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!

Yesterday I tried something different (for me anyways): I published a quick demo of something that I'm cooking up using the Microsft Web Browser Object Control that I've been talking about these last few days. The difference with yesterday's demo was, instead of using simple images trying to show you what I was talking about, I used Jing and posted two Flash screencasts.

Now, the embedding was totally screwy, but I think that by using these screencasts I was able to quite effectively communicate what I was doing in less than a minute. More importantly, the prep work involved was around five minutes from the start of the recording to it's publication (while Jing limits you to 5 minute videos, it's a pretty slick little application).

But I'm not too sure - were the Flash demos as effective as I am assuming? What were your thoughts with the screencast? Should I have included a voiceover?

So last night I played around with the Embedded Windows Explorer stuff that I mentioned yesterday and came up with the following - which I'm calling Sorting Hat:

View demo in full screen.

In this first really simple demo - we can see the embedded Microsoft Web Browser control, which is "activated" in the PostOpen event on the UI Form Design Element and uses the value stored in the url NotesItem of the NotesDocument. This allows us to not only access remotely-accessible file stores directly from a Lotus Notes client UI, but also allows drag-and-drop from this "widget" into the UI document - pretty slick!

View demo in full screen.

In this (yet again really simple) demo - we can see two embedded Microsoft Web Browser controls, again "activated" in the PostOpen event on the UI Form Design Element and that each use their own NotesItem from the NotesDocument for it's control (url and url2 respectively). The big difference in this example, you can drag-and-drop from one "widget" to another "widget" to move files across remote file stores - really slick!

Now, there are some issues with this approach that I'll get into in the next few days - the biggest being that the UI Document needs to be in Edit mode from what I can tell to run the Microsoft Web Browser control. I'm working around that stuff now and expect to have this example database available for download pretty soon!

Comment here with suggestions, thoughts, comments, and things that you want to see!

Eyes right gang - a two-part article on Flash banners and Domino backend-databases is up and ready for your viewing pleasure.

Flash Banners and Domino - Targeted Marketing Flash-based Banners and Clearframe's Domino-based Utilities (Part 1)

Flash Banners and Domino - Targeted Marketing Flash-based Banners and Clearframe's Domino-based Utilities (Part 2)

Author's Note:

The majority of my projects allow me to integrate some "real-world" technology with Lotus Notes/Domino to come up with some pretty seemless solutions - much like a project that I recently wrapped up where a client was looking for a Macromedia Flash-based banner to create content back in their CRM solution. The client has given authorization to use their banner as an example in this article, for which I am very thankful!

The Client

COMPANY X, a growing New Jersey-based organization offering classes and programs to teach your children second-language skills with both Spanish and Chinese courses. The company is ready to add more seats to their classroom rosters, and thus is in need of targeted marketing solutions - they need to get the word out to their potential student families that they are in open enrollment!

The Requirement

Site hosting and other technology is managed by Clearframe under the "Professional Services" group. We handle all of their technology needs from hosting their messaging solution to maintaining their website (via an in-house CMS solution). Currently, a potential student family can sign-up for additional information via the website's signup form. Their targeted marketing campaign calls for banner ads in various online parenting and NJ-local business sites, but a simple banner ad would not generate the registrations that COMPANY X was looking for. The solution: a Flash-based banner containing a simplified version of their current DHTML-based signup form that communicates potential student family information back to COMPANY X's CRM solution for review/follow-up.

The Solution

I'll start this by assuming that you know nothing about Flash, nor have it installed. That being said, you can get a 30 day trial of Flash Professional 8 here so you can play around and/or follow along with this article. I plan on taking you step-by-step through the build of this banner, so seeing the Flash client UI may help in your digestion of the materials. I'll additionally use some very basic visuals (not the higher-end visuals of the finished banner) as they may confuse those of you not familiar with Flash and thus prove distracting from the goal of this article.

We'll start on the Welcome page in the Flash client (fig. 1), and select the Advertising folder under the Create from Template section (fig. 2). We'll select the 240x400 (Rectangle) template and (selecting the text tool) add a total of four fields (name_first, name_last, phone_home, emailaddr respectively) to the page (fig. 3):

1. Field in Design Mode
2. Field Type Selector
3. Field Instance Name Input
4. "Show border around text" Field Properties option

Continue to Part 2!