Wednesday, March 28, 2007
NotesTracker Version 5.0 Guide (final) is now available
The last feature has been added to NotesTracker Version 5.0 and the new version should be ready to release by early April (or perhaps even the end of March).
A major new feature has been incorporated,in a last-minute burst of development and testing. It was too valuable to be left out. It is described in the Developer Topics section of the finalized NotesTracker Version 5.0 Guide
It goes by the name of "Fast Design Propagation" and means that in many cases it should now take only a few minutes to modify a database to work with NotesTracker. (That is, to use the standard NotesTracker feature set, certainly not to make extensive modifications of the way that NotesTracker interfaces with a particular database to meet special usage tracking requirements.)
This final enhancement goes a long way to addressing one objection about NotesTracker, that you have to devote develop time to getting in and modifying a database's design. It means that you now should be able to justify rolling out NotesTracker more widely than with earlier releases, due to the far lower developer workload involved.
Enough of this sickening super-hyperbolic over-exaggeration ...
The NotesTracker Version 5.0 Guide is available from:
A major new feature has been incorporated,in a last-minute burst of development and testing. It was too valuable to be left out. It is described in the Developer Topics section of the finalized NotesTracker Version 5.0 Guide
It goes by the name of "Fast Design Propagation" and means that in many cases it should now take only a few minutes to modify a database to work with NotesTracker. (That is, to use the standard NotesTracker feature set, certainly not to make extensive modifications of the way that NotesTracker interfaces with a particular database to meet special usage tracking requirements.)
This final enhancement goes a long way to addressing one objection about NotesTracker, that you have to devote develop time to getting in and modifying a database's design. It means that you now should be able to justify rolling out NotesTracker more widely than with earlier releases, due to the far lower developer workload involved.
Enough of this sickening super-hyperbolic over-exaggeration ...
The NotesTracker Version 5.0 Guide is available from:
- Australian web server: http://asiapac.com.au/Downloads/NotesTracker_Guide_Version5.0.pdf
- Web server in USA: http://notestracker.com/Downloads/NotesTracker_Guide_Version5.0.pdf
Saturday, March 24, 2007
NotesTracker v5.0 -- works well under Notes Domino 8 Beta2
Over this weekend I've had the opportunity to install the just-released public Beta #2 of IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 (or ND8 for short).
I installed Domino 8 over a Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 image of Domino 7.0.2 and it went without a hitch -- up and running inside ten minutes.
GREAT STUFF!
Unfortunately the Notes 8 installer file turned out to be corrupt. But apart from having to download the 635 MB file again, the Notes 8 Client ("Standard" or Eclipse-based) also installed without a hitch.
COOL!
One observation is that the Notes 8 installation considerably longer than the five minutes that I'm used to. While I didn't measure how long it took (I was multitasking, so didn't really care one way or the other), it seemed to be twenty to thirty minutes. My suspicion is that the bulk of this time is spent installing the Lotus Productivity Tools (IBM's implementation of the OpenOffice tools from openoffice.org, which I reckon in themselves are rather slow to install). Maybe I'm off target here, I'll have to investigate this later.
Anyhow, upon opening the Notes 8 client, I was presented with the jazzy new workspace (see illustration) and within a mere five or ten minutes felt perfectly comfortable with its new features.
AN ASIDE:
One thing that's good is the terminology change, for "databases" now being called "applications" which is as it should be. ... Maybe I'm oversensitive about this. I mention it because, in another blog post, I bemoan the fact that the IBM Application System/400 (or AS/400), with its original emphasis on being an application-focused platform, had its name changed later to "IBM iSeries" and later again to "System i" as part of an IBM branding campaign, which in my mind is a loss of an important part of its identity. (During my decades at IBM, I spent many years supporting the predecessor IBM System/38, then the AS/400, with some intervening assignments on IBM mainframe networking systems, the real-time sensor-based IBM System/7, and the IBM RT System with AIX Version 1.0.)
So now we have moved on to using the term "applications" for Notes databases, and I like it! I reckon that far too much discussion about Notes -- and especially about Notes versus the rest (Outlook, Exchange, etc) -- centers on e-mail topics. There are many, many, many other sorts of applications out there, much loved and still widely used by IBM's customers. Sure, e-mail is still a very important application (the original "killer app"), but let's move the focus back on to applications. I think we'll see that happening with ND8, what with the great capability of integrated "composite applications" -- and not a moment too soon, I say!
My initial interest is to test NotesTracker (in fact, the very latest Version 5.0 Beta 1) databases, as well as the next versions of SDMS and CAPTURE (which, when released, will have NotesTracker Version 5.0 built into them).
Then I played around for a short while with various features, including the Sidebar, added some RSS feeds including this blog's feed NotesTracker news and tips and it looked like this:
(Click to view a larger image)Preliminary testing indicates that all of the NotesTracker Version 5.0 features work without problems under this slick new Notes 8 Client.
This is good news all round, because NotesTracker has some fairly intense LotusScript routines, and they all seem to work just like they do in Notes/Domino 7.0.2.
I say this with a feeling of relief, because I had an unsettling experience with Notes 6.0. NotesTracker uses two Rich Text fields to store the before and after values of user database fields that have been updated, and the code worked fine for Notes R4 and R5. However the code "broke" with Notes 6, due to an "undocumented feature" that erroneously created duplicate Rich Text fields. I would call this a bug, but I suppose that Lotus would regard as an "undocumented feature change" added when Rich Text support was significantly enhanced in Notes 6. Luckily I found a way to bypass this bug, so that feature of NotesTracker got back on track for Notes 6 and Notes 7. You will understand, then, why it was one of the first things I tested for Notes Domino 8, and all went well.
EXCELLENT!
I rather like the Sidebar's standard RSS feeds capability, particularly in view of the fact that NotesTracker v5.0 has made it even easier (with some code tweaking and examples) for you to automatically generate data for Notes views that form the building blocks or your own RSS feeds! (Refer to the NotesTracker Guide to find out more about this, in a section near the end.)
Further reports on NotesTracker and Notes Domino 8 will surely follow.
Labels: Applications, Branding, Notes Domino 8, NotesTracker
Friday, March 23, 2007
NotesTracker Version 5.0 Beta1 - Customer DB ready for public testing
The NotesTracker Customer Database referred to frequently in the NotesTracker Version 5.0 Guide is now available for download and public testing.
We think that Version 5.0 rounds out NotesTracker with lots of new features, including: e-mail alerting whenever database actions occur (even down to specific database fields being changed), the ability to define and track "special" documents (Particular documents in a database that are of importance to you for any reason), tracking of pastes and mail-ins, the ability to limit tracking to specific users of a database, enhanced RSS-style "Breaking News" view options, plus tons of usability enhancements.
These (and lots more) are fully described in the latest draft of the NotesTracker Guide, which itself has been significantly reworked to be more productive to use. See http://notestracker.blogspot.com/2007/03/notestracker-version-50-guide-draft-3.html
It will give you the opportunity to try out virtually all of the new features in NotesTracker Version 5.0 ... Not quite all of them, since there are some things that are restricted to the NotesTracker Repository database (but these are only technical features for using the repository itself rather than usage tracking functions).
As with earlier NotesTracker evaluation databases, the database's design is hidden. If you are evaluating this from a developer's perspective, please read the Developer Topics section of the guide for to see how the new features affect the design change tasks. While doing this, you should also refer to the related discussions in the Administration Topics section.
Get the Beta1 Customer Database from either of these sites:
TIP: when testing this beta version of the NotesTracker Customer example database, be sure to set usage tracking as "Internal" to the database. (You could set it as external to another copy of the same Customer database, which has the necessary enhanced views and Usage Log form designs. This works, although you don't gain much from doing it this way.) Also, set the new e-mail alerting feature to be "Immediate" (because the agent needed for "Scheduled" alerting is not yet part of the Customer database).
We think that Version 5.0 rounds out NotesTracker with lots of new features, including: e-mail alerting whenever database actions occur (even down to specific database fields being changed), the ability to define and track "special" documents (Particular documents in a database that are of importance to you for any reason), tracking of pastes and mail-ins, the ability to limit tracking to specific users of a database, enhanced RSS-style "Breaking News" view options, plus tons of usability enhancements.
These (and lots more) are fully described in the latest draft of the NotesTracker Guide, which itself has been significantly reworked to be more productive to use. See http://notestracker.blogspot.com/2007/03/notestracker-version-50-guide-draft-3.html
It will give you the opportunity to try out virtually all of the new features in NotesTracker Version 5.0 ... Not quite all of them, since there are some things that are restricted to the NotesTracker Repository database (but these are only technical features for using the repository itself rather than usage tracking functions).
As with earlier NotesTracker evaluation databases, the database's design is hidden. If you are evaluating this from a developer's perspective, please read the Developer Topics section of the guide for to see how the new features affect the design change tasks. While doing this, you should also refer to the related discussions in the Administration Topics section.
Get the Beta1 Customer Database from either of these sites:
- Australian web server -- http://asiapac.com.au/Downloads/NotesTracker_Customer_V5.0_Beta1.exe
- USA web server -- http://notestracker.com/Downloads/NotesTracker_Customer_V5.0_Beta1.exe
TIP: when testing this beta version of the NotesTracker Customer example database, be sure to set usage tracking as "Internal" to the database. (You could set it as external to another copy of the same Customer database, which has the necessary enhanced views and Usage Log form designs. This works, although you don't gain much from doing it this way.) Also, set the new e-mail alerting feature to be "Immediate" (because the agent needed for "Scheduled" alerting is not yet part of the Customer database).
Labels: Beta, NotesTracker
Thursday, March 15, 2007
NotesTracker Version 5.0 Guide - Draft #9 for Beta1 is now available
Following a lot of work on SDMS and other things during the last few months, NotesTracker version 5.0 has been progressing well during March 2007 and is in its final stages: testing, documentation, more testing, adding more features, improving usability, more testing. (Some of the ideas tested and built into SDMS are also going to show up in NotesTracker v5.)
Many hours during the last two weeks have been devoted to the NotesTracker v5 Guide. All the new v5 features have been carefully described, with added documentation still happening daily as last-minute usability and function enhancements to NotesTracker v5 are made.
Apart from all the new stuff, the whole guide has been scoured for usability and errors.
Many sections have been substantially rewritten for improved readability and clarity. This includes a much better layout for the Table Of Contents (making it faster to jump to what you're looking for), plus a Task Table in the Developer Topics section making it even easier to follow the simple steps used to incorporate NotesTracker in your database designs. Some of this has rubbed off onto the product itself, as documentation improvements has mandated corresponding improvements to the software.
Since the public Beta2 of IBM Lotus Notes Domino 8 has made available a week or two ago, I've decided to add a further week or two to the NotesTracker v5 release schedule so that it can be tested against the fantastic new Notes 8 client and the Domino 8 server!
I'm also considering whether or not to add a further new feature or two, to make NotesTracker v5 even better. (One such possible feature is being able to nominate that tracking in a database be done only for specified users, which would be very handy for forensic auditing and so on.) If you have any last-minute requests or suggestions, then send them to us ASAP.
In the meantime, you can find out a lot about the new features and capabilities by downloading a copy of the 25th March 2007 draft of the NotesTracker Version 5.0 Guide. This edition is labeled DRAFT #9. Get it from either our web server in Australia or our web server in the USA
The PDF file size is around 5.5 MB, it's nearly three times the size of the V4 guide because lots of additional information and illustrations are in it.
Many hours during the last two weeks have been devoted to the NotesTracker v5 Guide. All the new v5 features have been carefully described, with added documentation still happening daily as last-minute usability and function enhancements to NotesTracker v5 are made.
Apart from all the new stuff, the whole guide has been scoured for usability and errors.
Many sections have been substantially rewritten for improved readability and clarity. This includes a much better layout for the Table Of Contents (making it faster to jump to what you're looking for), plus a Task Table in the Developer Topics section making it even easier to follow the simple steps used to incorporate NotesTracker in your database designs. Some of this has rubbed off onto the product itself, as documentation improvements has mandated corresponding improvements to the software.
Since the public Beta2 of IBM Lotus Notes Domino 8 has made available a week or two ago, I've decided to add a further week or two to the NotesTracker v5 release schedule so that it can be tested against the fantastic new Notes 8 client and the Domino 8 server!
I'm also considering whether or not to add a further new feature or two, to make NotesTracker v5 even better. (One such possible feature is being able to nominate that tracking in a database be done only for specified users, which would be very handy for forensic auditing and so on.) If you have any last-minute requests or suggestions, then send them to us ASAP.
In the meantime, you can find out a lot about the new features and capabilities by downloading a copy of the 25th March 2007 draft of the NotesTracker Version 5.0 Guide. This edition is labeled DRAFT #9. Get it from either our web server in Australia or our web server in the USA
The PDF file size is around 5.5 MB, it's nearly three times the size of the V4 guide because lots of additional information and illustrations are in it.
