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As I'm working on a community project (more on that once we get past the initial stages and flesh out some more details, etc.) with an individual that is outside of my organization, I needed a simple solution that would allow me to create and maintain a Project/Task/Sub-Task to do list that we could both work from. Enter bleedyellow.com's Connections Activities.

Now, if I'm any indication of Joe Notes-Guy, I hear of all of these amazing capabilities that are becoming available to use "Notes shops"... but I don't get the chance to really flesh them out. This is one of the reasons that I both jump at chances where I can utilize these new solutions or functionality within established solutions, and why I try to share them with those of you that find yourself in this same situation: life interrupts technology playtime.

It's with that in mind that I bring up Activities, which is absolutely cool. With my 8.0.1 Lotus Notes client, I can turn on the Sidebar Activities application and it's really an afterthought of functionality - it's right there. Makes you wonder if the integrated To Do List would get used today if it was always-on at the UI layer, huh?!

As you can see with these screen caps, I've got the projects and their tasks at my fingertips. With them right there, I can imagine that collaboration with project teams that reside outside of the physical location (or, for this community project, both outside of the location and into a global community!) is going to be MUCH easier - kinda like Tweeting is MUCH easier with the Lotus Notes client Sidebar application TwitNotes.

As for this project that I'm hinting to... unlike Zephyr and Yellowcake (which I'm positioning as low cost community solutions), the goal of this project is to provide not only 2 open source community-accessible solutions, but also do it utilizing ancillary technologies or spanking-new capabilities within Lotus technologies that us Joe Notes-Guys and Gals just don't get that much of a chance to play with - and via a medium which will lend to hectic schedules.

BleedYellow.com Dogears

Weblog (Cont.)

I've been using Twitnotes (currently release 1.0.3) for the past week or more, and a funny thing happened - I kept out of the blogosphere and pretty much out of my Inbox that entire time. Mind you, I really wasn't focused on Twittering all that much, but the Lotus Notes client add-on was in-my-face enough to keep me connected. In fact, my only contact with the outside world last week was through Twitter and the BleedYellow.com and Lotus Greenhouse Sametime environments. Project work (including something with IBM... but I have no idea how much I can get into that stuff here...) has been keeping me very busy at the moment. If you sent an email in the past few days, rest assure that I'm working through the list to get back to you!

At the very least, this might be an interesting study in just how effective a Notes side-bar application can be - despite my schedule I was still able to keep up to speed on the basic ongoings of the members of the Lotus Community (at least those who currently twitter anyways...).

But enough of that, onto the goodies:

Since I was so out-of-touch, I thought I'd make it up to those of you who kindly read my babble. Thus, in case you missed it, I published a new Notes Client Wizard Components application in the Examples & Downloads section of this site. RSS feed readers of this site would have gotten the update, but those of you who navigate to this site may have missed it. It's a few Design Elements that can be used (and modified - it's very vanilla) to create a content creation/maintenance wizard in your Lotus Notes client applications. I may do a formal article on the implementation of such a technique... when I get the time.

Those same website visitors (those who actually still use a web browser client to access this site) may also notice a change in the layout of the content in the right-hand column; I've added a "Contact Information" section as well as my 5 latest tweets. This pushes the "Publications" and "Examples and Downloads" sections down a bit, which I'm not exactly sold on as of yet. Another idea I had of displaying the 5 latest twitters was to create a 2-column layout where the current BleedYellow.com Dogears are today (under the latest Weblog entry on the index.html page), allowing me to display both said Dogears and the 5 latest tweets. The issue with this approach, you lose them once you navigate off of the main page. Mind you, I could have a dedicated webpage to both the Dogears and the Twitter updates... I dunno - feedback appreciated at any rate.

This week, I'll be working on Yellowcake, Zephyr, some other stuff, and hopefully getting a few things completed before the weekend. Here's to hoping anyways... ;-)

And feedback is appreciated! http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/dominoappdev/Home

This pre-population of what could become the definitive online resource for Domino Web Development is just the beginning - it's our solution, and up to us (the Lotus Online Community - and that includes IBM in my mind) to keep this a living, breathing, and ever-expanding resource.

The gang that keeps on giving has given us Yellow Bleeders yet another excuse not to get any work done community solution: a Community-accessible Sametime Advanced 8.0 environment at http://imadv.bleedyellow.com, which features persistant chat rooms!

I've gone ahead and setup the Notes and Domino Developers chat room, where you'll find me today. So -- if for some reason you haven't done so already, get over to BleedYellow.com, sign-up, and get involved in this ever-expanding community!

So, many thanks Lotus 911 - you're giving us both a series of collaborative solutions that helps strengthen our global community and real-world adoptions of technologies that many of us have only seen in Powerpoints and product portfolios. You are and continue to be a true realization of the best in our community: people selflessly helping other people.

While working on a mail-in enabled Project/Task Application (Lotus Notes-based), I had a need to collect and display all inbound email messages into a single location to facilitate manual filing/categorization. My first thought was to use an "After new mail arrives"-type Agent Design Element, but while I was in the shower this morning (where I do some of my best thinking), I thought about how Domino handles normal inbound email.

What makes Domino email go into the Inbox? There's no sniffer Agent Design Element waiting to do the legwork, so...

I (after getting out of the shower, of course) created a Folder Design Element named Inbound Email, and added "($Inbox)" as it's alias.

So, like $$ViewTemplates, $$NavigatorTemplates, $$SearchTemplates, $$Returnenter_type_here, the name/alias of ($Inbox) has a function based on the designation: a Folder Design Element with the name/alias of ($Inbox) will receive and store inbound email messages.

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