Domino Interface

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...

After 14 months in the making, the Midwest Lotus User Group Conference 2009 site is now online. The conference will be held in Chicago on August 27-28, 2009. The Midwest Lotus User Group Conference is made possible by the collaboration and cooperation of many Lotus user groups throughout the Midwest including: Central Ohio Notes/Domino User's Group GRANITE Lotus User Group Northeast Ohio Lotus User Group Northeast Wisconsin Lotus User Group Southern Wisconsin Lotus User Group West Michigan Lotus User Group Our goal is provide great in-depth technical sessions and workshops presented by your peers, promote awareness of Lotus user groups, and provide a venue for Lotus professionals to collaborate and network. For more information, go to www.mwlug.com . Registration for this conference will open on June 1, 2009.

Over the past couple of months I have been optimizing our IBF 3.0 technology to develop applications. One of the goals of the project is to develop Notes applications with an interface design that is effective for users, especially small business users. The design team and myself have gone through a number of different designs understanding the limitations of the Lotus Notes Basic client. I thought about designing just for the Lotus Notes standard client, but I do not like it because it is big, slow, and the UI is buggy. As many who know me, I would have preferred that IBM revamped the Basic client rather than go with the an Eclipse framework. I understand why IBM went with the Eclipse framework, my I still do not like it. I am a proponent of small and lite clients. The Lotus Notes Basic client is much leaner and faster, but the UI and controlling it even with all the tricks that I and others like Chris Blatnick and Nathan Freeman has come up with is still lacking. This is espe...

We are please to announce our new training for Sametime 8.02 and Quickr 8.1. It has been a very busy past couple of weeks getting ready for Lotusphere 2009. We will be demonstrating these two new courses plus the rest of our Lotus courses at Lotusphere at booth #418. Hopefully the weather cooperates. It is so cold here in Chicago and we are expecting more snow for the entire week on top of the 16 inches that we have on the ground. Considering how cold it is, I was hoping that it was too cold to snow.

Over the past couple of days I have been trying to trace a bug in my code without any resolution, until today. Wasted days of precious time. I trace down the issue and discovered it was the result of another odd behavior of Lotus Notes. I do not know if this applies to other versions of Lotus Notes, but I can guess it does. In the Lotuscript database class, NotesDatabase, the property Notesdatabase.Server is used often. It should return the server name in the following format: CN=Acme01/O=Acme This is fine, but if you get the same property in a dialog box, you WILL NOT get the same format. Instead the format is: Acme01/Acme So when I was parsing the server name I would get different results causing a chain of errors that resulted in hours of time tracing the error in code that has been working for years. What a pain. As we push Notes and Domino more and more into a new level, we are finding more and more things to watch out for.

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

ReCor has just released two new training courses for Lotus Notes 8 in additional to our LearningDocs for Lotus Notes 8.01 - Standard / Migration course, we now have available for download: LearningDocs for Lotus Notes 8.01 - Advanced Course LearningDocs for Lotus Notes 8.01 - Basic Client The advanced course covers topics like Quickr integration with Lotus Notes and advanced rich text editing and remote users. The new Basic client course provides detailed training on the Classic or Basic client. This course took us longer because thought it seem that there was not much differences, there were many changes to the Basic client compared to Notes 6.5 or 7. From the interest that our customers has expressed, there is a lot of companies that will be rolling out the Basic client since their hardware and operating system will not support the Standard client. As I mentioned before that is a lot of new features in the Notes 8 Basic client that developer can utilizes. At the April GRANITE me...

The June 2008 GRANITE Lotus User Group Meeting is coming up on Monday, June 9, 2008. If you are in the area come join us at the IBM Center in Chicago. I will be presenting a short presentation on titled "SOA, Not Just for the Web." It will be a short version of a longer presentation that I have been creating. The presentation will show how you can use SOA-like techniques to create Notes applications that are easier to develop and maintain and works with the Notes Classic client. Our Integrated Business Framework v3 system uses an advanced version of this technique. If I have time this weekend, I will create a demo and combine it with the composite application technique that I demo a while back and show it working using the Notes Classic client.

Happy Chinese New Years, It is the year of the rat according to the Chinese Zodiac sign starting February 7, 2008. It is the year 4706. But from what I have seen from Lotusphere and from our customers, it is going to also be the Year Of Lotus. With all the new products and services that IBM Lotus is rolling out combined finally with a coherent focus on Lotus and Domino and SMB market, I see that 2008 is going to be a very good year. We currently are talking to customers not only about Lotus Notes, but also on integrating Quickr, Sametime, and Symphomy as part of their business solution. So everyone part of the Lotus community have a properous Chinese New Year. PS. Since I am a rat, this must be a good year.

At Lotusphere 2008, there was discussions about XPages and how it would change how Notes applications are created. Since I was so busy with booth duty and other events I did not attend any of the sessions that involved XPages. However, Rob Burton from my group did attend a session that talked about XPages. Yesterday, he asked if I attended any of the sessions that talked about XPages and I said no. I did briefly hear someone talk about it, but did not pay attention. Surprising he said from what he has learned XPages does a similar thing we having been do for over a year in our Integrated Business Framework system by removing the data from the form. Similar to the concept of XPages, in the Integrated Business Framework design when you open a document you are really opening up a form that can collects data from many databases. The form is automatically populated based on a set of XML configuration data. During the save process the data is stored not as a single document, but the ...

I am finally recovered from Lotusphere 2008. Standing at the booth for 8 to 12 hours a day for three days plus waking up at 5:30 AM to get to the BOFs and breakfast at 7:00 AM and ending at 11:00 PM is very tiring. However, it was worth it. As an exhibitor I believe this was one of our best shows ever. I am very happy with the number and quality leads that we got. Of course, I would not mind even more leads. Our crew did a great job. Our two newbies held together well. The blogger dinner at ESPN was great. I finally had a chance to meet others that I blog with. I hope we get even more to attend next year.

This is part 2 of my creating composite application for classic Lotus Notes clients. In part 2, I will cover how a new event in Lotus Notes 8 can used to simplify the process of creating a composite application. You can download the demo code from the sidebar or download it from here. This new event is "onSelect" and is found in Notes View. This event works not only for regular views but also for embedded views and even embedded views within a dialog box. This event is triggered whenever a document is selected in a view. It hold true even when the view is display for the first time. As a Notes developer, I feel this one single event is more than enough reason to upgrade to at least the Lotus Notes 8 Basic client. It makes a number of UI issues simply go away. Just like in the previous Lotus Notes clients we need to create a launch document in our composite application that will be used to trigger the population of the frames in the composite application. However, rather than ...

A new thing in Lotus Notes 8 is the ability to create composite applications using the Eclipse Lotus Notes 8 client. It is a powerful feature to aggregate visually information from different sources. It leads to a simpler looking interface with powerful results. Since I am an advocate of smaller lightweight clients, I wondered if composite applications could be created for the classic Lotus Notes clients including Notes 5, 6, 7, and the Notes 8 Basic client. The classic clients are much smaller that the Eclipse-based client and loads up much faster than its Eclipse counterpart. After experimenting for a few hours, I discovered that the answer is yes, “you can teach an old dog to do new tricks.” Though, it is possible with the Notes 5 client, it is buggy and I would not recommend it. I have divided the presentation here into two parts, part 1 for Lotus Notes 7 and older clients and part 2 for the Lotus Notes 8 Basic client. The information that I am presenting here is an expansion of a ...

It has been a long time since I blogged. It has been a very busy late spring and summer. We are finally completing our IBF Portal module that handles all interactive between a user and the Integrated Business Framework components on the Domino server. For years now Notes has been the "Ugly Duckling" of the IT world and both pro and con Notes users have complained about it. The new Notes 8 interface will bring a great new look and feel that has been lacking for years in the Notes interface. However, the standard version of Notes 8 also has a much heavier hardware requirement especially with Vista. For companies that have older hardware or will not be able to have the necessary hardware soon, they can upgrade to Notes 8 basic but it still has the same interface that everyone complains about. In the last beta, IBM has done a great job in improving the loading speed of the client but not as fast as the Notes basic client. But the Basic client has an advantage, speed. Sin...

On Ed Brill's blog link for the past few days that has been a long discussion about Notes and the small business market and whether IBM is addressing this market effectively with the new product offerings that are in the pipeline this summer. The blog has progressed into the discussion about the Notes Basic client which has been a point of long discussion for me in many blogs. If you have seen the Notes 8 Basic beta client, you will find that it is pretty much the Notes 7 client with some improvements. I do not see signficant investment in improving the Notes 8 Basic client in the future. Whether it exist in the future I do not know. I truely understand the direction that IBM is moving forward for Notes 8. It may not address the needs of some small businesses (under 500), but it is a direction that best fits the medium and large businesses that makes up a major of IBM's clients. As a business partner who focuses primarily on the true small business market, I understand th...

I spent the past few days playing with the Notes 8 beta 2 both the Standard version (eclipse) and the Basic version (w32 C++). My review here is based only on the UI and not the other features that are available in the new version of Notes 8. In addition, this is the my first review. My review was done on a Thinkpad T41 with 1Gbytes of memory with Windows XP SP1. The Domino server that I used to make this review is an Domino 6.53 server. Notes 8 Standard client: As I understand it, the standard version is an Eclipse wrapper around the Notes Basic client. If I am wrong, please correct me. Even with the much larger footprint, the standard version perform pretty well on a machine that is not dual-core. The interface looks very good, though there are a number of quirks that I assume will be fixed in the final release. I did discovered and reported a number of bugs, but that is normal since this is a beta. I was disappointed to discover that there is no storage of the productivity ...

I finally was able to download Notes and Domino 8. You definitely need to have a download manager. I tried a number of times, but the servers were so busy. Now I have to build a Windows 2003 server for it.