The past six months have been difficult. As some of you know, my father is dying. I don't talk about it a lot (heck, I haven't been talking about anything a lot recently), but he is at the hospice stage now, so it is only a matter of time. The whole experience has been very tough on my mom as well. They've been married fifty-three years, so it is emotionally rough even imagining him gone, but the care giving role also takes a great toll. I have a brother who is a nurse who lives near them, and he's been a great help.

In any case, I've been working with clients on custom work, and working on new releases of all three major product lines (CoexLinks, CoexEdit and Midas), but haven't felt right about releasing anything major when I have been so distracted. As things are settling down some with my dad (he doesn't leave his bed much), I am going to try to get these out so that customers can take advantage of some of the cool new features. More about that later, though. For now, I just wanted you to know that I am here and alive, despite my near total silence.

For those who want the quick family catch up, my wife is working as an aide and tutor at the elementary school across the street (an enviable commute) and absolutely loving it. She started on a volunteer basis, but they insisted on hiring once she started working with multiple classes. My daughter is high up on Obama's digital team working on the 2012 campaign (read: no sleep, bad food, amazing opportunities). Hard to believe the level she has reached by 25... unless you know her. My older son is graduating from the University of Chicago in three weeks, after which he hopes to take the summer off doing "some grunt work" in Washington, DC. My younger son is finishing up junior year, having taken Russian, Greek and Latin along with slews of other horribly difficult courses that make my brain hurt. College, and thus empty-nesting for us, looms. 

CoexEdit has been a slow but steady product for Genii Software. It hasn't had the great success of the Midas Rich Text product line or of CoexLinks, but people have used it for many different projects in many different companies.

Slow and steady isn't good enough, so I asked lots of questions of customers and developers and partners: What does CoexEdit need?

The answer was fairly simple, given how many people know what I do. CoexEdit needed more magic. Developers didn't want to mess with the changes to design elements, no matter how simple. Administrators didn't want to involve developers at all. All of this got worse when the economy collapsed, and many developers were let go.

So, I took a page from the CoexLinks playbook and added a dash of magic. Auto-magic, really. Not easy, but now you can enable CoexEdit in most XPage-enabled databases, and many non-XPage-enabled databases, without a single design change. It just happens. When CoexEdit 3.0 is released, you can use it too, even if you are an Administrator. Even in databases with locked designs.

That's enough to turn on XPage recognition for all 8.5.2/8.5.3 Discussion databases.

That's enough to enable two additional templates, assuming they use the Body field. But what if Your XPage Template uses different fields?

You have a custom database without a template?

I would have added more magic, but I didn't make it into Hogwarts. Tomorrow, I'll show you some of the functionality that is added auto-magically.

Starting today, those requesting evaluation licenses for CoexEdit will not get an eval license for Version 2.x, but instead one for 3.x. The latest interim candidate for Version 3.0 is now available for download, but it will only work with a 3.0 license, so if current customers want to give it a whirl before the gold release (due by the end of the month), you will need to request an eval license. Over the next few days, I will be posting demos of how CoexEdit works with XPages, and why you will want it for your organization. Stay tuned!

As some of you know, I got the "zombie flu" that Mat Newman and others had at Lotusphere 2012. By some miracle, I made it through my session on Thursday morning, though I imagine some people probably noticed that I was visibly gripping the podium so as not to fall over. At least I didn't have coughing fits, and Tim Davis did a great job entertaining and enlightening the audience by building a mobile app on the fly using the session data and XPages Mobile Controls.

I was supposed to leave Friday, but was in no condition to travel. In addition, Cleveland was under a snow advisory, and I thought that if I got stranded in an airport, I might never see another Lotusphere. So, I changed my flight to Sunday, the next available flight,, and have been sleeping and groaning and coughing ever since. The hardest part has been that the hotel has so many little Disney Princesses wandering around. Adorable little girls with doting parents. I look at them having a wonderful vacation, and I am deathly afraid of giving this plague to them, which makes it take forever to get to my room on the 5th floor, as I have to try hard not to ride up with anybody. At breakfast, I make sure to sit in a distant corner and look menacing, but little kids never find me menacing, and I keep having to shoo them away. Even when I give them my best Get off my lawn! snarly look, they laugh and try to play. Fortunately, their parents usually catch sight and whisk them off, but it is difficult to avoid breathing or coughing while they are close.

Anyway, a forced extra two days in Florida is not all bad, as I can stumble down to sit outside by the pool, which is blessedly empty when all the families are at the parks. One of the oddest endings to a Lotusphere that I've ever had, but overall, it was a very good week. When I come out of my haze, I hope I remember enough to do a wrap up.

Last year, a number of people took advantage of the Lotusphere Sessions database bookstore, finding books that related to topics and ordering them directly from the database. This year, we have added new books, but also added links to the Kindle versions of books where that is available. For example, the well known Guy Kawasaki is going to be giving a keynote address at IBM Connect 2012. His books are available in the Lotusphere Sessions db, but you don't have to wait for them to show up at your house or office, or carry them in your luggage. Instead, you can buy them and have them delivered instantly to your Kindle or other mobile device. Below is the page for Guy's latest book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.

When you find a session you find particularly relevant, open it up in the Sessions db and see what related resources are show. There may be books on that topic or written by one of the speakers that you can order right then and there, in print or digitally.

As I have mentioned (incessantly), I have been adding social details into the Lotusphere 2012 Sessions db. Now, from inside the database, click an action to request your name and social details be included (see below). Or, click on the image below to go to the form directly. Get social at Lotusphere! Encourage your friends to do so as well.