Mission to Mars

And it only took 2 hours to get there!
OK, so it was Mars the confectionery company rather than the red planet.
Still, makes a good headline :-)

's-Hertogenbosch

Just returned from a town in the Netherlands that sounds like a big sneeze! Somehow it just doesn't seem right to have a place name beginning with 's-H.

Anyway, I was delivering a workshop to IS Projects, the winners of the 2008 Teamstudio Spotlight Awards for Remarkable Notes Applications. Part of the prize was a selection of Teamstudio products, and I was there to train them on the tools that were new to them and to show some of the new or advanced features of the tools they already owned. As you would expect, the team there is pretty switched-on, so this didn't take too long.

During the session one of the attendees, Erik Klessens, told me that it was possible to 'skin' the Notes client. Here's the site that tells you how:

http://blog.panagenda.com/pub/panablog.nsf/d6plinks/FLOR-7DRBHC

Nice job!

Domino Designer Not Installed? No Problem :-)

I was in France this week facilitating a 2-day Teamstudio training/workshop at a large French bank in La Défense, Paris. I had arranged to visit the customer on the day before the event to prepare the training room but, at the last minute, my contact was called to a meeting and I was not able to do the setup.

The developers did not have laptops, so the company provided a batch from a pool of machines retained for training purposes. Great. Unfortunately, when we started up the computers we found that although Notes had been installed, Domino Designer hadn't. As this session was about using Teamstudio tools to develop & maintain applications, this was a problem . . . Worse, the machines were ultra-secure. USB disabled, limited rights etc.

Happily, one of the developers - Pascal - reminded me of a little trick. If you simply create a text file in the Notes executable directory called designer.exe then Designer suddenly becomes available - launch the Notes client and you'll now see the Designer icon in the bookmarks bar. Don't believe me? I didn't the first time I heard of this trick! Try it out for yourselves.

And if anyone can remind me of the way to do this for Domino Administrator I would be most grateful.

Notes 8

Here's a most excellent post from LotusUserGroup.org all about installing & testing Notes 8

* Installing And Testing The Notes 8 Client, By Julian Robichaux

February 2008: the Lotus Notes 8 client has been "gold" code for 6 months, and 8.0.1 is about to be released. Have you started testing it yet?

IBM hasn't offered numbers on how many clients have upgraded to Notes/Domino 8 so far, but common speculation is that a lot of people were waiting for 8.0.1 to come out because they didn't want to install a "dot zero" release of software.

Fair enough, but have YOU been testing Notes 8? Do you have it installed on your workstation, playing with the new features and testing your applications on it? If not, here are a few tips on installing and testing the new client.

Understand the two different clients
There are actually two different versions of the Notes 8 client now: "Basic" and "Standard". The Basic client is essentially the same as the Notes client you're used to using, and it looks virtually the same as the Notes 7 client. This is for customers who want to upgrade but who either (A) don't have machines powerful enough to run the Standard client, or (B) don't want to shock their users with a modern, pleasant-looking new interface.

The Standard client is based on the Lotus Expeditor framework, which is an IBM customization of Eclipse. While it still runs the Notes executables in the background, the presentation layer is all done in Expeditor/Eclipse, which offers a lot of nice new interface and add-on possibilities.

From a functional standpoint, here's a good list of what the Standard client CAN do but the Basic client cannot:

http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21264877

Interestingly enough, you can actually launch the Basic client from a Standard client install by running nlnotes.exe from the Notes 8 install directory. As a Developer, you most certainly want to install the Standard client.

Install everything
Two of the optional components for a full (client + Designer + Admin) install are the Productivity Editors and the Composite Application Editor. Even if you don't plan on looking at those things right away, just go ahead and install everything. Either you'll want them later (like when you want to create a Composite Application), or someone will ask about them (like a manager who's curious about whether a spreadsheet will open in the new Notes editors).

Use a reasonably new computer
I actually do demos of Notes 8 sometimes on my 3-year-old Thinkpad with a Pentium 1.5 MHz processor and less than 1 GB of RAM, just to show people that you don't need a supercomputer to run the client. However, you may want something a little better than that.

At the very least, use a newer machine with more than 1 GB of RAM. If you're running Windows Vista, make it at least 2 GB of RAM. If you're the type of person who always has 8 or 10 programs running at the same time, give yourself another GB. The Standard client likes to do a lot of things when it runs, and the underlying Eclipse tooling means that everything is much more modular (and resource intensive) than the old client. This makes it powerful, extensible, and hungry.

And also, no matter what machine you run it on, it may take a while for the Notes 8 client to launch after you've double-clicked the icon. Get used to it. After it's started, things run much more quickly. If you can disable virus-scanning on the new Notes directory, that will tend to speed things up too.

You CAN install Notes 8 on the same computer as Notes 7
Yes, it IS possible to install Notes 7 and Notes 8 on the same workstation. That's what I do, and it's the same technique we've been using for years with concurrent Notes installations: rename the old install directory and adjust the registry when you're done. If you're not familiar with the technique, there are excellent instructions and information here:

http://www.assono.de/blog/d6plinks/Running-Notes-R5-6-7-8-concurrently

Just be aware that if you're not careful, Notes 8 will overwrite your existing Notes client installation. It's not that hard to avoid the problem, but you need to watch out.

It's mostly safe to edit Notes 7 apps with Notes 8, but be careful.
Just as a test, I kept going back and forth between Notes 7 and Notes 8 while I was developing my Lotusphere sample databases. Nothing seemed to break, but it was far from a scientific test. In older versions of the client there were sometimes strange issues with things like Action bars getting messed up if you used multiple client versions to edit, but I haven't noticed anything like that so far. The worst that's happened to me is LotusScript code that worked fine in 7 but required a recompile in 8 because of the old "Error loading UseLSX" error.

That being said, be careful editing your production applications with Notes 8 if you're "just testing". It's possible that you might stumble across some weird cross-version bug that makes your users mad.

One known area of incompatibility is web services: web services created or edited in Notes 8 WILL NOT WORK on Notes 7. You have been warned.

Read up on the new features
And of course you'll need to read up on all the nice new features of Notes 8. It's not enough to just test your old apps on the new client and say, "Yeah, that works." You should also learn about things like the sidebar, the new mail template, and composite applications. Here are some links to get you started:

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp4359.html
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247506.html
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/notes8-new/index.html

Rocky Oliver joins Teamstudio!

Read about it here!

Presentation tool

I do a fair few presentations every year and was recently introduced to a superb new piece of kit - a Logitech Cordless Presenter. It's a driverless device that allows you to:
- scroll forwards and backwards through Powerpoint presentations
- blank the screen
- set vibration warnings that help you manage your delivery timing
- also has a laser pointer.
I ordered one from Misco for £25 + VAT

Agile Programming

I thought this might strike a chord with the Notes developers out there. Remember, it doesn't have to be like this. Just because a technology allows you to do something quick and dirty doesn't mean you must to do it that way.