Month: August 2007

Notes 8 installed and I’m down with it!

I installed Notes 8 this morning after installing Domino 8 on our production server and I’m liking it! I’m also running a customized version of the Notes 8 mail template (I refuse to call it “mail experience”) and it’s über cool! No issues with the installation or any existing applications so far. It has been smooth sailing.

I don’t know what I was expecting performance wise as previous builds have been running in virtual machines but I have been very pleasantly surprised. The client is snappy and much faster than the beta builds. I’m leaning towards it actually being faster than my Notes 7.0.2 install. I installed the whole package incl. Designer, Administrator, CA editor, activities and productivity editors and all is running on my old IBM Thinkpad T41p.

Installing the client in the morning is tough as I gotta stay focused since there is also work to be dealt with. I wonder what that button does – more later… 😉

IdoNotes episode 37: Message Recall

Just finished listening to IdoNotes episode 37 on the message recall feature in Notes 8. Listening to the episode I found it interesting that the functionality is able to distinguish between unread and read messages as it was my understanding that this information was kept in the bookmark.nsf database. It could simply be that the router relies on the fact that unread marks may be replicated as it the case for clustered servers. In any case it means that replication of unread marks must be enabled for mail databases for this functionality to be able to work on unread messages. Just a thought…

Domino 8 installed on production server


I just finished installing Domino 8 on our main production server and it is currently restarting. As expected I had no issues at all. No reconfiguration has been done so far – for now I’m simply making sure it is up alright and working properly. I’m really forward to getting my hands on it.

Next up is installing Notes 8 on my main production laptop.

Notes 8 forum @ developerWorks

The link to the Notes 8 forum appears to be missing at the developerWorks Notes welcome page. The link was quite easy to guess. I also made a copy-and-paste of Julians Firefox shortcut (using “ldd8”) for searching with the following URL (all on one line):

javascript:url='http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd8forum.nsf/
search?SearchView&SearchOrder=1&SearchMax=0&SearchWV=TRUE&
SearchFuzzy=FALSE&Start=1&Count=100&Query=';s='%s';
terms=s.split(/s/);location.replace(url+terms.join
('%20AND%20'));

Give me better ways to contribute

There is a nice post over at Nathan Freemans blog on how to keep the “gurus” involved in the Notes/Domino community. I feel that the forum on developerWorks should be the place to ask questions of those willing to respond but in order for me to get back in the game the forum needs a couple of new features. Below is a couple of suggestions in order of importance (to me anyway):

  1. A RSS feed per post/thread including all comments. This will make it easier for me to keep up with replies to a post and easily let me stay involved and contributing. I already blogged about this some time back (post)
  2. Allow me to subscribe to all posts containing a given tag or the results of a search. There are a number of areas I want to contribute answers to in the forum. By letting me subscribe to a RSS feed for a search I would be more inclined to get help since I’m only notified about posts I want to answer.
  3. Allow me to tag questions and replies to ease future searching.
  4. Make the respondent rate the reply or at least indicate that the question has been answered.
  5. Allow me to ignore threads that haven’t been closed/answered when searching (see #4).

To all you guys from a non-English speaking country…

…be sure to chime in over at Mary Beth Ravens blog and make sure that Lotus understand that they need to cater for non-English speaking countries as well. In this case we are talking automatic spell check for Notes (text) fields but it could be any other feature involving some kind of i18n.

For this specific issue my input is to make sure that the automatic spell check language doesn’t necessarily follow the client and/or OS language. Many Notes applications in Denmark are in English even though the Notes client and/or OS might be in Danish. There really should be some way of indicating the spell check language for an entire application or individual form.

Another reason to chime in is to make sure simply stuff is considered as well. This could be that contacts from the personal name and address book is printable on A4 paper. As basic as this sounds it hasn’t been considered up to this point. Try printing a personal contact in Notes 7 or earlier in A4 format. Not a pretty sight. I think it is kind of embarrassing.

With all the talk of persona-driven design for Notes 8 I’m utterly confused that none of the selected and described personas are non-English speaking, from a country using the metric system or using a different paper format. Why isn’t Samantha from Belgium?

What’s up with the “me too” articles on developerWorks?

After reading the last installment in an article series on Notes 8 development on developerWorks I have to wonder how many articles they (developerWorks) need to publish on creating simple plug-ins, building features and publishing them using an update site. This is already extensively covered as part of the Eclipse development articles both on developerWorks and on eclipse.org/articles.

In my mind a good example of bringing something new to the table is the article on leveraging the current context in Notes 8 (Leveraging user context in the IBM Lotus Notes V8 sidebar and toolbar). That’s new. That’s something I wanna do. It still uses the first third configuring and setting up stuff but still it’s new.

Why not try some more concrete examples that actually cover some of the things that IBM bring to the table in Notes 8 / Sametime 7.5 / Expeditor or some of the areas that is going to cause problems? Suggestions could be:

  • Using the components of Expeditor e.g. the message broker and the web services engine
  • Building Notes UI’s using SWT components
  • Making your SWT components look the ones supplied by IBM
  • Communicating with the Notes application from your features/plug-ins

The above suggestions aren’t great but I’m dying to read articles on Notes 8/Sametime 7.5 that doesn’t spend the better half explaining the same ol’ concepts as have been explained so many times before…

Zzzzzz….

Mental note to self:

Private Declare Sub Sleep Lib "kernel32" (ByVal dwMilliseconds As Long)

Private Sub DoSleep(repeat As Integer, sleep_period As Long)
   Dim i As Integer

   While i < repeat
      Call Sleep(sleep_period)
      i = i + 1
   Wend

   MsgBox "Awoke..."
End Sub

Ytria Summer Promotion


If you’re developing in Notes and if you’re not using the Ytria tools you’re crazy! Crazy I tell you! 😉 Once I saw that Ytria was repeating their promo from last summer I had to share it.

I have been using their suite of tools since last year and I’m finding it increasingly difficult to live without actionBarEZ and signEZ. The first because I hate doing repetitive work and it lets me easily copy action bar design styles among views, forms and subforms and the latter because, as a consultant for hire, I do a lot of signing and cleaning up before shipping databases to customers. signEZ lets me do that and it is much easier than using the Domino Administrator.

This is why I don’t find it hard to recommend that you stop by Ytria and take advantage of their Summer Promotion where you can get free license keys that will last you until 25 August.

Oh! And they’re stand-up guys too and look so cute at Lotusphere in their orange t-shirts! 🙂 At Lotusphere 2007 I hung out with Andre Hausberger to talk about a new tool they where doing (agentEZ). Before long Andre had fetched the lead developer and we were taling feature requests and possible solutions… How’s that for accessibility! 😉