My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives...

10/13/2009 12:01:00 AM by Chris Toohey

See, I've got some ideas...

Ideas for new projects. Ideas for new articles. Ideas for new community efforts. And ideas for new and exciting stuff!

The problem is scheduling them into the daily grind. Notice I didn't say time, as my AMA Time Management instructor would be happy to note that I understand that we all get the same finite hours in the day - it's how effective we are with those hours. Our effectiveness comes from prioritizing and properly scheduling.

And thus, I'm putting priorities and schedules to each of these ideas...

Time Tracker
A time efficiency and tracking Lotus Notes Client application. Help find the missing hours in your day that you spend on websites like this one! Be more efficient. Fight. WIN!

Critical Path
A Project Management Lotus Notes Client application which allows you to align projects to your PMO, track individual tasks and project calendars -- all based on PMI standards.

Spread
A Microsoft Excel (and eventually other format) Lotus Notes Client NotesData Export Utility. The idea is simple: Have a format that you need to export into? Spread will do the job! Simply configure an export template based on your specific needs - the given NotesDatabase, NotesDocumentCollection criteria, etc. - and Spread will export based on your configuration settings. This one will be an actual product that I plan on selling, and looking at a $30USD price per user.

Prada
A Lotus Notes Client NotesDocument categorizer/labeller Application and Widget. The idea here is that you can categorize/label (ala GMail Labels) email, calendar entries, and other NotesDocuments - allowing you to group documents based on project, customer, etc..

Secret Community Project
Sorry - I don't want to go into this one any further than that at this time, other than to tell you that I have an idea for developers internal and external to the Lotus Online Community to create some truly amazing stuff. More details coming soon!

Lotus CMS
A Lotus Notes Database designed to maintain web resources. Single instance per site-setup that I'm already using to run one website in production today with great success.

DominoGuru.com v3
I've re-designed the site, and wired everything into my Lotus CMS. It's just a matter of making it the top priority to sit down, migrate all of the content to the new site, etc. That - sadly - will take some time, and I want to make sure that I get the above items (including the Lotus CMS itself) out before I tackle this one entirely!

MatchMaker
The more views that you have in a NotesDatabase, the more bloat and potential functional lag in the UX you'll experience. MatchMaker is a simple development utility that will allow you to create logically-controlled indexes - allowing you to quickly access like-categorized NotesDocumentCollections without a need to query the NotesDatabase at runtime.

Yellowcake v2.0
An admin/developer-defined NotesData CRUD Proxy and API that would allow you to quickly and easily integrate NotesData into existing web/non-Lotus Notes client solutions. While v1.0 never made it out of a few customer implementations and my own testing, I want to get this next release out there for general consumption.

Now, that's the in-order prioritized list of upcoming projects. As I'm plotting out the schedule, I'm hoping to put the Secret Community Project out while those lucky enough to be attending LotusSphere 2010 are in Orlando, Florida grabbing swag.

That means I'll have three open source/freeware (will more than likely put them out on OpenNTF) products online and available and one new pay-for-play product before the end of the year.

This - of course - includes distractions by things like the Blackberry Widget SDK/API, the occasional YouTube screencast, and other mid-day tangent that I might want to hop on here and discuss.

These sound good to you? Think I have any that are mis-prioritized? Am I missing something from this list? Comment to this post or send me an email with your thoughts!