NotesTracker news and tips

Simple Signer Version 1.1 for IBM Lotus Notes released

2009-11-02T06:15:00.001-08:00

When a Lotus Notes application is developed, it is a quite common requirement that it must be "signed" by an appropriate Lotus Notes user ID or Lotus Domino server ID before it will operate correctly in a production environment.

The developer (or developers) who over time created the various design elements in the database (forms, views, agents, etc) will have placed their own "signature" against each design element every time that they save it.

The situation commonly arises that the developer(s) who coded the database have signatures that do not provide sufficient or appropriate authority for agents that are to run on a Domino server, for formulae to be executed in a form, etc).

This is especially the case for “alien” Notes applications that come to you from outside organizations such IBM Business Partners and Independent Software Vendors, but can be true even internally in your organization when there are multiple developers over time or for a specific release of the application..

Therefore a given version of a database application is put into production, its design elements need to be signed by a Notes ID with the appropriate authority. (Refer to the IBM Lotus Notes documentation for full details about the concept of signing Notes databases.)

Although signing is not all that difficult to do, it can be a somewhat circumspect process for the uninitiated!

Hence a few years ago I released the “Simple Signer” for IBM Lotus notes. This is a single-purpose database that was developed to make life a little easier for everybody (including myself) who at some time or other, frequently or only occasionally, has to sign Lotus Notes databases.

Its one an only design goal is to make it extremely quick and easy to sign each and every design element in a given database.

Just switch the Notes ID (if necessary), select the database to be signed, and click on the big pink button.

Note that it works only in Notes 6.0 and later versions (because it relies on the LotusScript "Sign" method introduced in Release 6.0), but this is not much of nowadays.

Also note that the database’s design is not hidden, so by modifying a few lines of LotusScript you can alter the way that signing is carried out, to sign only agents for example.

Version 1.1 has no functional changes, it’s still as easy to use as always, but the “Help Using This Database” built-in documentation has been enhanced to show you how add a toolbar button to make it faster to launch Simple Signer.

Download version 1.1 of the Simple Signer from either of our mirrors at notestracker.com or asiapac.com.au.

Golly, gosh, it’s nearly quarter past 1 AM here Down Under so I’m heading off to the cot right away after submitting this post.

Technorati Tags: IBM,Lotus Notes,Lotus Domino,Sign,Database,Application,Security,Authorization,Ease of Use,Freeware,Asia/Pacific Computer Services

SDMS Version 4.5.00 for Lotus Notes/Domino released

2009-10-08T17:42:00.001-07:00

SDMS is a very popular free “simple document management system” for IBM Lotus Notes and Domino:

SDMS incorporates our NotesTracker capability, which enables comprehensive tracking of database activities for usage details (document creates, reads, updates, deletes, pastes, mail-ins, view or database opens, etc) and for monitoring database compliance (who did what, when, and where).

See our home page asiapac.com.au or notestracker.com for the download link to the current production version 4.5.00 of SDMS.

The e-mail merge feature was enhanced, as requested by a user of SDMS, now allowing any of the user's mail views and folders to be selected as the source of mail messages to be merged:

Previously, just the Inbox was available for selecting memos. This view shows a merged mail memo:

Also added was an agent to import SDMS documents from a different SDMS database into the current one (very useful, for example, when upgrading to a newer SDMS version).

You can better tailor the SDMS page header area, by specifying your own database logo image together with your website URL or your e-mail contact address.

Notes client header, showing user-specified logo (and logo description) plus website link:

Web browser header, showing that (if you like) for the Web environment you can set up a different user-specified logo and logo description:

And as you might expect, there are various usability improvements. Plus some bug fixes, of course!

Technorati Tags: NotesTracker,SDMS,Document Management,IBM,Lotus Notes,Lotus Domino

How views affect size & performance of Lotus Notes databases (like NotesTracker usage log repositories) — a case study

2009-05-19T02:48:00.001-07:00

Some application performance tips, from a somewhat different perspective, for Lotus Notes developers and administrators…

Preamble - Performance still is important
Sooner or later, the performance of any application you’re using becomes important. It may start off performing quite well, and then begin to slow down and grind to a halt over time. In a few cases, it may perform abysmally right from the launch.

I spent more than two decades at IBM (starting in 1970, now long retired) and a fair bit of that was taken up advising, supporting and troubleshooting IBM customers on a broad range of performance-related matters. Forty years on, performance is no less important as we approach the end of the first decade of this 21st century.

We don’t usually notice a system’s performance at all when it is good, but we certainly notice it when it is slow. Think Google search, nearly always sub-second (which now we take for granted, and only notice the extremely rare slowdown), versus some other web applications that run at tortoise-like speeds. Overall, the performance of a system could be summarized as “what the end user sees and accepts as reasonable” for whatever applications they are running.

Once upon a time computing (or “data processing”) was nearly all in the form of batch batch processing on centralized machines, then along came mini-computers (smaller than corporate machines, typically in corporate divisions or departments or smaller businesses), then desktop machines (like the IBM Personal Computer, or PC), nowadays right down to handheld devices (PDAs, mobile phones, netbook PCs, etc).

As a general statement, the overall observed performance is the sum of the individual performance of each in a series or chain of stages involving different hardware/software components: central processing unit (CPU), main storage (RAM), buffers of various types, channels or similar data paths, communication links, the operating system binding it all together, and finally the applications being executed.

Then there’s the speed of movement of data between the stages: to and from non-volatile storage (persistent, long-term storage) on devices such as paper tape or punched cards in the early days, magnetic media (disks, tapes, diskettes), flash memory (getting faster and cheap enough to soon become widespread for bulk storage in the gigabyte range), and who knows what in the future (quantum storage, holographic storage, carbon nanotube storage, or whatever might eventuate).

The overall performance of a transaction — the time from when a user requests something to be done until the last bit of the result is served back — is the sum of the performance of each and every link or step in the device chain. It depends on the not just the raw speed characteristics of each step, but on the workload being imposed (often in a shared user environment, such as a Web server).

There are nearly always complex interactions between steps and at each stage in the overall process: queuing for service, task execution (at some relative priority and , for some length of time or “time slice”, perhaps getting preempted and dropping back in the queue), recovering from errors (often badly designed and handled), and more. As I said earlier, it’s a very complex picture.

Sometimes you encounter poor performance because of inadequately funded hardware (and perhaps software), poor infrastructure design (low-powered servers, slow communications links, and the like).

But quite frequently it’s a matter of poor application design: bad or even erroneous coding, choosing the wrong algorithm for a sub-task, inadequate or even non-existent error handling, and much more. Even an otherwise excellent service can be brought to its knees by a bad application, such as one with an extremely inefficient sorting algorithm, one that retrieves a data record in an extremely inefficient manner, one that waits for an error that is never going to be recovered from. One classic example is the deadlock or so-called deadly embrace record update situation, which can bring even the fastest of systems to a dead halt in processing your transaction (and at the very least locks out one other user too, but possibly more).

IBM Lotus Notes and Domino performance considerations
Here I’d like to share my findings on one aspect of performance that I haven’t come across being covered elsewhere, at least in the way that I’m going to explain it: the analysis of Notes/Domino view size as it relates to view indexing performance.

You’ll want to know how much hard disk capacity is needed to store the view indexes (indices, if you prefer) in your Notes applications, and from this get some feel for the effect on view index maintenance processing overheads which can have a major effect on overall Domino server transaction throughput and response times.

There are many resources from IBM and other parties which give excellent advice and guidance about analyzing and managing performance for both the Lotus Notes desktop client and the Lotus Domino server. I’ve no intention of going over this broad field, having already assembled many useful reference links for you at my web site here and its mirror/backup here.

Many of these (and other forums/blogs maintained by the Notes community) discuss the design of Lotus Notes views. Some of them give excellent tips for optimizing the performance of Notes views, either by optimizing view design (many considerations) or setting the properties of the views such as index refresh/discard options:

What follows is a brief discussion of views as they relate to NotesTracker (see here or here). I gathered this information when a user of NotesTracker asked me how to predict the size of the Usage Log repository database, and to give some guidance on when it should be archived.

NotesTracker concepts
NotesTracker is a set of easy-to-apply routines that you (once a licensed purchaser) can easily apply to the design of any of your own Notes/Domino applications. Read more about it in the NotesTracker Guide, a download link for which is on on either of the web pages mentioned a few paragraphs above.

Think of NotesTracker as a software development kit (SDK). Once you have modified the design of any of your applications, NotesTracker can write out a “usage log record” for each and every user interface transaction against that database: document CRUD events (Create, Read, Update, Delete), document paste-ins, document mail-ins.

You control what NotesTracker does via a NotesTracker Profile that you place in each database (on a replica by replica basis). For example, in the case of document update event you can specify whether or not field changes are tracked, and on top of that whether or not an e-mail alert is sent out (say, to Notes administrators or coordinators of that particular application database).

These events are logged as ordinary Notes documents, the same way for both Notes Client or Web browser interactions (no dichotomy here). For a given database replica, you can specify that the usage log repository be the database itself or en external Notes database,

With this very generic logging mechanism, you have tremendous flexibility in the way that usage log repositories may be organized, as the following diagram illustrates:

You might take the simplest approach, and send all build usage log documents to a single central repository. The top two groups of applications (circled in red and blue) indicate how you might instead set up a number of different repositories grouped by application category (Marketing, Finance, HR, Manufacturing, or whatever), and at the bottom (circled in green) have any database store its own usage log documents internally. Undoubtedly you would have many more Notes databases than illustrated above, but the same methodology applies.

NotesTracker uses nothing but regular Notes/Domino capabilities. Usage log records (documents) are replicated in the normal fashion between servers, giving a composite organizational usage picture covering both Notes Client and Web browser activities.

How is reporting done? Via ordinary Notes views of course, nothing special. A pre-built set of NotesTracker views are distributed with the SDK, and you can extend or modify these views any way you like, no specialist skills being necessary. Indeed, all of NotesTracker was carefully designed so that no more than a medium level of Notes developer and administrator skills are required for installation, programming and administration (including security).

No end-user training is required whatsoever (indeed, they may not even be aware that NotesTracker capabilities have been added to a database, although there may be legal or organizational policies that require you to inform them that their actions are being tracked).

The build-up of NotesTracker Usage Log documents, and view index overheads
Because NotesTracker is creating usage log document (one document per user interaction), the Notes administrator will need to understand the ramifications: disk space consumed and server CPU workload implications.

Presumably this would be particularly important to monitor for databases where the usage log documents are being created internally (in that database itself) and could have a noticeable effect on view opening performance. It’s probably not so critical for central NotesTracker repositories (particularly if they are placed on a dedicated disk drive), because the usage log documents are being appended to what’s already there and the speed of doing so should be quite fast, though the effect (of rapidly adding many such documents) on view indexing might be considerable. But to stress again, this is “business as usual” in terms of Domino server administrative skills needed.

As a good first rough approximation, for NotesTracker the database size increases at 1.5KB to 2KB per usage log document. The growth rate needs to be monitored, and you should devise an appropriate archive-and-purge strategy if disk space is a worry. How frequently you purge log documents should primarily be determined by the length of time — typically a number of months (or even years) — for which you wish to retain usage metrics.

Of course, it’s not only document contents that take up space in a database. Keep in mind that view indexes will have a major impact on database growth, rather than the relatively small amount of data stored in the log documents. To reduce Notes Client view opening overheads (and Domino server workload needed to maintain the view indexes), the number of sorted view columns has been kept reasonably low. However, you may wish to alter the view designs to decrease the number of sorted view columns even further, or to make other changes that balance view opening times against indexing overheads to your satisfaction.

As a guide, one user of NotesTracker found that some 60,000 Usage Log entries occupied close to 1 GB of disk space, equating to an average of 16 to 17 KB per usage log document. I’m not sure if they removed any of the default views from the repository, or altered any of the views’ indexing properties, both of which could have a big influence on this average. (Naturally enough, other Notes applications could and almost certainly would have quite different characteristics. Your mileage may vary, as the saying goes.)

Disk Space management – the NotesTracker archiving agent
In NotesTracker there is an archive agent that can be run as-required or on a scheduled basis, giving you the control you need to remove historic log records for managing repository database size. The archive agent is discussed a little further on.

Monitoring and Managing Usage Log view indexes
The NotesTracker Repository is distributed with around 35 views. Some views will only ever contain a small number of documents, even down to a single document. Most of the views are based on a selection of Usage Log documents (all of them, or a subset), and might contain tens of thousands of documents depending on the level of activity in your applications and the length of time — weeks or months — that Usage Log records have been stored before being archived.

The set of NotesTracker views provided are configured generally to discard their indexes after 14 days of inactivity, and it’s simple for you to alter these settings if you wish.

You should monitor the NotesTracker view index sizes over time. If there is any view that is used rarely, you should consider setting its view the discard period to a smaller number of days or perhaps even consider removing the view from the Repository.

It’s interesting to note that NotesTracker has a unique method for you to make an extremely quick and simple, standardized modification to the designs of the views in a database, after which you can track individual view usage. This gives you a sound basis for knowing which views are heavily used (and should be retained) and which ones are seldom used (thereby being candidates for being removed from the database’s design). Indeed, one company purchased a NotesTracker license just to do this very thing.

In his IBM Lotus Notes Hints, Tips, and Tricks weblog, Alan Lepofsky gives a few tips about database sizes. See:
http://www.alanlepofsky.net/alepofsky/alanblog.nsf/dx/local-mail-part-2
In this second article, Alan describes how view indexes occupy part of the space taken up by a database:
http://www.alanlepofsky.net/alepofsky/alanblog.nsf/dx/size-really-does-matter

To get a look at the innards of a Notes database, you could use a Domino console command of the form:
show database database_filename

Here’s an example for database notestracker.nsf in subfolder notestracker_v5.1:

But let’s do things a much better way: using the Domino Administrator client to look inside the database. Consider a newly-created NotesTracker Repository database, which we select like this:

The resulting panel “Manage the views of this database” (next image) show as that a group of Usage Tracking views, circled in red, have indexes that are some three or four times larger than other Usage Tracking views (circled in green). The index size difference essentially reflect the complexity of the individual view designs, nothing else. For this exercise, it will be the views circled in red that we focus on., but this has no effect on the overall argument.

As mentioned above, this example database is quite small. It contains only about 900 Usage Log documents and its overall size is only about 14 MB.

Firstly, a new “empty” copy of the database was made, containing no Usage Log documents as a base point. Its size with empty view indexes was less than 4 MB. You will notice that the various view index sizes ranged between 1 KB and 4 KB.

Then normal database activity was carried out for a short while: creating, reading, updating, deleting documents inn other databases. This generated some 6140 Usage Log documents in this NotesTracker Repository database.

Then each of the twelve commonly-used views circled in red in the following image was displayed, causing their indexes to be created. The repository database size increased from 4 MB to 74 MB, and the index sizes (focus on the twelve circled in red) looked like this:

Note that this was somewhat atypical, having a very high disk space percentage used of 99.3% — because this NotesTracker Repository is essentially a logging database, the main activity being sequential adding of Usage Log documents. It is likely that most “normal” databases would in practice have a significant percentage of “white space” (until they are compacted).

Finally, a new copy of this database was made, and its size was reduced to 9 MB (an somewhat easier way to eliminate the view indexes, compared with manually initiating a compaction).

This indicates that the 6140 documents themselves occupied about 5 MB (that is, 9 MB minus the “empty” database size of 4 MB).

We saw a little earlier that with full view indexes the database size was 74 MB, therefore the 6140 documents had view indexes (for 12 views) totaling about This all indicates that each Usage Log document adds, as a simple approximation, about 1 KB per view!

Extrapolating this to thousands or tens of thousands of Usage Log documents obviously will lead to much larger overall Repository size. Obviously the removal of unused Usage Log views could significantly reduce Repository size.

Summary
This brief insight into view index creation should give you a more definitive basis for managing your NotesTracker usage log repository databases. The same general approach can be applied for managing the views in your own inventory of Lotus Notes/Domino applications.

I first learned about Notes in 1993, just into early retirement from IBM. Compared with the lumbering mainframe office systems architecture that IBM had spent a decade or more trying to get off the ground, I was (and still am) struck with the way that “plain vanilla” Lotus Notes and Domino do smart stuff such as replication with simplicity and elegance.

The basic underpinnings of the Notes/Domino document-oriented database architecture are still without peer, and there’s still a big role for it (compared with other platforms, which shall remain nameless, because Ed Brill and others in the community say quite enough to go round).

Let the battle rage on, competition is good for us all, keeping us all on our ties and leading to improvements all around. Crikey, it’s my 40th year in the IT industry, and I’m still enjoying it — I must be crazy!

SDMS Version 4.5 for Lotus Notes/Domino now available for Beta testing

2009-05-11T06:54:00.001-07:00

SDMS is a very popular free “simple document management system” for IBM Lotus Notes and Domino, see the home page asiapac.com.au or notestracker.com for the download link to the current production version 4.4 of SDMS.

SDMS incorporates our NotesTracker capability for comprehensive tracking of database activities.

Version 4.5 of SDMS has been completed, and is now in beta testing. If you would like to carry out some testing of SDMS v4.5 then please send a request to participate via e-mail to SDMS_beta < at > asiapac <dot> com <dot> au

NotesTracker validated against Notes/Domino 8.5

2009-01-21T23:31:00.001-08:00

Just a short post to mention that NotesTracker underwent testing against IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5 during the Beta1 and Beta2 testing phases, and again a week or two ago against the official ND 8.5 release.

NotesTracker works fine in ND 8.5 (as it does with ND 8.). I could detect no functional issues at all.

Gratifyingly, this is in contrast to what happened with Notes 6.0, which introduced a bug in LotusScript’s handling of Rich Text fields forcing me to redesign the subroutines used for handling changes in the content of database fields.

Please note, however, that there’s now is a functional limitation, indeed for me it’s a major inconvenience: with the Notes 8.0 and 8.5 Standard client you’ll find that the "Open in New Window" context menu option is missing from three ultra-convenient places where it was available before: view navigator, workspace tab, and workspace icon.

Consider the following screenshots, on the left the Notes 8.x Basic client and on the right the Standard client. Click an image to see an enlargement (in a new browser window):

Notes ND 8.5 Basic client -
Open via workspace icon.

Notes ND 8.5 Basic client -
Open via workspace icon
is entirely absent.
MISSING IN ACTION

Notes ND 8.5 Basic client -
Open via view navigator.

Notes ND 8.5 Basic client -
Open via view navigator
is grayed out.
MISSING IN ACTION

Notes ND 8.5 Basic client -
Open via workspace tab.

Notes ND 8.5 Standard client -
Open via workspace tab
is entirely absent.
MISSING IN ACTION

Technorati Tags: NotesTracker,Lotus Notes 8

The ND 8.x Basic client works properly, as with earlier Notes client releases, as shown in the left column of the above table. No problems (or “no sweat” as we say in Australia).

But the Eclipse-based Notes 8.x Standard client simply hasn't implemented it yet, as shown in the right column of the above table. What a pity. I hope that IBM fixes this glaring omission soon, I (and one or two others) asked IBM to rectify this way back in ND 8.0 Beta1 days.

It's a bit of a shame, but only significant if you happen to have implemented any auto-refresh RSS-style "Breaking News" views. Now you need to follow a a much more convoluted pathway to launch such views in separate external windows.

As explained in the NotesTracker Guide, the idea is to move the external views to the side where you can monitor them separately from the main Notes client window. There's also a brief description here.

This is not a NotesTracker limitation, rather it's caused by the as-yet failure of IBM to support this feature in the Standard client. The only way you can launch an external window is by fiddling around: you'll need to learn how to set up each such Breaking News view as a widget/gadget, and only after doing so will you be able to launch the view in an external window (via its context menu).

So with the Notes 8.x Standard client it's no longer same trivial operation of merely right-clicking on the view in the navigator or the tab across the top and then selecting Open In New Window from the context menu) as it was before.

Simple Signer for Lotus Notes Version 1.01 released (04 November 2008)

2008-11-04T02:58:00.001-08:00

Technorati Tags: Lotus Notes,Database,Sign,Security,Deployment,Configuration

Today has been a busy day for me. While preparing for a presentation tomorrow, I’ve been dusting off my Lotus Notes freeware applications, checking them out and making small design tweaks here and there. This is the final one in the bundle.

Because of the strong security model that has always been one of the major features of Lotus Notes right from its outset, it is sometimes necessary to “sign” a database before it will work properly in your organization’s operating environment.

Here follows a brief, highly simplified explanation. It is definitely NOT intended to act as a tutorial in Lotus Notes/Domino security.

When the Notes database application was built, its design elements (components such as forms, views, frames, framesets, agents and much more) were all created by one or more developers. These design elements would have been given the “signature” of the original developer(s), which may not be (and generally should not be) adequate to pass the runtime security in your organization’s production environment.

In many but not all cases, it is sufficient to sign all of the design elements with an appropriately-authorized person’s Notes ID. This is exactly what Simple Signer does, in a few easy-to-perform steps.

STEP 1: Open the Simple Signer database. If necessary, switch to the desired the signing user’s ID file (top button), then click on the lower button (as shown by the red arrow) to select the database to be signed.

STEP 2: Use the normal “Choose Database” dialog to locate and select the desired database.

STEP 3: The selected database’s title, server and path are shown. Click on the lower button to sign ALL of the design elements in this database.

If your Notes ID has adequate signing authority for this particular database, it will be signed, else you’ll be informed that the signing process failed.

Remember that this is called the “Simple Signer” and it’s not meant (as distributed) to cope with complex signing requirements.

Because the Simple Signer’s design is not hidden, your can get your Notes developer to tailor the design to cope with more complex signing requirements. Otherwise, purchase a more powerful tool.

Simple Signer is a FREE tool designed to carry out a common, basic sign-everything-with-the-same-Notes-ID process and to do it both easily and quickly. … No more, no less. No apologies!

You can obtain your free copy from here or here.

Version 1.01 of Presenter for IBM Lotus Notes released (04 November 2008)

2008-11-03T17:16:00.001-08:00

I don’t give many presentations these days, but expect to do so tomorrow afternoon at the Melbourne (Australia) Lotus User Group meeting.

So I took out my unique little “Presenter for Lotus Notes” application and brushed up a few cobwebs on it. No new functionality, mainly some color changes to alternate view rows and little things like that.

Its now ready for download at either http://asiapac.com.au/NotesPresenter_Download.htm or http://notestracker.com/NotesPresenter_Download.htm. Naturally, it’s still completely free.

But you are probably asking: “What on earth is Presenter for Notes?”

Well, the story behind Presenter goes like this…

I once did industrial chemistry and high school chemistry/mathematics teaching, then spent a long time at IBM (from 1970 to the mid-1990s, now retired), and find myself as a consultant still in IT 39 years after starting at IBM. My fortieth year in IT begins next January, is that good or bad I keep asking myself.

During all that time, I’ve seen a vast number of lessons, lectures, business presentations and the like. In the early days, they were done on blackboards and paper. Later overhead projectors were in vogue, with their transparent plastic “foils.” These foils, in any quantity, weighed a ton and weren’t much fun to prepare, distribute and lug around (as I can attest from giving lots of IBM presentations across Australia, and Asia while supporting the IBM System/38 and AS/400 and other systems).

Then in the 1980s and 1990s, along came Lotus Freelance and Microsoft PowerPoint and suchlike. A better thing? On the whole, probably so.

But overdone to the n^th degree. Now we have PowerPoint presentations in plague proportions! See here or here (especially look at the articles about “Unplug that projector” and “Drag and drop” and “warts” and “disaster”).

When I was to give a presentation several years ago, I asked myself if there was a different and/or better way.

Being active in the Lotus Notes community, I decided that “If you promote and sell it, you should use it!.” So I developed a “presenter” platform to be used in the Lotus Notes Client environment itself.

The rationale for having a tool like Notes Presenter is briefly outlined in an earlier blog post of mine, see Notes Presenter -- Let's eat our own dog food with more details on the download page given above. There’s a user guide built in to the database, in the “Help Using This Database” document.

You can use Presenter not just for preparing and giving presentations via a Lotus Notes Client, but also for packaging and delivering virtually any Notes applications (databases) together with any sort of related supporting files: executables, documents, data files (even other Notes databases, including design templates), and much more.

You could, as just one example, hold different versions/releases of a Notes application suite – or a presentation, or anything else -- either inside [separate documents held in] a single Presenter database or in multiple Presenter databases each one dedicated to s single version/release.

In fact, whatever can be attached to a Notes rich text field can be delivered via a Presenter database as one tidy self-contained package.

With the various Presenter views (such as the view by Category/Concept shown just above), and via full-text search, you can quickly and easily locate a particular slide or group of slides related to a given topic.

For example, in the question time at the end of a pitch, somebody asks you about a particular term you used that’s buried deep within one of many slides. Use a full-text search to rapidly locate that slide instead of fumbling around (as I’ve seen happen a number of times) and perhaps not even be able to find that slide again.

There’s a lot more I could say, but let me just say that if you’re a Lotus Notes Client user you should “eat your own dog food” and avoid using PowerPoint wherever possible. Download Presenter for Lotus Notes and go try it out!

CAPTURE Version 2.2 released (30th October 2008)

2008-10-30T03:53:00.001-07:00

CAPTURE version 2.2.00 is now available for download from either http://asiapac.com.au/CAPTURE_Download.htm(or its mirror at http://notestracker.com/CAPTURE_Download.htm ).

From the same page, you also can download the built-in "Help Using This Database" document as a separate PDF, if this is more convenient for you to read outside the Notes environment.

CAPTURE stands for "Customer And Project Tracking with Usage Reporting Extensions" and is a completely free Lotus Notes CRM application -- with Asia/Pacific Computer Services' NotesTracker^TM incorporated so that you can track and audit usage of the documents in a CAPTURE database.

Apart from a few very minor changes, the main functional improvement added is the ability to specify (for each CAPTURE database replica) the three headings that appear at the top of each page.

This is shown in the following illustration. Click on it to open a larger image (on a new page).

This was requested by a CAPTURE user as a means of applying “branding” to a CAPTURE database.

And the best news is that it is still a FREE application. So download and enjoy!

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Having NotesTracker capabilities built in is a unique feature, possibly not found in any other CRM application. For example, you can see who updated the sales forecast figure for your customer Acme Widgets, and when they did it, or who deleted a Contact from the database.

Another option is to keep open the RSS-style "Breaking News" view so as to see database actions appear automatically as soon as they occur (in the case of events on remote Domino servers, as soon as then next replication cycle occurs for the database).

You can purchase the NotesTracker toolkit to add powerful features activity tracking and compliance management to the design of your own IBM Lotus Notes/Domino database applications.

SDMS version 4.4.01 released (28 October 2008)

2008-10-27T16:11:00.001-07:00

SDMS Version 4.4.01 was released today, Tuesday 28 October 2008 -- and of course it’s free, as ever.

When v4.4.00 was released, I inadvertently reset its default access level so that it was no longer Manager.

This meant that, as delivered, you could not do things such as changing the database’s title, unless you knew that you could bypass this problem by making a local copy and select not to copy the access control list.

In version 4.4.01 the default for the ACL has been reset to Manager.

This should make it easier for you again to start off using SDMS “out of the box” (without suffering the abovementioned access level problem).

SDMS Version 4.4 released (30th July 2008)

2008-07-30T08:06:00.000-07:00

SDMS version 4.4 (otherwise known as version 4.4.00) was released today, Sunday 16th December 2007.

As always, it's still completely free!

V4.4 is largely a maintenance release, with some documentation additions and very minor changes here and there.

The only functional change is that there are several additional columns in the main document hierarchy view (added at the request of an SDMS user, together with a new option in the SDMS Profile document to enable this. Read the built-in Help Using This Database document for information about this.

Download SDMS from either http://asiapac.com.au/SDMS_Download.htm or http://notestracker.com/SDMS_Download.htm

KEEP ON ENJOYING SDMS, and please send in your feedback!

NotesTracker Guide Version 5.1 updated

2008-07-12T00:16:00.000-07:00

Various relatively minor usability plus explanation changes have been made to the NotesTracker Guide today.

Please download your fresh copy of this PDF document, from the main server http://asiapac.com.au/UsageTracker_Download.htm#Documentation or backup server http://notestracker.com/UsageTracker_Download.htm#Documentation (feedback appreciated).

CAPTURE Version 2.1.04 released (29th January 2008)

2008-01-29T05:57:00.000-08:00

CAPTURE version 2.1.04 is now available for download from either http://asiapac.com.au/CAPTURE_Download.htm (or its mirror at http://notestracker.com/CAPTURE_Download.htm ). From the same page, you now can download the built-in "Help Using This Database" document as a separate PDF, if this is more convenient for you to read.

This version contains fixes for minor bugs, as well as several small but useful feature enhancements.

CAPTURE stands for "Customer And Project Tracking with Usage Reporting Extensions" and is a completely free Lotus Notes CRM application -- with Asia/Pacific Computer Services' NotesTracker incorporated so that you can track and audit usage of the documents in a CAPTURE database.

Having NotesTracker capabilities built in is a unique feature, possibly not found in any other CRM application. For example, you can see who updated the sales forecast figure for your customer Acme Widgets, and when they did it, or who deleted a Contact from the database. Or you can keep open the RSS-style "Breaking News" view so as to see database actions appear automatically as soon as they occur (in the case of events on remote Domino servers, as soon as then next replication cycle occurs for the database).

You can purchase the NotesTracker toolkit to add powerful features activity tracking and compliance management to the design of your own IBM Lotus Notes/Domino database applications

SDMS Version 4.3 released (16th December 2007)

2007-12-16T00:29:00.000-08:00

SDMS version 4.3 (otherwise known as version 4.3.00) was released today, Sunday 16th December 2007.

As you would expect, it's still completely free!

The major enhancement in V4.3 is the ability to run multiple copies (replicas) of SDMS, with some of them operating in "Simple" mode and others operating in "Publishing" mode.

The former mode is very close to the extremely SIMPLE way that SDMS used to operate prior to V4, while the latter mode offers all of the same powerful publishing features added in V4.0 and V4.1.

As before, you definitely should read the built-in Help Using This Database document for guidance and tips. Very important from an operational perspective is the part that database roles play, especially when you're using Publishing mode.

As before, download SDMS from either http://asiapac.com.au/SDMS_Download.htm or http://notestracker.com/SDMS_Download.htm

ENJOY, and please send in your feedback!

SDMS Version 4.23 released (09 September 2007)

2007-09-09T03:03:00.000-07:00

SDMS version 4.2.03 (otherwise known as version 4.23) was released today, Sunday 9th September 2007, and it's still completely free!

Version 4.23 contains several usability enhancements and fixes:

Bug in the drop-down list of values for the Category and Sub-Category fields was fixed. (This bug slipped in when the "By Category" view was modified to support "special documents" that were introduced with NotesTracker Version 5.1 incorporated in SDMS Version 4.20.)
The four Edit / Submit / Approve / Publish views were enhanced, with the Level Number column shifted to be in a more natural position just to the left of the Document Section plus Title column.
The Document Section plus Title column was enhanced to better show the five-level document hierarchy.
The database's default Access Control List was modified so that default access includes the "Read All Docs" role, enabling all database users initially to access all documents in the database regardless of the readers field settings of those documents.
The security section of the "Help Using This Database" document was reworded here and there for better clarity, and some typographical errors were corrected.

ENJOY!

NotesTracker Version 5.1.04 released (12 June 2007)

2007-06-12T01:24:00.000-07:00

(Click to view a larger image)

Visit either notestracker.com or asiapac.com.au download NotesTracker version 5.1.04 evaluation or licensed editions, released today 12th June, 2007.

And don't forget to retrieve the updated NotesTracker Guide (find it at the bottom of the download page), because it has been updated to include the new features and several paragraphs added to better explain more clearly how deleted documents are tracked.

As shown in the image above, in the "General Tracking Controls" tab of the NotesTracker Configuration Document for each database being tracked you can now specify user(s) that you do not wish to track. For example, a database auditor might wish to be excluded so that his/her activities are not included in order not to distort usage metrics.

Just underneath that, as introduced in NotesTracker version 5.0, you can also specify the names of particular users that you do wish to track (which overrides the NotesTracker default of tracking all users of the database).

(Click to view a larger image)

Ignoring of database users (the first list of names) has precedence over explicitly-tracked users (the second list of names. If you happen to have the same user name in both lists, as circled in red just above, then that particular won't be tracked.

Together with the flexible alerting controls (see image below) that were introduced in NotesTracker Version 5.0, you now have an extremely wide range of options for configuring usage tracking in each database.

(Click to view a larger image)

And the options are all very easy for you to set up.

With NotesTracker, you definitely don't have to be a technical specialist to monitor and administer your application database usage!

NotesTracker Version 5.1.03 released (04 June 2007)

2007-06-03T18:56:00.000-07:00

(Click to view a larger image)

Visit either notestracker.com or asiapac.com.au download NotesTracker version 5.1.03 (evaluation or licensed editions) released today. Don't forget to retrieve the updated NotesTracker Guide from the bottom of the download page.

This version has a slightly slicker version of the installer, but its main enhancement is the added capability to send e-mail alerts for tracked "generic" events (such as button clicks).

This means that you can now have e-mail alerts generated for pretty much any sort of application activity occurring in your Notes/Domino databases!

NotesTracker v5.1 working under IBM Lotus Notes Domino 8 Beta 3

2007-05-31T07:05:00.001-07:00

Having downloaded and installed the IBM Lotus Notes Domino 8 (ND8) public beta #3 a day or two ago, we have the new NotesTracker Version 5.1 working happily under this tidier pre-release of ND8, as the following image indicates:

(Click to view a larger image)

NotesTracker Version 5.1 released (28 May 2007)

2007-05-28T01:57:00.000-07:00

We are very pleased to announce that as of a short while ago NotesTracker Version 5.1 has been released today (28 May 2007) -- see either notestracker.com or asiapac.com.au for information and to download V5.1 evaluation or licensed versions.

For full details, refer to the NotesTracker Guide also downloadable from there. Note that starting with V5.1 the guide is produced using OpenOffice Writer 2.2, which produces the PDF output directly as a simple export (rather than having to use Word with a third party PDF generator).

NotesTracker Version 5.1 main changes are:

A new action type "Generic" has been added, so that with as little a a single line of LotusScript code you can log general applications actions such as clicking on a button of graphic hotspot. For example, you could easily log the clicking of the Send button in the Lotus Notes Mail database. This new feature enables you to track a wide range of application events for the purposes of gathering database usage metrics, auditing and compliance.

One or two very minor bugs have been fixed.

The NotesTracker Repository usage log views have been "tweaked" -- for example, the percentage column now displays three decimal places (rather than two places).

The LotusScript routines that are the keystone of NotesTracker have been reworked so that all global variables are now prefixed with "_ntr" (quotation marks excluded) in order to vastly reduce the likelihood of a clash of variable names with pre-existing LotusScript code. For example, instead of "uidoc" NotesTracker uses "ntr_uidoc" as a global variable, and instead of "session" NotesTracker uses "ntr_session" and so on. ... This was quite a job! The intention for expending this effort was to make NotesTracker even more robust than before as a developer toolkit.

(Click to view a larger image)

SDMS Version 4.2 released (14 April 2007)

2007-04-14T05:59:00.000-07:00

Already SDMS is up to version 4.2.02 (not just 4.2) after two daily updates since first release last Thursday.

The updates include a number of minor "tweaks" and (see accompanying image) an action button added to the three Alerts views to enable otherwise "dead" scheduled mail to be processed.

SDMS Version 4.2.02 is now available, and can be downloaded from either http://asiapac.com.au/SDMS_Download.htm or http://notestracker.com/SDMS_Download.htm

The reason for having this button is discussed in the built-in Help Using This Database (which gives a brief SDMS tutorial).

Be sure to find out about the new NotesTracker Version 5.0 capabilities now available in this version of SDMS.

The NotesTracker Guide is downloadable from either http://notestracker.com/UsageTracker_Download.htm#Documentation or http://asiapac.com.au/UsageTracker_Download.htm#Documentation

CAPTURE Version 2.1 released (12 April 2007)

2007-04-11T19:28:00.000-07:00

Today we have released the latest and greatest version of out FREE application CAPTURE ... Customer And Project Tracking (plus Usage Reporting Extensions).

You may download CAPTURE V2.1 from either http://asiapac.com.au/CAPTURE_Download.htm or http://notestracker.com/CAPTURE_Download.htm

The major new feature of CAPTURE V2.1 is the inclusion of NotesTracker Version 5.0 capabilities (see previous announcement earlier in this web log, athttp://notestracker.blogspot.com/2007/04/notestracker-version-50-is-released.html ).

This brings powerful new capabilities to CAPTURE, such as the ability to nominate and track "special" documents (any document that has significance to you, for whatever reason), the sending of e-Mail alerts (when fields are changed, documents deleted, "special" documents are used, etc), the ability to track the actions only for specified users, and more!

SDMS Version 4.2 Beta #1 released

2007-04-10T00:07:00.000-07:00

Version 4.2 of SDMS has been released today, 10 April 2007 (and while being labeled "Beta #1" it should not be much different if at all from the final V4.2 release).

It has been upgraded to include NotesTracker Version 5.0 capabilities (see the recent post http://notestracker.blogspot.com/2007/04/notestracker-version-50-is-released.html for that announcement).

This includes such things a the ability to specify and track "special documents", mailed-in documents, pasted documents and to generate e=mail alerts for all sorts of database events. The NotesTracker Guide Version 5.0 has full details of all such new capabilities.

Here's a sample e-mail alert message;

SDMS Version 4.2 can be downloaded from either http://asiapac.com.au/SDMS_Download.htm or http://notestracker.com/SDMS_Download.htm

NotesTracker Version 5.0 is released (4/4/2007)

2007-04-04T07:35:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce that Version 5.0 of NotesTracker is now available for download, from either:

Be sure to download the latest edition of the NotesTracker Guide Version 5.0 (see link at the bottom of the same page).

Please enjoy!

NotesTracker Version 5.0 Guide (final) is now available

2007-03-28T05:02:00.000-07:00

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:

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

NotesTracker v5.0 -- works well under Notes Domino 8 Beta2

2007-03-24T20:17:00.000-07:00

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.

NotesTracker Version 5.0 Beta1 - Customer DB ready for public testing

2007-03-23T05:34:00.000-07:00

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:

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

The full set of NotesTracker databases (the Repository, plus extra example databases) will be available soon. And the two free applications SDMS and CAPTURE will be enhanced to have NotesTracker Version 5.0 built in (currently they use Version 4.6).

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).