NotesTracker validated against Notes/Domino 8.5

Just a short post to mention that NotesTracker underwent testing against IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5 during the Beta1 and Beta2 testing phases, and again a week or two ago against the official ND 8.5 release.

NotesTracker works fine in ND 8.5 (as it does with ND 8.0). I could detect no functional issues at all.

Gratifyingly, this is in contrast to what happened with Notes 6.0, which introduced a bug in LotusScript’s handling of Rich Text fields forcing me to redesign the subroutines used for handling changes in the content of database fields.

Please note, however, that there’s now is a functional limitation, indeed for me it’s a major inconvenience: with the Notes 8.0 and 8.5 Standard client you’ll find that the "Open in New Window" context menu option is missing from three ultra-convenient places where it was available before: view navigator, workspace tab, and workspace icon.

Consider the following screenshots, on the left the Notes 8.x Basic client and on the right the Standard client. Click an image to see an enlargement (in a new browser window):

Notes ND 8.5 Basic client - Open via workspace icon.	Notes ND 8.5 Basic client - Open via workspace icon is entirely absent. MISSING IN ACTION
Notes ND 8.5 Basic client - Open via view navigator.	Notes ND 8.5 Basic client - Open via view navigator is grayed out. MISSING IN ACTION
Notes ND 8.5 Basic client - Open via workspace tab.	Notes ND 8.5 Standard client - Open via workspace tab is entirely absent. MISSING IN ACTION

Technorati Tags: NotesTracker,Lotus Notes 8

The ND 8.x Basic client works properly, as with earlier Notes client releases, as shown in the left column of the above table. No problems (or “no sweat” as we say in Australia).

But the Eclipse-based Notes 8.x Standard client simply hasn't implemented it yet, as shown in the right column of the above table. What a pity. I hope that IBM fixes this glaring omission soon, I (and one or two others) asked IBM to rectify this way back in ND 8.0 Beta1 days.

It's a bit of a shame, but only significant if you happen to have implemented any auto-refresh RSS-style "Breaking News" views. Now you need to follow a a much more convoluted pathway to launch such views in separate external windows.

As explained in the NotesTracker Guide, the idea is to move the external views to the side where you can monitor them separately from the main Notes client window. There's also a brief description here.

This is not a NotesTracker limitation, rather it's caused by the as-yet failure of IBM to support this feature in the Standard client. The only way you can launch an external window is by fiddling around: you'll need to learn how to set up each such Breaking News view as a widget/gadget, and only after doing so will you be able to launch the view in an external window (via its context menu).

So with the Notes 8.x Standard client it's no longer same trivial operation of merely right-clicking on the view in the navigator or the tab across the top and then selecting Open In New Window from the context menu) as it was before.

IBM ANZ's Jonathan Stern outlines Lotus collaborative and social software strategy (podcast at iTWire)

Hey, this is my first post here for quite a few weeks, since last November in fact!

It’s not that I’ve been inactive or have nothing to say, just that recently my blogging efforts have largely been directed to writing articles for iTWire. But I do plan soon to refocus on writing more articles here (and on my other Blogger.com weblogs, listed at right).

IBM’s Lotus Software products are on a roll, not just for the re-architected Lotus Notes and Domino 8 but also for enterprise social software offerings and the very popular free Lotus Symphony office suite.

I’ve installed Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5 gold code and have repeated testing of my NotesTracker SDK to confirm (as with the two ND8.5 public betas) that NotesTracker works just fine with this latest Eclipse-driven Notes client release.

As well as regular writing, during the second half of 2008 I recorded a number of podcast interviews, see them listed here at iTWire.

I’ve been very much in a Lotus frame of mind during the last few months, so would like to draw your attention to the latest podcast uploaded that I’ve published just a few hours ago: IBM's Jonathan Stern outlines Lotus collaborative and social software strategy

In this podcast interview, Jonathan – who is IBM ANZ regional executive for Lotus Software – gives a wide-ranging outline of the Lotus communication and collaboration products.

Another podcast being prepared should be of a fair amount of interest to IBM and Lotus followers in particular. It’s with Michael Karasick, Director of IBM Lotus China Development Labs, who talks in depth about Lotus Symphony and other similar Lotus Software product development topics. So watch for it at the aforementioned iTWire podcasts home page.

Just to show that while I like Lotus I’m not totally one-eyed, look out for the last of the three interviews that I recorded in the weeks immediately before Christmas (and also to be published fairly soon), this one being with Greg Stone, Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft Australia.

Apart from podcasts, my regular stories for iTWire are in the section A Meaningful Look at Desktop and Enterprise Computing

And if you like puzzles, why not check out my contributions at the the iTWire TechWords Interactive Crosswords section. I really need a bit of encouragement/justification (by your visiting them, that is) before I decide to devote any more precious time to composing these technology-oriented word puzzles!

Eh bene, ciao bambini.

Europe’s pragmatic approach to open standards

In my blog section over at iTWire I’ve highlighted a new European Commission report on open standards, a topic that I’ve been extremely interested in for decades (during my long time at IBM, and now as an independent consultant).

Here’s the link to that article. Go take a peek at it since there’s lots of interesting/important content:

A pragmatic European approach to open standards (a must-read)
Sunday, 09 November 2008
The European Journal of ePractice has just published a research report showing that the achievement of wide-scale implementation depends not only on the openness of the process, but also on the willingness to negotiate and achieve a compromise.

Simple Signer for Lotus Notes Version 1.01 released (04 November 2008)

Technorati Tags: Lotus Notes,Database,Sign,Security,Deployment,Configuration

Today has been a busy day for me. While preparing for a presentation tomorrow, I’ve been dusting off my Lotus Notes freeware applications, checking them out and making small design tweaks here and there. This is the final one in the bundle.

Because of the strong security model that has always been one of the major features of Lotus Notes right from its outset, it is sometimes necessary to “sign” a database before it will work properly in your organization’s operating environment.

Here follows a brief, highly simplified explanation. It is definitely NOT intended to act as a tutorial in Lotus Notes/Domino security.

When the Notes database application was built, its design elements (components such as forms, views, frames, framesets, agents and much more) were all created by one or more developers. These design elements would have been given the “signature” of the original developer(s), which may not be (and generally should not be) adequate to pass the runtime security in your organization’s production environment.

In many but not all cases, it is sufficient to sign all of the design elements with an appropriately-authorized person’s Notes ID. This is exactly what Simple Signer does, in a few easy-to-perform steps.

STEP 1: Open the Simple Signer database. If necessary, switch to the desired the signing user’s ID file (top button), then click on the lower button (as shown by the red arrow) to select the database to be signed.

 

STEP 2: Use the normal “Choose Database” dialog to locate and select the desired database.

 

STEP 3: The selected database’s title, server and path are shown. Click on the lower button to sign ALL of the design elements in this database.

If your Notes ID has adequate signing authority for this particular database, it will be signed, else you’ll be informed that the signing process failed.

Remember that this is called the “Simple Signer” and it’s not meant (as distributed) to cope with  complex signing requirements.

Because the Simple Signer’s design is not hidden, your can get your Notes developer to tailor the design to cope with more complex signing requirements. Otherwise, purchase a more powerful tool.

Simple Signer is a FREE tool designed to carry out a common, basic sign-everything-with-the-same-Notes-ID process and to do it both easily and quickly. … No more, no less. No apologies!

You can obtain your free copy from here or here.

Version 1.01 of Presenter for IBM Lotus Notes released (04 November 2008) – Eat your own dog food!

 

I don’t give many presentations these days, but expect to do so tomorrow afternoon at the Melbourne (Australia) Lotus User Group meeting.

So I took out my unique little “Presenter for Lotus Notes” application and brushed up a few cobwebs on it. No new functionality, mainly some color changes to alternate view rows and little things like that.

Its now ready for download at either http://asiapac.com.au/NotesPresenter_Download.htm or http://notestracker.com/NotesPresenter_Download.htm. Naturally, it’s still completely free.

But you are probably asking: “What on earth is Presenter for Notes?”

Well, the story behind Presenter goes like this…

I once did industrial chemistry and high school chemistry/mathematics teaching, then spent a long time at IBM (from 1970 to the mid-1990s, now retired), and find myself as a consultant still in IT 39 years after starting at IBM. My fortieth year in IT begins next January, is that good or bad I keep asking myself.

During all that time, I’ve seen a vast number of lessons, lectures, business presentations and the like. In the early days, they were done on blackboards and paper. Later overhead projectors were in vogue, with their transparent plastic “foils.” These foils, in any quantity, weighed a ton and weren’t much fun to prepare, distribute and lug around (as I can attest from giving lots of IBM presentations across Australia, and Asia while supporting the IBM System/38 and AS/400 and other systems).

Then in the 1980s and 1990s, along came Lotus Freelance and Microsoft PowerPoint and suchlike. A better thing? On the whole, probably so.

But overdone to the n^th degree. Now we have PowerPoint presentations in plague proportions! See here or here (especially look at the articles about “Unplug that projector” and “Drag and drop” and “warts” and “disaster”).

When I was to give a presentation several years ago, I asked myself if there was a different and/or better way.

Being active in the Lotus Notes community, I decided that “If you promote and sell it, you should use it!.” So I developed a “presenter” platform to be used in the Lotus Notes Client environment itself.

The rationale for having a tool like Notes Presenter is briefly outlined in an earlier blog post of mine, see Notes Presenter -- Let's eat our own dog food with more details on the download page given above. There’s a user guide built in to the database, in the “Help Using This Database” document.

You can use Presenter not just for preparing and giving presentations via a Lotus Notes Client, but also for packaging and delivering virtually any Notes applications (databases) together with any sort of related supporting files: executables, documents, data files (even other Notes databases, including design templates), and much more.

You could, as just one example, hold different versions/releases of a Notes application suite – or a presentation, or anything else -- either inside [separate documents held in] a single Presenter database or in multiple Presenter databases each one dedicated to s single version/release.

In fact, whatever can be attached to a Notes rich text field can be delivered via a Presenter database as one tidy self-contained package.

With the various Presenter views (such as the view by Category/Concept shown just above), and via full-text search, you can quickly and easily locate a particular slide or group of slides related to a given topic.

For example, in the question time at the end of a pitch,  somebody asks you about a particular term you used that’s buried deep within one of many slides. Use a full-text search to rapidly locate that slide instead of fumbling around (as I’ve seen happen a number of times) and perhaps not even be able to find that slide again.

There’s a lot more I could say, but let me just say that if you’re a Lotus Notes Client user you should “eat your own dog food” and avoid using PowerPoint wherever possible. Download Presenter for Lotus Notes and go try it out!

IBM’s ITSO sails on… Long live the ITSO!

For some months now, I’ve been writing a lot of articles for Australia-based iTWire rather than here, and think that it;s about time I linked across to them for you.

Here are two articles about IBM’s International Technical Support Organization, (ITSO), with which I had a close working relationship during my career at IBM Australia.

Big Blue sees Red -- Celebrating 40 years of IBM international technical support
Thursday, 25 September 2008

IBM recently celebrated the 40th anniversary of its international technical support organization, ITSO, and has committed to continue producing its core product, free IBM Redbooks, which these days are downloaded in the tens of millions.

IBM's Jackie Olson explains ITSO mission and services (iTWire podcast)
Tuesday, 07 October 2008

Jackie Olson, program director of IBM's International Technical Support Organization (ITSO) and Authoring Services, tells us in this iTWire podcast with Tony Austin about the ITSO's numerous products and services, plus its benefits to IBM customers, IBM business partners, other parts of IBM, and the general IT community.

See all my articles, including podcasts ...
A Meaningful Look at Desktop and Enterprise Computing

Have some fun with a challenge or two that I've devised!
Go visit the iTWire TechWords Interactive Crosswords section.

CAPTURE Version 2.2 released (30th October 2008)

CAPTURE version 2.2.00 is now available for download from either http://asiapac.com.au/CAPTURE_Download.htm(or its mirror at http://notestracker.com/CAPTURE_Download.htm ).

From the same page, you also can download the built-in "Help Using This Database" document as a separate PDF, if this is more convenient for you to read outside the Notes environment.

CAPTURE stands for "Customer And Project Tracking with Usage Reporting Extensions" and is a completely free Lotus Notes CRM application -- with Asia/Pacific Computer Services' NotesTracker^TM incorporated so that you can track and audit usage of the documents in a CAPTURE database.

Apart from a few very minor changes, the main functional improvement added is the ability to specify (for each CAPTURE database replica) the three headings that appear at the top of each page.

This is shown in the following illustration. Click on it to open a larger image (on a new page).

This was requested by a CAPTURE user as a means of applying “branding” to a CAPTURE database.

And the best news is that it is still a FREE application. So download and enjoy!

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Having NotesTracker capabilities built in is a unique feature, possibly not found in any other CRM application. For example, you can see who updated the sales forecast figure for your customer Acme Widgets, and when they did it, or who deleted a Contact from the database.

Another option is to keep open the RSS-style "Breaking News" view so as to see database actions appear automatically as soon as they occur (in the case of events on remote Domino servers, as soon as then next replication cycle occurs for the database).

You can purchase the NotesTracker toolkit to add powerful features activity tracking and compliance management to the design of your own IBM Lotus Notes/Domino database applications.

SDMS version 4.4.01 released (28 October 2008)

Version 4.4.01 of SDMS, the Simple Document Management System for IBM Lotus Notes and DOmino, was released today with NotesTrackerB built in, Tuesday 28 October 2008 -- and of course it’s free, as ever.

When v4.4.00 was released, I inadvertently reset its default access level so that it was no longer Manager. This meant that, as delivered, you could not do things such as changing the database’s title, unless you knew that you could bypass this problem by making a local copy and select not to copy the access control list.

In version 4.4.01 the default for the ACL has been reset to Manager.

This should make it easier for you again to start off using SDMS “out of the box” (without suffering the abovementioned access level problem).

TechWords Interactive Wikipedia Word Search Puzzle (and Crossword)

iTWire Puzzler number 004 was just released over the weekend, and the technology theme this time is Wikipedia, in the sense that without using Wikipedia you probably won't have much hope in solving the puzzle!

You have a double challenge with this one: firstly, using the clue you have to find the correct answer via Wikipedia research. And then you have to locate where the answer word(s) are located in the puzzle, which is complicated by the fact that some of them are diagonally positioned and this makes it a lot harder to do.

As you'll see from the above image it's in the form of a word search rather than a crossword (although a day or so after releasing this puzzle I relented and also made available a crossword version in case the word search format is a bit too hard).

TechWords Interactive IBM Lotus Notes Crossword

Hey now, here's something crafted especially for Lotus Notes enthusiasts and just posted to my iTWire blog section, A Meaningful Look

It's the third in my new series of interactive technology crosswords for iTWire, and you'll find it at the following link:

TechWords Interactive IBM Lotus Notes Crossword

I really hope that you Lotus followers all like it -- or at least appreciate it -- and if you do please help me by "Digging" it on the above iTWire page.

I'm looking forward to coming back to the theme of IBM and Lotus Software in a while, after creating some puzzlers for other technologies.

I'm aiming to create a new technology crossword (or searchword) puzzle every week or two, but they take quite some fiddling to prepare and upload to iTWire. And keep in mind that's not even making allowance for the creative juices that have to flow in order to devise the clues and answers for each theme. Over the last few weeks I've developed a healthy respect for crossword puzzle authors!