RedWiki

Here is an announcement that I want to pass along:

An exciting new program is being piloted by the IBM Redbooks team to engage the broad customer and partner community in shared authoring and updating ‘best practices’ information.

The program is called RedWiki.  They are piloting the idea with a wiki on Lotus SmartUpgrade.  If it works, Wikis could become available for other products.

SNTT: Opening subforms quickly

This is a tip that has been around awhile, but it is so unbelievable that I wanted to share it in case you haven’t seen it.  In other words, this doesn’t originate with me, and I’ve forgotten where I found it originally.

As most of you know, subforms are slow. A form with multiple subforms is particularly slow, even if the subforms aren’t computed (which, of course, slows the loading of the form further). There is one easy way to make subforms load quickly: Put some lotusscript code–Any Code!–in the initialize event of every subform. We use something like this:

Dim fastOpen as boolean
fastOpen = True

If you have a form with multiple subform, this simple, meaningless code that does nothing makes a HUGE difference in load time. I have no idea why adding code makes the subforms load faster, but it does (at least in Notes 5 and 6). Give it a try!

Coding without Code

One of my goals as a developer is to write as little code as possible.  That’s a bit flip, but it’s true.  I try to code in such a way that it is easy to access, re-do, or re-use code so that when requirements change or get added, the amount of work is required is minimal.

One of the requests that came up last week was to add an email reminder to a database that would send an email to anyone who had not yet submitted a particular form.  The form exists in the database, and the administrator has a view that shows whose documents are outstanding.

When we first designed databases, we knew we’d be sending emails to tell people that documents were available as well as other sorts of reminders.  My design had 3 parts:

1. a form where the administrators selected the type of reminder, entered the content of the email, and set a date and time for it to be sent;
2. an agent that checked the dates and times of these documents and sent emails as necessary;
3. A designer only form that gave a name to the reminders and told the agents where to find the list of people to whom the email should be sent;

Item #3 is what allowed me to add the requested functionality without any code.  All I had to do was create a new document from this desinger form and give it a name (for the administrator to pick from the list) and tell the agent the name of the view where the list to send to could be found and the name of the field where the email address exists.  Once I saved that document, the functionality was immediately available:  no design refresh and no new code required.

Of course, all my code doesn’t come out this way.  But it’s so nice when it does!

The Whole Lotus Enchilada

We currently run Lotus Notes/Domino, Sametime and Quickplace in our environment.  We do not run Websphere, but we don’t have any other portal software either.  We are in the middle of a project to switch our email to Outlook/Exchange.  We have been told that “as long as we have workflow, we’ll have Notes/Domino” (with the implication that we’ll always have the product).  OTOH, Quickplace (soon to be Quickr) has been under pressure both from Sharepoint and E-Room, and there are rumours that we are going to be moving from Sametime to the Microsoft instant messenger product.

Here is my question:  from a developer perspective, how much should I worry about losing Sametime from the product lineup?  I’ve done some Quickplace work, so I worry a bit about losing that.  If I thought Microsoft had a viable workflow option for Notes, I would also be worried about that.  But while I know that Sametime is (particularly now) an extensible platform, the fact is that I (and my fellow developers) don’t do any Sametime development.  Part of me says that it is just a tool that happens to be from Lotus (like our document managment system is just a tool that happens to be from Interwoven).  Another part of me says that anytime Lotus is removed from our environment that my job as it currently stands is one step closer to vanishing.  I have every reason to believe my company would retrain me, but that is beside the point I’m wondering about.

So, what do any of you think?  In my situation, would you consider the loss of Sametime to be a threat?