LDN - Luminis Developer Network

For those of you that did not (were not able to) attend Summit 08 this year, you missed a great opportunity to network, hang out with and learn from some of the best developers and admins in the country. Every year I head to Summit, honestly, simply looking forward to talking to you all about everything from cool new hacks, to how bad a new patch or installation went. I enjoy hearing the war stories and the success stories. I was blown away by some things that you all are doing with luminis now, and am excited to be back to try out some new things I learned. Overall the conference experience was great, however, there were some things that MUST improve next year. My wife usually asks - do you want the good new or the bad news first ... I usually pick the bad news so at last I'm left on a good note when we're done talking. So using that approach here's the bad news about Summit 08

The Bad & the Ugly-

[Disclaimer : I was in no way involved in the planning or execution of the lounge this year - maybe that's why it was like this]

The UDC Developer's Lounge (formerly known as the Luminis Developer's Lounge) was a disaster. Not the presentations - those were great, the people are great, the room, or should I say cubicle sucked - flat out. For those of you not in attendance, let me paint a picture for you. Picture a gigantic exhibit hall, filled with vendors and bustling with activity. Sales pitches, contests, vendor toys and gifts flowing. Now picture about a 50 x 50 cubicle 10 feet high (approximations in feet - I'm horrible at spatial reconciliation) set in the corner off to the right as you first walk in to the exhibit hall. you see no real signage as you look at this monstrous cubicle looking thing, and wonder what it is. If you happened to continue walking you'd miss it. If you did take a trip to the right, you'd see something called the UDC Developer's Lounge. I guess its possible they're moving away from the word Luminis with the announcement of version 5 coming along (whole nuther story), but it was still quite cryptic.

Also if you happened to wander in there during the reception Sunday night, you would have seen no schedule posted out front, and looking in only a single couch and cushy chair. Looking in the Proceeding books you get, there's no mention of the session descriptions or presenters in the main book or the presentation schedule book. It wasn't until tuesday that I found a small list of times and titles listed in the book with maps and generic conference information. I guess the maps could have helped if we knew it wasn't called the Luminis Developer's Lounge, but still, you had no idea who was giving talks or what they were about.

Since there was no schedule Sunday evening, come Monday morning I pop in to see how things are going. I had no idea I was still supposed to talk about LDN at 9am. So here it is 9:20, I saunter in. Tables and chairs were just delivered and set up and the AV guy was in the corner setting up a screen and asking me where I want the projector, and how many days we need it for! Priceless. Ok, I figured not perfect but at least there are chairs and people are filling in the room. As AV-guy continues to run cords and tape them down, I figured I'd talk a bit about LND and the past year and make the best of what we had.

At this point I'm thinking the lounge was an oversight and probably forgotten about until the night before, at least that's what it feels like, and SCT is attempting to fix the problem by getting it set up as quickly as possible. Everyone in the room just kind of laughs it off, some jokes are made about the state of the room but we're professionals, we can deal with problems, and unexpected issues - heck we're Luminis admin, this is cake.

Then it gets better.

About 1 minute into my State of the Union address - I hear a voice. Not one of those little voices you hear when you wanna run a stop sign at 1am, or eat that extra piece of cake. I'm talking one of those Biblical - God to Noah, booming, all encompassing voices that surrounds you. What did 'HE' say to me?? "In about 3 minutes we'll be announcing the winner's of our first drawing, so you have about 3 minutes to get your raffle tickets filled out and in the box". I kid you not. No this wasn't God addressing the Summit community for tickets to Heaven, this was the announcer guy in the exhibit hall. We're in a 10 ft tall cubicle with no ceiling, and a huge PA system speaker perched perfectly above us in such an angle to turn the lounge into a giant speaker box. Needless to say it was frustrating for everyone to present in there.

So for that I am sorry - even though it was not my fault, even though all I could do was run to someone at Sungard and complain, even though it was never resolved.

The Good

I was continually amazed at the work some of you have done with Luminis. To list a few -

We had Greg Skinner providing Drag-N-Drop functionality pretty much ready to drop into your luminis 4 instance. He amazed us with DnD channels, DnD tabs (quite cool way to reorder your tabs) and some new innovative Add Channel mechanism that keeps your users from having to go into the nasty content/layout screen.

Todd Tran wowed us with some DnD tabs, and a very Google-esk add content function - again keeping users away from the array of Add Channel buttons. Todd Tran was the winner of Luminis Idol 08 this year - a highly competitive portal dog-n-pony show where developers show off the coolest things they're doing with their portals. Details about the contest and all the contestants will be posted to http://www.portalchamp.com whenever Alister gets around to it :)

Matt from Plymouth State amazed us with their totally hacked up portal, that demonstrated how you can leverage CAS and javascript loaded channels to provide a very dynamic and personalized portal to your users. They tackled the tab issue another way, limiting the number of tabs displayed at the top. If a user has 7 or more tabs, 6 are displayed and the 7th is a More tab, that flies out and allows you to choose other tabs in your layout. It then swaps out the last tab for the one you chose.

There were countless others that presented just fantastic things they're doing with the portal, how they're providing content with custom written apps - in the case of ArrowPoint, a .Net app written by Ryan Soward which allows you to create news articles and custom in house RSS feeds for your portal. To a simple lunch menu application that helps the lunch lady enter the day's menu into a form that provides content to a channel. That one channel was so beautiful in its simplicity, I wrote down that concept and have already emailed off that suggestion to dining services here.

I was continually surrounded by developers that either had ideas or questions, and countless others that touted cudos and thanks for the site or help they've gotten in the past. I'll try not to get too sentimental here, but the real value in Summit is the people. I don't go to visit vendors, or for the food, or to get away from my job (although that's a great benefit) - I go to be around like-minded people that all want to make a vanilla product into a double-decker banana split with all the toppings.

So to return the 100's of thank-you's I received over the past week - THANK YOU back for a great conference.

-Jon