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A Monthly Collection of Resourceful IT Articles by Davalen Technical Staff
March 2010
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Welcome to the March 2010 edition of the Davalen eNewsletter.

In this monthly publication, Davalen's WebSphere, Lotus, National Staffing, and Search and Discovery Practices and Davalen Brazil, come together to share relevant news and information on the technology that powers your projects.

From technical tips to consulting and mentoring services, Davalen provides comprehensive resources for your business needs. So take a quick break, and gain some valuable insight from the professionals who know it best.

To view articles from previous eNewsletters, simply visit our blog.

Cheers,
Ruth Jarvis

From Dave Jacob, Managing Partner, WebSphere

Since returning from Lotusphere, our WebSphere team has been working to implement many of the suggestions we heard from Lotus clients, prospects and IBM Training Centers worldwide.

Here is what we learned at Lotusphere 2010:

The global marketplace is hungry for information about the Davalen Top Gun Portlet Factory curriculum and where to find local training centers.

Davalen has recently established an easy certification path for global training centers to offer the course TG916 (IBM WPC42). The path consists of becoming certified by IBM to teach WP416/WP516 then working through the course material and project labs to become familiar with the Davalen course.

Instructors will have a working session with our Portlet Factory practice manager to answer questions and recommend particular teaching techniques to make sure you will be successful with the course.

Once certified, the training center is able to post and sell the course to its core audience with the assurance that Davalen is providing the best, and most affordable IBM training resources on the market. We provide the books at a set fee per book (pricing depends on volume), provide access to our Lotus Quickr environment for set-up instructions, and allow access to our internal technical staff to answer any questions as they arise.

We also provide certified instructors to teach the classes (virtually or on-site) while the training center is coming up to speed.

Spread the word about Portlet Factory course updates for recent release 6.1.5.

Our newest release of the updated course has been adopted worldwide, specifically in:
To learn more about these exciting opportunities, contact Davalen Global Training at: (US) 800-827-8451

Develop a continuing career path for Domino developers who are looking for work.

We continue to show Domino developers how to expand their career path as Domino development work slows down through a migration path to Portal development utilizing Portlet Factory. We have also expanded our offerings with X-Pages, Expeditor, Connections and LotusLive. In spite of what many blogs and LinkedIn say about the future of Domino developers, we see an ever increasing demand.

Expand the Davalen Virtual Classroom to allow former students to rent a configured development machine for practice and to serve as a course refresher.

Davalen currently has limited capability to rent our virtual capacity. In the next month, there will be an offer to provide unlimited capacity through the IBM/Amazon relationship. We have configured the Davalen Virtual Classroom in the Cloud on both Windows and Linux environments, and are testing the capability now. Using this Cloud computing method, the first installation of the course has been successfully administered to a private group of Domino developers.

All in all, I am excited about the rebound of the business climate and the expanded offerings of the Lotus Product family.
From Len Barker, Managing Partner, Lotus

IBM Lotus Notes/Domino 8.5.1 upgrades are all the rage right now. Davalen consultants are working on client upgrades across the country. On each project we are asked to help identify ways that productivity can be boosted using the capabilities of the new software. Live text coupled with actions taken by custom plugins to business processes has turned out to be a leading method of achieving productivity gains. Lotus Notes 8.5.1 comes with several "recognizers." When these recognizers are enabled, email addresses, names, addresses, phone numbers, etc. in the body of any Notes document are recognized and underlined. If the recognizer is linked to an action then clicking on the link performs an action (e.g. launching a widget).

An IBM staffer recently showed me how to extend the built-in recognizers with custom regular expressions. This is done by right clicking on My Widgets in the sidebar, selecting Manage Widget, Content, and Recognizers, clicking on the Recognizer tab and clicking on New Recognizer. Below is an example of how to add a new recognizer for a Notes Name that is up to four OU's deep.

Below, you can see that this extends IBM's person.name recognizer. The important thing to remember when creating custom recognizers is to be as specific as possible with your regular expression. Remember that these recognizers scan all text in the body of a Notes document so mistakes in writing the regular expression could significantly effect performance of the Notes client.
Widget Management 250px
From Deborah Corcoran, National Practice Manager for Resource Deployment Services to IBM

As Q1 comes to a close, Davalen's National Technical Staffing Practice experienced quite an "uptick" in requests for technical services. Moving toward Q2, many of our customers are assessing their Domino environment as they focus on upgrading to 8.5. Davalen provides help during this evaluation process by partnering in several key areas of the decision making process as your trusted Premier IBM Business Partner.

Increasingly, clients are choosing Davalen's expertise with Lotus products to educate their technical staff on enhanced software capabilities including: Lotus Quickr, Sametime and WebSphere Portlet Factory.

If you are interested in an assessment - please give us a call 1.800.827.8451
From Peter Wilkerson, Search & Discovery Practice Area Manager

The Search & Discovery practice is working with clients on several different kinds of search-driven projects. Currently, the most interesting of these is for an enterprise that is using OmniFind to drive navigation for a retail site with an extremely diverse set of products. OmniFind is the software of choice to drive the navigation to this website because of it's capability to filter by using a rich set of descriptive attributes. This approach enables Davalen's client to provide a more dynamic, responsive user experience in the retail environment, a successful dynamic and responsive interface, which results in a higher revenue as people find exactly what they are seeking to purchase.
From Helmar Martens, Country General Manager, Davalen Brazil

Davalen Brazil has been working on a B2B solution for companies operating on the cooperative business segment. The solution is employing WebSphere Portlet Factory to leverage WebSphere Portal features such as Role Based authentication, easy integration with LDAP and access to a vast array of back-end sources. The combination of Portlet Factory with WebSphere Portal Server enables the delivery of personalization aspects required by such B2B solutions.

About Davalen: We Speak Business. We Understand Technology. TM

Davalen, LLC, has been a trusted partner in collaborative software consulting solutions for the enterprise since 1993. An IBM Premier Business Partner, Davalen provides RapidValue Services for Lotus Domino, WebSphere Portal, Retail & Enterprise Search, and Web Content Management. The RapidValue Services are designed to ensure clients receive the most value from their investment in IBM software. With masterclass training in IBM software brands, Davalen provides an elegant blend of system architecture, mentoring and agile implementation assistance.

With offices across the U.S and Brazil and classes operating in the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, and Europe, Davalen instructors and consultants have won numerous training awards from IBM for their deep understanding of advanced IBM technologies.

Contact Davalen today to learn how we can help your business understand its technology.


Davalen, LLC

phone: 800.827.8451