Get the most from Notes®

Category Good Practice
The aim of a good administrator is to have complete control of the content of, and access to, the servers they are responsible for in order to maintain a highly reliable service.

The aim of a good developer is to implement new databases, features and functions in the shortest time possible in a controlled fashion with minimum defects.

Unfortunately, these objectives are often in conflict. The administrator often sees the developer as a disruptive element wanting to deploy buggy, untested code into their beautifully controlled environment that will disrupt and destroy it. The developer sees the administrator as unnecessarily rigid, forcing them to jump through many bureaucratic hoops to get the simplest change deployed.

Sound familiar to you? If so, what do you do about it? Play this ‘cat and mouse’ game every day? Work to peacefully coexist? Ignore this dynamic all together? The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way.

There are solutions to this challenge. By setting up a process that addresses how code moves from development, to test, to production, you can control what code is moved into production. At the very least, this will ensure you are aware anything new.

Naturally, there is a lot behind this process. How much testing is required? Who has the authority to move code out of test? Is it possible to skip this step? The questions can go on and on. Teamstudio has developed a number of policy guides to help you with this. The policy guide on Application Delivery (PRO 10) is particularly helpful.

Of course once you have a process in place, you need to enforce compliance. The great news for admins is that there are ways of strictly controlling deployment to production. But your developers won’t be satisfied unless the solution still flexible and efficient enough to deliver legitimate updates in a timely fashion

Normally we wouldn’t promote Teamstudio events as part of this blog. But this issue has been coming up more and more lately, so we thought we would make an exception to let you know about an upcoming webinar that will show you how you can resolve these issues. The webinar is Thursday, December 3, 09:00 ET, 15:00 GMT. It will also be available on demand after the live event.

Register for our upcoming webinar to find out how easy it can be to resolve such issues. Thanks for indulging us in the promotion of this event.

Posted by Michaela Murray At 8:37 AM | Location Huntingdon, UK | Permalink | Comments (1) |      

Category Personal

As many of you know, one of our colleagues and friends at Teamstudio, Andrew Fentiman, was in the Territorial Army and was recently deployed to Afghanistan. It is with deep sadness that we have to announce that Andrew was killed during active service on Sunday November 15th 2009.

We were absolutely devastated to have lost Andrew. We would like to express our deepest sympathy to his family and friends. Andrew was a remarkable young man who will be missed by all of us here at Teamstudio. He had a fantastic sense of humor and it was a pleasure to work with him.

We are grateful for the time that we got to share with Andrew.

Posted by Scott Johnsen At 6:57 PM | Location Beverly, MA | Permalink | Comments (5) |      

Category Development

Did you catch my earlier post on UI?  It reminded me of my favorite shared column.  Why should you just display a paper clip in a view when the document has an attachment when you can add value by displaying what kind of attachment it has?   Try this formula and be sure to check Display values as Icons.

extList := ".ODS":".XLS":".ODF":".DOC":".ODP":".PPT":".NTF":".TXT":".MP3":".ZIP":".PDF";
ext := @UpperCase( @Right( @AttachmentNames; 4 ) );
choice := @Member( ext; extList );
@If( @Attachments > 5; 30:30;
        @Attachments > 1;150 + @Attachments;
        @Attachments = 0; 0;
        @If( choice = 0; 5; @Select( choice; 141;141;142;142;143;143;145;1;15;10;171) ) )

To add other icons, add the extension to the first line, and add the icon number to the last line.  Also note that in ND 8, the icons for the M$ products have changed to a generic icon, despite the documentation.  

Also note that if you want to modify the mail template, this column is copied to every folder, which needs to be modified separately.  And if you want help interpreting the formula, the first clause checks to see if the version of Notes is less than R4 - you can probably safely remove this clause along with its other clauses that start with the @IsAvailable( $ContentIcon) phrase.  You can then fit this @if into the remaining @If statement.

Posted by John Kingsley At 8:16 AM | Location Beverly, MA | Permalink | Comments (0) |