On this theme:  Last week I wanted to collect ideas from my colleagues for topics to cover in an upcoming presentation on ND7.
     I could have just sent out an email and asked everyone to email me back.  Instead, I set up a Domino Wiki (using the template provided on OpenNTF), then sent a link to the Wiki to everyone.
     This not only let people provide anonymous feedback, but "the medium is the message"; it puts out the idea that "hey, you can do a Wiki in Notes!"  (In some cases, it gets the message across, too, that there is such a thing as a Wiki, and here's how it behaves.)

     Now looking for other opportunities to dazzle my colleagues.

Update:  forgot to give the link for this campaign, on Julian Robichaux's blog.

As I said in the last entry, it's amazing to me.  We're all from rival clubs who will try to beat each other soundly during the coming months.  Yet here we are, working with each other to help each other become better coaches.  It turns out I'm one of the more experienced fencers here (although mostly in sabre, not foil, and at a mediocre skill level).  Many people here have only been fencing for a few years.  In some cases, they took up fencing because they teach at schools which needed fencing coaches, so they've had very little time to learn the sport.  On the other end are people who have competed at high-level tournaments, who are moving into coaching.  All of us will return home and stand before a group of beginning students, who have only seen fencing in the movies.  We'll all face a similar challenge:  How do we help these people add skills to their interest?  Can we encourage some of our students to move from interest to passion?

Here we aren't competitors, but collaborators.

Two months from now?  Different story!

The first thing we think of when we think "design", of course, is the appearance of something.  I tend to dismiss appearance, myself, but that's a personal bias.  I know it's important, but I have a hard time bringing myself to care much about whether a particular background is this color or that, or whether Arial is a better font than Helvetica.  Frankly, as long as I can read it with my bad eyesight, that's enough for me.  If everything were black or blue text on a white screen, I'd be satisfied.  That's not enough for everyone, though, and so it's important for me to be able to get help prettying things up when I need it.

The more interesting part of design to me, though, is the Structure.  What are the parts?  What comes in?  What goes out?  How do all the moving parts fit together?  These are the things that, to me, make it possible to tell a good design from a bad one.  Does the application do what it's supposed to do?  When I click on this button, what happens, and is it everything I expect to happen?

Quite frankly, I don't expect IBM to know how to do this for me or my company.  Sure, it'd be nice if IBM had, say, a Notes/Domino template for project management, but just try deploying one in most companies.  The arguments start.  Which project management methodology to use?  Which pieces of the method do we really need, and which are a waste of time?  Can we really afford to train everyone to use a PM tool?  And so forth.  If the IBM tool differs from the method the company decides to deploy, what then?  The great thing about Domino is the ability to customize, or even to throw out a design completely and build from scratch.

I get more value, quite frankly, from OpenNTF and the Notes designer forums than from the templates IBM builds for me.  I also experience a lot of frustration dealing with the out-of-the-box tools some companies throw at me; whenever I get an upgrade of MS Word or Excel, I end up having to switch off a bunch of features someone half a continent away decided I need.  I'm not so sure I want IBM spending a lot of time going down the same path.

To me the New Black is collaboration, and that includes collaboration with other designers and professionals who are out here doing business and building tools to do business.

Setting a database to open to a default frameset is all well and good, but the standard frameset opens a particular view or page. For our work management database, our users wanted to open whatever view they were in last.

Kevin's tip gives the details, but in essence, we save the last view the user visited in a profile document, and then the next time the user opens the frameset, a formula in the content frame of the frameset opens the last-visited view.

Our database has three different framesets, so we set three different fields in the user's profile document, tracking the last view visited in each frameset. Otherwise, we pretty much use what Kevin laid out.

Show-n-Tell Thursday

We were asked to build an application to replace a Sharepoint app which features a "Shared Documents" page.  Clicking on any of these items in the Shared Documents page automatically launches the item in its native application (Word, Acrobat Reader, whatever).

In Notes, of course, we'd simply attach the file to a document in a standard Doc Library database.  However, there the end user had to click twice -- once to open the Notes document and once to launch the attachment.  We could simply set up the application to launch first attachment, but we had several issues with that approach:

1.  When using the native "Autolaunch first attachment" form property to launch Word documents, the Word document opens but loses focus; the user sees the Notes window, and the Word document is in the background.  Rocky's tip gives background on this.

2.  Even if that weren't an issue, the document might not necessarily be an attachment.  It might reside on a shared network drive, or in another Notes application.  In those cases, we didn't want to have a second copy as an attachment; we wanted to reference the master document on the network drive.  We could put an .ndl file or something in the document, but most of our end users don't know how to create .ndl files, and

3.  we wanted to make this easy for the end user to maintain.  Nothing more irritating than to have to submit a work request every time you want to share a document with your colleagues.

4.  We wanted to include other types of links in the same view.  If the resource someone needs to share is not a Word document, or a PDF, but rather is a public webpage, or a SQL Server table or something, we wanted to be able to include those in the view as well.

The result was an "Autolaunch Entry" form, and its two accompanying views, the public view and the "maintenance" view.  Ryan Case, of Case Innovations, of Clive, Iowa, is the designer primarily responsible for this.  If the Autolaunch Entry view is opened in the maintenance view, Notes opens a Notes document, which can be edited to deliver one of five things:

• an attached document
• a file on a network drive (provided the user has access, of course)
• a webpage
• a Notes application
• any other result which can be programmed in LotusScript

Anyone in the company can set up an entry to do the first four, simply by attaching a file, speciying a server/path, or entering the desired URL.  The fifth option requires knowledge of LotusScript, of course.

If the above view entry is opened from the public view, Ryan's view calls a script from queryopendocument which interprets which of the five options the document author has chosen and acts accordingly:  launch the attachment, open the website, run the custom LotusScript, or whatever.

Ryan's original implementation, which he built for us a year ago, didn't include the launch-attachments feature, but when I saw Rocky's tip I knew we could adapt it to do so.  We rewrote our scripts to be extensions of Rocky Oliver's LS.utilities.BE.6 and LS.utilities.FE.6 script libraries, which are included in the sample database he provides in the aforementioned tip.

So, thanks to Rocky, Ryan and "Show N' Tell Thursdays"!