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If it sounds like I'm flying through this... I am - first time I recorded I was half-way through before the Jing 5-minute timer cut me off!

I've gotten a lot of questions since the release of Zephyr v0.1... and I thought the best way to answer them would be to give you a quick (it's like 4:50 minutes in runtime) flash demo and tutorial on just what is Zephyr and how it works.

Zephyr v0.1 Quick Tutorial (Flash Demo)

If you like what you see, you can download the totally free mail merge notifications utilty here: Zephyr v0.1 - Configuration-based Rich Text Mail Merge and Emailing Utility

And - as an aside - if anyone has any suggestions on a (freeware maybe?!) solution that allows me to record this stuff - screencasting, etc. - I'm all ears!

Following the rule of the lemming, I decided to give the FaceYourManga.com-thing a shot. Not too sure if I'll be changing out the current bio/author pic on this site (as well as ALL of the other sites which use that same pic - ie., Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, et al) though - as that could be a rather painstaking process. Am I wrong is assuming that this is just the latest tech-fad?! I dunno...

Chatted with Nigel Grant last night, and he informed me of this major win that seemingly slipped by the collective radar. Apparently the The Sydney Diocese of The Anglican Church of Australia had left the IBM flock in favor of seemingly greener Microsoft pastures. However, like the prodigal son, they've returned to IBM and Lotus technologies (including Lotus and Domino, Sametime, and Quickr) to achieve their collaborative technologies goal: a Unified Communications Strategy that will enable them to better collaborate within their community.

"Many of the people we reach out to in our community, such as the young people who participate in our youth programmes, use a mobile phone as the primary way to communicate. If we want to attract and retain these young people in the Anglican Church we need to communicate with them in the ways they understand and respond to."
- George Lymbers, CIO of SDS

Here are the details, but there's no mention of Microsoft at all in this document - can anyone confirm/deny the failed migration to Microsoft technologies? I was told that they just couldn't get Sharepoint to do the things that Lotus Notes and Domino were already doing...

I've been cheating. When I have an application that requires some form of automated emailing, chock full of doclinks, formatting rich text, and other mind-numbing exercises in what will eventually leave to hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing... I cheat. See, I won't write on-the-fly emails in an application - aside from being a PITA to get juuuuuuuust right, 2 days after the application is implemented you're getting calls from the project champion asking for tweaks.

I'd rather avoid those calls, and give them the rod and bait that allows them to fish for themselves... if you follow me.

So - very much in-line with my Excel Export utility, I don't create an email on-the-fly, but rather take a configurable Email Template, do the required Mail Merging, and simply send that email on it's way. While it is generated on-the-fly so to speak, it's not as if I have to build everything from scratch.

Okay - enough small talk - we're here to get you this utility application, so you don't have to wrangle Rich Text or settle on simple Plain Text-based, workflow-driven notifications. It's with that, that I present Zephyr!

So... what exactly does Zephyr do?

Well, let's say you have a Helpdesk database where you wish to send out context-sensitive notifications when select tickets are closed. You can create a simple agent that - to make this simple - takes the contents of the source NotesDocument (sdoc), and copy them to a new NotesDocument (jdoc) in Zephyr which we'll call a Job Document. ( In fact, we actually need to change the Form NotesItem to "jobdocument" in order for it to work in Zephyr!)

Once we have our jdoc in Zephyr, we take a look at the Email Templates (edoc) within Zephyr. Each Active edoc contains a searchcriteria NotesItem, which is evaluated at runtime against a NotesView containing all of our jdocs, checking for an @True-match. When found, we simply write a new NotesDocument (memo) to the Server (where Zephyr currently resides - even works on Local!) mail.box, evaluate pseudo-Mail Merges against the edoc, and copy all needed items into the memo.

For some added goodness, we update the jdoc with a stamp that tells us that the given edoc has evaluated and ran against said jdoc. If you never wish to process that same jdoc again, simply add that condition to the edoc's searchcriteria NotesItem.

The From/Principal, SendTo, CopyTo, BlindCopyTo, ReplyTo, Subject, and even the Body NotesItems of the edoc are Mail Merge-friendly, allowing you to completely control the generated email!

So, if you use this application, all you'll need to do is use the typical Rich Text editor to define what your email should contain (including Embedded Single Category Views, placeholders for DocLinks, Computed Text, Attachments, etc.), the Job Document criteria specifying which jdocs the Email Template should run against, and - lastly - externally deposite whichever documents you wish to trigger such Rich Email Notifications against!

In this release, you'll see a UI-accessible Agent called New Example Job Document. This Agent creates a simple Job Document - which when used in combination with the example Email Template, will send me a simple email! Also - the Notifications Agent is scheduled to run every 5 minutes (decrease that!), and is currently disabled. You can manually run the Notifications Agent to test the utility - which I hope makes your life as easy as it's made mine!

I've been playing around with Jott later - which allows me to dial into a (free to setup and use) account, and either leave myself a simple message or send that message to one of my contacts. The coolest part - it doesn't send an audio clip of my voicemail, but rather transcribes (and pretty damned accurately I might add) your message into text.

It's pretty slick, and something that I've been using to take mental notes over the past few days.

Today - while playing around - I saw that you have the ability to basically create a contact in Jott that is basically a conduit to a Web Service! This means, with the addition of a few Domino Design Elements, I could easily create an alternate publishing source for content on this 'blog.

The Jott Developers Guide gives a pretty simple overview of exactly how this is done, and it looks like it will allow integration with any HTTP POST-enabed solution (and thankfully Domino allows POST!).

I'll play around with this over the next few days - around some major data architecture tweaks to Match Maker to get it juuuuuuuuuuuuust right - and report back my findings, as well as some code, for those interested.

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