Imagine wanting to arrange a meeting with someone and being able to see whether they’re free or not… how great would that be? Well, most modern e-mail solutions (such as Notes / Domino and that one that Microsoft sell) offer such a thing – it’s called ‘free time search’. Unfortunately, many people are either too lazy to use free time search, or maybe just don’t know how – I say this because most of the meeting invites I get are for times that I’m already busy. Not using free time search should be added to the calendar and scheduling bad habits.

Sarcasm aside, free time search works fine within organisations, although some people do their best to scupper your best attempts to find a convenient time. I have known people to be apparently busy every day, but the reality is that their days are marked with an all-day event reading ‘working in Staines’ or even ‘pancake day’ – neither of which really prevent a meeting or conference call. But what about scheduling time with people outside of your organisation? Unless there’s an organised and maintained link it’s difficult to achieve. Tungle offers a way to solve this.

What does Tungle do? It allows you to upload and sync the contents of your calendar from a number of sources, and then present the free and busy time to contacts on the web. Your contacts can see when you’re free (not necessarily the meeting details), suggest some appointment times, and then Tungle does the job of arranging the meeting between the two of you and provides the invites.

A partnership between Tungle and IBM Lotus was announced at Lotusphere – see here for details. The Tungle plug-in for Notes, now in beta, provides the synchronisation between your Notes calendar and the Tungle service. This means that you just have to update one calendar for your internal and external colleagues to see when you’re free.

Click on the purple button for a view of the Tungle calendar with my free time.

Going to Lotusphere? Do you use Lotus Notes? Do you have an iPhone or a BlackBerry. If you answered ‘yes’ to the first question and ‘yes’ to any of the others, then you’ll be interested in some resources offered by Geniisoft and The Turtle Partnership.

Firstly, Ben Langhinrichs has once again provided the Lotusphere agenda and session planning database. This is a Notes application which you can store locally, and then inspect the sessions and add them to your personal calendar.

The Turtle Partnership have taken Ben’s application and hosted in on their server, so you can get up-to-date information via replication. You can open the application from lotusphere.turtleweb.com and then grab a replica.

If you have an iPhone or a BlackBerry you can also access the session information from native mobile applications (created by The Turtle Partnership) on these two devices. Check the Turtle Partnership’s blog for instructions, but the easiest way to grab them is to go to the respective app stores for either device and search for ‘Lotusphere’.

Many thanks to Ben and the Turtle team for providing these resources to the Lotus community. I hope you’re kept in free drinks for the duration of Lotusphere.

Also, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this thing called Twitter, apparently it’s quite popular. The Lotusphere team will be updating the Lotus Knows Twitter stream with information about the event. So if you’re attending, or if you’re stuck somewhere less interesting and want to keep up with the latest news, you should follow LotusKnows.

Here’s a very handy Notes side-bar plug-in which has been knocking around since the middle of 2009 but has really come into it’s own with the latest release. The File Navigator plug-in does what it’s name suggests… it allows you to access your file system from the Notes side-bar, perform a set of actions on the files and folders, and drag and drop files to and from Notes documents and e-mails (not that I’m condoning sending file attachments in e-mails of course – there are other ways to share files).

The plug-in also has a number of other useful features – adding favourite folders to the top-level navigation, adding shared network drives, and converting e-mails to EML files.

The File Navigator plug-in is available from OpenNTF.org (if you’ve registered and logged in), and can be installed from a local update folder or from the Notes widget catalog (it’s easy, but the instructions are included). Congratulations to the guys for creating this, a fantastic piece of work.

Standard Life have spoken at Lotus and BlackBerry events in the past couple of years, but here’s an excellent write-up of how they use BlackBerry devices to extend the value of their Domino infrastructure and how they have provided BlackBerry-based access to their many TeamRooms.

Despite it’s small number increment, IBM Lotus Notes / Domino 8.5.1 is really a very significant release – not just because of the many new capabilities and improvements, but because it’s the version that many organisations have been waiting for to deploy. It’s nine months on from 8.5 and that extra time in development does show in an extremely positive way. I haven’t upgraded my Linux client yet, but the Windows and Mac versions provide a far better user experience.

Many other blogs and news sources are covering this today, so I’ll be brief. As you’d expect you can get more detailed coverage at edbrill.com and if you’re feeling really brave you can wade through the full announcement letter. For those of you with less time to spare, here’s an overview…

• Oodles of new features in the Lotus Notes client
• Lotus Traveler now supports the Apple iPhone
• Many improvements to Domino Designer, including new LotusScript and Java editors
• Significant improvements to the process of building composite applications
• Simplification of the licensing model, down to two Client Access Licenses (Messaging and Enterprise)
• Domino Designer is now a FREE DOWNLOAD
• Some bandwidth-reducing improvements to DAOS

Notes / Domino 8.5.1 is scheduled to be available for electronic general availability on Monday 12th October 2009. My general advice to anyone is ‘upgrade’.

I was perusing PlanetLotus today and an interesting blog post from Vaughan Rivett caught my eye – what’s the worst email in-box that you have ever seen? Vaughan tells the tale of a user with a mail box weighing in at 11 gigabytes. This is what’s known in the trade as either a) hoarding or b) bad management. Mail boxes of that size could never be tolerated at IBM, because like so many companies we impose a mail quota – your mail box gets to a certain size, some things stop working, and the functionality isn’t given back to you until you’ve fixed the problem. But is that fair? After all, was it the mail box owner at fault?

I’m speaking as someone who recently had to concede that, after more than 10 years with a 150 mb mail box quota, I could no longer keep it within the limit every day – I was spending too much time managing the volume, so I had to apply to go up to the next level, 250 mb. Why, in an organisation with a rich collaborative infrastructure, was this necessary? I put it down purely to my change in role – suddenly I was communicating with many more people and there was an increase in data flying around. It reminded me of a slide I sometimes use on less serious occasions, such as the recent keynote at Collaboration University. Entitled ‘about me as an e-mail user’ it explains that I don’t like having a scroll bar in my inbox and I resent anyone who…

• Forces me over my mail quota
• Sends me two e-mails when only one was required
• Marks everything they send as high priority (yes, I know who you are)
• Starts an e-mail with “I know you’re busy but…” – but what?
• Sends me an e-mail and then immediately Sametimes me or phones me to ask if I’ve read the e-mail
• Continues to reply-to-all way past the point where I’ve ceased to be involved or interested
• Only knows how to use PrtSc rather than Alt-PrtSc

So in summary, just about anyone who sends me an e-mail.

A couple of years ago I did a small survey of some of our customers, not big enough or detailed enough to draw any great conclusions from, and asked the question…

In terms of e-mail efficiency what would benefit your organisation the most – improvement in user practises around e-mail, or operational improvements?

71% said user practises, 29% said both, but no-one (0%) said operational improvements alone. So the conclusion is that end users need to be given the tools in order to become more efficient with how they disseminate information, but they also need some clarity about the right tools to use and when.

I believe that we’ve added the right things to the Lotus portfolio to help end users to realise better collaboration and knowledge management – simple things that make a difference. Firstly, think how your typical e-mail user would share a spreadsheet, document or presentation with a colleague (or group)… we all know the right thing to do is to post it to a collaborative space (which hopefully supports the business activity associated with the content) and then notify people of the content via e-mail. However, most e-mail users have escaped from Utopia via a small hole in the fence, so they’re just going to shove that file attachment in the e-mail regardless of the storage or content revision issues.

That’s why I love the Quickr approach – because it supports the users’ long-ingrained behaviour (shove in the attachment) but at the point of sending it offers to place the file in a document repository. The recipient sees a set of links, and they click to navigate to the content. Simple. So collaboratively we’re doing the right thing, but we haven’t interrupted the user’s normal pattern of work (in my head I’m picturing people grunting like Cro Magnon man did when he spotted a bison wandering across the Paleolithic plains, but instead they’re saying “ugg, file attachment”). The added bonus with Quickr is that you can also take existing file attachments that Cro Magnon man sent to you in the past and offload them to a Quickr place – you can retain the e-mail with the link replacing the attachment.

The other thing I love telling people about is Connections Files. To fully embrace the idea of Connections Files you do have to discard the caveman instincts and post that file… no, not in an e-mail, in your Connections file-space. Yes, I know this goes against years of bad habits, so the important thing is for users to realise the benefits. The first benefit is to other people – you are not contributing to ruining their day by sending that quota-busting spreadsheet. Okay, so you don’t care about their quota, how about a benefit for yourself? Have you ever sent an e-mail with a file attachment and then later someone else wants the file? And then someone else a bit later? This used to happen to me all of the time, but not any more. Rather than having to repeat the process of create another e-mail, type in the subject, find the file attachment in a folder (hmmm, which folder), add an explanation – I just share the file. The file in question is posted in Connections Files and I add another name to the share list. An e-mail is automatically sent, and the recipient grabs the content but doesn’t have to worry about the volume of data. If the file is updated, I simply add the update as a new version and note the changes.

Another great way to share content, in the context of a business activity, is Lotus Connections Activities, but I’ve already covered that in an earlier post.

September continues to be composite application month here at dadams.co.uk, and to round off this exciting set of posts I’m going to show you how to easily grab content from a web page and publish it into a Notes form. It’s also possible, and just as easy, to publish into a Symphony spreadsheet, but we’ve done that one to death already.

First thing to do is create a blank composite application. Then go into Domino Designer and add a simple form containing three fields – Following, Followers and Tweets. Yes, we’re going to grab some information from Twitter (at this point IdoNotes, also known as Chris Miller, has become extremely interested).

Open the composite application for editing and drag a Managed Browser component into the empty page. We’ll come back and configure the component later. Then drag in a Notes Document Container, and configure it to open the Twitter details form you created earlier – this is done by editing the component properties, going to the Component Settings tab, and hitting the Browse button next to the Notes URL field. Select Form as the object kind, the current database, and then the name of your form. Click OK to complete the configuration.

Now let’s head back to the web browser component. We’re going to grab details from a Twitter account – you can use your own or anyone else’s, but for this example let’s start with Stephen Fry. Enter http://twitter.com/stephenfry into the address bar and retrieve the page.

On the toolbar above the web page you’ll see a small finger-pointing hand – the tooltip says ‘Toggle DOM element inspection’. Click this on to reveal the elements declared in the document object model, and you’ll then find that moving your mouse around the web page places a blue box around the available elements. Select the number of people that Stephen Fry is following, and the element (id:following_count) will appear in the toolbar. Ensure the action is set to Publish and in the next box declare a new landmark – call it something like sourceFollowing – and click on the cog icon. Repeat this for the number of followers and the number of tweets.

The next part is important – go into the browser component properties and select the Landmarks tab. You’ll see the landmark is set to http://twitter.com/stephenfry – change this to http://twitter.com/* – this will ensure that the data transfer works on everyone’s Twitter page, not just Mr Fry’s. Click OK.

Now head over to the Notes Document Container which contains your form. Click in the first field (named ‘Following’ in my example) and use the toolbar to set the landmarks. Ensure the action is set to Recieve, enter a new landmark name (something like targetFollowing) and click the cog icon. Repeat for the other two fields. You can inspect the generated landmarks by looking at the component properties, but it’s not necessary.

Now you just need to wire the two components together – this can be done by clicking the yellow plug icon of the browser component and using the dialog box to set the wires, but it’s easier to go into the wiring view and drag from browser component to the Notes Document Container component.

As in the previous examples, you can now tidy up, name the components, set the application icon and set the dimensions of the two components. To see this simple and quite frankly rather pointless application (but hey, it’s a proof of the technology) working, simply change the Twitter URL and watch the figures change. Yes, that’s all it does, but I’m sure you can take the basic principle and come up with better uses. Click on the image to see a full-size example.

In an attempt to completely alienate everyone who just comes to dadams.co.uk for humour and pedantry, here is the third part of our look at Notes 8.x composite applications. Our previous look at integrating Symphony spreadsheets with a composite application was a simple example publishing individual field values. Today we’ll get a little more complex. Just a bit. Please note that this example is hopelessly ripped off from this article from the Composite Application wiki – I make no apology for that as I’ve learnt some things by following that example and building my own.

This example features an employee database with the following details can found in the form and view:

• Employee name
• Country (set to a choice of England, Scotland, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden)
• Department (Sales, Marketing, Finance and Technical)
• Age
• Salary (recorded in $s to keep it uniform across the countries)

As in the last example I created a blank composite application and then added one form and one view, so basic stuff to this point. I then added a variety of records to bring into the results in the Symphony spreadsheet (which I also needed to create and make available in the file system). The spreadsheet itself can be modified as you build the composite application, there’s no need to do everything up-front. I created individual sheets to hold a table of Notes records, analysis of salaries and ages (maximums, minimums, averages and the size of the record sample), and counts of how many employees in each country and department – and then set up charts to show the results graphically.

As before, open the application in the composite application editor and drag in a Notes View Container – edit the component properties to select the view and set it to Java rendering. Then drag in a Symphony Spreadsheet Container and set the initial file to be the spreadsheet created earlier. Now, as in the previous example, we need to set the Selection Output from the Notes view – the difference this time is that we’ll be using some functions as well as straight field values. For example, we’ll be counting the employees from each country and department, and finding the minimum, maximum and average ages and salaries… like so:

Next we will decide where the outputs will sit in the Symphony spreadsheet. This is no different to the previous example – using the toolbar at the top of the Spreadsheet Container to assign the landmarks – apart from one clever trick. In this example we’ll be able to select multiple Notes records and see them reflect in Symphony. This is what creates the sample to find minimums, maximums and averages, and counts from the sample. These landmarks are created in the same way as before, the results landing in one cell each. But the data table needs to repeat, a spreadsheet row for each Notes record. To make this happen, for each Notes field you need to select a range… the values will then list downwards. Repeat for each of the available fields.

After setting up the Spreadsheet Container you just need to wire the two components together, as in the previous examples. This can be done via the dialog boxes, although with the greater number of wires required in this example it may be quicker to use the drag and drop functionality of the wiring view.

With the wiring done your application is finished, bar the finishing touches of page titles, icons and final layout of the spreadsheet. In previous posts I omitted details of how to set an application icon. This is easy to do, simply add a 16×16 .PNG image as a resource using Domino Designer. You can then edit the properties of the composite application and select the image. Bear in mind that if your composite application has multiple pages you can set an icon for each page.

Here endeth the lesson. As always, here’s a finished application (note the customised icon breaking the 16 colour limit of a standard Notes application icon) – just click on the image to reveal the big picture.

My previous post on composite applications turned out to be a bit of a mix-up because composite application guru Bob Balfe spotted that although I was using the new view container, I was still defining the wiring properties the old way. The good news is that now I’ve found out how to do ‘the new way’ it’s even easier.

So, today’s lesson in composite applications involves taking Notes data and pulling it into a Symphony spreadsheet, all within the neatly-packaged environment of a Notes 8.5.1 composite application. Hang on, I hear you say, I’m an Excel user… that’s okay, the spreadsheet can be an Excel file. Right, propeller hats on? Then we shall begin.

Like our last lesson, you’ll need to start with a standard Notes database with a view and a form. For my demo application I picked a scenario that would fit nicely into a spreadsheet, but would also let Symphony do a few extra calculations and display a chart. So mine contains the name of a sales rep, month and year, and targets and actual sales figures for cogs, widgets and bolts. The details aren’t too important but you should make sure that all of the fields you want to use are added to the view. Bear in mind also that you can do the whole thing in one NSF created as a composite application, or you can start with a standard Notes database, then create a new blank composite application and pull the design elements in. I did it all as one application. You’ll also need to create a spreadsheet – design it so there’s places for the data to sit and set up the chart in advance.

Assuming you now have a composite application and the form and view ready (don’t forget to add some data), edit the composite application and pull a Notes View Container from the Component Library palette onto the blank application. Edit the properties of this component – under Component Settings select the view from your Notes database and set the rendering technology to ‘Java’. Press OK and let the view appear.

Open up the Component Properties again and go to the Selection Output tab to declare the data that you want to pull from the view into the spreadsheet. Add a new property, name it (e.g. Month for the first one), select ‘Formula’ as the type, and then in the Formula column select the Notes view column to grab the data from. Add another property, and repeat until you’ve included all of the Notes view columns. At this point you can go to the Advanced tab and check that all of these new assignments are set to be wireable – by default they should be. Click OK.

Now you can add a Symphony Spreadsheet Container – drag it into the application workspace, place it wherever it will fit best and open the Component Properties. Set the name of the spreadsheet file (including the path) and click OK. Now comes the clever bit… we’re going to specify where the data from the view is going to land on the spreadsheet, and this involves the bar along the top of the Spreadsheet Container. For each data element specify a name and then the cell where the data will land, and then click the cog-shaped button. It will look like this…

Repeat for all of the values. After doing this, look at the Component Properties and go to the Landmarks tab – you’ll see all of your new landmarks created and listed. All that needs to be done now is to wire the two containers together. Click on the yellow plug icon at the top of the Notes View Container. Select your first available property (say SalesRep) – the target component will already say Symphony Spreadsheet Container – set the action to ‘Set SalesRep’ and click Add Wire. Repeat for all of the properties, then click OK.

That’s it… you can now tidy up with page names and making sure your spreadsheet looks okay. In true Blue Peter tradition (us Brits will understand that), here’s one I created earlier with not a scrap of sticky-back plastic in sight… click on the image.

Crikey, this is a bit technical, isn’t it? Well no, actually it’s not, but I’m not going to pretend that I know this stuff to anywhere near the depth of fellow Lotus guys Steve Castledine or Bob Balfe. If you want deep technical stuff on Notes composite applications, I suggest you visit their blogs or hunt down their articles on DeveloperWorks. This is really just to show how to take a simple standard Notes application and give it a bit of the composite treatment. Please note that I’m using Notes 8.5.1 so you’ll have to wait a month or so to get the full effect (although the functionality now be achieved now with 8.5).

Step #1 is to create a Notes 8 widget that associates a post code (or zip code) with Google Maps. If you don’t know how to do that, forget the rest of this and go and read Dilbert.

Step #2 is to create a simple Notes database to supply the data. I’ve used a mix of customer and product details – in my sample application some schools are the customers and they’ve bought telescopes. The two important things are the post code (or zip code) in the customer details and the product they bought expressed as a product code. All you really need is two forms, two views (customers and products) and some data.

Step #3 – create a blank composite application in Notes. We’ll come back to it later.

Step #4 – open your Notes database (the one with the forms and views) in Domino Designer and create a new set of wiring properties. You’ll then need to add two new properties which match the field names in the customer form for post code and product code – it’s best to give the same name to ‘Name’ and ‘Title’ and ensure the option for ‘Automatically generate an action for this property’ is selected.

Step #5 – go to the design of the view which will list the customers. This view should include the post code and the product code. For each of these columns pull up the properties box, go to the last tab (the propeller hat) and look to the bottom. Under ‘Composite Settings’ the property value should be set to the property you just created for the wiring in step #4. Save the view and close it.

Step #6 – open the blank composite application and select Actions, Edit Application. The application opens in the composite application editor. Notes 8.5.1 provides some new containers – from the Component Library palette look for Containers, grab a Notes View Container and drag it into the big empty space.

Step #7 – you need to configure this container to display the customer view from your Notes database. On the left you’ll see your new Notes View Container in the application hierarchy (there isn’t anything else on the page at the moment). Right click and edit the component properties. Go to Component Settings – you can change the name and description, and then hit the Browse button to find your Notes customer view. Select ‘view’ as the kind of object, choose the source application, and then select the view. After pressing OK, select ‘Java’ for the rendering. Click okay, and you should see your view.

Step #8 – repeat step #7 but this time pull in the product view. It doesn’t matter where you place the second view, and you can move it later.

Step #9 – change the palette to ‘My Palette’ and drag the Google Maps widget onto the page. Again, positioning isn’t critical but bear in mind that this frame will demand a bit of space.

Step #10 – now you’re ready for wiring. Click on the wiring icon (the yellow plug) at the top of the customer view. The available properties will list ‘postcode’ or whatever you named that property in the wiring properties in step #4 – select that. Then select Google Maps as the target component and leave the available action as the one which it suggests (which by default is ‘q’ – that’s what the Google Maps search uses as it’s parameter). Click Add Wire and then OK.

Even now in the previewing within the composite application editor you will see that clicking on different records in the customer view plots the location on the Google Map.

Step #11 – now to wire the customer view to the product view. Again click on the wiring icon at the top of the customer view. Select the other property that you created in step #4, the one for the product code. Select the product view container as the target, and select ‘Search in View’ as the target action. Add the wire and click OK. Now you’ll see that selecting a record in the customer view causes one product record to appear in the other view. Size the preview pane to get a full preview of the product information.

Step #12 – close the composite application editor and save your work. Effectively you’re done but you can add action buttons to the views and tweak the forms to polish up the application.

You can also go back into the composite application editor to define an application icon and make sure everything is named correctly for display. Click on the image here to see a screenshot of the finished application… well, until I find some other things I can add to it.

Addendum – I spoke with the aforementioned Mr Balfe and he said that I probably had some unnecessary steps in this process because the new view container takes away the requirement to define the wiring properties in Domino Designer. So it shouldn’t be necessary to go through steps 4 and 5, and there’s something else that can be done in the configuration of the view container. As soon as I work out the right way, I’ll post an update.