ded. reckoning

I hope I'm As Cool as Ralph Kimball When I'm His Age

2009-09-17T16:46:00.000-07:00

A real gem...

If you don't know Ralph Kimball, here's his Wikipedia entry.

What I Learned About Rich Text This Week

2009-06-18T17:00:00.000-07:00

I don't work with rich text alot, but I am aware of its eccentricities. I learned a few things this week and I thought I'd share them so as to save someone the time and frustration I endured. Starting out, I was at least aware of the whole issue with refreshing rich text in the UI, so this influenced my ideas of how I was going to approach my project.

For a Notes client app. I needed to control editing of a rich text field on a form. My first thought was to have a computed field just display the contents of the field and create a dialog box for authorized folks to edit the actual data. Although this is possible with some workarounds, the default nature of LotusScript dialog boxes is not rich text friendly. By default you can control the passing of field changes from your dialog box back into the underlying form, but not with rich text. The workarounds are to get rid of the default "OK" and "Cancel" buttons and build your own directly on your dialog box form so you can save your changes to the back end and do some script magic to make the changes appear on the underlying form. After working on the script magic and getting things to refresh, I found a show-stopping flaw in my approach. The biggest problem with this approach is that you don't have access to the rich text controls for adding any formatting to your text -- without that, what's the point? The bottom line is I abandoned the dialog box and opted to go with computed and editable fields and some show/hide formulas on the main form.

The first thing I ran into with this approach was the fact that a computed rich text field acts like a computed when composed field. The field gets set the first time it is displayed, but won't change if you make changes to the field it is computed to. Luckily Google is my friend and I found a way to make this approach work. Basically, I added a third computed text field with the formula FIELD myComputedRTF := @DeleteField; "" which blows the computed rich text field away every time the document is saved so that it can be recreated the next time it is opened.

Hope this saves someone the time and hassle learning this the hard way...

Cannot execute the specified command (ViewExpandAll)

2009-06-11T10:06:00.000-07:00

I ran into another glitch in testing the Notes 8.5 client. When opening a couple views in a custom DB, I get the warning "Cannot execute the specified command." The LotusScript debugger wasn't able to help with the diagnosis (no LotusScript firing before the error appears). I then manually tried to follow the sequence of events and found the @Command ViewExpandAll in the PostOpen event of the views. I commented out the formula and that stopped the error.

Google isn't returning any hits to provide insight surrounding the problem. Having the view automatically expand isn't critical and we could live without it, but I'm curious if there's a workaround. Should I be reporting these problems to Lotus?

The peaceful coexistence of Java and .Net

2009-06-11T07:24:00.000-07:00

Hopefully no one takes this the wrong way, but I just found it interesting that the Java group hosts its site using .Net technology.

(Then again, this Notes blog isn't hosted on Domino. Probably in both cases the reason why has a financial component.)

Not a sub or function

2009-06-10T12:42:00.000-07:00

In my testing of custom Notes applications written for version 7 and prior, some applications throw the "Not a sub or function" error message in the R8.5 client. The errors aren't triggered when the LotusScript Debugger is turned on. This leads me to believe that subtle differences in the compiler versions are the culprit. I opened the application in the 8.5 Designer and ran Recompile All LotusScript from the Tools pull-down menu. This appears to have stopped the errors. The recompile had no adverse impact when going back and testing the application in a R7 client.

Recommendation: Parings Market

2009-05-31T06:01:00.000-07:00

This past Friday I had a chance to experience a new business that recently opened up in my 'neighborhood' called Pairings. (www.pairingsfoodandwine.com) It's a great great concept that has been executed especially well. The whole idea is to pair up choice adult beverages with choice cuisine in order to bring out the best in each and maximize the flavor quotient!

First, there is a liquor store. In the land of municipal liquor stores and super-size liquor emporiums, I'll give these guys credit for providing a great selection combined with expertise and even some help finding a great value. The part that makes this liquor store stand apart is their assistance in pairing up your beverage with the food.

Next there is the Deli/Restaurant. In here, the first thing you'll notice is the various market offerings; things such as eight different types of gourmet salt, or pure maple syrup. Walk in a little further and you'll notice the deli case filled with scrumptious salads ready for a trip home or maybe a quick bite right at one of the tables in the store. You'll also see a menu of dishes the chefs will prepare for you while you wait or perhaps a wood-fired pizza or have a custom made salad made for you from the build your own salad bar. Finally there's a huge cheese bar including some nice dried and cured meats.

I suggest you give it a try and for a first pass, get the staff to pair a great wine or beer with one of their meat and cheese trays. While our short Minnesota window of nice weather is present, have your pairings on the outdoor patio and enjoy!

Linked!!!

2009-04-29T08:46:00.000-07:00

DominoPower Magazine picked up my post on Creating PDFs in a Java Agent using Apache FOP.

(Something to tell the grand kids someday.)

Creating PDFs Using Notes Java Agent

2009-04-28T09:00:00.000-07:00

A new project hit my desk a few weeks ago. The project involves the enhancement of an existing Notes workflow application, adding on processes to the start and finish of the workflow process. One of the requirements is to create a PDF for archival as the final step. In order to save some money and learn some new techniques, I chose to look into using the Apache FOP project.

I learned a few things while building a proof of concept and wanted to share what I learned. At a high level, this approach will require some knowledge of Java agents and a little knowledge of XSL-FO. So if you're not already up to speed on these two areas, you might want to spend a little time with the following:

Java agents and the Notes Java back-end classes. The notes help has a pretty good reference, and if you know the LotusScript back-end classes, you pretty much already know the Java classes. Also note that Java is pretty version specific and the Apache FOP project requires 1.4.x or later. That means this solution only works on Lotus Domino 7 or newer.
You'll probably want to learn how to use Eclipse in your Java agent development. Although not necessary, it provides a lot of help organizing and importing your packages, and assisting with your coding so your method signatures are correct, etc.
Depending on how intricate your PDF formatting will be, you'll want to familiarize yourself with XSL-FO. Also, download the Apache FOP zipped source files and look at the example FO files for ideas.
Download and set up OpenLog from OpenNTF.org to help in your debugging and error handling. As always, you can use the Java Debug Console or system.out to the console and log.nsf, but OpenLog gives you a few more options such as including a document link to the document being worked on at the time of the log event or error event. (You can even debug from Eclipse if you know what you're doing.)

My original approach was to import the Jar files into the agent or a script library, but I ran into a few problems with this approach: even if you get your base directory lined up correctly for your classes to access the META-INF path, the Jars are too big to include and will throw a out of memory error. Although not ideal, you will need to put all the Jar files in the jvm/lib/ext directory of your Domino directory (or Notes directory if you're testing locally).

The rest is pretty straightforward:

My agent (download the sample NSF here) will access a Notes document and construct the FO as a string. The string is constructed from various fields in the document and formatted to conform to the XSL-FO standards. When complete, the string is passed into a transformer class. (If the XSL-FO is quite large or elaborate, you will probably want to use a StringBuffer: use the append method to build the XSL-FO; use the toString method to pass the resulting XSL-FO into the transformer.)
Use the example in the Basic Usage Pattern to write the FOP components of your Java agent.
The results are saved to a file on disk, which you will eventually want to deal with. In my case I'll save directly to the file system of another server using a UNC path. In the example you will see a file path in which you can specify where the resulting PDF is to be saved. If you would like to add the PDF as an attachment to a document use the embedObject method of the RichTextItem class. Depending on what you end up doing with these PDFs, you might find yourself with a pile of files. Cleaning up these files can be done with another LotusScript agent or with the java.io.File class delete() method in the same Java agent.
Because the agent is writing to the file system you will need to give it a runtime security level of 2, allowing restricted operations.

Regarding setup, for testing you can run it locally on your workstation. Download the FOP binaries at the Apache site and extract the jar files to your notes/jvm/lib/ext directory. Sign the database and give that ID manager access and double-check that ID can run unrestricted agents. Right-click the ApacheFOP agent and select Run. If everything goes well and you haven’t changed anything, there should be a file in your C:\Temp directory called myfile.pdf. Once you know its working, go ahead and start customizing things to suit your needs.

Note: The code uses the UNID of the Simple.fo document that is inside the nsf, so you can open that document up in your Notes client and modify the XSL to make it custom for you.

There's alot of different things you can do within the FO, different approaches with Notes to build the FO, and different ways to process the resulting PDF (attaching, emailing, etc.). Hopefully this open source solution gives you some new options when it comes to incorporating PDFs into your Notes applications.

LCTY Minneapolis

2009-04-16T08:02:00.001-07:00

Just a couple quick thoughts on yesterday's Lotusphere Comes To You Minneapolis. The one thing that really stood out for me was the number of new faces. Typically, these events draw alot of the Lotus faithful, but I noticed quite a bit more new faces in the crowd. Granted, this is a very unscientific analysis, but I do have another supporting piece of information to back this up. At my lunch table I spoke with two gentlemen who were either brand new to Notes or whose employer is a new Lotus customer. This is a good sign that the Lotus Software climate is not only alive, but growing. There is excitement about the new Notes and Sametime clients and the accompanying new technologies in the 8.x releases.

I think to round things out, the message needs to penetrate upper management of existing customers, both at the I.T. level and at general corporate level. The new customers (my lunch mates yesterday came from a position of not having a good email solution and evaluating the product market from scratch) are finding value, having not known much about Lotus Notes. Does upper management know what these new customers have found out?

After new customers get it, and upper management gets it, the last piece for all of them to be enlightened on is the value Notes and Domino brings as an application development platform. With new tools in our toolbox--composite applications, XPages--we developers can reignite interest in using Notes and Domino to provide excellent solutions to meet business demands.

Keep up the great work everyone!

Microsoft BizSpark

2009-04-14T17:37:00.000-07:00

Got a LinkedIn invitation to join Microsoft BizSpark, so I started the sign-up process. Looks like an interesting deal: get access to developer tools and resources for free. I'm interested for two reasons.

I'm interested in extending the capabilities of the Notes client by scripting into the Microsoft Office Suite. (On the same note I'm also interested in extending the capabilities of Notes by scripting into Lotus Symphony and OpenOffice.)
As a newly minted small business owner, I'm interested in what big corporations are offering little guys like me. I'll keep an eye on things and perhaps let IBM know what's going on inside BizSpark.

I shall keep you all posted when I find out more.

No Ordinary Small Business I.T. Solution

2009-04-06T09:00:00.000-07:00

Why settle for an ordinary I.T. solution? Make your small business extraordinary!

Does your current I.T. solution facilitate

COLLABORATION

inside and outside the office? Help with

INNOVATION

in delivering your product to your customers? Provide

BUSINESS AGILITY

in responding to change? Facilitate

SUPERIOR CUSTOMER SERVICE

? Allow you to leverage

SOCIAL SOFTWARE

? Provide

INSIGHT

into your operation and your market? Help seek out a new

OPPORTUNITY

? Would your potential I.T. solution help with

COST REDUCTION

? Does it give you

FREEDOM OF CHOICE

? How about

FLEXIBILITY

?

IBM Lotus offers you all of these.

Want to know more? Contact me.

Does your job give you enough satisfaction?

2009-04-04T09:00:00.000-07:00

Joel Spolsky writes a column for Inc. Magazine in which he discusses how to structure salaries in such a way that things can be equitable and transparent.

A couple paragraphs resonated with me, as I've been that miserable employee:

At the same time, if you hear a lot of griping about salaries, you shouldn't look just at your system for paying people. One thing I've learned from experience is that happy, motivated employees who are doing work they love and feel they are being treated as adults don't gripe about money unless their pay is egregiously unfair. If you hear a lot of complaints about salaries, I suspect that's probably a manifestation of a much bigger disease: Your employees aren't deriving enough personal satisfaction from their work, or they are miserable for other reasons.

It takes a lot of salary to make up for a cruel boss or a prisonlike workplace. And rather than adjusting pay, you might choose to focus on some nonmonetary ways to make employees happy. Happy employees make better products and provide better customer service and will make your company successful and profitable. And success allows you to pay workers better. It's a virtuous circle, and it has worked for Fog Creek.

I've always said that people will work for much less, provided they're happy and they feel like they're a productive, contributing member of the team.

Small Business IT Services

2009-04-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

Following up on a post from January, I wanted to expand on point #2: Develop a Strong Marketing Message and Hook. I really believe IBM Lotus is offering an outstanding value to small and medium size businesses. So the message is...

The lineup is extensive:

The technology's reliability and scalability has been proven in the enterprise. The administration of these products has been refined over many years and they practically run themselves. Their "fit and finish" are on par with all the Web 2.0 offerings presently in the market. They offer out-of-the-box functionality for mobile access as well as provide tools to combine your Notes applications with external data (aka Mashups). Third party solutions to layer on top of these platforms are abundant and talented independent systems integrators (Me!) are ready to help put these products to productive and profitable use.

The hook? Why go with the unproven upstart or the default choice just because you didn't dig a little deeper to find a really great value? With Express licensing, small and medium size business can get these enterprise-grade technologies at a very affordable price.

Document was deleted from this collection

2009-04-02T09:40:00.000-07:00

In LotusScript, you might encounter the error number 4434 and/or the error description "Document was deleted from this collection" when looping through a NotesDocumentCollection object and calling the DeleteDocument method.

I'm a big fan of OpenLog, which has shaved off a ton of development time when coding back-end objects that are difficult to debug with the LS debugger. Most recently, it helped detect a bug in my code that might never have been caught. The error wasn't fatal, but it revealed that my code just wasn't doing what I thought it should be doing.

Anyway, since Google is our friend when we run into issues like this, I thought I'd post it to benefit any future searchers. Notes help is fairly useless for troubleshooting error numbers and in this particular case the example code only retrieves the first document in the collection.

Credit for helping me solve this problem goes to Domino Power and Mick Moignard. The article is about folders, but the relevant piece has to do with utilizing a temporary NotesDocument object and setting it to your current NotesDocument object so you can use that object as the parameter in the DeleteDocument method. This allows you to use your current NotesDocument as the parameter in the GetNextDocument method at the end of your loop. Without it, the GetNextDocument has no reference point to refer to in the collection.

Here's an example where you want to remove a document from a collection based on some criteria (SomeFlag = 1) and maybe do something with the collection later on, such as StampAll.

'Assume I have already built the NotesDocumentCollection called docCol

'and I have dimensioned two NotesDocument objects, curDoc & tmpDoc

Set curDoc = docCol.GetFirstDocument

For i = 1 to docCol.Count

        If curDoc.SomeFlag(0) = 1 Then

                Set tmpDoc = curDoc

                Call docCol.DeleteDocument(tmpDoc)

        End If

        Set curDoc = docCol.GetNextDocument(curDoc)

Next

Using the temporary document allows you to not lose your reference to the current document in your collection.

This should help spur things along

2009-04-02T07:06:00.001-07:00

Accounting board poised to give companies more leeway in asset values. Looks like the market likes it:

My Sentiments Exactly!

2009-03-31T06:44:00.000-07:00

Although I don't share an interest in motorcycles, I do share their sentiments:

I would say the same to the New York Slimes if it were me...
(for background, look here)

Small Business: An IT Strategy Too Good to Pass Up

2009-03-28T19:00:00.000-07:00

Attention all small business owners! IBM Lotus Software has a product to handle just about all your I.T. needs. Lotus Foundations 1.1 delivers email, office productivity applications (word processing, spreadsheet, presentations), firewall and VPN, anti-virus, backup and recovery, to name just a few of the big pieces. Best of all, Foundations is delivered to your small business in one complete, easy to set up, self-maintaining package.

See for yourself by viewing this short video:

Foundations can bring your small business all the sophistication of enterprise-class applications with a price tag most any small business owner can't afford to pass up. I would love to have the opportunity to talk to you about what a valuable contribution Lotus Foundations can make to your business. Contact me.

Lotusphere Comes to You - Minneapolis

2009-03-26T17:41:00.000-07:00

If you haven't heard, Lotusphere Comes To You will be in Minneapolis April 15, 2009. The location is at the Park Place Doubletree. No excuses not to attend, admission is free!

Even more than the presentations on Social Software, Unified Telephony, Portal and LotusLive, I'm looking forward to visiting with the vendors. Be sure to swing through and try to visit with as many of the IBM Business Partners as you have time. They're a big reason LCTY is possible.

Look for me and say hello. See you there!

Minneapolis St. Paul Lotus Notes User Group Meeting

2009-03-25T08:22:00.001-07:00

Great turnout last night for the Minnesota Notes User Group. Tom and John did fine job highlighting the recent offerings from Lotus that were announced at LotusSphere this year. Thanks to the Meridian guys for providing the space to meet. I especially enjoyed some of the Q & A that occurred toward the end. I hope there's more of that in future meetings.

Also, it was good to have the opportunity to talk to a few Notes folks afterward at TGI Fridays. (Greg, Mark and Jeff, it was great to get to know you guys.) Hopefully the social time afterward will be a regular component of the meetings.

Finally, if you're a Notes person in the Twin Cities and haven't attended recently, I would highly recommend attending. There is great benefit in having a community of fellow Notes Admins and Developers to bounce ideas off and these days it doesn't hurt to do a little networking too.

Is what's interesting to me interesting to you?

2009-03-21T04:40:00.000-07:00

I've been running Google Analytics for a little while and was curious about what kinds of things people are interested in here. It kind of breaks down into a couple categories:
1. Business and/or Economy, 2. Lotus Notes. This makes sense as that's pretty much the two major categories I find interesting enough to write about. But lets dig a little deeper.

Overall, the most hits I've received on a single post falls into the Business and/or Economy category. A little blurb about the Miller High Life Superbowl ad seemed catch peoples attention. Probably because I titled the Post "Why Didn't Lotus Think of This?" To be fair, I did subtitle it "Don't blink or you'll miss Miller's Superbowl Ad." If you didn't see it, here it is:

As for my favorites, I liked my entry on the Long Tail and the one about how your people are your competitive advantage.

In the second catetory, Lotus Notes, the top vote getter was a reference to a comment I made on Ed Brill's blog. But to be fair, riding Ed's coattails is probably not a legitimate winner. So the number one really should be my post about the difficulty in locating some Lotus Foundations product information.

Seeing as I'm not by nature a complainer, I offer up my favorite in the Lotus Notes category: Notes Formulas for Strings and Lists. (But I am very partial to "Approaches to generating custom HTML of a document collection (view) from notes data via XML(DXL)" as I think the LotusScirpt XML processing classes are pretty handy.)

Contrarian words these days?...hope not!

2009-03-19T17:51:00.000-07:00

Thomas Paine: "I seek opportunity ... not security. I do not wish to be a kept citizen ... dulled by having the state look after me … I refuse to barter incentive for a dole; I prefer the challenges of life to the guaranteed existence."

MN Lotus Notes User Group Meeting 03/24/09

2009-03-17T15:00:00.000-07:00

If you're not already aware...

The Next Minnesota Lotus Notes User Group meeting has been scheduled.

Date/Time: Tuesday, March 24, 2009, 4:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Location:
Meridian IT, in the Park East Building, near I-394 & Hwy 100
Room 820
5775 Wayzata Blvd
St. Louis Park, MN 55416

Looking forward to mingling at TGI Friday's afterward. Hope to see you there!

More of this please!

2009-02-08T13:05:00.000-08:00

3M chief sees better economy by second half (a huge Notes shop, by the way):

"People get so fixated over what's gone" as they react to declining sales. "You need to focus on what's left. So it's about gaining market share."

Read the rest of George Buckley's comments here.

100 Best Business Books

2009-02-08T08:04:00.000-08:00

I love lists like this. I also love books, especially business books.

I thought I'd make a little list myself. Books from this list I own/have read:

Getting Things Done by David Allen
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
The Leadership Challenge by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner
In Search of Excellence by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.
Reengineering the Corporation by Michael Hammer and James Champy
A Whack on the Side of the Head by Roger Von Oech

Now I have a few more to add to my yet-to-read list:

Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will by Tichy and Sherman
Never Give In! Speeches by Winston Churchill
Secrets of Closing the Sale by Zig Ziglar
How to Become a Rainmaker by Jeffrey J. Fox
Growing a Business by Paul Hawken
Guerrilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson
The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander

What's on your business reading list? Anything you would add?

Tip of the hat to Bilal Jaffery @ Web 2.0, SMB and Lotus Foundations
Link to the original post: http://100bestbiz.com/more-on-the-100-best/

Thanks, Ed!

2009-01-22T18:04:00.000-08:00