Captain Oblivious

On the off chance that you read this blog, don't pay attention to any other Lotus Geek blogs (and thus haven't seen the Lotusphere schedule yet), but still care who is speaking at Lotusphere:  Yes, I'm speaking again this year.  For the third straight year, Julian NSFTools Robichaux and I will be co-presenting.  This year, though, we have two sessions instead of one.  That's right - for the same (not particularly) low cost, you get twice as much of the McDonagh-Robichaux Variety Show!  Or is it the Robichaux-McDonagh Variety Show?  Nah, the second one doesn't rhyme - sorry, Julian. 

So we have a session about the various JavaScript toolkits available, BP104, called "Choosing and Using a JavaScript Toolkit" oddly enough, scheduled for Tuesday from 3-4 in the Swan Mockingbird room:

Look at all the JavaScript toolkits out there: Prototype, Scriptaculous, DoJo, YUI, Ext, MooTools, JQuery. Which one should you use? How do you get started? This session will outline a number of differences between these toolkits, along with some advantages of each one. We'll also show you examples of using each toolkit with your Domino databases and give you implementation tips as we go along. Don't let the myriad of choices confuse you. We'll help you get started and get productive.

We also have a revised (yes, really) session on reporting, charting and graphing, BP111, which we called "Reports, Charts, and Graphs 2.0" in a sad attempt to be hip, which was originally scheduled for the incredibly competitive Monday 1-2 slot (in the Dolphin Southern Hemisphere 1):

Come learn how to quickly and easily create great looking charts and graphs of your IBM Lotus Notes data using Composite Applications, IBM Lotus Symphony, IBM Lotus Domino xPages, and modern web techniques. Impress your customers (and your boss!) without ruining your budget OR putting in overtime. Even better, we'll be giving away all of our code for free!

It's cool stuff, and we're building on top of last year's demos so that you'll wind up with two sessions worth of code even if you missed last year's session.  We've been working out the detailed plans for the past couple of days here in KC at the legendary SNAPPS home office.  It's actually turning out to be even better than expected, by the way, because Julian is The King of the Sidebar.  Really.

Anyway, as I said, that time slot is chock full of great sessions.  Paul Mooney and Bill Buchan publicly blaspheme during the Eleven Commandments (OK, you may have seen the blasphemy from those two before, but the session's a new concept for our own Bad Boys of Lotusphere); Matt White and Bruce Elgort give you the inside scoop on building IdeaJam and TaskJam with XPages (and they will literally give you TaskJam itself, source and all); Mikkel Heisterberg gets hardcore and shows you how to leverage Eclipse and your existing Java skills to add new plug-ins and extension points in Notes 8.x; and Tom Duff and Chris Blatnick try to finally beat it into your head that the UI matters, teaching you how interface-driven design can take your apps to the point where your users say "WOW!"  And that's just the BP track, by the way.  The AD, ID, and INV tracks also have the (expected, but undeniably popular) "what's new or planned" sessions. 

There was a bit of grumbling about how people were going to choose a session in that slot, and a fair amount of speculation about why IBM took down the schedule almost as soon as they posted it.  Turns out they were adding the planned repeat sessions (they always have some unplanned repeats, when something is unexpectedly and overwhelmingly popular).  And for the first time, Julian and I have one of them.  Apparently, some of the attendees are interested in our Charting and Graphing 2.0 session.  Or at least, that's what they claimed on the survey (thanks, Mom!). 

The long and short of it (OK, really only the long - you DID know that I can't write concisely, right?) is that we will be presenting our charting and graphing session twice in a row on Monday.  We have the 1-2 slot and the 2:15-3:15, both in the Dolphin Southern Hemisphere 1 room.  I gotta say, if I could pick the perfect way to repeat a session at Lotusphere, that would be it.  We're still done with our sessions by the end of the day on Tuesday, and we don't even need to have an extra refresher before the repeat - even I can't forget the session within 15 minutes...