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Notes Design Blog

    What do you want to learn at Lotusphere in a "hands on sessoin" about the sidebar?

    Mary Beth Raven  November 11 2008 12:55:12 PM
    Hello Lotus fans,
    Yesterday, Jamie Liu (Sidebar developer) and I were notified that our hands-on session has been accepted.  (I also was notified that 2 other sessions were rejected).
    Now, I know that most of you who follow this blog probably already know a lot about the sidebar because you're exceptional. Nonetheless, I'm going to ask you what you want to learn-- and what you think more average Notes developers and admins would like to be able to do by the end of the session.

    Here's the abstract:
    Sidebar Safari: Controlling and Extending the Lotus Notes Sidebar with Policies, Widgets, Plug-ins and a new API
    During the Sidebar Safari, you'll learn how to corral wild widgets into sidebar panels! In this session, we will also demonstrate how to control the appearance of the sidebar using Desktop policy settings, how to add Notes views and documents as sidebar panels, how to install plug-ins, and how to take advantage of new API introduced in 8.5 to programmatically open or close the sidebar and show or hide specific panels.  We will demonstrate the latest sidebar design that allows end users to more easily manage all the panels they may have in their sidebar.  We will include UI design guidelines for building your own sidebar plug-ins.

    My Questions (remember, this is a new "hands on" session where you are supposed to bring your laptop and do the exercises yourself during a 2-hour session!)

    1. Can we reasonably expect that you'll have the 8.5 shipping version of the Notes client? (we assume it will ship before Lotusphere)
    2. Can we expect you to have Eclipse installed?
    3. Can we expect you to have a Domino server on the same machine  so that during the session you can tweak the Widget desktop policy and push it out to yourself?

    Here are some of the things we were thinking of having "labs" for (no guarantee!)
    1. One-click to put a Notes view in the sidebar
    2. One click and EDIT the url to put just the "listview" in the sidebar
    3. Add an "info only" Google Gadget  sidebar e.g. the world clock
    4. Add a Google Gadget that  takes some kind of input, like countdown
    5. Do some live text thing (like the delta flight example,but something a little different) where the answer opens in the sidebar
    6. A sample Eclipse plug-in , with examples of:
    - how to contribute to sidebar declaratively - explain extension point (if some people in the audience have no knowledge of this)
    - how to contribute dynamically
    - new API/how to access ShelfPage object (and what it is)
            - how to toggle sidebar state (Open, Thin, Collapsed)
            - how to show/hide panels using new API available in 8.5
    - demonstrate how a panel can be modified by listeners
    7. How to use policy to
    -Deploy the sidebar as open or closed
    - Use the widget catalog to deploy categories of widgets
    - Set who is allowed to create  and share widgets

    We don't think we'll have time to cover it all, so we're asking your opinion. Should we do a smattering that covers power user, app dev and admin? or just focus on app dev?
    I look forward to being one of the "Hands-on session" guinea pig presenters.