Kicking off Project Romulan: Federated Social and Business Networking Dashboard for the IBM Lotus Notes Client

02/03/2010 12:30 PM by Chris Toohey

Members of the dominoGuru.com Facebook Fan Page were treated to a special sneak peek of several upcoming projects soon to either hit a domain or be available for download.

Today, I officially announce Project Romulan, my Federated Social and Business Networking Dashboard for the IBM Lotus Notes Client.

This is my version of the much discussed Project Vulcan from IBM. Romulan will be an XPages Lotus Notes 8.5.1 Client Dashboard-style application that allows you to interact with your IBM Lotus Notes Messaging environment as well as various social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more!

I tend to rely on more prior release design approaches for these type of projects, more to keep those of you that haven't had the opportunity to upgrade to the latest release of the server or client in the game, but I wanted to create something a little more cutting edge.

So far, the build is going smoothly. The Lotus Notes 8.5.1 Client's ability to render XHTML and CSS correctly is a big help, and quite frankly the more and more I use it, the less likely I'm going to go back to writing Forms and Framesets. You're feedback on that, Constant Reader, is appreciated; I don't want to alienate those of you who haven't upgraded yet and will -- quite frankly -- see all of this as yet-another-thing that you should upgrade for but can't.

My plans are to support as much of the internal IBM Lotus infrastructure as possible - eventual tie-ins with not only IBM Lotus Notes Domino, but also Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, et al.

Combining these with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and whatever other well-documented social networking solutions available in the cloud, I believe, will create a pretty slick utility.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment. If you're interested in learning more, keep an eye out for more hitting the site shortly!