Wednesday, March 15, 2006

NotesTracker V5 -- An ides of March progress report

Unlike Julius Caesar's terminal experience in 44 BC, there are no bad omens for NotesTracker at the ides of March in 2006!

Progress has been steady. Not only have we been adding some powerful new functionality, but we've also been taking the time to improve code modularity for easier maintenance and extendability.

We've also been revamping some of the existing features to make them work better and display information more effectively. Thus in the NotesTracker Repository database you'll find a much improved navigator design. As well, all of the repository's views were checked carefully and tweaked where beneficial to information presentation.

Here's one example, the improved-look navigator, showing the new "Special Documents" views:

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"What is meant by special documents?" you might ask.

Well, in NotesTracker V5 you can easily signify that specific documents in a tracked database are "special" to you -- simply by placing a new control field into those documents and, programatically or otherwise, setting some appropriatively descriptive (non-blank) text into the field. Doing this will be "as easy as falling off a log" just like everything else in NotesTracker.

A couple of examples: there may be certain servers in your Domino network that have special importance (hubs, etc), so you will want to closely monitor any field changes made to their Server Documents. Or there may be certain customers in a sales database that you wish to focus on so as to track their orders, or complaints, or anything else about them that is important to you. The thre "special documents" views enable you to passively monitor such documents.

What's more, in NotesTracker V5 there is also e-mail alerting: that is, the automatic generation of e-mail messages whenever a "special document" is acted upon (deleted, updated, etc) even down to being alerted only if certain fields that you specify are updated.

So this forthcoming release moves NotesTracker from reactive to proactive monitoring and auditing of your database contents!