Notes… does some very intuitive stuff that Microsoft just didn’t consider.
This is priceless. I was in search of a complex url, one with many different characters, so I did a search at ebay.com. The first thing that came to mind was Notes, and boy did i find something amazing... Apparently for a bid of $60 you can get Lotus Notes 6.5.2! It sounds like an amazing piece of software. I must warn you, after reading the details, "... There's a lot to it, so you may need a reference manual that unfortunately cannot be supplied.", you've been warned.
And what about the box you might ask? Well, you're screwed; "Additionally there isn't a box, but it does come safely and securely packaged." all this functionality and no box! This could be the deal breaker for me. "
The best part? If you're new to "Lotus Notes"... the seller is available for questions after the sale, so free tech support, potentially FOREVER, you know, for when 'Notes' is unable to find 'Domino'!... "I am easily accessible to answer all and any questions post sale date!!"
I'm guessing the motivation behind the winning bidder is this... "It is full and perfectly 100% functional and does some very intuitive stuff that Microsoft just didn't consider.".
....Notes 6.5.2 ebay post....
Happy Purchasing...!
My current project: Broadcastr. It’s Twitter meets Facebook’s wall for the enterprise.
Before I spend too much time building the prototype I wanted to throw the idea out to the community to see what you think.
Broadcastr is a light weight communications vehicle that takes the best of Twitter and Facebook wall and puts it inside your firewall. It will deliver as a Ubuntu JeOS, LAMP, VM Appliance that can be quicly started on any VM server. It will use Lotus Domino LDAP for authentication against the Domino Directory. I have posted a screen shot to give you and idea... Screen shot of Broadcastr.
The Overview
Your company is looking for a Twitter / Facebook wall type solution. (I will spare you from explaining why your company would want this). You simply start up this VM, answer a few questions and hit the url with a browser. The user base will be built over time as new users login. They will be challenged for their Lotus Notes http username and password and upon LDAP authentication a page will be created for them. The future of the users session will be handled by PHP and MySQL. The admin of the system will determine the life of the session. Since it's inside the firewall, the default is set very far out so there is an illusion of SSO.
The page that is create will act as a wall of sorts. Anyone can write on anyone's wall and since its a company only site anyone can follow anyone. This concept is broken out further, anyone can create a 'project'. A project is identical to a persons page. Anyone can follow a public project, allowing them to read or pull feeds from broadcasts from that project page.
Similar to People and Projects there will be the concept of Lotus Domino directory groups. Directory groups will also have their own page. Only the groups chosen to be pulled into the system will be managed over time. This will cut down on synchronization of the two directories in the background. Any person group from the Domino Directory can be selected and instantly anyone can post to that group and all members will receive that broadcast on their page.
I have a majority of this already completed. In posting this I've had to do a balancing act of how much to complete before making the idea public. I will error on the side that the feedback will trump all since its is that what i need to know right now. I hope to get a working prototype up on http://www.broadcastr.net in the coming weeks. The problem is the domino authnication piece (which is up and running). It's asking a TON but I've put in a request to Bruce to cross pollinate ideajam.net or openntf.org for the LDAP calls. This way those registered at those sites can poke around on the prototype and be spared yet another registration.
What about DomCastr? Pure coincidence. Every idea above including the name was in place before Dec's announcement. I wish him luck! Bottom line, you can see from his post and this one, they are very different.
There is another fun part to this posting. The invitation to all of you to occasionally check in to watch the progress of the idea. My hope is to turn all the amazing knowledge I've gained from PlanetLotus.org into another successful idea/product.
How to save 609 MB of disk space in a couple of seconds
Check out:
and remove the 609 MB Microsoft Office 2007 leaves behind. How many employees does IBM have? 300,000? 183 Terabytes of wasted storage. Then install Lotus Symphony.
Update: Apparently not everyone saw this post: http://vowe.net/archives/009840.html. I've had issues with Office all day so to me, at the time, it was funny.
SnTT: Notes R5 SuperHumanSoftware Lunch Box
How many out there still have this? I've used it as a mini pharmacy ever since.
If memory servers, during the R5 launch they distributed lunch in it.
Sorry for the low res picture... I used my Curve.
SnTT: Mail Folder Count
If you've ever wondered how many folders are in your Notes mail databases...
- Add the code below your catalog.nsf as a new agent
- Select the agent properties similar to the image below; tweak as you wish.
- Paste the sub in.
- Run againt selected documents in any view.
- The field FOLDERCOUNT will be created and populated.
Make sure you have access to the databases you are running it against and access to edit the catalog document. Also note that this is temporary because cat docs are disposable, rebuilt, live a short life, blah, blah. Also x2: Tweak the default folder exclude list as needed. I collected the list below from v7.
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Sub Initialize Dim session As New NotesSession Dim db As NotesDatabase Dim collection As NotesDocumentCollection Dim doc As NotesDocument Set db = session.CurrentDatabase Set collection = db.UnprocessedDocuments Set doc = collection.GetFirstDocument() Dim i As Integer Dim dbc As NotesDatabase Dim views As Variant While Not(doc Is Nothing) Set dbc = New NotesDatabase(doc.Server(0), doc.Pathname(0)) views = dbc.Views i=0 If Not(Isempty(views)) Then Forall v In views If ( v.IsFolder ) Then If (v.Name <> "($JunkMail)")_ And (v.Name <> "(Group Calendars)")_ And (v.Name <> "(Rules)")_ And (v.Name <> "($Alarms)")_ And (v.Name <> "($Inbox-Categorized)")_ And (v.Name <> "($Inbox)")_ And (v.Name <> "($Trash)") Then i=i+1 Print doc.Pathname(0)+ " - "+ v.Name End If End If End Forall End If doc.FolderCount = i Call doc.Save(False,False) Set doc = collection.GetNextDocument(doc) Wend Messagebox Cstr(collection.Count)+ " database(s) processed. ", 64, "Folder Count" End Sub
provided by Julian Robichaux at nsftools.com.
Lotus Notes 1.0 Desktop Video
Yesterday Carl Tyler put together a quick screencase to show how the Lotus Notes 1.0 desktop worked. He did it to illustrate a comment he made on vowe.net. I loved watching it and I'm assuming many of you out there would get a kick out of it. Those that never got the pleasure of working with 1.0.
Thanks to BleedYellow, I was able to Sametime Carl just after watching it to see if he made others, he didn't but i learned in the process... Given that i started with Notes 3.3 I always had buttons and inline attachments. Thank goodness. I remember how Action Buttons in 4 were the Widgets of today.
Here is another good one from the IM chat: Saving the Browser
Trying to understand Notes Widgets.
But what if you don't have 8.0.1? If you're interested in the inner mechanics of what Notes widgets are all about, look no further then Chris Brandlehner's blog.
His latest posts give in-depth step by step detail on creating and enhancing the integration of widgets with Lotus Notes. It's a must see from those that want to expand their widgets or just see how they work.
How to create a Lotus Notes Widget that submits data to a form on the web
SnTT: @Unique. Everything you ever wanted to know.
I've had this for almost 10 years now. It came from an internal Lotus source back when I worked there as a developer. I took the examples out so its a partial document. For the record it was flagged 'Public' when I obtained it. I have removed the 2 paragraphs that were marked <<End of Public Information>>. If I can loose my house over this, please someone let me know asap and i will take it down.
Warning, what you are about to read is ubergeek.
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The string that @Unique returns when invoked with no arguments consists of two parts: the first part (the prefix) is generated using the common name of the Notes ID in use. The second part (the suffix) is generated from the current time. The two parts are separated using a hyphen ("-") .
For a given Notes ID, the prefix will be constant. The suffix will vary depending on both the system time and the frequency of invocation.
The prefix is (usually) a four-letter string, consisting of uppercase alphabetic characters (A-Z); this gives an absolute maximum of 26^4 unique prefixes, or ~450,000 strings. In practice, however, the number of prefixes generated will be reduced since people's names do not contain a uniform distribution of letters.
The prefix is selected using the following algorithm to select the four-character prefix, stopping when four characters are selected:
- Select the alphabetic uppercase characters in the common name.
- If three characters have been selected, use the last character in the common name; if not, select the character after the last selected.
- Translate the four characters to uppercase.
The suffix is a six-letter string, consisting of digits and uppercase characters from the set [2-9A-HJ-NP-Z]; this gives an absolute maximum of 32^6 unique suffixes, or ~1000,000,000 unique strings. In practice the number of unique strings is reduced as the value of the strings is not random. The first three characters are based on the number of days since a fixed date, the last three characters, is based on the number of seconds since midnight.
The first three letters of the suffix are therefore identical for all sequences generated on the same day, and different for any sequences generated on different days.
The last three characters of the suffix are generated based on the number of seconds since midnight. Within a Notes session a check is made to ensure that the last three digits are not based on the same time (e.g. using the F9 key to refresh will generate sequential (base 32) numbers). If the Notes client is restarted, however, the sequence is generated from the time directly without regard to any previously generated sequence. This means that the sequences may 'restart' earlier than those generated using the F9 key. For example, if F9 is pressed 30 times, the sequence number corresponds (roughly) to 90 seconds in the future. If Notes is restarted, and a sequence generated less than 90 seconds later a sequence number may be reused.
In practice for non-automated use of @Unique the sequence should be unique if:
1. The prefix differs
2. The sequence numbers were generated on different days
3. The sequence numbers were generated using a time for which the
effective clock time differed
This information is provided to assist in assessing if the @Unique function is appropriate for a given application. It is possible that the algorithm used may differ between releases, and may be changed in a future release. Applications should not depend on the behavior of @Unique documented in this document other than that the value returned should under most circumstances be unique.
