Domino Interface

About a year ago, it was reported to me that all the kiosks that we help develop for the Take Flight exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) in 1995 were removed and replaced with newer kiosks. I was very sadden to hear this.  We developed three different types of kiosks, two outside the 727 and one inside the plane and installed into the back of each seat in the plane. My colleague, Robert Burton developed a compiler using C and assembly that was originally used for developing our Lotus cc:Mail training courses for version 1.0 all the way up to version 2.  The compiler and development kit allowed us to create very dynamic graphics for the DOS platform.  At least it was very dynamic in 1995.  Each of the 20 so kiosks ran on a Gateway 486 with 64M of memory.  Wow!!  Startup and shutdown of these kiosks was done by turning the power on and off.  I wonder what would happen to Windows if that happened. Since...

It is one week until the start MWLUG Conference 2011 so make sure you register. Here are the top ten reasons why your should be attending MWLUG 2011. For your $35 donation you get: - 40 Technical and Social Business Sessions - Miller-Coors Brewery Tour and Beer and Beer - Wednesday Evening Reception with Food and Drinks - Thursday Evening MWLUG Private Party at Comedy Sportz Club with Dinner, Drinks, and Show - 50% off one IBM Certification Test - Open Session with David Cohen from LinkedIn - Breakfast and Lunch (buffet lunches not box lunches) for two days - Free XPages Workshop - Meeting Ed Brill - And see me make a fool of myself on stage

20 years ago, Rob Burton, Dan Eitel, and I founded ReCor. It is hard to believe that it has been 20 years. For 20 years we have been provide training in the form of self-paced training to thousands of companies training millions of users through out that time. Lotus Notes training has always been our best training product out there. With the next version of Notes come, it will continue to be our best training product. Like everything else, we have also diversified in what we are doing these days and training represents a small portion of our revenue. The funny thing is that we did not start out as a training company, but as a small development shop to do application development. Training for Lotus Notes kind of fell into place while we were working on a custom application for a client. Those days, the big thing was a IBM 486 PC. Man do I feel old. Like all businesses we have had our ups and downs, but the experience of being on my own and not working for a large firm has been gr...

The ReCor team here in the Chicago area and in Germany have been working hard over the past few months to redesign our Java-based Enrave engine to include interactive audio with our Domino-based LearningDocs training technology. I am glad to announce that the ReCor Lotus Notes training is now available in both English and German with interactive audio. This brings the ReCor Lotus Notes training to the next level. The audio is a great addition to the already packed LearningDocs solution that includes interactive simulation, built-in learning management system, quick reference cards, customizable content, and integration with the Notes client.

Recently a couple of our clients added iPhones to replace their Blackberries in their operation and we installed Traveler for them so that they can access there mail and calendar from their iPhones. Everything is working fine with the one exception. Using BES with your Blackberry you have the option of whether the handheld or the desktop has control on the deletion of messages. So if you set it to the desktop (default) when the user deletes the message from their Blackberry to remove the clutter of messages, the messages remain in their mail file until they delete it using their Notes or iNotes client. This is very handy. However, with the Traveler Exchange ActiveSync there does not seem to be a similar option. Has anyone encountered this issue and found a resolution?

Until recently I was using the Domino Designer 8.02 client because it is smaller and faster. However, the new eclipse-based client has one key feature that I have always wanted in the old client that was not available. Why it was not available I do not know. The Domino Designer 8.51 client automatically sorts the functions for a script library into alphabetic order. For years this has irritated me when searching for a function. I glad they finally have this built in. Unfortunately, I am still getting Java errors when I go to preview mode, but I guess I will have to live with it.

From January 1, 2010 to June 30, 2010, ReCor is offering to registered and qualified IBM Business Partners, a 20% referral fee on referrals of qualified ReCor training products to their customers that result in a sale. This program is designed to help IBM Business Partners generate additional revenue by recommending ReCor training solutions to their customers. By providing training during the migration or deployment process, you help your customers maximize the return on their investment in Lotus technologies. For more information about ReCor products visit our web site at www.recor.com. For more information about the Extended IBM Business Partner Referral Program please contact Richard Moy at (847) 424-8700 x 229 or email him at rqmoy@recor.com. This offer is not valid for referrals of Lotus customers that have purchased products from ReCor with the past two years or who are currently under the ReCor maintenance/upgrade program.

It is a new year and ReCor have just completed their new web site. Take a look. Along with the new web site, ReCor has just released the updated new Lotus Notes 8.51 training courses that include training for: - Notes 8.51 Standard client - Notes 8.51 Basic client - iNotes 8.51 client If you are going to Lotusphere, visit their booth, #704. In addition to the interactive simulations that they have had for many years in their courses, they now have started to include interactive videos into their products.

Since the second Monday of October is always Columbus Day, the October GRANITE meeting is on the third Monday of the month, October 19, 2009. So don't show up next Monday. We a have an exciting couple of presentations including virtualization of your Lotus environment.

In addition to training courses for the Lotus Notes 8.5 Standard client, 8.5 Basic client, and iNotes 8.5 client, ReCor now has Lotus Notes 8.5 standard client course books available for purchase online, www.recor.com .

This morning as I was riding my bike to work around the lakefront and received a number of messages that I needed to address immediately. The signal along the lake is spotty. So the took out my T41 and did all my work disconnected with my Lotus Notes applications that I had on my laptop plus I made a few changes to the design of the MWLUG conference application that I had a local replica on my laptop. When I got a better signal a little later I replicated everything and everyone is happy. As a result, my contacts did not have to wait for me to get to my office and then make the changes. Remember, time is money. Microsoft and Google. That is the power of Lotus technology.

Lotus Notes is now prettier with the Eclipse wrapper, but making a functional user interface is not about looking pretty. Google's interface for their applications is not as pretty as Lotus Notes. It is simple but logical. Though Lotus Notes now has a nicer looking interface it still has things that are not logical and layout incorrectly for the end user. For example is contact synchronization. You would thing that if you have to synchronize your contacts with your blackberry or other mobile device that you would go to your contact database and there would be a button or link to click on to start the process. That would be the most intuitive approach. But NO!!!! In 8.02 you need to go to your mail file. I understand the reason it is done that way, but come on it is not that hard to have a button in the contact database to start the process. Same thing in Notes 8.5, if you need to go to the replication page if you need to force a contacts synchronization. These are the litt...

ReCor has released their new LearningDocs for Lotus Notes 8.5 training course which includes a whole of new content and features including the expansion of the curriculum designer to include the quick reference cards in the LearningDocs Administrator. Their course books for Lotus Quickr 8.1 will be available also on Monday from lulu.com. LearningDocs for Lotus Notes 8.5

We have created a new LinkedIn group in conjunction to the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference 2009. Our goal is to continue the collaboration between Lotus professionals in the Midwest Region of the United States even after the conference is over with. If you are interested in joining here is the link. Midwest Area Lotus User Group at LinkedIn

Last Friday was the second annual RIApalooza conference here in Chicago which I attended. It is run by a number of Chicago user groups including Adobe User Group and Flex User Group. They did a great job. Hats off to Correy Miller from Magenic for a great presentation on applying UX principles in developing applications. All the food was provided by Microsoft. There are now great tools out there to create Rich Internet Applications (RIA) including Adobe Flash and Flex and Microsoft Silverlight. Google now is starting to roll out their toolkit. However, one audience asked about IBM's contribution to providing development tools and support for Rich Internet Applications. The only mentioned was the Expeditor platform that most attendees have not hear of or disliked because of how big and bulky it is compared to Adobe's and Microsoft's solution. Unfortunately, the perception is that IBM does not seem to be involved in RIA at all. It then hit me, what is IBM's strat...

Since Notes is a client server solution it generates a significant amount of NRPC calls between the Notes client and the Domino server. Thousands of NRPCs are created during simple actions like searches and lookups. If you are developing Notes client applications that are used only inside your LAN you will never notice this because the NRPCs are quickly processed. However, if you are accessing the Domino server through the Web, the time to process the NRPCs grows exponentially as packet jumps from router to router. What took less then a second on your LAN could take minutes or longer. One way to reduce the delay cause by NRPCs is to process as much of your transactions using RunOnServer agents. For our applications, we package everything as XML and process the XML using RunOnServer agents and return the response as XML which is then process on the Notes client using string manipulation which is very fast. From the response XML, we then populate the form. Therefore, there is separ...

Over the next few months I will be involved in a number of Notes application projects that will require design interfaces for our clients. I usually sketch out the interface using paper and pencil and then scan it in and store it in a file. I read Daniele Vistalli's blog about "Website designs for lazy developers." He mentioned in his blog about the tool Balsamiq Mockups. I downloaded and tested it out. It is great. It will save me a lot of time. With Balsamiq Mockups I can quickly create it and store it as a file and make changes to the UI design with the client on the fly. Thanks Daniele for the blog. It is also very cheap at $79.00. I just recommended this product to a few other designers that I work with.

We are currently working on a new interface for our IBF-based product line and our graphics team sent me this link that I would like to share with everyone. It is blog entry about using icons on your web site. However, it can easily be applied to creating interfaces for Notes client applications (both the standard and basic). http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/03/how-to-use-icons-to-support-content-in-web-design/

At Lotusphere 2009, a number of business partners including myself were discussing how BPs who focus solely on the small business market ( small not medium) can collaborate and discuss our needs which is different from BPs who focus on the mid-market and enterprise. Bernie Leung from Mesa Technologies suggested that we start a LinkedIn group as a starter. I also have many others ideas. The new "Lotus for Small Businesses" LinkedIn group is now online. If you are a BP that focuses on the small business market come join our group. http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=1775798

I originally though this was a problem with my installation of Notes 8.02, but after talking to another developer who had the same problem with forms, I believe there is a bug in Notes 8.02 that drives us developers crazy. The ran into this problem with views, but today I wasted 2 hours of my time modifying framesets. When developing using the Notes 8.02 Designer, every so often changes that you make to views, forms, and framesets will not appear when you run the application after you made your changes. Unfortunately, I have not been able to repeat the problem. It seems to come and go. The only solution that I have found to work is to shutdown not only Designer but the Notes client. I did not have the problem with Notes 8.01. I would like to know if others have encountered or know of this problem