Jan Schulz

There are a lot of people who argue for a "personal edition" of notes to get some enduser promotion. In its current form, this won't be a good idea:

Yes, you gain LiveText, nice email-environments like eProductivity and maybe even some personal apps. But I haven't found any apps yet, which will satisfy a casual user! Password store? Keepass is better (ever used strg+v to autopaste a user/pw into a browser window?). Note taking? Personal journals might be eligible, but there are apps like evernote which sound better. And I can't think of any other apps which might be interesting to a *normal* end user!

Any then there are things like this, when you use notes as a pop3/smtp client:

• No Spam handler: you need to setup your own.
• 20+sec startup time and 500MB downloads just to open email (thunderbird is 5 secs away and a tenth that size)
• preferences for email all over the place and much to cryptic for "normal" emailusers: smtp.box, location docs, smtp & pop3 accounts, "replication" instead of "send and receive", File->Preferences overload.
  
• lots of features, which are no use to a normal user: sametime, replication, ID management, ...
• Strange behavior uncommon to other clients: for example no warnings that pasted images are not attached if the email is sent as plain text. You can edit received mails. Folders vs. Views.
  
• I also don't think that the code for POP3/SMTP in the client was much used:calendar invitation don't work: You can't send replys because of a bug in the code (the From is sent to your emailadress and the replicator expects a NotesName -> reported to IBM, reproduced, waiting for action: PMR 67543SGC724, SPR MALZ7Q249V).
  

Notes strength are the easy collaboration features with a client attached to a domain and servers. As a standalone product all these strength become weaknesses because they are too complex for a enduser and to heavy (and in most cases useless) to be convinient.

Some examples: in a company you use connections, replicated doclibraries, KM and CRM Apps to collaborate. But as a enduser without a server? Excel + dropbox. Secure and replicated storage of notes? Textfiles and Dropbox. Webpages or blog on a domino server? much easier with LJ/blogger.com or even some html files uploaded via ftp. Chatting via Sametime? Again not useable without a  server, so I use skype.

So I think that releasing (and promoting) notes as it is now as a enduser standalone tool will result in much disappointment and negative feedback/ publicity.

Maybe if vulcan becomes available and it integrates facebook/Xing/StudiVZ (german facebook clone), doodle, skype, sharepoint, and whatever there is to become a "universal inbox, calendar, todo and contact manager" for everything. And gets a enduser open server in the cloud, so that your data is replicated and secure.

Recent contacts were a PITA when the location settings "first local, then server" and "stop after first match" are enabled:

• Receive a mail from 'sales@otherorg.com', have your own 'sale' group in NAB. Send a mail to 'sales' and it will go out to 'sales@otherorg.com'. Fun (see Comment 9 here). Happens even when replying to such a mail...
  
• Have a group called "XY" and a group caled "XY group". You get a Mail to "XY group". You can't send a mail to "XY" anymore, every time it will be (quietly) resolved to 'XY group". Even more fun...

Both could have security implications: You more or less don't notice that the names are expanded and it happens after you press send. And you probably don't want internal mails to sales ending up at the competitions site. Or sensitive mails to "XY" at maybe much bigger group.

Enabling exhaustive lookup will result in other errors (group is available two times -> doc.send will fail!. Also the user will get a strange picklist, where he must choose between the two addresses) or will not resolve the issue when the user is offline.

This seems to fixed as of 8.5.1 FP1:

SPR# MCMA7VPKUN - When a group with the same name exists in the local and server replicas, and was also in recent contacts, the recent contacts version was used and the ambiguous dialog box was not displayed. This problem has been fixed in 8.5.1 FP1 and was a regression introduced in 8.0.

Lets hope for the best... downloading right now...

You might also vote for this ideajam entry: notes.ini variable to exclude internal NotesNames from Recent Contacts, which is another problem with recent contacts.

Dear lazyweb: I've some problems with Drag&Drop into the sidebar.

The goal: drop any notes document to a sidebar target and do some LS magic with them (create a new document, call some functions from a LS-lib -> add a eProductivity Action from any NotesDocument).
The Idea: use a Folder and the Drag&Drop/AddToFolder events, add it to a Outline, add the outline to a form, add the form to the sidebar.
The Problem: using the "QueryAddToFolder"-event (and probably "QueryDragDrop" -> couldn't get it to fire...) on a folder will not work, because the event is called on the source folder, not the target :-(

Is there any way to get to the dropped documents in the target design element? And call LS function from there?

I also thought about java sidebar views (example @ SNAPPS), but some functions are in LS and I can't replicate them in java (source is hidden) :-( And I didn't find a way to call LS from Java.

Any Ideas?

How do I do that? There seems to be no language chooser in the preference/profile and since the update to 2.5 I get a German interface on bleedyellow (with all content in English) :-(

Language of blog content = language of userinterface

I've set my browser to German as a first language, so that get search results from my country and don't disturb any browser switch. But changing the language of the template of an blog, which is in one language, so that the menu and other stuff is in a different language is just annoying...

Any Idea how to get it back to English?

In German, "Jan" (spoken: like "j" from "yes" and "an" from Ian, only one short syllable) is a male given name.
It seems that in the US, Jan can also be a female given name.

Now I know why I'm sometimes named "she" - and why I always thought about Jan from the Notes beta program as a male person :-)

Ah, and it can even get better.

Since a few days, I get my private mails delivered into my Notes mailbox, so that I can process my private mails as well as my normal "company" mails with eProductivity. But most of this article is not specific to eProductivity, you can do this with the normal mailfile as well.

There are great instructions how to setup notes to get the mails from a POP3 server on the "Lotus Notes 8.x Tips" blog. If you get mails from both a domino server and a POP3 server, I recommend to first create a new location and switch to it and then run the described wizard... I had to recreate my normal (-> mail goes out via Domino Server) online setup afterwards.

Anyway: this works really well apart from one point: up to now I read mail my private mail in Thunderbird and used ThunderBayes to filter out spam. Notes, unfortunately does not have a spam filter, but this is how you can work around this limitation. Another limitation is, that notes does not process mailrules for POP3 mails, but there is an OpenNTF project for that. So here is the setup to fight spam in POP3 mails delivered to the Notes client:

1. Setup SpamBayes
2. Configure Notes to use SpamBayes
3. Setup POP3 mailrules
4. Configure a Mailrules to filter Spam
(5. Train the filter)

Setup Spambayes
I use SpamBayes, which is a baysian/learning spam filter which acts as a proxy beween the POP3 server and your mailclient and classifies the mail as ham (=good), unsure or spam (=bad :-) in some custom mail-header.  Just download the windows version and install (make sure it is started automatically as a service!). Do a restart of windows, to make sure you have the service running... Afterwards point you webbrowser to http://localhost:8880/config and configure SpamBayes to connect to your current POP3 server and a local port number (the rest of the options are ok for now :-). You don't need to input your username/password into SpamBayes.



Configure Notes to use SpamBayes
Now configure your Notes POP3 mailsetup as you would before, just with "localhost" and the local port number and Notes would get the mail through SpamBayes. If you have already configured it: the config is in the personal adressbook under "Advanced -> Accounts". My final setup looks like this:


Now you should already get mails delivered into your mailaccount which have the new mailheader: Open a new mail, goto "View -> Show -> Page Source" and you find something like this:

Setup POP3 mailrules
No we need something to filter on this. Go to the POP Mail Rules OpenNTF project and get the latest release. It has a nice Install instruction, but for the impatient: copy the rules.dll next to your notes.ini file and add a "EXTMGR_ADDINS=rules.dll" line to your notes.ini (if there is already one, read te instructions...). Restart Notes and your POP3 delivered Mails will be filtered by your mailrules.

Configure a mailrule to filter Spam
Now we have only one problem: how to get a Mailrule to filter on the "X-Spambayes-Classification:" Header? This is also done by a trick: the new extention has some extra capabilities, which can be accessed when you build a rule based on the BCC field: instead of you adding the string you would filter, you add "header:string" and the rule engine will base the filter on that header instead of the BCC field or better that field in the final mail document in your mailfile. There is unortunately a difference beween header names and fields: notes converts '-' in headernames into '_' in fieldnames. So if we want to filter by Mail with "X-Spambayes-Classification: spam", we need to add a BCC rule with a "contains"-String of "X_Spambayes_Classification:spam" (and move that mail into the junk folder (in eProductivity, Mailrules are under E-Mail -> Tools -> Rules):

And that was it: from now on, every classified spam mail should be filtered into the Junk folder.

Train the filter
On problem remains: how to train the filter. This is best done via the webinterface at http://localhost:8880/review: just classify the daily mails there and train the filter with that data. After a few days, it should get better and better until you get less and less false classified mails. For this to work, you need to cache messages in SpamBayes (see SpamBayes webinterface -> Configuration -> Storage options). The other option, to send messages to "spam@localhost" or "ham@localhost" does not work, as Notes does not send every old mailheader. Also, we haven't configured notes to send maisl through spambayes.

Happy emailing!

Opening weblinks in notes does not work, if you have opera set as your default browser. This is unfortunately still so in the 8.5.1 beta client.

Today I found the solution after looking at the registry values when firefox is the default browser: notes seems to miss a '%1' string in the returned registry value. Adding that to the registry lets Notes open URLs in my preferred browser.

before:
C:\Programme\Opera>reg query HKCR\https\shell\open\command
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\https\shell\open\command   <NO NAME>   REG_SZ  "C:\Programme\Opera\opera.exe"

After:
C:\Programme\Opera>reg query HKCR\https\shell\open\command
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\https\shell\open\command     <NO NAME>   REG_SZ  "C:\Programme\Opera\opera.exe"  "%1"

So, just edit that registry key and add the "%1" (with quotation marks around both strings!) and you are done...

Why Notes can't handle default browser which do not register themselves in that way, when every other programm can.... I've filed bugs both with opera and IBM (in the beta forum)...

And just to be on the secure side:
Disclaimer: IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and Lotus Notes Traveler 8.5.1 is prerelease code and there are no guarantees from IBM that the functionality presented or discussed will be in the final shipping product.

Andre Guirard released some of his little treasures on OpenNTF: several lotusscript libraries. I especially like one if them: StringDiff.

This diff util was part of the replication conflict tool he posted some years ago. I used it to generate field diffs for a field level history:



Then I had to refactor it to get text output instead of html, now I only need to write a "TextDiffWriter" implementation (there is already a RichText and a HTML one), which should be about 20 lines of code, most of it function definitions and so on. Nice!

Thanks Andre!

Since a few days I get the "valid usage period expired" message when trying to add new actions to my action lists. Seems that it is time for a resume of my time with eProductivity (and to some degree with GTD).

To start with: eProductivity changed my way of time- and email-management and for a lot better! One of the objectives of my evaluation period was if it reduces the constant nagging feeling of "did I miss something" and I can say that it does! A lot!

eProductivity is up to now my most productive way to organize myself: it makes it really easy to us it, especially the integration with email. The "today" view is up to now the fastest way to get an idea what needs to be done today. Having three different ways to look at your actions (by context, entities or projects) gives you a lot more overview than what I previously had.

(Not) Getting in my way
Eric Mack argued in a "taking notes podcast", that one of the key features of a time management system is the ability to not get in the way: even one click to many is unconsciously preventing your adaption of such a system. eProductivity does that most of the time and especially more often than my other tools I used before. Draging an email to a context makes it an action. Different ways to look at your actions (not doable at all on paper). Linking information to actions and the info is one click away.

But sometimes it does force me to do this "on click to many". The most important one is the "drag email to context" (or "copy email into"): afterwards it asks me to what I want to do with the original email and my answer is in 99%: put it into folder "done". To do this it is click on 'put into folder' -> wait a few seconds to get the picklist up -> choose the folder -> ok. This was my number one resistance to using eProductivity and putting every email into an action. Hopefully there will be a way to do away with that in future versions (feature request filed :-) )

Another one is the dialog which comes after "mark complete" of an action in a project: usually I have my actions sorted (possible in the projects) or multiple action in my todo, so just pick the next or one of the "today"-marked and don't bother me...

Linking information to reminders
Also great is the ability to link emails, actions, calendar items and projects. It's such a timesaver to have the ability to have all the information linked into a action or callendar item (at least if the information is/was contained in an email) or actions linked together into projects. I just wish if there was an toolbar button to link arbitrary notes documents (or even things outside of notes).

Working on your action lists: Stream vs. structure
I'm a very structured person: I need it and I feel uncomfortable without structure. In a lot of ways, eProductivity and GTD helps me with that by giving me structure in my todos/actions, at least on the filling level. On the other hand, on the last step when working on my action lists, it misses structure: the context lists are not ordered at all, you always have to pick one action after completing the last one. At least you have different ways to look at your actions (context, by relevant persons, by projects), but urgency and priority are missing.

Other time management techniques argue for planning the day in advanced (-> the evening before, adding puffers and including timeslots for "unplanned events") and ordering your actions by priority/urgency (Eisenhower method). The only way to emulate this is by using the today flag, but that way I can only chose the items, not the time when I want to do them. This "problem" seems to be build in, at least I found that the GTD book also argued for this kind of "stream" time management without predefined order or priorities.

What I also miss is some kind of "daily review coach", which lets me pick actions for the next day, review my callendar and fit them in and then present me a schedule for my next day.

GTD - the book
I didn't know GTD when I started using eProductivity and read the book during the last weeks. The biggest "aha" moments came in the last three chapters when it came to the "big picture" view ("The Power of the key principles" -> seems that David Allen really likes bottom up :-)) and I think I will re-read the book with that knowledge.

Some of the ideas in the book are really great (I reordered my paper stuff into folders.... What a great feeling afterwards! That alone was worth the book!). Most of the action stuff was intuitive with eProductivity (at least I did them that way when using eProductivity without reading the book :-) ) What I didn't like was the "stream vs structure" view of GTD (see above). Anyway: I'm looking forward to what the re-read will bring!

So, to sum it up:
+ Up to now the easiest way to organize my time
+ Really intuitive way to work with your emails and getting on top of them ("inbox zero")
+ Linking information is a great time saver (and could be used much more) .
+ Different ways to look at my action lists make me much more comfortable not to miss something
+ Today view gives me a easy way to know what needs doing today
- "Dragging emails to actions" and "mark complete" have too many clicks
- Stream (vs structured) based action picking doesn't fit my personal working style
- I miss a daily review coach

But even with last negative points: eProductivity wins hands down against all my other tried time and task management tools! And not to forget: the support team is great! :-)

Thanks to Eric Mack and his team for this opportunity! So lets hope they will let me go on with eProductivity :-)

We have a webform which is processed by an agent. In this webform you can add a message. Every few times this agent failed to process the form (fortunately the raw message was copied in that case and so no message was lost). The problem is, that the messages were to long: @URLDecode can only process strings which are no longer than 2048 chars.

Unfortunately @URLDecode is used in several WebSession classes to access the form content, so have a look if this is a problem for you, too...

I opened a Service Request, as this wasn't specified in the designer help and the error message shown in the client sounds more like bug than a feature: "Type mismatch in method CoerStrToNum: STRING found, double expected".

Update 21.09.2009:
IBM looked at it and found that evaluate is the problem: it can't handle more than 2064 bytes. So a fix could be to add the string to decoded to a doc and pass that doc to evaluate and let @URLdecode get the string from there. Another would be to split the string, but then I would need to understand, where would be a good value to split it: it does not be in the middle of a multi byte decoded umlaut...

Another post about my road to productivity heaven with eProductivity. This time how I plan my next day.

When I've lots of things to do, I like to plan my next day on the evening before that day. For this, eProductivty gives me the possibility to flag action to be done today. The are then visible in the today view (my default on opening the mailfile), which lists all calendar items for today, the due actions for today and everything I've taged as "do it today".

Usually I go through different views to look out for the tasks I want to do on the next day. This involves looking at my current projects ("projects and actions" view) amd the contexts I will "visit" that day. (I would also like to look at my high priority actions, my urgent ones and the actions for the various people I meet, but there are currently no views for that or the view is not compatible to my setup.)  To mark an action for "today", just click the small green flag and it will get flagged:



After that some short quiet time remember everything I might have missed yet and I'm ready to go to bed :-)

The next day I'm greeted by a nice view with all the planned actions on it:



What I'm still missing is a possibility to put this actions into an order or assign them timeslots. No idea if that's actually possible with notes. This would be great to have to implement in full the other time management techniques I learned (privatization with the eisenhower method, doing the time allocating for actions the day before, adding buffers)
.
Somehow this soundes like small weekly review, but just that I do that daily and not that extensive. As far as read the GTD book yet, there were no recommendations or actually tips on how to plan the day, so it seems that I either missed that part (or didn't understand it) or that GTD is missing this :-)

I like ctrl+m: a new mail memo with one key presskeypress even in totally different DBs. Never suspected that I can have Actions (and I suspect Todos in normal Mailfiles, just a different key), too.
This menu is available from everywhere in Notes, so just press alt, c,m,a (one after another) and you have a new action. Great!

Ok, its not Thursdays, but at least "show & tell". :-) Happy weekend!

This is another blogpost about my experience with eProductivity, this time about working with my lists of ToDos.

Your ToDos (or actions in eProductivity speak) can become quite a lot. To get an overview of this pile, there are different ways to divide them or better "look at" them: by context and by projects.

Context is one of the key concepts of GTD: sort your actions by context so every time you have a telephone nearby or a computer or are @Work or @Home, you know where to look for work and it lets you keep an overview over your todos. eProductivity implements that by some categories and views (default and user specified!) , where you can sort in your actions and view them:


Unfortunately I have some problems with that as I am/was a student: my room is my workplace, together with telephone, laptop and online connection. So basically everything is @Home. And most of the rest isn't getting filled up and I felt like I overlook some actions in all my @Home ones. And that was exactly the feeling I wanted to leave behind with my "old style" todo handling. So something needed to be done. First try was sorting "leisure" items into a different box, which helped a lot. Anyway, I still think I have to split up the rest, but currently I've no idea how: there isn't really a hard border between the rest, where I can divide them up. Any Ideas?

Another way to sort your actions is by linking them to a project. A project is defined as something, which takes several actions to get done. This divides most of my actions quite cleanly and is currently my default way to get a grip on the "important" actions. There is also a view "projects and actions", which sorts all actions by projects and so is almost as informative as the context views and I can even drop stray actions into projects. Using the projects itself is also possible (all actions are shown there too), but most of my projects start out with a brainstorming session and a lot of small actions and so the small embedded view does not give the same overview as the view. It's even possile to sort the action, but only in the embedded view of the project, not the view (feature request sent :-) )

[there is another way to look at your actions: usually you fill in the action as "Category - Action title", where category is usually a person you need to contact. If you use advanced settings and subcategories, there is a view, which shows all actions by this categories ("Actions by entity", burried a bit in the preferences in "Navigation -> advanced"). As I only use categories, not subcategories, it only shows "uncategorized entities" and is so unuseable for me :-/ Lets see if the next version makes this view available for category only users :-) ]

What I miss
I use eProductivity as a dumping ground of all my actions (as a "trusted system" and to get them out if my mind) and then sort through them to get to the ones I need/want to do and plan the next day. There is still some lingering feeling, that there is some urgent or important action burried in my pile and I would overlook that. Actions which are due today show up in the today view (if set to advanced and I got a reply to my bugreport, that there will be some more improvements in the next version) and you can sort most views by due date, so that helps already (here is an ideajam for a specific view). Also you can assign priorities to actions, but I haven't found a way to look at them in that way, sorted by priority.

Anyway: even if there is still some of this "do I overlook something important" feeling, it isn't as high as with any other system I've used so far. In this regard, in times of stress, eProductivity really took a lot of anxiety out of my life. :-)

Found this on Ed Brills twitter feed:


Is that the famous "Air cover"? Just wondering, because I couldn't find any reference/speculation/blogpostings to this tweet in the yellow bubble.

Ok, seems that I was quite pissed off yesterday. Sorry to anyone who felt offended by it, but it really feels good to "go out and scream" sometimes...

... the problem with notes and opera ...
Anyway, afterwards I tried for some time to get an idea what notes expects as an browser and even compiled a "null.exe" (AutoHotKeys: one line to "run , %1%" -> opens the parameter (webpage) in your default browser. Autohotkeys is a really great tool!), but didn't work.

And then after giving up and working some hours, it magically worked. And I couldn't get an idea "why": ProcMon just didn't spit out anything, just the call to the browser. Until I changed my webbrowser preference in my location document to an invalid value and voila: Notes gave an error. Now I have an situation where Opera opens the page, but with completely the wrong preferences:

Instead of using the operating system preferences, it uses the old style location preference.  Even deleting the "notesdata\workspace" folder and recreating it with one from a completely new installation gives now the same result: it opens the link with that browser.



[UPDATE, an hour later: Now it is back to null.exe and not working at all. &§$&$§! Has anybody of you a switch and tries to make me look stupid and bewildered?]

Notes -  when everyday mysteries (or miseries) are not enough...

... some thoughts about support ...
I got a second email from lotus support (seems to be higher up), saying exactly the same: "Opera not supported". Ok, I give up.

Not sure how to rate this: yes, we have paid only for "supported platforms", but browsers are deeply integrated into my and I think everybodies personal productivity and only supporting the big two and only in certain versions is a pain in the a**. For me it's another small sign that IBM really only cares about big companies, where such a requirement can be satisfied, but not the 30 people startup where "no, you can only use IE 6/7 or F1.5/2" is just not possible. FF is at version 3.5, IE at version 8 and notes8.0.x will be arround for some more years: when will it happen that you can't build a "supported" system anymore, becaus both MS and Mozilla don't support their old browsers anymore?

Having such strange behaviour on "not supported" environments is in my opinion a bug and should be reported to the developers. Just imagine a browser crashing your domino and getting a  "sorry, that browser is not a supported browser"? Even if nothing will happen in the current code stream, such a "put into our bugtracking system" message is better than just replying "not supported", even if it is strictly following what you paid for. "Not supported" without any other explanations is just another way to say "piss off", at least in my mind.

Jan
PS: Not supporting different browsers can cost you some big money, as some hardware manufacture found out the hard way...