CAPTURE Version 2.2 released (30th October 2008)

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!

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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)

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)

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!

CAPTURE Version 2.1.04 released (29th January 2008)

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)

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)

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 5.1.03 released (04 June 2007)

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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

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:

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NotesTracker Version 5.1 released (28 May 2007)

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.

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

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:

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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

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).