NotesTracker Version 5.0 Guide - Draft #9 for Beta1 is now available

Following a lot of work on SDMS and other things during the last few months, NotesTracker version 5.0 has been progressing well during March 2007 and is in its final stages: testing, documentation, more testing, adding more features, improving usability, more testing. (Some of the ideas tested and built into SDMS are also going to show up in NotesTracker v5.)

Many hours during the last two weeks have been devoted to the NotesTracker v5 Guide. All the new v5 features have been carefully described, with added documentation still happening daily as last-minute usability and function enhancements to NotesTracker v5 are made.

Apart from all the new stuff, the whole guide has been scoured for usability and errors.

Many sections have been substantially rewritten for improved readability and clarity. This includes a much better layout for the Table Of Contents (making it faster to jump to what you're looking for), plus a Task Table in the Developer Topics section making it even easier to follow the simple steps used to incorporate NotesTracker in your database designs. Some of this has rubbed off onto the product itself, as documentation improvements has mandated corresponding improvements to the software.

Since the public Beta2 of IBM Lotus Notes Domino 8 has made available a week or two ago, I've decided to add a further week or two to the NotesTracker v5 release schedule so that it can be tested against the fantastic new Notes 8 client and the Domino 8 server!

I'm also considering whether or not to add a further new feature or two, to make NotesTracker v5 even better. (One such possible feature is being able to nominate that tracking in a database be done only for specified users, which would be very handy for forensic auditing and so on.) If you have any last-minute requests or suggestions, then send them to us ASAP.

In the meantime, you can find out a lot about the new features and capabilities by downloading a copy of the 25th March 2007 draft of the NotesTracker Version 5.0 Guide. This edition is labeled DRAFT #9. Get it from either our web server in Australia or our web server in the USA

The PDF file size is around 5.5 MB, it's nearly three times the size of the V4 guide because lots of additional information and illustrations are in it.