Genii Software's 5th Annual Lotusphere Agenda Database for PDA Synching and Session Planning

Back by popular demand, we have built a Journal database containing all the sessions listed on the official Lotusphere site. This database is based on the personal R5 Journal with a few added views, so it should synch with the Palm Pilot, but it also contains a wealth of useful information for planning out your schedule. Modify it all you want or make suggestions at Ben@GeniiSoft.com.

Also, just for fun, read Mike Midas in his Veiled Threats, where he gives a hint as to what might be coming in Version 3, to be released just before Lotusphere. You can even read his earlier Luck be a Lady Tonight and Carrying Concealed, if you need something to do while waiting for Lotusphere 2005.

Version 1 - 349 downloads

Version 1 - 349 downloads
Posted Thursday, January 6 at 6:29 pm (Version 1 - ND6/ND6.5 only) 349 downloads

Finally, after a few beta versions, our first real release. This version includes times, speakers and locations for all sessions, including the Workplace Forum sessions, the CertFX Certification Bootcamp sessions, the Birds-Of-a-Feather sessions, and the three special sessions which I have listed as GURU sessions. It includes repeats, and special views to make it easy to see the repeats. It includes separate documents for the speakers and a few others, and for locations. This version includes a number of bells and whistles, but there will be more, including especially all of the bloggers who will be blogging at and about Lotusphere. This should be good for creating a plan, and a plan is essential to making Lotusphere work for you. Finally, I added a new action on the session form to allow you to add any selected sessions to your personal calendar (the one in your mail file, not the one in the database). Thanks for the idea and initial code go to Robert Gouin!

Version 2 - 1436 downloads

Version 2 - 1436 downloads
Version 2 - Posted Monday, January 10 at 11:51 pm (ND6/ND6.5 only)
Version 2a - Posted Tuesday, January 11 at 9:45 am (ND6/ND6.5 only)
Version 2b - Posted Friday, January 14 at 1:40 am (stripped down for R5)
A whole lot of changes and better data than Version 1. Abstracts that were truncated have been re-imported properly. Bloggers and CULT shirt sponsors (or at least some of them) have been added. Christopher Byrne contributed a great new look for the views. The Person document has been cleaned up considerably as well. The session preferences now show up in the Session Preference calendar. The GURU, CertFX and Workplace Forum sessions all have the correct variables so repeats do not show up when they should not. Finally, the difficulty rating has been more universally applied.

Version 2a fixes two problems, one critical one with repeats and the other a minor one with Session Preferences. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Version 2b is a Version 5 stripped down version. It has Ken Wax's BDD presentation added, but is otherwise the same basic data as 2a

Version 3 - Posted Thursday, January 20 at 1:58pm (ND6/ND6.5 only)
A few data changes, fixing problems people have identified. Some new bloggers, we now have 39, and some better categorization of the CULT sponsors. The views have been cleaned up to better express times, but the biggest change is to the Session document, which now uses layers to show other uses of the room the same day. Let me know whether that is useful, and maybe I'll create more "views" that way. See the Mike Midas post above for details on that, or my blog post Ogres have layers, and now the Sessions db does as well. Current Midas customers, and other curious people, can also look at the agent used to create the layers, which I have left in the database.

The only big change remaining is the better webified version, which will be available tomorrow on the web for use during the conference. Thanks for all your support and interest. As you can see, there have been a lot of downloads.

Full version 3 for ND6.x/ND6.5x

Stripped down version 2b for R5 (and perhaps more suitable for basic PDA synching). Will be updated shortly to 3.

*** See other cool demos people have made using the sessions database.
Check these out! ***

Proposion's Browser for Smartphone, Mobile Browser, and Web Service

Proposion's Browser for Smartphone, Mobile Browser, and Web Service
Proposion's Browser for Smartphone, Mobile Browser, and Web Service

Have a mobile phone? Check our our free Lotusphere 2005 Session Browser tools:

Smartphone (demonstrates replicating data to device for off-line access)
Mobile browser (for other mobile devices with micro-browsers)
Web service (build your own clients that access live session data)

Full C# source code for these sample applications is now available in our on-line library.

All demos use a Notes database (Ben Langhinrichs' Lotusphere Sessions database ) as the data source.

Mac Guidera's Sessions Wiki for Lotusphere:

Mac Guidera's Sessions Wiki for Lotusphere:
Mac Guidera's Sessions Wiki for Lotusphere:
http://www.s3consulting.com/lotusphere/sessionswiki.nsf

To quote the site:

This site is intended for all to use before, during, and after Lotusphere.The goal here is to give people a place where they can collaborate on the happennings of Lotusphere. Feel free to use it to keep in touch with friends, to write up your comments on a session, to find a buddy, link to your site, or whatever you can think of.

Ben Poole's Lotusphere Wiki

Ben Poole's Lotusphere Wiki
Ben Poole's Lotusphere Wiki

http://www.benpoole.com/ls05

This has had some problems due to memory leaks, but is very cool when it is running. A different twist on the same idea.

Additional comments, thanks, etc. by Ben Langhinrichs on Jan. 6, 2005:

For the first time in about five years, I'm not doing a session this year, but I will be spending a fair amount of time on the showcase floor at both the Granite Software pedestal #605, because Granite is selling CoexLinks for us, and Proposion Inc's pedestal #509, because Proposion has integrated our @Midas Formulas into their .NET/Lotus integration tools. Stop by, and I'd be happy to see you or talk about either of the solutions, or anything else for that matter.

This database was created using our Midas Rich Text LSX, our soon to be released CoexEdit, and our GrabIt LSX utility. GrabIt was used to retrieve the HTML pages. Midas was used to import the HTML and search for the relevant information, and also to format the rich text in the documents. CoexEdit was used to allow editing of some documents from the web remotely by others without losing the formatting when editing in the Notes client. Come visit Genii Software's webpage for information on the all our products, including our new coexistence products. If you want the actual code used to generate the sessions db, drop me a line at Ben@GeniiSoft.com and I'll send it, or at least a good part, along. Also, watch the Genii weblog for updates about the Sessions database, commentary on Lotusphere... and maybe even another entertaining case file post by our resident Ace Developer Mike Midas. (Watch via RSS if you like)

If you will be at Lotusphere and would like to meet, be sure to get in touch and I'd be happy to meet with you.

Thanks to Ed Brill for information on Gurupalooza and other sessions, for talking with the Lotusphere folks about pointing to this page, and for generally being supportive and inspirations. In addition, Christopher Byrne, Julian Robichaux, Stephen Walch, Jerry Glover, Carolyn Kraut, Robert Gouin and the many others who have offered design modifications and suggestions which have gone into the database design. We are building off the success of last year's database, which was downloaded by almost 1/3 of Lotusphere attendees.