We’ve covered Notes’ live text feature before in the hallowed pages of dadams.co.uk, but this time we’ll dig a bit deeper and show a real-world example. Let me first thank Mikkel Flindt Heisterberg, as his post helped me clarify some of this. I knew the basic concept but needed a little help, and his post gave me what I needed.

A quick intro for anyone who doesn’t know what live text is… Notes has the ability to recognise a set of characters and associate an action with them. Out of the box Notes will recognise people’s names and e-mail addresses… the obvious thing to do with a name is click on it and look up the person in a solution such as, oooh, IBM Lotus Connections Profiles. You can also teach Notes to recognise things like post codes, and then perform associated actions like find the place on a Google Map, look at the local weather, or find the nearest restaurant or wi-fi hotspot. You can teach Notes to recognise account numbers, part numbers, projects codes… anything that is formed of a recognisable string of characters… such as flight numbers.

So here’s the scenario. I receive an e-mail from a colleague saying they’re travelling on British Airways flight number 1541, and it’s typed in as BA1541. That’s easy to recognise using the following regular expression (or some other variation of it):

[BA]([0-9]{3,4})

That’s ‘BA’ followed by three or four digits which range from 0 to 9, and this recogniser means that BA1541 will be recognised as live text… once there’s an action associated with it. The obvious action is looking up that flight number on the BA web site, but here’s where it gets tricky. The BA web site doesn’t want BA1541 passed to it, just 1541 because it assumes that the BA is a given. So 1541 has to be extracted from the value, and this is where groups are used. Look at the regular expression above and you’ll see that the part which defines the flight number (not the operator, BA) is contained within parentheses – this creates a group.

As luck would have it, for the BA flight information that’s all you have to do. As the one and only defined group, just the number (not the BA) is passed to the BA web site and the live text action works. So let’s look at a slightly more complex example.

FlightView.com also allows you to look up flight details, and not just BA flights. But FlightView requires that the airline code (the two letters) and the flight number (the digits) are entered into separate fields. As we’re no longer just looking for BA flights, the regular expression needs to change, and also needs to define two groups and cater for two digits… so it now looks like this:

([A-Z]{2})([0-9]{2,4})

Now let’s build that widget. Start off by clicking on the widget icon in the Notes toolbar (it looks like a jigsaw piece) and select ‘Web Page’. In the next dialog box select ‘Web page by URL’ and then enter http://flightview.com. In the next dialog box select the ‘From a form on this web page’ option and hit the Next button. You’ll then see the following form:

The wizard will work out the available web-based forms to fill in, and present them at the top of this dialog box. Selecting the right one will turn the fields green showing that this is the form that you want. Select Next. On the Basic tab of the next dialog box you can set the widget’s name – you should also select ‘Wire as an action’, and then go to the Advanced tab. In here you’ll tell the wizard that you’re going to use the airline and flight number fields, but not the airlines from the provided drop-down list… so set out the dialog box as follows:

In the next dialog box you’ll need to configure a recogniser – press the New Recogniser (the Americans spelt ‘recogniser’ with a z) and fill out the dialog box as follows – but first create a new content type:

After clicking OK you’ll get back to the main wizard – ensure that you have clicked the option for ‘Recognised content’ and select the recogniser you just created. I would advise selecting ‘Tab’ for the option of how users see the results, but that’s up to you.

Now switch to the Advanced tab. One of the content type properties will already be set, but you’ll have to click the Add button and add the other content type, as seen below:

Click the Finish button and you’re done. Now you’re ready to check if this works (it should do) – add some flight numbers into a new e-mail and save as draft. Preview the draft e-mail and the flight numbers should show a blue dashed underline. Click on one and you should see the flight number broken into the two parts and passed to the home page of flightview.com – and then the results. Bear in mind that FlightView works best with flights that are currently in the air or scheduled to leave soon.

If you also created a British Airways specific widget you should notice that BA flights will be recognised by both your BA and FlightView recognisers, so it’s best to set a default action. If you base the British Airways widget on the recogniser built here, you run the risk of associating non-BA flights with the BA web site, so it’s best to build a BA-specific widget and set that as the default action for BA flights. On the plus side, you’ll be able to create a dashboard from the two actions, providing a BA and FlightView view of the flight in question… click on the image above to see an example.

I love Lotus Notes. And I wish it had been me who had set up ilovelotusnotes.net, but it wasn’t. So far the comments have been pretty much what I’d expect – the perception is that the hate-filled rants on ihatelotusnotes.com are mostly from people using older versions of Notes. Mind you, once you hate something you’ll probably convince yourself that you’ll always hate it, no matter how much it improves. So going to that site and telling people that they’re on an old version won’t help. Let them get on with their whining. If they ever read that book ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ they may see that whining about your e-mail client isn’t one of them.

It may surprise you, but I think that Lotus Notes Sucks is a far more constructive web site than ihatelotusnotes. Rather than directionless whining, this guy actually took the time to document reasons why he thought Notes sucked… and he was good enough to cross them off when the issues were fixed (up to a point). It’s a shame that the conclusion “Lotus Notes sucks” was applied to each of the eighty points, thereby making it seem a little witless and predictable. Our host also refers to the time he was contacted by Mary from Westford with an offer to participate in the Notes redesign (the basis of Notes 8), but he declined.

What’s also apparent is that the site hasn’t been touched for quite some time – the last update was in February 2006. Several fixed issues remain listed as current ‘suck factors’. Maybe he got bored, maybe his company migrated to Outlook. I hope he’s happy now.

My frolleague Matt Newton is running a series of Notes upgrade workshops during September and October. With Notes / Domino 8.5.2 available this week there’s never been a better time to look at upgrading a back-version infrastructure, to take advantage of the attractive and highly-functional Notes client and the many improvements on the Domino server (many of which will contribute to lowering the cost of ownership). To quote the invite…

The Notes & Domino 8.5.x upgrade workshop is intended to provide the customer with an in-depth examination of the new capabilities of version 8.5.x. For existing customers, this exploration will help them assess the additional value and potential impact to their existing environment. For new customers, this exploration will give them an invaluable insight into Notes & Domino 8.5.x.  At the conclusion of the workshop, the customer will leave with an excitement about the business problems this new version can help solve.

Sounds good? Okay, here’s the dates and locations for these free-of-charge events…

• Wednesday 29th September – IBM Warwick
• Tuesday 5th October – IBM Staines
• Wednesday 6th October – IBM Manchester
• Tuesday 12th October – IBM Edinburgh

Interested? E-mail Matt using matt dot newton at uk.ibm.com – or leave a comment here and I’ll pass your details on.

Warning – this blog post contains details about a yet-to-be-released product version. There is a remote possibility that some features may not make the shipping version, blah blah, etc.

IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.2 (to keep the brand police happy) is scheduled for release in Q3 of 2010. Those of you working to the Gregorian calendar may say “hey, it’s Q3 now” – indeed it is, so expect it soon. ‘Soon’ is of course a vague adverb – in the grand scale of the history of our planet the 2014 World Cup is happening soon. England will soon get another chance to lift the elusive trophy. Anyway, I digress. So what’s in this forthcoming version? Loads of stuff, but I’ve picked out a few highlights.

Multi-threaded replication – we have some whopping big Notes applications containing thousands of documents… sales opportunity tracking, customer contact, and the IBM directory catalog which allows me address any one of the 350,000-ish people in IBM even when disconnected (actually at only 80 mb it’s not really that big). Sometimes there’s a lot of updates in these applications, and the last thing you want to happen is that all-important e-mail getting stuck behind a behemoth replication operation. Never fear – now you can replicate multiple applications (and e-mail) at the same time, and chances are your e-mail will finish first while the big fella keeps going.

21st century application icons – when I started at Lotus in 1991 (straight from school, obviously) and used Notes version 2.0a, Notes application icons could only have sixteen colours. When I woke up this morning, that was also true of the current version (8.5.1). But that’s set to change with 8.5.2 – you can now load a full colour 32 x 32 image into your application to use as the icon. The old-style icon will remain stored in the application and will be used with older versions or if that full colour icon hasn’t been set. A feature that has zero productivity value yet will please millions (me included).

New mail preferences - quite a few here, including the format of displayed names (e.g. last name followed by first name, rather than first then last) and ‘automatically close original e-mail when replying / forwarding’.

Forward an e-mail from the Trash folder – I hate having a scroll-bar in my inbox, so I’m often quick to delete e-mails. Later, I’ll need to forward that e-mail to someone else, which means restoring it first. 8.5.2 allows me to forward directly from the Trash folder. I’m already using that one a lot.

Send someone a personal group – a great new feature in the personal address book, you can click the Send option and a special e-mail type will send the group contents. The recipient will then see an option to import the group straight into their own personal address book. You can also do this for location profiles.

There’s loads of other features, these are just a few that I’ve picked out. Notes / Domino 8.5.2 will be coming ‘soon’.

Polymorph, a premier IBM Business Partner who just happen to be hosting Lotusphere Comes To You in Warrington this year, have posted a testimonial video for one of their customers (Practice Plan) on their web site. I love stuff like this, because it highlights the big differentiator between Lotus Notes and it’s competitors… line-of-business applications. E-mail is a mission-critical solution, but no matter how cost-effective you make it, it is a cost to a business. Applications however have the potential to reduce costs, improve efficiency and increase revenue.

Webinar… now, there’s a word your grandparents probably never used (and they probably didn’t ever use ‘leverage’ as a verb either). Anyway, our friends at OpenSpan provide a Windows Container for use with IBM Lotus Expeditor and Notes composite applications, and on the 14th of April we (i.e. Lotus and OpenSpan) will be holding a joint webinar to talk about this nifty piece of technology which allows your Expeditor or Notes composite-based applications to pull in and utilise .NET, Visual Basic and Windows applications. You’ll hear from OpenSpan’s Francis Carden and our very own Product Manager for Application Development Mike Masterson.

Click on the OpenSpan logo to register.

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.