Stu Downes

The Lotus Notes 7.0 client, presently in Beta 3, is not a massive step change
from the 6.5 client. In this blog I’d like to look at the enhancements in the
Beta and also the announced enhancements in the Gold version (not yet available).

The BETA

• Autosave (at last) … for enabled applications an autosave function will
  save any open document locally for recovery after a client or OS crash.
• Close all tabs :o) one button to close all open databases/views etc.
• Save state of windows on exit … to allow your client to open with selected
  views and databases already open (like your in-box, to do, etc)
• Message marking - this is cool. A circle shows various messages. Empty =
  more than x recipients apart from you. Half filled = 2 to x recipients apart
  from you. Solid = you are the only recipient. great for prioritising that
  busy inbox.
• In build presence awareness now extends to calendar and to do lists. On
  the server side it extends to include the Domino Directory.
• Presence awareness icons changed (more messenger like)
• Close notes confirmation dialog box - for those like me who accidentally
  "X" notes!
• Microsoft office smart-tags now supported!
• Opening views does not lock your notes client!!!!! So that slow server or
  huge database view doesn’t stop you getting on with other work.
• Button in mail message to show message tread, so from within the message
  you can see the entire thread history.

The Gold Version

The enhancements in the client with the gold version will be mainly around
the Sametime integration. Roger Eames announced the following enhancements at
the recent DNUG conference in Hannover (where the follow on release to 7.0 was
first highlighted by IBM, funnily enough called "Hannover", much more
detail about this on Ed Brill’s site. These
were:

• Ability to launch meetings and collaboration from the integrated Sametime
  client inside the Notes client.
• Ability to sort names, show only online people and sort names in the integrated
  sametime client for Notes 7.
• Multithreaded integrated client - doesn’t stop views building etc. when
  chatting in the integrated sametime client.
• Ability to minimise the buddy list to the windows taskbar.
• Chat journalling to the notes mail database
• Ability to support notes url’s effectively allowing you to paste doclinks
  into sametime chats using the integrated client.

When I get myself sorted out I’ll blog with images so all will be much clearer!
For now words will have to do.

Notes 7 is likely to ship in August or September 2005.

Collaboration

Well I’m 2 years behind the time with this, and no doubt many of you will be using this technology right now. However, I’ve just discovered Powerpoint Producer, I like it, so it is blogged here.

From their website Microsoft have a free download for users with licenced copies of Powerpoint 2003.

The producer allows users to simply, and I mean simply - less than 2 minutes from intall, add audio and video to traditional Powerpoint slides. What this allows me to do is via my laptop record presentations as I present them - this is a large part of my job and the tool allows people to playback presentations through a browser. (now I need to get a webcam to add a face to the voice!).

I personally get hacked off with the amount of presentation material that is sent round in email, all you see are the slides and you don’t get to hear the presenter fill in the blanks. This tool allowed me to very quickly post a presentation I did about GSX Monitor for Domino to all my collegues so that they could playback the presentation at will, or for those who couldn’t attend see and hear the presentation at a later time.

I’m just annoyed it has taken me 2 years to discover it!

Collaboration

A collegue, Mark Sta-Ana pointed me to this “social bookmarks manager”.

http://del.icio.us

The site offers a superb tool to allow you to transport your favourite web links with you anywhere you access the internet. The other advantage is that it is social so each url is tagged and I can search for all other links with, for example, the tag “collaboration”. Not only does it list the sites it also lists who added the URL so you can build a network of people, most of whom also blog, using del.icio.us.

Your list is also RSS syndicated so you can update here and keep your blog URL list up to date as well - superb, I’ll be playing with this feature later.

Top site. Thanks Mark

Collaboration

This blog uses bblog. I do need to work on the template as I’m aware that the look and feel in Internet Explorer is not as good as the look and feel in Firefox. Apologies to the IE community for now!

Collaboration

XML is fast becoming the file format which vendors are clammering to adopt
in their products. My main interest area is with collaboration and I see two
key announcements recently which will bring great benefits in terms of opening
data to collaboration platforms.

• Office 12 XML document format for Word, Excel and Powerpoint (see Brian
  Jones’ Blog)
• Lotus, more quietly, announced RSS integration into the "Hannover"
  client (Notes and also XML feeds from Quickplace.

As more and more products jump on the XML bandwagon we may soon have a situation
where platforms aimed at providing document management and knowledge manegement
elements of collaboration will be able to interact more freely through RSS feeds
(and some work will be required for the security and integrity of these feeds
where commercially sensitive information is involved but one would expect most
of this to be dealt with at the network level).

My main area of interest at the moment has been thoughts around the humble
file server. The search capabilities of these devices have just been boosted
with the XML format as it should be possible to index header information from
the XML documents in order to allow rapid searching of huge volumes of data.
If fields in the XML headers could be linked to a users unique identifer (email
address, IM name, group name) then presence awareness at a file system level
would be possible. With smart search engines looking at keywords in header data
you could for example search for spectroscopy, this returns 1000 documents from
your physics company, but by drilling into the author field you see that 60
documents can be attributed to a particular group or individual.

I can foresee a complete re-code of many document manageent platforms and database
platforms in order to utilise the capability of more granular search and replace
from within XML based office documents.

The next interesting area will be the aggregator development and how that progresses
into an enterprise level desktop application ….. well theres one for another
post (but I’m still arguing with myself what to blog next, I think it will be
SIP and how that affects instant messaging environments and the interface between
different proprietry systems (the main corporate environments being Sametime
and LCS…..so I’ll aim to do that in the next 7 days).

Collaboration

Well, I’m just playing with my new blogging site. Hopefully over the next few months this will develop to reflect my views and also give some reference on collaboration.

Collaboration