Captain Oblivious

Yes, I'm Speaking at Lotusphere 07. I know, everyone else posted their "bragging rights" article weeks ago. I'm such a slacker.

I'm lucky enough to be working with Mr. OpenLog himself, Julian nsfTools Robichaux. Our session, BP 312, Trap and Manage Your Errors Easily, Efficiently and Reliably, is based on deploying and extending OpenLog as your one-stop-shopping error logging solution. And when we say extend, we mean extend, biatches! In general, OpenLog is most often used on back-end code, and it is extremely powerful in that scenario, as many of us can attest ("Can I get a witness?!?"). But there are some really great opportunities to take your error logging to a whole new level, and that's what we're going to show you how to do.

Food for thought:

• Why should your error reporting system notify you, the developer? Make your administrators do their share of the work! Integrate the error reporting with Domino Domain Monitoring, so all your errors - be they system or application - are available in one interface. Yes, that means you should drag, push, bribe or blackmail your admin team into attending one of the sessions or jumpstarts on DDM so they can set it up and start using it (assuming they aren't already - but, hey, we know how lazy those admin types are, don't we?)...
  
• Why rely on your end users to give you information about the errors they're seeing on your web applications? We all know users can't accurately report errors. They'll call the Help Desk and say, "It doesn't work." And the Help Desk, 'cause they know it'll tick you off, will create a trouble ticket for you with exactly that as the description. Why not log errors directly from the web browser? You'll get more information, you won't have to worry about the details being lost along the way, and you'll get that information as soon as the error occurs, rather than waiting for the 17th user to see it ('cause users don't *like* to call the Help Desk and report problems, so usually they just give up). Oh, and while you're at it, why not simply create the Help Desk trouble ticket automatically? After all, Domino can be integrated with just about anything, whether by email or ODBC/JDBC or Web Services. Yes, this means OpenLog will now have web error reporting capabilty built in, so look for a new version after Sphere.
  

Imagine the expression on your boss' face if you extend OpenLog like that, and deploy it in all your applications. The word is "proactive" and the definition is "big pay raise."

Here's the official description:

Learn about errors before your users tell you! Use the legendary, free, open-source OpenLog database to trap and manage your IBM Lotus Notes and Domino errors in: * Lotus Notes Client Forms; LotusScript agents; Java agents; Web Services; AJAX (and regular) Web Pages. As an added bonus, we'll show you how to integrate OpenLog with Domino Domain Monitoring (DDM) in IBM Lotus Domino 7. We slice, we dice, we even julienne! It's error trapping for fun and profit!

No, I don't know what that asterisk is doing there either. When we submitted the session, that sentence was a bulleted list. IBM removed all but one of the bullets, but they must have really liked that first one for some reason...

We're scheduled for Thursday morning from 10:00-11:00 in the Dolphin Southern Hemisphere II. We're opposite some really good sessions, particularly including a talk about DXL from IBM, a great session on low-fidelity prototyping called "Measure Once, Cut Twice" (I saw a similar one with these speakers last year - highly recommended), and the phenomenally useful "Great Code Giveaway" by Rob Novak and Victor Krantz of Snapps. If you are a developer and you only go to one session all week, go see Rob and Victor. Not only do they give good session, they also hand you several extremely useful and fully functional routines that you can cheerfully Rob and Duplicate (R&D, baby!) to blow your boss' mind.

Fortunately for us, most of those sessions are repeats, so it IS possible to see them and still see us. Plan ahead, minions! Be there or ... um ... be somewhere else!