporate BlackBerry functionality into our product. The customer arranged for us to tag along to a training day they were given by their carrier (Vodafone in the UK), and we were taught the absolute basics - adding a new handset, nuking a handset, upgrading the firmware on a handset, etc. This cannot be under-rated as a training exercise, believe me. Just having someone there to answer the first 10 or so dumb questions that spring into your head is a lifesaver. Rob Owen of Vodafone did a stand up job, and left us all with a really positive feeling.

After that, I dig into the BlackBerry Enterprise Server manuals themselves, and that seemed to do the trick. Also, I downloaded a QuickStart BES, put it on a test server and generally abused that for testing and developing. I'm guessing it took me a few days of floundering around to get comfortable with the processes.

What resources did other folks find really useful out there ?

Posted by Bill Buchan At 15:31:43 Location Marykirk | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)