Uploading Files to Quickr from a Mac Notes Client

This post comes from a discussion I had with someone around a lack of MAC Quickr connectors.

Mac Guidera has responsibility for the Connectors and last year at Lotusphere the question was asked about MAC connectors among others. The answer is we don't have any as far as I know.

SNAPPS has a product called Panda Bear which helps this problem. But what if you wanted something inside your MAC Notes client?

After the excellent session today by Mat Newman the idea came to me and while it may not work, I had a theory which I will explain how to bring some hope to the MAC people.

Sidebar. Yes that thing so many people never use or think about has some excellent options inside it. One is to provide a feed, link, notes db, view, URL etc.. as a Sidebar application.

I don't have a MAC so I will describe the idea and maybe someone can try it and let me know if it works.

Take the URL of the Quickr place, say the file area of a Place and make that a Sidebar app. There is a java section on the page and I wondered if you could then drag and drop your files into the place.

Sounds simple enough but some problems could exist.
1) Maybe drag and drop on a MAC is not enough to add the file. Perhaps it would prompt you with the save dialog?
2) If drag and drop doesn't work. If the main Files page was in the Sidebar, is it asking a user too much to click on the add a file option? Could it be this easy?
3) Maybe there is code preventing this from happenning in some way?
4) How would you do this if you had dozens of Places? There is no good way to import/export the places like there is for the Windows Connector. So this may not be perfectly practical in all situations.

There it is, not a great option, but possibly one that has merit in some cases.

Lotusphere inspires ideas and if this works, maybe for some people it would mean a lot.

Sidebar Apps and Portability

About a year ago, I posted this post which had 15+ sidebar apps to think about. Since then numerous more have been crated, added or designed by the greater world at large, not just the Yellow Bubble.

Not going to create a new list but suffice it to say Tungle, Gist(recently purchased by RIM and the Lotus plugin is now dropped from their site as of Feb 2011),  Linkedin, Recon, File Navigator, Wildfire are ones I use regularly.

No question these have been a great enhancement to the Notes clients. Great things come in small packages.
And if you are not using these, or teaching employees or customers how to leverage them, you are hurting your clients/employers. Sure there are reasons some people do not want to do it, but those with horses and buggy whips can wait outside.

However, when you need to rebuild a client or laptop or just move everything, unless you can get a cloned drive you will fall into this dilemma. How does one save/move existing sidebar apps that have been installed?

You see unlike Bookmarks or the desktop which have specific files that maintain all of the UI data, there is nothing as simple on the Eclipse side. Welcome to the double edge sword of Eclipse. With great options and benefits come some questionable benefits to life as an admin or developer.

So the IT staff could enable apps in the Update Site and the Widget Catalog and push them out via policies, but that seems a bit heavy handed doesn't it?

Why could the installed files not be installed into an updatesite file on the client side?
Even if there are pointer/directory issues, the db should be self contained so it could be reconfigured to just find the Notes path.

So as I sit here and wait for reinstalls and reboots, someone out there have a better way to make these portable?

What is running on your Sidebar?

Or how many Sidebar items can you fit on your screen?

On Twitter today I had asked about sorting my Sidebar apps. This elicited an interesting flurry of messages.

My main question was if I can sort them alphabetically and the answer was no straight from the source. Ideajam to the rescue, go vote for it. Sure it's a minor thing, but one of those nice things to do for the person using it.

Keep in mind, one can make the Sidebar apps into icons instead of taking up screen real estate, but then you need to know what the icon means and wait for the hover of a mouse to tell you.

So what do I have on mine? I will try to let you know where to find them, if anyone can fill in the gaps, or recommend anything else, let me know. The name has the link to get to it aside from IBM product related items.

Don't forget there are sidebar/widget catalogs out there in a few places.
One comes from the Turtle Partnership. Thanks to Gabriella, Tim and team for being one of the first out there and maintaining it. The basics are there like USPS, FEDEX among others.

1) Doodle - Just got a link to their beta of the widget. Not sure how much I will use it, but I'll try it.

2) Twitnotes - Although it does not work for me or anyone switching locations and ID regularly, similar to Sametime, if you are at home so to speak all day, you got to love it. And thank Mikkel for his great work!

3) Sametime, Quickr, Activities, Feeds, Day at a Glance any other native IBM pieces obviously as well.

4) Linkedin - For me and my nearly 5,000 connections this has been really helpful, especially when working with Livetext. You do know about Livetext don't you?

5) Sidebar Chart - (Quoted directly from the about this app)This is the Sidebar Chart application for the Lotus Notes 8.x Standard client, first demoed at Lotusphere 2009 in session BP111 by Rob McDonagh and Julian Robichaux of SNAPPS. This plugin displays a graphical representation of either (A) how many documents are selected in the active view versus how many docs are in the view, or (B) a comparison of values for selected docs in the view based on columns chosen for values and categories.

6) Recon - Another Julian app. This one you can not live without if you are an Admin. ReCon is short for Remote Console.

7) SNAPPS Calculator - Doesn't everyone need on in their Sidebar? Thanks SNAPPS.

8) Scrapple - Drag and Drop place that makes it easier in life. Again from the genius Mr. Robichaux.

9) Learning Plugin for Lotus Notes/Lotus Learning Widget - 2 slightly different versions of same information. Excellent videos, documents, PDFs and other how to help and such for Notes, Sametime, Symphony etc.

10) Lotus Learning widget for Symphony - Similar to #9 but Symphony focused. By the way, the Symphony website has a bunch of add-ins for Symphony and Notes.

11)Status Updater/ - Sametime, got it, Connections? got it. Twitter? got it. A Must if you are IBM/Twitter centric (until the release of Wildfire yesterday) but I haven't played with Wildfire yet but Wildfire extends to Facebook, GTalk, PingFm, Plurk, Tumblr, Twitter, Wordpress and more! Thank you to Andrew Welch; Adam Brown for wildfire and Jessica W Ramirez for Status Updater.

12) Openntf Widgets - You aren't really using your Lotus infrastructure if you are not using Openntf's goodies. There are a few different options in the download. Thank you to Niklas Heidloff; Steve Castledine.

13) File Navigator - By far THE most wanted and used and installed Sidebar app. Bring your directories and files and folders easily into Lotus Notes. HUGE Thank you to Xiao Lei; Jian Kang; Rene Winkelmeyer.

14) Tripit - Travel much? Like to with friends? Get it use it to find everyone coming to Orlando this week.

15) Google Maps(from the turtle Partnership site) - No explanation needed, in conjunction with Livetext a big winner especially when locating new clients.

I also have about half dozen or so personal/corporate widgets there, like my Gotcha database(which I may post one of these days), billing app db, UK post code lookups, partners time card reporting for our subcontracts. You can do a lot in a Sidebar.

And don't forget, you can undock ALL of them. So those of you with multiple monitors go crazy and keep them open everywhere. Try doing this in Outlook.

So there you have it the top 25+ on my Sidebar not including bits and pieces.

Happy Lotusphere to all and share this list with your clients and friends.

And let me know what else I am missing that I just MUST have.

More Sidebar Coolness and perhaps confusion in 8.5.1

Something else which is really nice to have is the ability to drag an email over to your sidebar and drop it on the data/time necessary.

Amazing time savings and effort. Of course now I have to retrain people to use the Sidebar.

This is a good thing.

The downside is they will ask why can't they drag and drop the email into the little calendar piece instead of the hourly line which is shown above in the picture below?

And why can't they drag an opened email to it? It only works if the email is in the inbox.

This is fine if used in preview mode but what about those who don't use it? Or worse don't know it exists?

But it's here it works and so far saved me a ton of extra effort already.

PS - I still can not drag an email to the To Do Window :-(

SNTT - Forget Bookmarks or Launcher Go Sidebar!

Some bloggers have posted this, but since it came up today, wanted to share it again for those new to R8.

Okay, maybe not fully drop the Launcher(My favorite part of the Home view), but if there is a view or a form you need to see/use all the time or even a few times a day, stick it in your sidebar.

What? Huh? How?

I admit being lazy about it as well, but it's here and you don't need 8.5.1 to do it.
Finally moved our TimeCard app to it(waiting for Chris Toohey's new Time Tracker app as well to see if I like that better or merge some pieces)

How to do it:
1)Open a database, go to the view you use regularly.
2)Click on Tools from the menu bar.
3)Then Widgets - Configure a Widget from Current Context
4)It will bring up a popup with 2 options, pick Open a notes view, document or frameset.
5)Click next
6)Give it a Name
7)Then Select "Display as a sidebar panel" (just configure a component sticks it in the "My Widgets" folder
8)Click next

And that's it

You now have easy access to a view or form and can open it up as a window if you need too as well.