Blog & Technical Insights

Unless and until an organisation creates a budget for a dedicated social business delivery team, user adoption will wax and wane and eventually tail off. The delivery team is a group of people (roughly 1 for every 1000 employees) who work full time on the user engagement and sustained adoption challenges relating to the roll-out […]

Understand your culture in terms of collaboration and create a social business strategy that is in harmony with it. Simply making the technology available to employees is not enough; in fact it is a recipe for failure. 70 % of social business deployments are failing today due to the lack of a social business strategy. […]

Before we can discuss how organisations get their employees to meaningfully engage with a collaboration platform (user adoption), we need to briefly address the question of why collaborate at all? Fortunately we are in the middle of a perfect storm in terms of both organisational and consumer shift. The digital technology that we use to […]

I try to avoid using the word “bug” too freely, because those who live by the word “bug” may die by the word “bug”! After all, we’re software developers whose own software may include bugs. Use the word freely and we can’t complain when others also do. But a little while ago I was battling […]

As many others in the community, I am devastated at the tragic news from Scott Hooks of the passing of Tim Tripcony. I first met Tim in person some years ago at BLUG, although I had since co-hosted an episode of The XCast in which he appeared and he had already contributed many comments on […]

Over the last few days my understanding of views and an XPages display of content has become much clearer. I don’t think I’m the only one who has confused the boundaries between the various moving parts and not fully understood the granularity involved. But the objects all have a clear place and function, and when […]

The DataView is an extremely powerful control that was added with the Extension Library. I was never a huge fan of the View Control. It was limited in its datasources and layouts. But the DataView accepts any datasource, provides a nice out-of-the-box layout as well as allowing flexibility with facets. Unsurprisingly it took up a […]

Some time ago I posted about the number of times the rendered property gets calculated during the JSF lifecycle and the benefits of partial execution. (One caveat is that I haven’t re-tried that since 8.5.x, so more optimisation may have been built into the XPages runtime engine.) One way of optimising calculations in the rendered […]

Events in my personal life took over at the end of March, and I realised I had not yet blogged about the last release of XPages OpenLog Logger. This had a number of feature enhancements. The first was to move the openLogBean from requestScope to sessionScope. The reason for doing this was to address issues […]

Mastering XPages has been released today by IBM Press, as followers of Twitter or anyone who pre-ordered the book from IBM Press. Amazon will be shipping shortly. I had the honour or being one of the technical editors of the book and it is well worth investing in, whether you bought the first edition or […]