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:

(Click to view a larger image)

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).

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.

SDMS Version 4.1 released

Following some useful feedback, we have released version 4.1 of SDMS.

You can download it from either our Australian Web server or USA server.

As well as the major new "publishing life cycle" feature of version 4.0, this latest version introduces Breaking News view enhancements, enhanced document security (Reader fields), enhanced documentation (in the built-in Help About and Help Using documents), and more!

Version 4.1 also fixes a bug in the setting of the three heading lines that was inadvertently introduced with version 4.0.

We expect the next major release of our premier product -- that is, NotesTracker Version 5.0 -- to be released for Beta testing soon. The new NotesTracker V5.0 features will shortly thereafter be incorporated into SDMS (and also into out other free application, CAPTURE).

SDMS Version 4.1 beta now available

A test version "SDMS version 4.1 Beta #4" is now available for download.

Get your copy from the download page here or here (go to the middle of the page for the download links and password).

Be sure to read the Help About and the Help Using documents before using the new features, which include:

• Readers field security to control who can read sets of documents


• Sets of documents, once approved for publication, can be set to display within a given date range (which can be in the future)
  
  


• The refresh interval of the Breaking News view can be specified from 5 seconds to 2 hours (previously was fixed at 60 seconds).


• The header fields can be collapsed to free up screen "real estate"

SDMS V4.0 and CAPTURE V2.0 released

Yesterday -- 06 November 2006, Melbourne, Australia time -- enhanced versions of two of our FREE Lotus Notes applications were released. They have been in beta testing release mode for a month or so.


CAPTURE Version 2.0 is a free CRM database. The name stands for "Customer And Project Tracking plus Usage Reporting Extensions" and the usage reporting is carried out by means of the built-in copy of our unique NotesTracker database usage reporting tool.

As well as numerous small enhancements, this new version of CAPTURE includes a "mail merge" function so that you can now easily merge any of your mail memo documents (from your Notes mail Inbox view) anywhere into the hierarchy of CAPTURE documents. Doubtless your staff have lots of valuable information about your customers and prospects held in their Notes mail files, so this new mail merge capability is a significant new way to incorporate this vital information directly into the CAPTURE database.

Additionally, Version 2.0 of CAPTURE now has a full set of NotesTracker views built in, so that merely by choosing "internal logging" you will cause NotesTracker to store all your tracking documents into the CAPTURE database itself (rather than in an external NotesTracker Repository database). This makes it possible to examine the database usage without having to switch out of the database.

SDMS -- the Simple Document Management System -- also FREE, and now with the same handy "mail merge" function as CAPTURE.

There is also a major new "publishing life cycle" capability, so that (compared with earlier SDMS versions) instead of just being able to create/edit/submit documents and nothing more, they must now be approved, and then finally be released for publishing. Following the "keep it simple" philosophy of SDMS, these are quick-and-easy operations (merely the clicking of radio buttons) that add very little overhead to SDMS document preparation.

According to the SDMS design philosophy, the publishing steps are designed to be simple to carry out.

Of course, as before SDMS has our powerful NotesTracker usage tracking capability built in.

Note: If you happened to download SDMS Version 4.0 yesterday, please be aware that there's already an updated version 4.01 available! It released this less than an hour ago this morning (07 November 2006, Melbourne time). An enhancement was made to the way that editing of the SDMS Database Profile Document is managed.

You'll find links to both the SDMS and the CAPTURE download pages on our web site's home page: that is, either asiapac.com.au or its mirror notestracker.com

Announcing CAPTURE Version 2.0 Beta

Today, we're very pleased to announce that availability of the beta Version 2.0 of CAPTURE. This is a popular CRM application and it's FREE.

Version 2.0 has numerous small "running improvements" as well as:

- Improved layout and appearance, more modular navigation

- NotesTracker views directly integrated into the CAPTURE database (no need for an external NotesTracker Repository datbase to hold usage log documents)

- Capability to directly merge/insert memos from your personal Notes Mail inbox

You can download CAPTURE from eith http://www.asiapac.com.au/CAPTURE_Download.htm or http://notestracker.com/CAPTURE_Download.htm

Announcing SDMS Version 4.0 Beta

Go to either http://www.asiapac.com.au/SDMS_Download.htm or http://notestracker.com/SDMS_Download.htm to download the initial beta Version 4.0 beta of SDMS - the Simple Document Management System for Lotus Notes/Domino.

In this version, SDMS has been enhanced significantly to incorporate document lifecycle management -- simple, yet for many situations "good enough" -- as well as improved user interface.

Plus, not to be overlooked: the very handy ability to merge your important Notes Mail memo documents with ease, straight into your SDMS database hierarchy (without any cumbersome "cut and paste" steps involved).

As with earlier versions, SDMS still includes NotesTracker built right in. This provides comprehensive document usage tracking, making SDMS unique amongst document management systems for Lotus Notes.

Who's been accessing my Lotus Notes mail?

I do not hide the fact that I use a Web site tracking service (or two) to see what sort of visits there are to asiapac.com.au and its mirror notestracker.com. I do this so as to better understand the site's traffic pattern and why people are visiting, thereby to be able to improve the site. This is menioned under "Site Visit Metering" on on the Policy and Disclaimers page. (Every Web site should have this sort of page, but it's a sad fact that most don't!)

Anyhow, yesterday (2nd July, 2006) there was one site visitor who had performed a Google search and arrived at my site. The search words were: "lotus notes suspect a colleague is accessing my email proof" -- you can click on the following link to see the results if you like:
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=lotus+notes+suspect+a+colleague+is+accessing+my+email+proof&meta=

My point in bringing this up is that NotesTracker is quite capable of monitoring all activity in your Notes Mail, suspicious or otherwise. Indeed, one customer purchased NotesTracker just to do this.

A few relatively simple changes to the design of the Mail Template are all that's needed. Then you have comprehensive tracking and auditing of mail Memo creation, deletion, updating, reading -- by anybody and everybody (not just the Mail database's owner): see here or here.

You will see if any unexpected person(s) accessed you mail file, which particular Memo document(s) they accessed, the date and time plus for how many seconds they had the Memo open, whether or not they attempted to delete any Memo or make any updates, and more.

This is "par for the course" as far as NotesTracker is concerned. NotesTracker can do this for any Notes database (if you have access to its design, that is). But NotesTracker certainly does seem to have what's needed for detailed Notes Mail auditing and compliance, wouldn't you agree?

NotesTracker Guide Version 4.4 update (25 May 2006)

For all NotesTracker users and evaluators ...

An updated edition of the NotesTracker Guide for Version 4.4 is now available for download. Get it from either of:

• http://asiapac.com.au/UsageTracker_Download.htm#NotesTracker_Documentation
  or
• http://notestracker.com/UsageTracker_Download.htm#NotesTracker_Documentation

There are some better explanations in paragraphs here and there, but the biggest improvement is in the Developer Topics section. The steps for implementing NotesTracker design modifications in a target database have been concisely listed in a table near the start of the section. Also, the changes needed for the tracking of View Opens have been moved up so that they now form part of the list of steps.

The intent is to lay out a clearer picture of the total NotesTracker design change process. Your comments, impressions and any suggestions for improvement would be most welcome.

Note: please watch out for a maintenance release of NotesTracker -- Version 4.43 -- to be made available in the coming week or so. Apart from some minor cosmetic changes, V4.43 fixes a bug in the tracking of Domino database field changes made via a Web browser.

After that, focus will be on completing Version 5.0 of NotesTracker.

Notes Presenter (initial Beta version released)

Please visit the following link to find out more about our new freeware application ... Presenter for IBM Lotus Notes otherwise known as Notes Presenter:

http://notestoneunturned.blogspot.com/2006/05/notes-presenter-lets-eat-our-own-dog.html

"Simple Signer" - Freeware tool to easily sign Lotus Notes databases

This is a deliberately simple tool enabling you to select any Lotus Notes database -- local, or on a Lotus Domino server -- and then to sign all of that database's design elements (forms, views, agents, etc).

It has a single purpose: to make the database signing process as easy and strightforward as possible, even for Lotus Notes users with little or no technical background. Following the KISS principle it's "a simple tool for a single task."

And it's free for you to use wherever and however you like... ENJOY!

You can download the the "Simple Signer" tool from either http://asiapac.com.au/Simple_Signer_Download.htm (Australian server) or http://notestracker.com/Simple_Signer_Download.htm (USA server).

The User Guide can be downloaded from http://asiapac.com.au/Downloads/Sign_all_design_elements_in_a_Notes_database.pdf or http://notestracker.com/Downloads/Sign_all_design_elements_in_a_Notes_database.pdf

And while you're at the site help us out by taking a look at NotesTracker, and requesting an evaluation copy!

---------------------------------------------

WANT TO SIGN ONLY SPECIFIC DESIGN ELEMENTS?
If you want a more granular tool for your Notes database signing requirements, then you really should consider purchasing a copy of signEZ from Ytria. It has great flexibility in the way that you can select and filter specific types of design elements.

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:


"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!

Controlling the size of a NotesTracker Repository database

Two recent IBM developerWorks articles are a must-read for Notes/Domino developers (and also very important for administrators):

• Lotus Notes/Domino 7 application performance: Part 1: Database properties and document collections
• Lotus Notes/Domino 7 application performance: Part 2: Optimizing database views

In the second article, under the heading View Performance Testing the point is made that:

The biggest "performance killers" in terms of view indexing are categorized columns. Sort columns add a small amount of overhead as do some other features, such as the Generate unique keys option.

There are two accompanying charts that reinforce this statement. The first one displays View index size versus response times and we see that the categorized views (the two rightmost bars) having index sizes considerably larger than those of comparable non-categorized views:

Column sorting uses far less resources than view categorization, as shown by the shorter bars in the chart. (The other chart shows View size versus refresh time and demonstrate that the categorized views also have distinctly longer response times.)

In a NotesTracker Repository database -- assuming that you retain the database design as distributed -- the usage log documents are shown via a dozen or so Database Activity views. These views select all of the usage log documents in the repository, whereas the other views select subsets of usage log documents (in some cases quite small subsets) and should not have all that much impact on the repository's size.

Here's a typical view, the Database Activity by Action / User view (shown with the new navigator coming in NotesTracker Version 5.0):

One user of NotesTracker has reported that it only took around 55,000 usage log documents for their NotesTracker Repository database to reach a size of 1 GB, so you may see a need to somehow minimize the database's size.

In light of the findings about categorized views described in the articles, if you feel that you want to reduce the size of any of your NotesTracker Repositories, one good way way to do so would seem to be by deleting unwanted and/or infrequently-used categorized views from the repository's database design. (You could might gain some advantage by implementing some of the other techniques described in the two articles.)

We would be very interested in recieving your feedback if you try doing any of this.

Comprehensive Notes Mail monitoring, via NotesTracker

The IBM developerWorks article Discover the power of Calendar Delegation in Lotus Notes shows you how to how to setup and use the Calendar Delegation feature in the Lotus Notes client to grant another Notes user access to your mail file and act on your behalf.

The article starts off:

"One of the most powerful tools in the IBM Lotus Notes client is the Calendar Delegation feature. Calendar Delegation allows you to grant another Notes user access to your mail file, enabling the delegated user to view and edit your calendar data, send email messages on your behalf, and act as a manager of your mail and calendar data. This scenario is typical in the case of an executive who employs an administrative assistant to schedule his meetings and appointments and to respond to non-confidential email messages. To allow the administrative assistant to manage his Notes mail file, the executive specifies the assistant as a delegate for the mail file. In turn, the administrative assistant may be responsible for managing several users' calendars, particularly if he supports several executives."

Naturally, the presumption here is that the delegate is trustworthy and this would generally be the case.

Nevertheless there exists the possibility of privacy or data security violation if a delegate for whatever reason, malicious or otherwise, mishandles or exposes the contents of your Notes Mail database.

One North American company justified the purchase of NotesTracker to extend the design of their Notes Mail design template so that all usage of a person's Notes Mail database can be monitored in detail.

As for any database being monitored via NotesTracker, they can audit each and every database document operation -- Create, Read, Delete, and Update (including every field value change).

Authorized people can view what everybody, including yourself, did to your Notes Mail database and keep an archive going back as far in time as required.

This sort of thing is quite simple to do and just "par for the course" with NotesTracker!

So if you have a Notes Mail monitoring or compliance requirement, you should consider using NotesTracker to implement a proven solution to this important need.

NotesTracker V5 progress report - 13th January 2006

Development of version 5 of NotesTracker is well under way. Many of the proposed new features are working (but there's a fair bit more testing, refinement and documentation to do).

One key new feature is the option of nominating individual documents in a database as being "special" so as to be able to focus more on them compared with other documents in the database. This enhancement is in response to a user request to have the ability, while still tracking all document usage, to place greater emphasis on certain documents that for some reason or other are especially important. Certain of their Domino servers play a key role in their network (as might be the case in your Domino network), and it's important to them to be able to closely monitor and control all changes in the Server Documents of these particular servers. (Of course, the same ability to focus on certain specific "special" documents would be widely applicable to other sorts of databases as well.)

Another enhancement will be the ability to track the Pasting of documents has been added to the previous list of actions trackable via NotesTracker: document Updates, Creates, Deletes and Reads (not to forget View Opens).

Right from the start (NotesTracker V1) you could always passively view database actions as soon as they appeared viewable in the NotesTracker Repository, which would be virtually immediate for a local Domino server or at the enext replication cycle for a remote Domino servers. But with NotesTracker V5 there will be a major new feature: the sending out of e-mail alerts for important tracked events. This brings proactivity to NotesTracker, instead of your having to rely on passively detecting actions while perusing the Usage Log (possibly long after the event).

The proactive sending out of NotesTracker alert messages will be able to be specified for:

• Any combination of the above document actions (as before, against any and all documents in a database).
• All actions, or any combination of actions, carried out on "special documents".
• In the case of updates, the ability to specify a list of important fields -- "trigger fields" -- that cause an alert to be sent whenever any of the fields is changed (rather than just the document as a whole having been updated). This will provide an extremely powerful auditing and control capability!

You can choose to generate the e-mail alerts either "immediately" (synchronously, at the time that an action occurs) or "delayed" (via a scheduled agent, every 5 minutes or at some longer time interval). Which of these two send options you choose is mainly a performance issue.

Much of the NotesTracker code base is being reviewed and touched to make these (and other) enhancements. In the process, quite a few usability enhancements and tweaks are being made.

Tracking of Rich Text fields

As a deliberate design decision, NotesTracker does not track changes to the full contents of a Rich Text (RT) field, but only the changes to the "plain text" component of each RT field. This was done to minimize the size of the Usage Log (the NotesTracker Repository database).

If the entire contents of each and every RT field in the document were to be logged, this could generate some inordinately large Usage Log documents, since it would be necessary to store the Before and After values for each and every file attachment and embedded object in the field (which in some cases would amount to many MB per Usage Log document).

It was considered that for most usage tracking purposes, it would be sufficient to track only the changes to the "plain text" part of the RT fields. If this is not adequate for a particular databse, then some code changes would be needed (particularly in the "UsageTracker_FieldsAfterUpdate" subroutine).

Desirable NotesTracker V5 features? Your feedback needed!

This is an invitation to all NotesTracker users -- and also those who have evaluated NotesTracker but perhaps found some feature or capability lacking.

Please let us know ASAP what changes and new features you think NotesTracker needs. Use this blog to post your comments.

To kick things off and get you thinking, here are some possible changes, not in any particular order nor guaranteed to be implemented:

• e-mail alerts -- for example, when a particular document is updated (or deleted) or when a particular field is updated, or when a specific database or document is accessed by particular person or group? Would this sort of alerting be of any value? How configurable should it be (how detailed should the tracking go for this)? Can you suggest how it might be implemented? Our thinking is that for best performance of tracked databases any such e-mail alerts should be sent asynchronously, say once every 15 minutes or hour? (What frequency would be satisfactory for such alerts?)
• Sample code for tracking such things a button clicks?
• Sample code for showing how to enable usage tracking for database accesses carried out via LotusScript agents? (Because NotesTracker is LotusScript-based, it will only be possible to do this with LotusScript, not for Formula Language or other database accesses such as importing documents.)
• Sample code for adding NotesTracker capabilities to a Notes Mail database (for compliance monitoring, tracking of changes in mail message text, etc). This would make it harder for somebody to get away with falsification of mail violating privacy of mail database owners.
• Sample code for automatically generating RSS feeds from Breaking News types of views? (And qhat about Atom feeds, is this important?)
• New field for configuration field for "Tracked Database's Category", so that accesses across multiple databases can be grouped together in the reporting views. (For example, all Human Resource databases, or a all Marketing/Sales databases or all Finance/Accounting databases.)
• Add a "legend" to the NotesTracker Repository which describes in outline the meaning of the various tracking fields and options?
• Provide example methods for producing managenent reports and charts from the usage log entries in a NotesTracker Repository?

A lot of thinking has already taken place and a few things have already been developed: an improved "look and feel" for the NotesTracker Repository, and an agent for easily signing the two NotesTracker Web Agents with the appropriate ID for execution in the Domino server environment. (Tentaive V5 release would be mid- to late-first-quarter 2006.)

Over to you for some good ideas!

Announcing the NotesTracker News & Tips weblog

NotesTracker -- from Asia/Pacific Computer Services -- the "universal enabler" for document usage tracking and metrics for your Lotus Notes and Domino database applications.

General product information iabout NotesTracker is available at the following mirror-image Web sites. Choose the server that is more often available or faster for you:

• asiapac.com.au (Web server in Australia)
• notestracker.com (Web server in the USA)

This weblog was set up in November 2005 to provide you with breaking news about NotesTracker, tips and techniques, background information, and to solicit your feedback on NotesTracker (as it exists or what improvements/additions you'd like to see in the product).