NotesTracker validated against Notes/Domino 8.5

Just a short post to mention that NotesTracker underwent testing against IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5 during the Beta1 and Beta2 testing phases, and again a week or two ago against the official ND 8.5 release.

NotesTracker works fine in ND 8.5 (as it does with ND 8.). I could detect no functional issues at all.

Gratifyingly, this is in contrast to what happened with Notes 6.0, which introduced a bug in LotusScript’s handling of Rich Text fields forcing me to redesign the subroutines used for handling changes in the content of database fields.

Please note, however, that there’s now is a functional limitation, indeed for me it’s a major inconvenience: with the Notes 8.0 and 8.5 Standard client you’ll find that  the "Open in New Window" context menu option is missing from three ultra-convenient places where it was available before: view navigator, workspace tab, and workspace icon.

Consider the following screenshots, on the left the Notes 8.x Basic client and on the right the Standard client. Click an image to see an enlargement (in a new browser window):

Notes ND 8.5 Basic client - Open via workspace icon.	Notes ND 8.5 Basic client - Open via workspace icon is entirely absent. MISSING IN ACTION
Notes ND 8.5 Basic client - Open via view navigator.	Notes ND 8.5 Basic client - Open via view navigator is grayed out. MISSING IN ACTION
Notes ND 8.5 Basic client - Open via workspace tab.	Notes ND 8.5 Standard  client - Open via workspace tab is entirely absent. MISSING IN ACTION

Technorati Tags: NotesTracker,Lotus Notes 8

The ND 8.x Basic client works properly, as with earlier Notes client releases, as shown in the left column of the above table. No problems (or “no sweat” as we say in Australia).

But the Eclipse-based Notes 8.x Standard client simply hasn't implemented it yet, as shown in the right column of the above table. What a pity. I hope that IBM fixes this glaring omission soon, I (and one or two  others) asked IBM to rectify this way back in ND 8.0 Beta1 days.

It's a bit of a shame, but only significant if you happen to have implemented any auto-refresh RSS-style "Breaking News" views. Now you need to follow a a much more convoluted pathway to launch such views in separate external windows.

As explained in the NotesTracker Guide, the idea is to move the external views to the side where you can monitor them separately from the main Notes client window. There's also a brief description here.

This is not a NotesTracker limitation, rather it's caused by the as-yet failure of IBM to support this feature in the Standard client. The only way you can launch an external window is by fiddling around: you'll need to learn how to set up each such Breaking News view as a widget/gadget, and only after doing so will you be able to launch the view in an external window (via its context menu).

So with the Notes 8.x Standard client it's no longer same trivial operation of merely right-clicking on the view in the navigator or the tab across the top and then selecting Open In New Window from the context menu) as it was before.

Simple Signer for Lotus Notes Version 1.01 released (04 November 2008)

Technorati Tags: Lotus Notes,Database,Sign,Security,Deployment,Configuration

Today has been a busy day for me. While preparing for a presentation tomorrow, I’ve been dusting off my Lotus Notes freeware applications, checking them out and making small design tweaks here and there. This is the final one in the bundle.

Because of the strong security model that has always been one of the major features of Lotus Notes right from its outset, it is sometimes necessary to “sign” a database before it will work properly in your organization’s operating environment.

Here follows a brief, highly simplified explanation. It is definitely NOT intended to act as a tutorial in Lotus Notes/Domino security.

When the Notes database application was built, its design elements (components such as forms, views, frames, framesets, agents and much more) were all created by one or more developers. These design elements would have been given the “signature” of the original developer(s), which may not be (and generally should not be) adequate to pass the runtime security in your organization’s production environment.

In many but not all cases, it is sufficient to sign all of the design elements with an appropriately-authorized person’s Notes ID. This is exactly what Simple Signer does, in a few easy-to-perform steps.

STEP 1: Open the Simple Signer database. If necessary, switch to the desired the signing user’s ID file (top button), then click on the lower button (as shown by the red arrow) to select the database to be signed.

STEP 2: Use the normal “Choose Database” dialog to locate and select the desired database.

STEP 3: The selected database’s title, server and path are shown. Click on the lower button to sign ALL of the design elements in this database.

If your Notes ID has adequate signing authority for this particular database, it will be signed, else you’ll be informed that the signing process failed.

Remember that this is called the “Simple Signer” and it’s not meant (as distributed) to cope with complex signing requirements.

Because the Simple Signer’s design is not hidden, your can get your Notes developer to tailor the design to cope with more complex signing requirements. Otherwise, purchase a more powerful tool.

Simple Signer is a FREE tool designed to carry out a common, basic sign-everything-with-the-same-Notes-ID process and to do it both easily and quickly. … No more, no less. No apologies!

You can obtain your free copy from here or here.

Version 1.01 of Presenter for IBM Lotus Notes released (04 November 2008)

I don’t give many presentations these days, but expect to do so tomorrow afternoon at the Melbourne (Australia) Lotus User Group meeting.

So I took out my unique little “Presenter for Lotus Notes” application and brushed up a few cobwebs on it. No new functionality, mainly some color changes to alternate view rows and little things like that.

Its now ready for download at either http://asiapac.com.au/NotesPresenter_Download.htm or http://notestracker.com/NotesPresenter_Download.htm. Naturally, it’s still completely free.

But you are probably asking: “What on earth is Presenter for Notes?”

Well, the story behind Presenter goes like this…

I once did industrial chemistry and high school chemistry/mathematics teaching, then spent a long time at IBM (from 1970 to the mid-1990s, now retired), and find myself as a consultant still in IT 39 years after starting at IBM. My fortieth year in IT begins next January, is that good or bad I keep asking myself.

During all that time, I’ve seen a vast number of lessons, lectures, business presentations and the like. In the early days, they were done on blackboards and paper. Later overhead projectors were in vogue, with their transparent plastic “foils.” These foils, in any quantity, weighed a ton and weren’t much fun to prepare, distribute and lug around (as I can attest from giving lots of IBM presentations across Australia, and Asia while supporting the IBM System/38 and AS/400 and other systems).

Then in the 1980s and 1990s, along came Lotus Freelance and Microsoft PowerPoint and suchlike. A better thing? On the whole, probably so.

But overdone to the n^th degree. Now we have PowerPoint presentations in plague proportions! See here or here (especially look at the articles about “Unplug that projector” and “Drag and drop” and “warts” and “disaster”).

When I was to give a presentation several years ago, I asked myself if there was a different and/or better way.

Being active in the Lotus Notes community, I decided that “If you promote and sell it, you should use it!.” So I developed a “presenter” platform to be used in the Lotus Notes Client environment itself.

The rationale for having a tool like Notes Presenter is briefly outlined in an earlier blog post of mine, see Notes Presenter -- Let's eat our own dog food with more details on the download page given above. There’s a user guide built in to the database, in the “Help Using This Database” document.

You can use Presenter not just for preparing and giving presentations via a Lotus Notes Client, but also for packaging and delivering virtually any Notes applications (databases) together with any sort of related supporting files: executables, documents, data files (even other Notes databases, including design templates), and much more.

You could, as just one example, hold different versions/releases of a Notes application suite – or a presentation, or anything else -- either inside [separate documents held in] a single Presenter database or in multiple Presenter databases each one dedicated to s single version/release.

In fact, whatever can be attached to a Notes rich text field can be delivered via a Presenter database as one tidy self-contained package.

With the various Presenter views (such as the view by Category/Concept shown just above), and via full-text search, you can quickly and easily locate a particular slide or group of slides related to a given topic.

For example, in the question time at the end of a pitch, somebody asks you about a particular term you used that’s buried deep within one of many slides. Use a full-text search to rapidly locate that slide instead of fumbling around (as I’ve seen happen a number of times) and perhaps not even be able to find that slide again.

There’s a lot more I could say, but let me just say that if you’re a Lotus Notes Client user you should “eat your own dog food” and avoid using PowerPoint wherever possible. Download Presenter for Lotus Notes and go try it out!

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!

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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!

NotesTracker Guide Version 5.1 updated

Various relatively minor usability plus explanation changes have been made to the NotesTracker Guide today.

Please download your fresh copy of this PDF document, from the main server http://asiapac.com.au/UsageTracker_Download.htm#Documentation or backup server http://notestracker.com/UsageTracker_Download.htm#Documentation (feedback appreciated).

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 5.1.04 released (12 June 2007)

(Click to view a larger image)

Visit either notestracker.com or asiapac.com.au download NotesTracker version 5.1.04 evaluation or licensed editions, released today 12th June, 2007.

And don't forget to retrieve the updated NotesTracker Guide (find it at the bottom of the download page), because it has been updated to include the new features and several paragraphs added to better explain more clearly how deleted documents are tracked.

As shown in the image above, in the "General Tracking Controls" tab of the NotesTracker Configuration Document for each database being tracked you can now specify user(s) that you do not wish to track. For example, a database auditor might wish to be excluded so that his/her activities are not included in order not to distort usage metrics.

Just underneath that, as introduced in NotesTracker version 5.0, you can also specify the names of particular users that you do wish to track (which overrides the NotesTracker default of tracking all users of the database).

(Click to view a larger image)

Ignoring of database users (the first list of names) has precedence over explicitly-tracked users (the second list of names. If you happen to have the same user name in both lists, as circled in red just above, then that particular won't be tracked.

Together with the flexible alerting controls (see image below) that were introduced in NotesTracker Version 5.0, you now have an extremely wide range of options for configuring usage tracking in each database.

(Click to view a larger image)

And the options are all very easy for you to set up.

With NotesTracker, you definitely don't have to be a technical specialist to monitor and administer your application database usage!

NotesTracker Version 5.1.03 released (04 June 2007)

(Click to view a larger image)

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:

(Click to view a larger image)

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.

(Click to view a larger image)

SDMS Version 4.2 released (14 April 2007)

Already SDMS is up to version 4.2.02 (not just 4.2) after two daily updates since first release last Thursday.

The updates include a number of minor "tweaks" and (see accompanying image) an action button added to the three Alerts views to enable otherwise "dead" scheduled mail to be processed.



SDMS Version 4.2.02 is now available, and can be downloaded from either http://asiapac.com.au/SDMS_Download.htm or http://notestracker.com/SDMS_Download.htm

The reason for having this button is discussed in the built-in Help Using This Database (which gives a brief SDMS tutorial).

Be sure to find out about the new NotesTracker Version 5.0 capabilities now available in this version of SDMS.

The NotesTracker Guide is downloadable from either http://notestracker.com/UsageTracker_Download.htm#Documentation or http://asiapac.com.au/UsageTracker_Download.htm#Documentation

CAPTURE Version 2.1 released (12 April 2007)

Today we have released the latest and greatest version of out FREE application CAPTURE ... Customer And Project Tracking (plus Usage Reporting Extensions).

You may download CAPTURE V2.1 from either http://asiapac.com.au/CAPTURE_Download.htm or http://notestracker.com/CAPTURE_Download.htm

The major new feature of CAPTURE V2.1 is the inclusion of NotesTracker Version 5.0 capabilities (see previous announcement earlier in this web log, athttp://notestracker.blogspot.com/2007/04/notestracker-version-50-is-released.html ).

This brings powerful new capabilities to CAPTURE, such as the ability to nominate and track "special" documents (any document that has significance to you, for whatever reason), the sending of e-Mail alerts (when fields are changed, documents deleted, "special" documents are used, etc), the ability to track the actions only for specified users, and more!

SDMS Version 4.2 Beta #1 released

Version 4.2 of SDMS has been released today, 10 April 2007 (and while being labeled "Beta #1" it should not be much different if at all from the final V4.2 release).


It has been upgraded to include NotesTracker Version 5.0 capabilities (see the recent post http://notestracker.blogspot.com/2007/04/notestracker-version-50-is-released.html for that announcement).


This includes such things a the ability to specify and track "special documents", mailed-in documents, pasted documents and to generate e=mail alerts for all sorts of database events. The NotesTracker Guide Version 5.0 has full details of all such new capabilities.


Here's a sample e-mail alert message;




SDMS Version 4.2 can be downloaded from either http://asiapac.com.au/SDMS_Download.htm or http://notestracker.com/SDMS_Download.htm

NotesTracker Version 5.0 is released (4/4/2007)

We are pleased to announce that Version 5.0 of NotesTracker is now available for download, from either:

• http://notestracker.com/UsageTracker_Download.htm
• http://asiapac.com.au/UsageTracker_Download.htm

Be sure to download the latest edition of the NotesTracker Guide Version 5.0 (see link at the bottom of the same page).

Please enjoy!

NotesTracker Version 5.0 Guide (final) is now available

The last feature has been added to NotesTracker Version 5.0 and the new version should be ready to release by early April (or perhaps even the end of March).

A major new feature has been incorporated,in a last-minute burst of development and testing. It was too valuable to be left out. It is described in the Developer Topics section of the finalized NotesTracker Version 5.0 Guide


It goes by the name of "Fast Design Propagation" and means that in many cases it should now take only a few minutes to modify a database to work with NotesTracker. (That is, to use the standard NotesTracker feature set, certainly not to make extensive modifications of the way that NotesTracker interfaces with a particular database to meet special usage tracking requirements.)

This final enhancement goes a long way to addressing one objection about NotesTracker, that you have to devote develop time to getting in and modifying a database's design. It means that you now should be able to justify rolling out NotesTracker more widely than with earlier releases, due to the far lower developer workload involved.

Enough of this sickening super-hyperbolic over-exaggeration ...

The NotesTracker Version 5.0 Guide is available from:

• Australian web server: http://asiapac.com.au/Downloads/NotesTracker_Guide_Version5.0.pdf
  
• Web server in USA: http://notestracker.com/Downloads/NotesTracker_Guide_Version5.0.pdf

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.