Lotus Notes Domino, Blackberry, WAP, and forgetting your portfolio (and Ego)!

I found myself in a pretty interesting situation today: I had a customer that had a need that I could address with a very low-tech solution. And it got me wondering if we don't put too much on building this monolithic solution that leverages the greatest cutting edge technology to date and something that's completely unique and amazing... just to sorta pad our own egos -- me being a huge offender of that very thing! I will often take a look at a situation and say, "Hmm, I know how everyone else would handle it; how should I take a look at it?".

And for better or worse, I talk about these really cool, unconventional ways of addressing an issue.

Well, I try not to do that for customers and in particular I didn't this time around. Now, the problem (if you will) or the request was simple: they had a Lotus Notes Client-based application that they wanted to be able to take to the mobile device. Now, the mobile device in question was a Blackberry. They run their own BES server; it's all in-house. They have people in the field that access their backend environment with Blackberries.

Everything was setup, so all I had to do was take the data out of the NotesDatabase and put it into a format that would work on the Blackberry.

I could use direct HTTP Requests... so I went that route.

(Click thru for more...)

One of the latest projects that I'm working on is something that I absolutely need: a simple yet effective Project Management and Tasking application.

I've decided to try to make this process as public as possible in an effort to drive away all of my readership to show you an example of ground-up development for new projects.

For example, I've posted the following two snapshots of my notepad entries based on customer meetings that I've had to gather requirements which establish a phase 1 and phase 2 run of napkin development for said project (shown respectively):

Yeah... you really can't see much. But it's not the particular content that I really wanted to share but the overall process.

Thankfully, the customer is all for my sharing this project with the overall community (minus their specific extended-functionality requests, of course), and provided I can get this completed in a timely manner I'll coordinate with the OpenNTF groups and get this online for a download.

I plan on starting development on this project after this weekend, where I'm wrapping up one post-due project and my Domino Java Ajax Proxy wiki article (and example application download)... so stay tuned!

... ok, I'll share a few basic features and functionality that I'm looking to add:

I want to create a fluid multi-client UX, which means using the UI that I played around with a few weeks back to mirror the Facebook UX in a Lotus Notes Client application. That being said, I'm writing this for the Lotus Notes Client, Wap/Mobile browser clients, and eventually a Web Browser client. Silly order you may say, but the fat client and mobile clients were the big requirements for this one... as the Web Browser client is really something that's a nice to have.

As for the functionality in the application itself, each Project will act as a single NotesDocument, which each Task a Response NotesDocument. A Task can have a dependant Task, which will allow you to properly weigh assignee workload across all projects as well as pinpoint potential delivery delays.

Each Task will also act as a milestone within the overall Project, so each Task is weighted against an overall 100% completion rate with completed milestone percentages rolling up to the Parent Project NotesDocument. ... hopefully that makes sense!

So anything else that you'd like to see in this application? Time provided, I'd love to get some click-to-export functionality that will allow you to take the content into Excel, Symphony, Open Office, or even Microsoft Project.

You'll get that bad pun at the end of this...

Welcome to the first post of the Domino + BES mini-project. Today we'll give you an beginner-level introduction to WML specific to something that you can use right now: the mobilization of a Group Personal Address Book.

If you're company is anything like my one customer, you have your main Domino Directory as well as several "other" directories containing things like IT contact information (such as home and mobile numbers) that you really don't want to get out to anyone that shouldn't have access. I know I wouldn't want to get calls at my house from someone who can't figure out how to print a calendar in a "planner" layout! So, the typical solution here is to create a new NotesDatabase based on the Personal Address Book Template and use that new NotesDatabase to store your shared contacts.

That's exactly what my one customer did... and then complained that each time they needed to access the contact information, they needed to boot up their laptops, VPN into their secured environment, launch Lotus Notes, and look up the information. Absolute pain for the user, and a situation that could be easily addressed with their existing technology investments: they have IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and RIM Blackberry Enterprise Server.

So, let's outline first what we're going to do, and then review the step-by-step build:

We'll create a very simple WML-based functional-build of the Personal Address Book. And don't worry - you don't need to know anything about WML... we're go step-by-step, and it's really simple stuff here.

Now, to outline our build:

1. Create a NotesView named "mobile".
2. Create a Form named "$$ViewTemplate for mobile".

Yeah - that's about it really. Two Design Elements, and you'll have your WML-based secondary "Mobile Directory", which you'll be able to access even when you're offline... but let's not get ahead of ourselves here.

As I'm a visual person - here's a pretty picture!

So, here's the basics of what we're going to do. The "mobile" NotesView - via the "$$ViewTemplate for mobile" - will load a single WML page that contains "cards" - the first being a radiobutton list of all entries in the "mobile directory". When an option/name is selected, you simply go to the card that's ID matches the UniversalID of the given entry.

And this is where the beauty comes in: since you're loading all of this into a single WML page, you can "navigate" any number of entries within the WML page, and the user experience mirrors that of the current Blackberry Mobile Device Address Book (with Select Name = Contact Page). The email and number "live-text" recognition on the device creates the hotspots/links as they would in an email body. The result is a fully functional, offline-accessible secondary Mobile Directory!

Now let's build it!

First, check out this WML Example from W3CSchools.com. We're going to modify this example to better fit our needs, as well as do away with the do event trigger for card1, and instead define an onpick event for the individual entry on card1. That make any sense? Don't worry - we're going for results first, complete grasp of this later...

So, we'll basically have the following WML markup:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN" "http://www.wapforum.org/DTD/wml_1.1.xml">

<wml>
 <card id="card1" title="IT Contact Information">
  <p>
   <select name="name">
    <option value="HTML">
     <onevent tpe="onpick">
      <go href="#013725AFF8D1811952117E30731E49FC" />
     </onevent>
     Chris Toohey
    </option>
   </select>
  </p>
 </card>

 <card id="013725AFF8D1811952117E30731E49FC" title="Contact Info">
  <p>
   <b>Chris Toohey</b><br />
   ctoohey@dominoguru.com<br />
   Mobile: 610.417.1700
  </p>
 </card>

</wml>

So, from this, we get the idea that all I'll need to do is 1) create a list in card1 of all contacts in the Address Book and specify the onpick event for each to go to the anchor named after their UniversalID.

The "mobile" NotesView contains two columns. The first - which is hidden - builds our options list for card1. The second - which is visible - contains the specific card markup for the individual contact - following the above schema (using the UniversalID, etc.). Just set the NotesView attribute to "Treat contents as HTML" (which is a misnomer here...) and you're done. Quick Note: The above sample markup only includes the name, email address, and mobile number - go nuts with what you want to include in the specific user's card.

Now that we have our "mobile" NotesView, we'll create our "$$ViewTemplate for mobile" Form.

Shouldn't be too hard from here to get - cfd_lookup returns an @DBColumn of the first (hidden) column, thus populating the card1 options list, and the $$ViewBody displays the visible contents of the mobile view (2nd column).

Last thing to do here is change the content type of the Form to text/vnd.wap.wml and you're finished! Just fire up your Blackberry Browser and point it to your "mobile" NotesView to get a fully-functional WML-based "Mobile Directory" which - once cached - will allow for complete offline access!

You can alternately - to deploy your new "Mobile Directory" as an actual Blackberry Application - use the BES Channel Push, which will push out a defined icon to the recipient device's Home Page and pre-cache the contents of the (in this case) "Mobile Directory". For that, you can either download the .Net-based examples, or wait for Showtime - which will allow you to do all of that Channel and Message Push to defined recipients from within your Lotus Notes client!