Publishing Zephyr on OpenNTF.org, but before I do...

12/16/2009 10:02 PM by Chris Toohey

Today, via Twitter, Denny Russell suggested Zephyr -- my IBM Lotus Notes/Domino Rich Text Mail-Merge and Email Utility -- to someone looking to send 800+ custom-to-recipient emails as part of (what I can assume) a marketing campaign. The only problem I saw with that was Denny's tweet response stated that it was an OpenNTF project. See, it isn't.

But after reading that, I wondered why it wasn't an OpenNTF project...

So tonight I created a new project on OpenNTF.org for Zephyr.< /p>

If you go to that project now (or at least at the time of this writing), the project page is blank. I did that, as I don't want to publish Zephyr v0.1, but rather clean a few things up and publish v1.0.

For that, I'll need your help: what do you want to see in this reinforced version of Zephyr?

But before that, let's recap what Zephyr does... via this Zephyr Screencast Demo (new window).

Now a few awesome suggestions that I'd gotten before or things that have been on my mind that are definitely going to make the list:

• Timestamps vs. 1 in the key NotesItems for each jobdocument.
• Eval-friendly inline formulas: <^@Text(@Date(@Now))^>
• Cleaning up some of the redundant Rich Text Mail Merge code...
• Create Preferences-driven jobdocument retention policies: ie, keep for n days

So what else would you like to see in v1.0? Comment with your suggestions and I'll do my best to make sure they get into the build!