Notes & Domino 8.5.1 were released about 10 days ago and we are seeing a record deployment pace. 8.5.1 contains hundreds of  bug fixes since 8.5. Having said that, 8.5.1 is not completely free of problems. So how do you know if and how you will be affected? The simple answer is a frequently overlooked step in the upgrade process: Read the Release Notes (non pun intended). The 8.5.1 release notes are wonderfully organized into about two pages of LIVE links, so they are (1) very digestible, and (2) always up to date. To make it easy on you, I have pasted the release notes below. Feel free to contact me directly with any further questions or concerns.

Release notes - IBM Lotus Notes, Domino, Domino Designer 8.5.1

Notes 8.5.1 is going to be chock full of new features for end users. I have listed my Top 10 favorites below:

1. Lots of new iNotes policy controls
2. Ability to automatically attach a vCard to your email signature.
3. New business card access on name type-ahead.
4. Distinct archive template and a "Recently Archived" folder which can contain stubs of the archived documents.
5. Drag email messages to Calendar or Day-at-a-Glance to copy there.
6. Click and drag to resize or reorder table rows/columns in rich text fields and other rich text improvements.
7. I have moved on from the Workspace, but for those who still love it, the Workspace will now roam.
8. Policy to push the "Synchronize Contacts" setting to clients.
9. The spell checker now has options to auto-correct common typing errors such as transposed letters, DOuble CApital LEtters, and capitalize the first letter of a sentence.
10. Embedded Sametime chat (and browser) now runs in it's own thread (so you can chat while waiting  for Notes to do something).

For more on this story as it develops, be sure to subscribe to Mary Beth's Notes Design Blog here.

I love Chris Toohey. I really do. In fact, he saved my butt this very morning by helping me correct some broken links in my blog entry. But he also posted this blog entry, which caused me a bit of hearburn, not because of him, but because of the technology he wrote about. Since I trust Chris implicitly, I got excited when I saw his entry about using Google Sync to publish his Notes Calendar to the web for internet users to see using my Blackberry as middleware. So I immediately signed up for a google account (no, I did not have one before because gmail is way inferior to Notes). I then started synchronizing my Notes cal to that Google cal. That was a week ago. First, I noticed that it wasn't synching everything. OK, no biggie. I can deal with that. It even told me that it couldn't sync everything because "another program" was (that'd be Notes). Fine, at least some were going through, so I left it going for a week. Interestingly, it was synching most (not all) of my new calendar entries. But I noticed it was draining my Blackberry battery, and I can't afford that at Lotusphere, so I decided to "sign out" of Google Sync on my Blackberry. It warned me that it would delete anything it had synched, so I looked for an option to NOT do that - no such option. So I figured, Google is smart, surely they wouldn't delete the entries that I created in Notes, right? WRONG. It wiped out 8 weeks of my appointments, and the Blackberry diligently sent cancellation notices on all of the meetings to the participants I had invited. Nice. Thanks Google (not so much).

But there is a (relatively) happy ending to this tale.  Since I am running the Notes 8.5 client and 8.5 mail template (on a Notes 8.0 server BTW), I simply went to my Notes calendar and clicked Add Calendar / Google Calendar, provided my credentials, and BAM, there are all of the Google calendar entries on my Notes calendar again. Thanks Lotus (sincerely).

Declan pitched the idea of Forum Friday's on his blog about picking a question on Notes.net and responding to it with a blog entry. I think this is a great way to get forum readers into the Domino blogging community, so I gave it a shot. I went to notes.net and picked the first entry I saw without a comment: Create Dialog Box Like Mail Address. I'm not sure if this is what Mr. Dressler is looking for, but it occurred to me that newer developers may not realize the power of @DialogBox or notesuiworkspace.DialogBox in LotusScript (and maybe even some guru's don't think of it). Basically, you can design any form you want and use it as a pop up box to collect or modify information on the underlying form (even if the fields on the underlying form are hidden). This is an effective way to move lesser used and/or non-printed data off of the main form to keep it clean, or to implement an interview-style "wizard" to collect user input in steps. The Lotusscript version can be further used to collect information into documents that are not open or even into a temporary document that is used just to get answers to questions, but never saved. Check it out in the Help file and start improving your user interfaces today.

 

Making a dialog box that does what this user requested should be relatively simple:

1. Create the form with two fields and a hotspot button between them. Tip: Put your form design elements in a table and use the [SIZETOTABLE] to make the best use of screen space
2. The first field is an editable single-value listbox field with an @DBLookup of the possible choices. Tip: make this a list of key values with the Doc UNID as an alias (e.g., key value | @DocumentUniqueID)
3. The second field is a single-value computed text field that equals itself (@ThisValue)
4. The hotspot button sets the second field to the selected value of the first field (since they only want ONE value).
5. Add a button to the calling form that runs script that calls notesuiworkspace.DialogBox and then copies the document that was selected using whatever method you want, such as.

Dim workspace As New NotesUIWorkspace

Dim session As New NotesSession

Dim db As NotesDatabase, otherDb As Notesdatabase

Set db = session.CurrentDatabase

'Set otherDb

Dim doc As New NotesDocument(db)

Call workspace.DialogBox( "Form", True, True, False, False, False, False, "Title", doc)

If doc.fieldname(0) <> "" Then

'Set your document, for example

Set doc = db.GetDocumentByUNID(doc.fieldname(0))

Call doc.CopyToDatabase( otherDb )

End If

By running it from the main form in this way, the dialog box becomes just a way to temporarily complete the action then throws away the temporary data AND bails out if the user clicks Cancel or no value is selected (because doc.fieldname(0) will equal "").

 

There are of course other variations that would work with things like embedded views, etc. If I understand the stated problem correctly though, I'd probably simplify the approach and just use a view picklist to capture the selected document's UNID then do the copy without adding the complexity of a dialog box with a hotspot button.

 

Regardless, the point is that dialog boxes are a powerful and flexible way to collect user input without junking up a main form.