Have you ever wanted to create a sub-list inside a list? (shown below on left) Mix list types? (shown below on right) ?You can! ?This is not limited to just two levels deep you can create as many sub-levels as you would like.


When you create your main list, press Enter on your keyboard to go to the next line, and then indent (F8, or ) the following line. ? This separates the sub-list from the main list. ?You can change the list type of this indented list to whatever you would like.

The animation below demonstrates the steps.

?Lotus® Notes® Developer’s Toolbox: Tips for Rapid and Successful Deployment, by Mark Elliott

Lotus® Notes® Developer’s Toolbox will help you streamline and improve every phase of Notes development. Leading IBM Lotus Notes developer Mark Elliott systematically identifies solutions for the key challenges Notes developers face, offering powerful advice drawn from his extensive enterprise experience. This book presents best practices and step-by-step case studies for building the five most common types of Notes applications: collaboration, calendar, workflow, reference library, and Web site.

This book is for Notes developers at all levels of experience, using recent versions from V5.0 through V7.0, and beyond. Like all IBM developerWorks® Series books, it is fully integrated with comprehensive Web resources, including working examples of each project, enhanced versions that go beyond the book, sample graphics, and tools for addressing real-world business scenarios.

Coverage includes:

• Getting started with Domino Designer®, and using the design elements it provides
• Developing Notes databases, step-by-step: considerations, code instructions, design tips, and project plans
• Mastering and customizing Lotus Formula and LotusScript
• Customizing forms, views, agent behavior, application interfaces, and more
• Building calendar applications with simple and complex recurrent events
• Developing applications that distribute information via email, response documents, and other methods
• Creating reference library applications, and generating Excel® spreadsheets for analysis
• Constructing sophisticated workflow and Web-based Notes applications
• Securing, deploying, and maintaining Notes applications, and managing their data
• Enhancing database functionality: more than 95 ready-to-use code modules and customizations
• Exclusive Web resources available only to book registrants

Lotus Notes 7.0.2 introduced a new feature with enables users to carry their Lotus Notes experience with them on a USB memory device. ?(Nomad was the unoffical name that has been adopted around this feature, hence the title of this entry)

Here is a 4 minute video interview that aired on the New England Cable News where this new featured is discussed.



Jeff Eisen did a great job in the interview, and IBM developer Jeff Mitchell and his teammates did a great job in implementing this new feature. ? Congratulations to everyone involved.

If you want to read more about this feature, Ed Brill has a complied a list of articles written by other bloggers including : Paul Rigby, Chris Miller, Chris Whisonant (extensive), Jack Dausman, Susan Bulloch, Colin Williams and more Colin Williams , DominoPoint.IT, Chris Linfoot, Declan Lynch , ?Declan Lynch, Matt Holthe , and growing...

Below is a table of some of the potential new graphics which may be used in the next major release of Lotus Notes*. ? I think they look fantastic!

	New Meeting Invitation		Meeting		From Invitee to Chair
	Accept		Appointment		From Invitee to Delegate
	Decline		Anniversary		Meeting Draft
	Counter Proposal		All Day Event		Meeting Update
	Meeting Cancelled		Reminder		Reschedule
	Meeting Confirmed		Tentatively Accept

* This post contains information about a future version of Lotus Notes. ?The information discussed here may change in any way (or even be removed) between now and the shipping product.

Did you know that you don't have to have just one Personal Address Book database? ?There are several reasons why it may be advantageous to divide up your Contacts in two, three, or even more Address Books. ?A few reasons may be:

• You have a long list of Contacts, but many of these are just acquaintances that you don't use that often and you want to reduce the clutter.
• You have contacts with only phone numbers, not email addresses, and you don't want them to show up when addressing emails.
• You have a subset of contacts that you want to synch with your phone, PDA, or other mobile device.
• You want to keep work and personal contact separate.
• You want to keep contacts for different customers in different databases.
• Insert your personal reason here!

It is easy to create an additional address book.

1. From the Lotus Notes menus, select File - Database - New, or click CRTL+N. ?
2. In the New Database dialog box, leave Local as the Server name.
3. Enter a title for the database. ? This can be anything you'd like. ?Secondary Address Book, My Friends, Customers, etc. ? It is best to keep the title short.
4. Enter the filename for the database. ? You can call this name2.nsf, friends.nsf, customers.nsf, or whatever you'd like,
5. In the list of templates, make sure you choose "Personal Address Book".
6. Click ok.



Now open the database you've just created, and add your new contacts.

If you would like to move some of the contacts from your current names.nsf to this new database, select the desired documents, then choose Edit - Cut, or press CTRL+X, or right click and choose Cut as shown below. ? Next open the new database you created above, and choose Edit - Paste, or press CTRL+V, or right click and choose Paste.



NOTE: ?At this point the contacts in this new address book will not show up when you are addressing an email. ?This may be what you want (example, when you are removing seldom used names to reduce clutter), but may not be in others (example, when you are creating a separate database for customers). ?I will cover this in more detail in a future tip.

I was reading my October 9th edition of eWeek and was ecstatic to find the following full page advertisement for Lotus Notes and Domino. ? It is part of IBM's Take Back Control campaign.



Here are the words...

_INFRASTRUCTURE LOG
_DAY 44: This lack of productivity is out of control. No one is getting anything done. ? What we're using isn't working. ? Gil's had enough. ? He moved everyone into one cubicle. ?A "collaboration cubicle.

_Note to self: collaborating means showers are a must.

_Day 46: I'm going with IBM Lotus Notes and Domino instead. ? It's far more than email; it's an open platform designed for collaboration. ?It has proven security features and it's packed with productivity enhancers like document sharing and custom app development. ?It's easy to deploy, and it's flexible enough to integrate across multiple platform, including J2EE and Linux.

_OK, who sat on my lunch?

Here is the PDF if you want a copy. LotusNotesDom_Cubicle_TBC_AD.pdf


This follows an equally exciting Sametime 7.5 Ad that ran a month ago which Adam Gartenberg blogged about. ?I'm thrilled to see IBM putting so much into Lotus.

I often drag multiple attachments from my file system into Lotus Notes documents. ?Once the attachments are in the document, you unfortunately can't move them around via drag and drop. ?You could cut and paste them, but if the attachments are large, this can take a while. ? Instead when I want to reorder the attachments what I do is take advantage of the Lotus Notes feature that allows you to Re-arrange values in a list or cells in a table.

Here is an example.


#1 Turn the line they are on into a bulleted list. ?(using the Toolbar Icon , the Text menu, keyboard shortcut ALT+T+L+L, or right click menu)



#2 Move each attachment to its own bullet by placing a line break (return/enter key) between attachments 1 and 2, and 2 and 3.



#3 Use the arrow keys (as described here) to rearrange the attachments.



#4 Reverse steps #2 and #1. ?Meaning, delete the line break, and then remove the bullet list formatting. ? Now the attachments are in the order that you want.



After doing this a few times you'll find it to be a simple process.

This week Ed Brill and I are co-moderating a discussion on LotusUserGroup.org. ?The topic is competitive aspects of the collaboration industry. ? I encourage you to surf over to the site, and join in the discussion. ? To start the conversation I've created a document about using tools other than email for collaboration.

If you have never visited the site before, using a Discussion Forum is a bit different than reading a blog such as this site. ?You can create a new topic of your own, as opposed to only being able to respond to the main documents the owner creates.


You can add comments to any existing topic by clicking Reply to main, or Reply here.


Please feel free to ask us anything that is on your mind. ? However, the intent is to discuss the industry, not get into specific features of one product versus another. ? Let's get creative, please share your thoughts and ideas and help make this a valuable discussion.

Here's my latest tool/toy for you to download and play around with:

SoapLog for Domino

"What does it do", you ask? It monitors the web service traffic on your Domino 7.0 server!

SoapLog is a Lotus Notes/Domino DSAPI filter and accompanying database. The SoapLog filter can be copied to a Lotus Domino 7.0 server running on the Windows platform to track the contents of incoming SOAP requests, both the request and the response.

It can be very useful for tracking and debugging web services on the Domino server, and it requires no special configuration of any of the web services or databases that are already on the server. It just listens for any SOAP request and logs the transaction. Here's how you set it up:

• copy the soaplog.dll file to the Domino program directory, and SoapLog.nsf to the data directory
• Add the line -- SOAPLOG_DBNAME=SoapLog.nsf -- to the server's Notes.ini file
• Add "soaplog.dll" to the list of DSAPI filters in the server document in the Notes address book
• Restart the HTTP task on the server

That's it! All SOAP messages/web service transactions will be written to log documents in the database (see screenshots on the download page).

Version 1.0 is the initial release of this program and database. The program and database are currently unsupported but free for personal, development, and production use -- please test thoroughly before deploying to a production server for this 1.0 release. I am currently working out terms for support of the product, for companies that prefer to work with a well-supported version of this tool. The DSAPI filter itself is currently Windows-only, although I am also working on compiling a Linux version.

Instructions for setting up and using the DSAPI DLL file and database can be found in the "Using This Database" document within the database download.

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Did you know that via drag and drop you can not only "move" documents, you can also "add" documents to a folder? ? That means instead of just changing from their current location (such as your Inbox) to the new folder, they also stay in their current location as well. ?It is called "add" instead of "copy", because copy sounds like it is creating an additional document, which it is not as I explain here.

In the animation below you can see that my inbox starts with four documents. ?Two of them are moved to a new folder via drag and drop. ?After the drop, the two documents are no longer displayed in the Inbox. ?Also notice how the folders expand when I hover over them.


This time I will do the same thing, but before I drop the documents, I press the CTRL key on my keyboard. ?The mouse cursor changes, adding a "+" sign, ?indicating that the documents are being "added" not moved. ? Notice after the drop the two documents are in the new folder, but they also remain in the Inbox.


The is extremely useful when you want to place a document in more than one folder.

When looking at an access control list (ACL) in a Lotus Notes database, you can only view information for one ACL entry at a time. For easier analysis, this LotusScript code from SearchDomino.com member Joe Steblay compiles all ACL information for a selected Lotus Notes database in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with auto-filtered column headings.

Today is Yom Kippur on the Jewish Calendar. ? For those that don't know, it is a day of reflection, both internally and about the world around me. ?I'd like to take this opportunity to wish all my readers and their friends and families health and happiness. ?Those wishes expand beyond the boundary of any religious belief, your choice of employer, which collaboration system you use, what OS you run on your desktop and servers, what mobile device your carry, and language you choose to program in. ?:-)

According to this article, the patent for the GIF file format finally expired yesterday, and there can no longer be any patent claims against programs (or people) that generate GIF files without paying a license fee to Unisys.

Granted, almost none of us ever felt any pain or had to pay anything extra because of the GIF patent -- it was mostly a theoretical issue for end users -- but it's a good thing to happen anyway.

Now if we can just get the Notes client to natively support the PNG format without having to resort to strange hacks I'll be in happy graphics land (PNG is a fantastic format for screenshots).

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How many documents are being shown in this Lotus Notes view?


Now how many documents are being shown in this Lotus Notes view?


The answer to both questions is 2, but I bet many people would have answered 4 for the second one.

So why is what looks like 4 documents in the second screen shot, really only 2? ? Because as you can see below, when the document was created it was labelled with three categories: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. ?


Lotus Notes allows a single document to be displayed within multiple categories, without having to make extra copies of the document. ? This can be very powerful in applications, but can also be a little confusing if you are not careful.

Say you no longer want the document to be shown under "Trains". ? When you select the document by clicking next to it under that category, you will notice the selection check mark also appears in the two other categories. ?That is because they are all the same document. ? So if you hit delete, the document would be completely removed from the database, not just from the single "Trains" category.


To change what categories the document is displayed under, you can either edit the document and remove the category


Or you can choose Actions - Categorize


This will bring up the Categorize dialog box where you can de-select categories or even add new ones. ?(if you have access to do so)


I hope this helps provide some better understanding of how Lotus Notes uses categories, and what you are really seeing when you look at the documents displayed in a view.

Messaging is only a small part of what IBM Lotus® Notes® and Lotus Domino® software delivers.

• Collaboration beyond e-mail—think outside the in-box.
• Software designed for organizational productivity—online and offline.
• Platform options—the choice is yours, not your software vendor’s.
• Continued innovation and integration—with no disruptive migration.

Version 7.0.2 makes Lotus Notes and Domino software even better!



In addition to delivering software fixes, maintenance release 7.0.2 includes new capabilities for business blogs, universal serial bus (USB) and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) support.

Domino 7 Performance Tuning Best Practices to Get the Most Out of Your Domino Infrastructure

This IBM Redpaper discusses a best practices approach to Performance Tuning in Domino 7. It addresses both how to approach the science of performance tuning in a structured, logical manner, while also providing an in-depth discussion of specific configuration parameters to tune in specific situations.

Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction to performance tuning in Domino
Chapter 2. Understanding performance tuning and the Domino tools available
Chapter 3. Managing Performance Data and establishing a baseline
Chapter 4. Road map for how and where to begin performance tuning
Chapter 5. Understanding what to tune
Chapter 6. Special considerations and advanced topics
Appendix A. Important notes.ini parameters

So, this week I decided to use my infinite free time to start development on a Domino DSAPI filter. It's actually some code I started writing a couple years ago, and never got around to finishing. So I'm finishing it now.

Unfortunately, I didn't have a C compiler on my new laptop and I decided to check my options. The only "supported" compiler for Microsoft (the platform I'm initially developing for) is Visual Studio 6.0, but they mention using gcc on a few of the other platforms, so I thought it might be good to try developing with gcc on Windows to make it easier to port to other platforms later.

Since I already have Eclipse loaded up, I decided to try using Eclipse CDT as an IDE (which is now part of the Callisto package, so it was easy to find). I then loaded up MinGW to get the gcc compiler -- partially because I didn't feel like doing a whole Cygwin install just for gcc, and partially because MinGW automatically creates code with no reliance on other DLLs.

Well I got everything going on CDT/MinGW, but kept getting one or two compiler errors having to do with conflicting data types between the Notes and Windows header files, and a weird error about an incorrect #pragma definition, and finally just called it quits.

My second try (a successful one, if you're not going to read to the end) was the free Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express release. It's not quite as full-featured as the "real" Visual Studio release, but it looked like it would do the job and it was only a single CD image install.

Well, sort of. Here's what you have to do:

• Download VCP 2005 Express and install it. This ends up taking almost 700 MB of disc space.
• Download and install the Windows Platform SDK. I used the "typical" install, and it added about another 900 MB of files.
• Follow the instructions to make sure that VCP knows that the Platform SDK is there.

Now I had a working installation to start with, but the only "New Project" option I had for non-CLR programs was "Win32 Console Application". That's not what I wanted. I need to make a DLL. A little searching later, and I found out that you can indeed create a native (non-.NET) DLL, it's just not one of the menu options on the Express edition. What you have to do is create a console application project, and then after you're in the project you can change the "Configuration Type" to "Dynamic Library (dll)".

And there you go. I compiled, debugged, repeated the process a few dozen times, and got my working DSAPI filter. Happy days.

In the end, I'm actually very glad I ended up using Visual Studio, just because of its amazing debugger. I'd still be fiddling with code if it wasn't for the Visual Studio debugger.

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Lotus has posted two new Lotus Sametime 7.5 demonstration videos. ?One for Instant Messaging (5:12) and one for Web Conferencing (4:12)

?

If you have not yet watched the new Sametime 7.5 video! ? ?Enjoy...

In this posting, I am going to explain a few important concepts of Lotus Notes: How/where is a document stored in a database, and what is the difference between removing a document and deleting one?

To understand these questions, you must first understand the difference between a Folder and a View. ?On the surface they look the same. ?Both display documents vertically in rows, and for each row there are columns which show information about the document. ?For example, your Inbox shows emails, and the columns for each row display values such as the name of the Sender, the date, the size, and the subject.



Where a Folder and View differ, is in how they determine which documents to display.

Each view in a database is configured (by a developer) to show documents based on something called a "Selection Formula". ?That formula can range from something as simple as "All", so that every document in a database is shown, to a very granular formula such as "Show me all documents by a specific author, and are older than a specific date, and over a specific size".

Folders on the other hand are more of an "open container" for documents. ? Instead of displaying documents based on any specific criteria, they display just those documents that you drag and drop into them. ? Folders tend to be more personal, and allow you to define your own way to store documents, organized in a manner which has meaning specific to you.

So assuming you now understand the difference between Folders and Views, the important thing to understand next is that each document is only stored a single time per database, no matter how many Folders or Views that document is displayed in. ? ?For example, when you move an email from your Inbox into several folders, your mail file only contains a single instance of the document. ? Each folder just contains a pointer to that one document.


Why is this important to know? ? Because if you DELETE a document from a folder, it will be gone from all the folders and views that it was displayed in. ? If you no longer want a document to be displayed in specific folder, you REMOVE it from that folder, not delete it.



To help reduce the amount of mistakenly deleted emails, Lotus Notes warns you when you try and delete a document from the Sent view of your mail file.



Does that explain things? ?If not, please ask questions and I'll keep updating this document until it is very clear.