OpenNTF has had a steady stream of contributions over recent years, adding to a large corpus of contributions during this century. There is also renewed focus on Domino, potential for new markets of JavaScript developers with Domino, imminent new releases of Sametime, Connections in the process of being acquired by HCL, and a number of other products already in ownership or being acquired by HCL. The board have appreciated the need for revisiting project approaches and management of key projects, to ensure greater scalability for the future, reach beyond traditional project categories and ensure better consumption of quality projects. After all, OpenNTF pre-dates YouTube (2005) and GitHub (2008), as well as most currently-active ICS-related blogs.

But we want you, our OpenNTF community, to be involved in building this future. We have some ideas, but we want to form a Project Steering Committee to review those ideas and come up with a formal proposal to the board. This will touch all aspects of the contributor process and probably resurrect or modernise existing roles like committers. The Project Steering Committee is expected to evolve into product-specific committees, ensuring review and overseeing of key projects for those products. But this inaugural committee will have a different focus, on recommendations only, and there is no obligation on your time beyond the adoption of the recommendations. However, this is an opportunity to get involved at the earliest stage.

We would like to move quite quickly, formalising the proposals before autumn if possible. As an initial step, the team will be brought together in a private Slack channel. So please reach out to one of the board members in the general channel of OpenNTF's Slack if you wish to be involved.

This is your community, and we can only function if there is a committed community of active participants. So please take this opportunity.

Posted by Paul Withers At 7:59 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Did you know?
OpenNTF delivers another great resource for every XPages developer - in addition to the various offers the IBM ESS (formerly known as ICS) community already gives you:

The brand new XPages Knowledge Base!

We are very thankful to have IBM Champion John Jardin with us to curate this area - and of course you are invited to do as well!
As OpenNTF is the resource for open source software the Wiki follows the rules of sharing as well - be a part of it and contribute!

Posted by Oliver Busse At 3:29 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now as the IBM Champions for ESS (fka ICS) in 2016 were annouced, I took the chance to implement some improvements to OpenNTF's other website "Collaboration Today" to give those people the credit they deserve. IBM Champions are people who deliver most valuable content and share their knowlegde. This is collected by people who are doing also very much appreciated work and apperently are also IBM Champions!

You now can see IBM Champion generated content directly by the new star indicator on every blog post's link on the homepage. I also realized a great idea of our OpenNTF chairman Christian Guedemann he proposed during our call today: show the most frequent bloggers and also the curators who collect the stuff just for you.

You can access the new statistics area right here: https://collaborationtoday.info/ct.nsf/stats.xsp

Posted by Oliver Busse At 3:06 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

NOMINATIONS  CLOSE ON AUGUST 12

The entry below is a re-post of an entry by Peter Tanner (7/14/2013)

It's time to nominate people for the OpenNTF Board of Directors!

We are holding the elections a little earlier this year - so that the new Board can elect a Chairperson who could then spend some time with Bruce to learn the ropes.

According to the OpenNTF Bylaws, there are two categories of Directors:

Member Directors - who represent OpenNTF's 33 corporate Members. There are nine Member Directors, and the terms of five of them expire in October although they may stand for re-election. The Member Directors whose terms
are about to expire are:

- Julian Woodward
- Corey Davis
- Bruce Elgort
- Mikael Orn (replacing Brent Peters)
- John Head

OpenNTF Members need to elect five Member representatives for two year terms as Member Directors.

Contributor Directors - who represent OpenNTF Contributors.

There are three Contributor Directors elected on an annual basis. Again, the incumbents may stand for re-election. They are:

- Niklas Heidloff
- Ulrich Kraus
- Christian Guedemann

Any OpenNTF Contributor (ie, someone covered by an ICLA or CCLA) is eligible to run. The Contributor population needs to nominate and elect three Contributor Directors.

Process:

The nomination period from now until August 9. Please send your nominations to IP-Manager@openntf.org.

Distribution of candidate statements from Aug 12-24. Member statements will be circulated to all OpenNTF Members, and Contributor statements will be posted on the OpenNTF blog.

Voting from August 24 to September 6.

If there are any questions, please do not hesitate to let me know.

Posted by Bruce Elgort At 9:29 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is your opportunity to influence the direction of OpenNTF.

 If your employer is a member of OpenNTF – you can run as a Member Director. There are four positions open.

If you are a Contributor to OpenNTF – you can run as a Contributor Director.  There are three positions open.

And yes – you can nominate yourself.  All you need to do is to send a note to the IP Manager (IP-Manager@openntf.org), and follow up with a statement saying why you think you should be an OpenNTF Director.  

More information can be found here.  

Posted by Peter Tanner At 10:25 AM Location Vancouver, WA | Permalink | Comments (0)

Please join the IBM Collaboration Solutions community meeting on Tuesday, November 15th to learn about upcoming activities, connect with other members, and hear about topics relevant to the community.

This month Niklas Heidloff and myself will share the OpenNTF.org success story. The mission of OpenNTF is to support the the creation and sharing of open source code, such as Notes templates, XPages applications, and Sametime and Connections plug-ins. Niklas and I will provide some background on how the alliance started, explain what we've been able to accomplish over the years and give you a peek into where OpenNTF is headed.

The November Community member spotlights will feature Giuseppe Grasso from Dominopoint and Larry Sweeney of IBM.

Register today >

Posted by Bruce Elgort At 6:32 PM Location Vancouver, WA | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here is list of the 28 Member Companies that are now part of OpenNTF, Inc.:

- ASND Designs
- Assono
- Axiot Ltd
- Collaboration Matters Limited
- Conxsys
- Czarnowski
- Developi Information Systems
- e-office
- Elguji Software, LLC
- Factor-Y S.R.L.
- GBS
- Hedersoft GmbH
- IBM
- Intec Systems Ltd
- IntelliGlobe
- ISW Development Pty Ltd
- iZone  
- Kalechi Designs
- Marketing for Profitability
- PHL Consult
- Prominic
- PSC
- Sherpa Software
- Simplified Technology Solutions Inc.
- SOFTWERK Gesellschaft fur Systementwicklung
- The Turtle Partnership
- YouAtNotes
- Ytria

You can also view the OpenNTF, Inc. Member Companies list on the OpenNTF site.

NOTE: If you are a Member Company and want to have text and/or your logo changed please drop me an email. If your company is interested in becoming an OpenNTF Member please contact Peter Tanner.

Posted by Bruce Elgort At 6:23 PM Location Vancouver, WA | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here are the slides from the session Niklas Heidloff and Bruce Elgort gave at Lotusphere 2011 entitled "Apps, apps, apps and more apps: Meet the very best open source apps from OpenNTF": Many thanks to those of you who attended the session.

Posted by Bruce Elgort At 10:25 AM Location Inside a template | Permalink | Comments (0)

For all of you who will be attending Lotusphere 2011 please be sure to include the OpenNTF Annual General Meeting / BoF in your plans. The meeting will be held on TUESDAY, February 1st in the Swan Parrot 2 room from 7:00 - 8:00am. An agenda for the meeting will be posted shortly. If you will not be at Lotusphere and would like to dial-in to the meeting please send an email to support@openntf.org.

Stay tuned for more info and OpenNTF looks forward to seeing you there. Oh and if you plan on attending please leave a comment. Thanks in advance!

Posted by Bruce Elgort At 5:26 PM Location Vancouver, WA | Permalink | Comments (5)

Normally for a Friday review I would go through all new releases since the last time, however there has been so many and with Lotusphere work in full swing we will instead do a "Year in Review" of projects over the holidays/in the new year. If you have any particular projects you like from this year then drop us an email and we will highlight those.

You can also view the "live" latest releases here.

Lotus Awards
Don't forget for Lotusphere in January 2010 there will be two new Open Source Lotus Awards:

1. Best Open Source Contribution by an Individual(s) (up to 2)
2. Best Open Source Contribution by a Business Partner

Nominations are coming in, however we would like many more (and the deadline is January 6th). Read this blog entry for more detail and get your entries in quick.

Lotusphere 2010
OpenNTF's AGM will be held at Lotusphere 2010 in Orlando, details below. Its a public meeting and we will publish a meeting schedule shortly. We would ask anyone who is interested in OpenNTF to please come along.

Meeting Name: Open NTF Annual General Meeting
Date of Meeting/Function: Tuesday, 1/19 – 6pm – 8pm
Hotel: Yacht and Beach Conference Center
Room/Function Area Name: Cape Cod C

Niklas and I will also be presenting on OpenNTF in our session "AD113 - IBM Lotus Notes Discussion Template Next Generation and other OpenNTF Assets", where we will also deep dive on building the discussion template. Outside of speaking duties we will also be in the "Ask the Developers" lab for any queries.

We would also like to request that anyone presenting on application development at Lotusphere give OpenNTF a mention. There's lots of code and examples your audience can benefit from. Any samples,demo's I write I will be placing on OpenNTF so I hope others can follow suit.

Technical Committee
The technical committee is looking for new participants. We did not progress as fast as we would have liked for site updates and the like this year, mainly due to a prioritisation on ensuring there was plenty of good, new content to consume, however also partly down to resource. Contact Niklas or I if you are interested. Between us we probably have a months worth of solid work to get what we would like for the home page, projects and catalogs.

Thank you
Finally I would like to extend a warm thank you to everyone who participated in OpenNTF this year. Plenty of people have put in a lot of work to ensure the projects, code, site and organisation are better than ever, and plenty of people also helped us keep the right course. So have a happy holiday season and here's to an even more successful 2010!

Posted by Steve Castledine At 4:26 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of the aims of reviewing the legal framework on OpenNTF was so it would be easier for developers, IBM, business partners and customers alike to reuse assets that they knew had been through a process to minimise legal risk.

So its always good to hear stories such as Elguji integrating the Lotus Connections custom control with IQJam, and Heiko Voigt integrating the XPages Wiki and xTalk discussion within his portal product.

Do you "reuse" OpenNTF assets? We would love to hear your stories (newsdesk at openntf dot org).

You can see for yourself the Lotus Connections custom control here, XPages Wiki here and xTalk here.

Posted by Steve Castledine At 6:25 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here is the presentation Vince and I did at UKLUG in Edinburgh last month.

Posted by Steve Castledine At 5:14 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Back in 2006 I developed some website plugins for OpenNTF. Since the 'action' is now not only in the Projects area but also in the Apache and GPL Catalogs I added new categories, we now have:

Most active projects, Most downloaded projects, Most recent releases , OpenNTF Blog Entries, Apache Catalog Entries, GPL Catalog Entries and even a 'Random category'

Note there is no content in the GPL catalog yet, but that shouldn't take too long.
Please let me know If there is a need to splitup the categories further to allow display of only one entry type like 'Component' or 'Plugin' in case of a catalog entry.

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
category = "random" //(current 'fixed' categories: "recent","downloads","active", "blog", "gpl", "apache") ;
inwidth = 220;
inheight = 170;
innumber = 3;
//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://www.openntf.org/projects/pmt.nsf/openntfplugin.js">
</script>

The parameters can be adjusted to suit your needs, the innumber can be used to limit the number of return values.
This helps to prevent the text being cutoff at the bottom of the iframe (since the lookups are dynamic there is no way to predict the exact amount of text returned).

Check out the result below:

Posted by Vince Schuurman At 1:30 PM Location Oirschot, NL | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't know about you but everything around OpenNTF feels like a whirlwind right now, lots of new content (best new quality in a short period for a long time for me), Notes Domino base templates being made available on OpenNTF (a first), Notes Domino Discussion Template being open sourced on OpenNTF (another first), constant top 1-5 on Planetlotus.org interest (giving edbrill.com a run for his money), Lotusphere 2010 planning, competitions (and not just competitions but LOTUS awards), large numbers of new registrations (over 7,000 since Lotusphere 2009), high download traffic and record page hits. I also see "new" interest in adding code to OpenNTF and people identifying "how OpenNTF can work for you".

Our biggest problem is actually keeping up with everyone's expectations, which is nice, but can be frustrating so please bear with us sometimes as we move the 7 year old environment forward. We finally have all servers running the same version of Domino (8.5.1) and we are near to having a new catalog which is important as we have many GPL and Apache entries queued up for entry (the existing GPL one keeps corrupting for some reason). The upgrade of the project management system is taking longer than planned which really is my fault due to time but the old system is holding out ok (just doesn't always look great). If anyone wants to help form a project group for this then let me know.

The forums will get yet another update soon, with the 8.5.1 servers being in place we will replace it with the base 8.5.1 version, add in the OpenNTF styling and move forward from there and add in the results from the Discussion next generation project. We have had some IE8 issues etc due to the Domino/Dojo version so hopefully this is/will be resolved.

Lotus Awards
As you have heard from Niklas Heidloff already, its very exciting that OpenNTF has two award categories in this years "Lotus Awards". This demonstrates a fair size commitment from IBM for this project.

The official Lotus Award details are also here, however the important detail, which is missing from the awards site but will be updated soon, is the fact that entries need to be in by January 6th 2010. If you read Niklas's blog entry linked above you will see all the conditions and what the judges are looking for etc but basically you need to have the code on OpenNTF and the second important information is to register your entry at the Lotus Awards site using the Nomination process and form. Now personally the form has a few questions which are not relevant to our category but we need to use the Lotus Award system, so bear with us and we will recognise that some parts of the form are not always necessary for an open source project. Any queries email us direct or use support at openntf dot org with the word 'award' in the subject.

Lotusphere 2010
So far it is in our planning to have an open, annual general meeting at Lotusphere 2010. The details are still being worked on so more soon. We also hope to place a position in the developers lab for OpenNTF so someone is always available for your questions. We thought this was better than a full pedestal as that is too detached from the "developers" area and logistically was easier for potential IBM representation.

We have other sessions pencilled in, however it is too early to talk about these as the track managers are still doing their planning work.

Technical Committee
As I mentioned at the top of this post, we have all the servers running 8.5.1, and we are, slowly, updating various parts that continue to cause us problems. We have also carried out an environment survey, thanks to Gab of Turtle Partnership, in order to make sure things are running as smoothly and securely as possible, We are also grateful to Prominic here for their efforts in keeping everything up and running.

I also mentioned the project management system is behind on being upgraded (its a huge task) and again will repeat if anyone wants to help form an action group to speed this up - just let me know.

TriStateLug
Continuing our stadium tour around the world, Bruce Elgort will be presenting a session on OpenNTF at the TriStateLug in New York November 9th. This session will be key noted by Bob Picciano.

Vince Schuurman also presented OpenNTF recently at the NL Lotus User Group.

New Content
Since the last friday review I think we have had the best period of great new projects for a long time, in my opinion anyway. This is all on top of the great news about adding most of the Notes Domino base templates to OpenNTF. So for the first time you can download these templates outside of the Notes Domino installation (yay!).

In no particular order here are some highlights:

xTalk Discussion Forums - xTalk Discussion Forums is a 100% XPages application written for IBM Lotus Notes And Domino 8.5.1 utilizing XPages in the Notes Client styled after many of the popular PHP web forums

Time Tracker - Time Management experts will tell you an individual only has 24 hours in a single day; proper time management isn't finding time in your day, but rather discovering and dealing with inefficiencies in your day.

File Explorer - The File Explorer is a sidebar plugin to explore files in the OS file system. The plugin supports Drag&Drop of files from/to Notes.

XPages Namepicker - A picker control for selecting notes names out of the Domino Directory, inspired by the Facebook namepicker.

SSO for Web for non Windows Servers - Achieve single sign-on for Domino Web users in an environment where some servers are Domino Windows 8.5.1 servers and other servers are on alternate platforms.

XPages Framework - Quickly create XPage applications using this framework which automatically creates the css layout for you.

Widget Library - various widgets that can be run in the IBM Lotus Notes client.

PlainTextView - This sidebar element displays the selected mail message as plaintext. This means, a Notes message is displayed with no format and a internet mail message is displayed with all the MIME headers and information.

Discussion Next Gen - Lotus Notes Domino discussion template open sourced on OpenNTF.org with new Client interface

assono Framework 2 - assono Framework 2 is a great fundament for developing modern Notes client and Domino Web applications. It consists of a system of LotusScript classes, forms, views etc. which fulfill most non-functional requirements for applications thus you can concentrate on the specific requirements of your current project.

Communication Center - The communication center is a Notes (composite) application that allows easy access to several communication/messaging applications, e.g. Twitter, Google Mail, Yahoo Mail, Facebook etc.

Active directory name picker and search - Sample database contains LS code to search Active directory ( or other LDAP ) from Notes client and Java Servlet code to build name picker for non-domino web applications.

Updated Projects
You can see all the projects that have been updated here.

New members
Membership of OpenNTF is fully open, and we will shortly be holding elections for some new steering Committee Members. This is your chance to help shape the future of OpenNTF.

Remember you can join at anytime and your support is very much appreciated.

Your News
Remember if you have any news to share - email us at newsdesk@openntf.org

Twitter and YouTube
Don't forget you can follow us on Twitter (openntf) and YouTube.

Posted by Steve Castledine At 3:49 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (4)

Steve Castledine and Vince Schuurman will be at UKLUG, Edinburgh this Thursday and Friday. Other steering committee members will also be in attendance.

There is a session on the Thursday morning at 11am on OpenNTF (so don't miss it if you are attending!), and we will be available throughout for questions, assistance, and signing up for OpenNTF. I (Steve) will also try and help you with any XPage questions (there's a lab setup at the venue).

We look forward to speaking to you!

Posted by Steve Castledine At 3:55 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here are the slides that show all of the resolutions that I will be bringing up to the Steering Committee for voting tomorrow. I think we have made some amazing progress, but this is not the end by any means. Please feel free to contribute your ideas and thoughts - we can make more refinements and improvements as time goes on. Please - if there is something you don't see, please don't fret! The journey is just beginning!

I want to thank everyone for sticking with this. I am super pleased on our progress and excited about the work we still have to do. Thank You!

I have posted the exact slides I am going to be using for the voting process here - so there is no issue with transparency (thanks for the suggestions Declan!).

Posted by John Head At 7:12 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (1)

We need to up both the quantity and quality of the posts on the OpenNTF blog, and whilst we try and keep up to date with all new projects, new releases etc via the OpenNTF twitter channel, we need to do more.  So we want to help you publicize your projects, requests for help, cool code, cool features etc on the main OpenNTF blog.

To this end we have set-up a central email address where we can be notified - newsdesk@openntf.org. So please send all your updates that we may have missed and requests (including links to your blogs posts etc on OpenNTF) to this email address.

Posted by Steve Castledine At 10:40 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

OpenNTF Alliance Steering Committee
Meeting Minutes: July 2nd, 2009
Conference Call

Members: Vince Schuurman (Chairman), Bruce Elgort (absent), Nathan Freeman, Ludwig Nastansky, Justin Hill, John Head, Rob Novack, Brent Peters, Scott Johnsen  

Others: Peter Tanner, Niklas Heidloff (absent), Steve Castledine (absent), Felicia Sienkiewicz

Proceedings: Meeting called to order at 11:00 am ET by Vince Schuurman.
Last month’s meeting minutes were approved.

Introduced: Felicia Sienkiewicz to help with project management

IP Working Group Update by John Head and Peter Tanner

Has put together 12 resolutions but will discuss at a future meeting due to time spent on technical issues this week.
Asks all Steering Committee members to review the resolutions put forward in the IP Working Group Forum.
John Head mentions the possibility of adopting Apache ICLA form directly instead of the employee waiver - Peter Tanner discusses the details.

Vince notes the resolutions are difficult to find in the forum. Editor Note - A link has been placed direct to that document at the top of the forum.

Technical Committee Update by Ludwig Nastansky (Niklas and Steve Absent)

Ludwig discusses a proposal to create an openntf committer/contributor management system/infrastructure and whether it would be required.
Discussion amongst members on this topic.
Related, Nathan suggests we need further infrastructure to separate live/test software

Resolved - To be owned by Ludwig Nastansky to setup a management infrastructure

IBM Agenda Items
Technical Committee Forum (requested by Niklas) - request for setting up. It is noted that we should not setup infrastructure for projects that are not available for all projects.
More information required on request. Request denied

Peter Tanner discusses Google Maps widget. Anyone using it would have to abide to the Google terms and conditions. Question is "is it reasonable to post an open source project that can only be used if you abide by a 3rd party agreement". Comparisons drawn with running software on Windows or even Lotus Notes. So consensus is "not a problem".

A Technical Committee meeting to track technical items will be setup within a month.

Status of when "non-IBM" entries will be posted in the catalog. Nathan working on that - waiting for individuals to submit clearance documentation (and waiting for ICLA).

General Issues

John requests a single to do list from Technical Committee and for Felicia to manage that.

Process required for people to become members of Technical Commitee

Nathan asks for feedback on maybe defining different groups in the technical committee and different roles. Say also category of people who are content managers and not developers etc. (posted in strategy forum). Nathan wants to set different rules for the different categories.Chairman of TC can decide on who is in TC for development purposes. Agreed.

Discussion on who needs full access to the openNTF servers and server support cycle/procedures (noted that a change took 48hrs over a weekend - so especially at a weekend). Need a published procedure. John has concerns over cover for vacation, timezones etc.

Nathan proposes to create a developer OU and pass to TC to create developer id's.

Meeting adjourned at 12:00 am ET
Minutes submitted by Steve Castledine

Next meeting: July 16, 2009
11:00 am ET

Posted by Steve Castledine At 5:15 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

There have been questions about the transition of OpenNTF to it's new structure, I will try to explain the background and intent of this new initiative.
I have been running this site alone for a couple of years now and although the site 'worked' for a lot of people, I had concerns about the continuity of the site. I felt that I needed feedback from 'the industry' since improving the Notes & Domino community and the market was the main reason for founding OpenNTF.
This led to the formation of the 'Advisory Board' in 2007, a board intended to provide feedback and advise on the direction OpenNTF should take.

Another issue was that as an independent entrepreneur I did not have the resources to improve the site and its content to the level I would like to see. Teaming-up with other organizations seemed the best way to provide these resources.

At the same time IBM was looking for a place to publish their example code, since the Sandbox was being shut down. They wanted exposure for their projects and participation of the Notes & Domino community to improve/extend their code examples.
Obviously OpenNTF was on their radar and they started publishing projects on OpenNTF, for example the composite application directory.

Steve and Niklas of IBM contacted me in December and proposed that we convert OpenNTF into a real non-profit organization. The new organization would be led by a committee and IBM would supply the resources for the conversion and a long overdue site update plus provide support for OpenNTF over a longer period.
They would not take over the site, the site would be run by the committee and IBM would get only one seat, the rest of the committee would consist of people/organizations from the community.
This was exactly what I was looking for, a site run by the community, with resources and guaranteed continuity.

And so it was agreed upon, a new OpenNTF for the Notes & Domino community, by the community with a little help from IBM.

I am convinced this is a good thing for OpenNTF, the community and IBM, but as with all changes there are some drawbacks.
Things like the employers approval for contributors and the Apache license requirement for new projects. There are good (legal) reasons for these formalities, but they will make it a lot harder for people to contribute.
We (the steering committee) are well aware of these issues and we will try to ease the pain as much as possible.
Constructive criticism is always welcome, but please give us a chance to get this new site up and running, before condemning the new alliance.

Although the committee is not currently accepting new members (we need to clear a lot of legal stuff before the alliance is formally founded), you can apply for membership in some time and have a say in any issues concerning the site and the alliance.

Posted by Vince Schuurman At 4:54 PM Location Oirschot, NL | Permalink | Comments (0)