Notes Design Blog

Introducing a new Desktop policy

Mary Beth Raven — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:29:50 -0400

Cacophonous constituents,
Many of you may remember the "Ask the developers" session at Lotusphere 2009, at which an attendee asked for the Admin to be able to enable the "synchronize contacts" function (because, I'll admit, it is pretty obtuse for end users to figure out what to do).

I believe the others in the room supported her request with a round of applause.

I have some happy news-- we took your input very seriously, and in Notes 8.5.1 there will be a new Desktop policy (on the basics tab, way at the bottom) for enabling "Synchronize Contacts" on the replication tab. It went into a recent build and we're testing it now.

A cleaner-looking sidebar is coming your way in Notes 8.5.1

Mary Beth Raven — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 08:01:22 -0400

In Notes 8.5.1 you'll notice that there are fewer buttons on each of the sidebar panel titles.
We (actually, Sheri Branco on our team-- many of you have met her at Lotusphere) did usabiity testing on manipulating the sidebar panels and, now that the dragging and resizing is easier, (as of 8.5) we determined that we did not need the other 2 buttons on each titlebar (for min/restore and for maximize). Both the tests and our anecdotal evidence indicate that none of you use these buttons anyway :)

So here is what you'll see in Notes 8.5.1. Clicking the titlebar maximizes a panel. You can easily drag to open several at a time.

The LinkedIn Sidebar is now in "alpha" testing, I just installed it

Mary Beth Raven — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:32:28 -0400

Hey LinkedIn lovers,
The LinkedIn sidebar for Notes is available to IBM employees on our "Technology adoption" website, so I quickly installed it to take a look.
Our own John Lance worked on it. We'll keep you posted as it its external availability!
Take a look:

Life imitates.... Sametime???

Mary Beth Raven — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:44:34 -0400

One of our designers (Carrie) has lovely curly hair. However, this can be a problem because we will walk by her cubicle and start asking her questions when she is on the phone-- we do not see her headset on because it's hidden by her lovely hair.

Thus, she has resorted to posting her "status" on her hair:

We will have a series of postings on "Whats new in Notes 8.5.1 starting this summer

Mary Beth Raven — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:51:47 -0400

Loyal Loti,
Many of you have asked for a list (with screenshots!) of what is new and coming in Notes 8.5.1. (of course, you'd have a good idea if you go back and read the postings on this blog)
We do plan a series of "what is coming in Notes 8.5.1.
But we are waiting for "pixel freeze" when all the final icons and layouts are done so that we can have screenshots that will really look like what you'll get.

We'll be starting it probably mid or late July. I might also be giving a talk at IAMLUG about "Whats new in Notes 8.5.1 and if I do then I'll post the entire presentation after IAMLUG.

You are invited to Complete a Dojo Lucid Theme Implementation and Visual Design Survey

Mary Beth Raven — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:22:00 -0400

We have a guest blogger/request for today!
The Open Client Initiative (OCI) is an effort within a pat of IBM called "Software Strategy and Technology" to, in part, improve the Dojo Toolkit by developing a new visual theme to address the problems with the current Tundra theme and a new Style Editor tool. These projects are in response to Dojo-related surveys conducted by the Design Leadership team early in 2009.

The OCI team is now conducting an on-line survey to gather feedback regarding the approaches we've identified to implement the new Lucid theme as well as the detailed Lucid visual design specification. Your feedback will help the OCI team steer a course that will result in a new theme and Style Editor tool that works for as many product teams as possible.

This survey expires 5pm Pacific (that would be GMT - 9 on 17 June I think) on 6/17. We are interested in gathering feedback from Dojo Developers, UX Designers, Visual Designers and anyone else involved in the visual styling of Dojo-based applications. Please distribute this request to all appropriate staff -- it should require no more than 15-20 minutes to complete.

What does this mean for Lotus Customers? Well, Xpages uses some Dojo controls, and so does Connections, Quickr and Portal.

Thanks for the feedback!!

David R. Schwartz, Ph.D.
Senior User Interface Architect | Certified IT Specialist
IBM Design Leadership
Phone|FX|Pager: 206.686.9974 TL: 349.1832
drschwar@us.ibm.com

Today is "String Freeze" for Notes 8.5.1

Mary Beth Raven — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:07:42 -0400

Scattered Schedule-watchers,
Today is string freeze for Lotus Notes 8.5.1. This means that it's the last day that we are supposed to change any labels that you see in the user interface.
After today, all the strings (properties files, .rc files etc) will be sent out for translation. So any changes we make to any words after today have to be re-packaged up and re-sent out for translation-- and that costs more. So as of today, only really important/really necessary strings will be changed.

As you can imagine, today is a bit hectic. The UI team has been installing builds and verifying that the strings are correct etc. And as usual, today's build is the first build with some of the new strings in them, and we've found a few missing strings (hum, perhaps I should say that we have NOT found a few necessary ones... but you get the idea).

The next big milestone for the UI team is "pixel freeze", which is when we have to stop re-arranging forms etc. and stop tweaking icons.

How often do your users want to "Mark All" as read or unread?

Mary Beth Raven — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 13:05:04 -0400

Ubiquitous users,
We have had a bit of feedback that says that the way we organized the menus for Unread marks makes it too easy to mark all unread (or mark all read) by accident.
(feel free to refer to the screenshot below).

Please note that in Notes 8.5 the context menu for the inbox was greatly reduced and Philippe can mark an individual message as read or unread. Is this sufficient-- as in, shall we leave the Edit - Unread marks menu alone and simply encourage users to use the context menu (and/or the Insert key) (Refer to the second screenshot below).
Thus, I am not inclined to change the Edit - Unread Marks menu because Philippe has ways to avoid accidentally marking all read or unread. (however, he might not find those very discoverable). I look forward to your opinions.

Plan your summer vacation -- Go to St. Louis, MO and attend IamLUG and GSX days!

Mary Beth Raven — Mon, 8 Jun 2009 12:14:15 -0400

Lucky Lotus customers,

Here's a great summer sightseeing opportunity combined with some lively learning about Lotus. I'm talking about the IamLUG conference on August 3 and 4 in St. Louis, MO, followed closely by GSX days at the same site on August 5th.

Both events are free, but you do have to register.

For those of you North Americans who are GSX customers-- or thinking about becoming a GSX customer, it's a great opportunity, partly because this is their first GSX days to be held in the USA. St. Louis has plenty of fun things (besides the Gateway Arch) to do. You might even want to take a brewery tour-- although I probably won't-- But that is because we have our own Budweiser brewery where I live in Merrimack, NH.

I had the opportunity to speak at GSX days in France last year. It was great to be able to spend time talking in detail about customers deployments of Notes. I think I learned as much-- if not more-- than any of the attendees, mainly about the big picture of deploying and maintaining Domino and Notes. For me, it was an excellent experience.

I encourage you to try to find the time to attend these events.

Congratulations to Chieko Asakawa, one of IBM’s 8 new "Fellows"

Mary Beth Raven — Wed, 3 Jun 2009 20:33:33 -0400

I want to publically extend my congratulations to Chieko Asakawa on being promoted to the highest technical level at IBM: that of "IBM Fellow. " I have met Chieko several times. Almost every time, it was within the context of trying to make Lotus products more accessible (several other times it was simply in the context of internal research conferences). My recollection of our first meeting about 10 years ago (in one of the conference rooms in Westford) was that she was there to help make Sametime (I was working on Sametime at the time) and Notes more accessible to the blind. That was just before the Americans with disabilities act was passed (so it was a while ago!). I am ashamed to admit that the general reaction at the time (as I remembered it) was " Nice ideas, too much work, sorry, lady." I also remember that she and I were the only women in the room-- and I remember feeling really really bad.

Cheiko was polite and very professional at the meeting-- and most of all, she was not discouraged. We have made dramatic strides (and we still have improvements we want to make!), and she has influenced not only the Lotus products, but many IBM products. Congratulations, Chieko. You are an inspiration to us all.

I have included blow the IBM write-up about Chieko and her path to "fellowship."

At a tender age, Chieko Asakawa lost her sight – but not her vision.

The petite research scientist in the Tokyo Research Lab perhaps has done more than any single person on the planet to make the wonders of the World Wide Web accessible to the visually impaired and others with special needs. Chieko was the lead designer of the IBM Home Page Reader, the talking Web browser launched in 1997 in Japanese and later produced in 11 languages and distributed worldwide. She continues to push the frontiers of the possible in accessibility technology.

That one day she would reach the pinnacle of IBM's technical ranks as a Fellow would have scarcely seemed possible four decades ago to Chieko, then a scared, suddenly blind adolescent. A standout athlete growing up in Osaka, Chieko's world changed when she accidentally collided with the side of a pool while swimming, damaging her optic nerves. The accident happened when she was 11 years old. Three years later, Chieko was completely blind.

"I was very worried about my future. I had no idea what people who can't see can do with their lives. It took a while to find out what I could do," Chieko recalled. "But I always knew I should try to make a difference for others with disabilities."

Learning Braille, particularly with the complexities of the Japanese language, was difficult for the teenager. In college, she majored in English literature, reasoning that English would be easier to master in Braille and picking up the language would help her find a job.

After a few years in a vocational school in Osaka for the blind learning optical character assembly and computer programming, Chieko was offered a job as a student researcher at the IBM Tokyo Research Lab. "Taking the job meant moving away from home for the first time – a big step when you're blind. But my father encouraged me, and joining IBM changed my life – and it's been changing my life ever since."

Immediately, Chieko grasped the power of computers to broaden the horizons for people with disabilities. "One of my first projects was developing the Braille Editing System, which makes it easy to input and edit Braille using an ordinary keyboard and monitor. This has become a standard among Braille libraries in Japan."

The explosion of the Internet put Chieko's career and influence into hyper-drive. "It was easy to grasp the potential of the Internet to improve the lives of people with disabilities, but there were obstacles to overcome."

Chieko developed software specifically designed to handle coding used for Web pages. She inserted aural cues to help browsing, such as using a man's voice for text and a woman's voice for links.

Changing the mindset of Web designers has been an ongoing mission for Chieko, who completed her doctorate in computer science at the University of Tokyo in 2004. aDesigner, one of Chieko's innovations, is a program that graphically shows Web designers how accessible their pages are – or are not –to those with poor sight. "As populations age in Japan and U.S. and other places, poor eyesight is going to increase," Chieko pointed out. "Web accessibility becomes more and more important."

These new Instant Corrections in the Notes Rich Text Editor will help a typo queen like me :)

Mary Beth Raven — Tue, 2 Jun 2009 12:20:18 -0400

Spiffy Spellers,

I am testing a few new instant correction features coming in Notes 8.5.1. I always spell "would" as wou - d - l and now I have a little preference that automatically corrects common misspellings, including that one and "t- e-h" for "the." I have another preferences that will fix things when I have 2 initial capital letters and I should not. For those of you know me, you know that I welcome these automatic corrections to my Notes rich text editor!

Take a look at the three new check boxes in the "Instant Corrections" section of the Spell Check preferences in the screen shot below.

From Forrester Research, regarding Google Wave: IBM is way cooler than they get credit for

Mary Beth Raven — Mon, 1 Jun 2009 09:42:33 -0400

Curious customers,
Over the weekend, I was inundated with emails, pings and Twitter DMs asking me what I thought about Google Wave. I'll start by giving you the opinion from a Forrester researcher, Rob Koplowitz. Oh, and, by the way, my colleague Sandra Kogan discovered this posting by using our internal "proof of concept" information aggregator. You might have seen it in the Innovation lab at Lotusphere last year-- it's called "Spectacular!"

Google Waves at the world of collaboration

Posted by rkoplowitz on May 29, 2009

Google unveiled Wave this week. They were careful to present the initiative as an early glimpse. Essentially, Google is leveraging the goodness of content development and communications in a pure web setting. Anyone that has used Google Apps has had that Aha! moment where you realize that stuff works differently on the web. I know, we all realized that intellectually, but you have to admit that you really do have that realization when a bunch of folks are working interactively on a Google spreadsheet and you think, “hey, that was way easier and way more efficient than passing a r around”.

OK, so Google is an interesting position to expolit this new way of working. Lots of dough to invest, really efficient data centers, eyeballs, cache, etc, etc. They also have the ability to drive a huge developer ecosystem. They absolutely have the ability to disrupt the collaboration market in a major way.

Is Google the only firm thinking in these terms? No, not at all. In my role as a Forrester Analyst I am in the process of doing a product comparison of collaborative platforms, a process we call a Wave (ahem). IBM, a company that is way cooler than they [get] credit for, provided a vision where the Internet is the collaboration platform of the future. They see their role as a vendor, to adhere to interoperability standards that allow their products to be part of a broad composition of capabilities that come together in real-time to serve the needs of people in the context of what they are doing. The result is a palette of capabilities that can include multiple content generation tools, synchronous and asynchronous communication and collaboration tools all melding with traditional business tools and applications in real-time.

Google’s message is clearly around the convergence of social and more traditional task and document-centric collaboration to change the way knowledge workers go about their business. This is a cool and undeniable trend, but is it a groundbreaking vision on the part of Google? It’s pretty much SocialText’s mission statement.

I like and applaud what Google is doing and I think they have unbelievable resources to pull it off. It will be interesting to see when we next hear about Wave. In the meantime, a lot of other vendors are pretty darn innovative too. Apologies to the many, many that I didn’t mention here. Time is of the essence and I need to get back to my day job. Got my own Wave to worry about.

Behold my roaming workspace!

Mary Beth Raven — Thu, 28 May 2009 09:09:47 -0400

The Notes development team is busy making the workspace roam (in 8.5.1 we hope). I'm one of the lucky early testers.
The idea is that at some point, Philippe (who is currently a roaming user) will be asked which of his current workspaces he wants to be his "primary" workspace. Then all the others on his other machines will get made to look like his primary workspace.

Here is my primary workspace:

Here is my workspace on my secondary computer:

Now that I've chosen my primary workspace, the next time Notes replicates, my secondary workspace should no longer have the 3 tabs; it should have the same 2 tabs (and the same chicklets in the same layout) as my primary workspace. And Voila! It is!

This is encouraging. Blogging about it does not mean that we promise it will make it into Notes 8.5.1-- we're still testing it. But it's a good sign. I found a few bugs and the dev team fixed them. Of course, we have a real QE team and a set of internal pilot users of the feature. I hope it will be robust enough to make it into Notes 8.5.1.

And yes, I certainly would like a beautiful workspace with .png files for icons etc. One step at a time!

Update on Symphony editors embedded in Notes on a Mac

Mary Beth Raven — Fri, 22 May 2009 11:40:57 -0400

I recently asked for your opinions about Lotus Symphony integrated in Notes on a Mac. We've decided to have only the Notes icon on the Application folder (see scheenshot below).
Once this ships, please feel free to give us feedback on how it is working for you and your users.

Hey look, Italian food company moves to Lotus Notes and Symphony!

Mary Beth Raven — Thu, 21 May 2009 13:00:00 -0400

Loyal Loti,
I'm pleased to announce that we're getting about a thousand new Lotus-product users at Gruppo Amadori, in Italy. This company is a wholesale distributor of quality food products and they are moving from Microsoft Exchange to IBM Lotus Notes and Domino on Linux! They are also deploying Lotus Symphony, Sametime and Quickr.

Recent Contacts and Blackberry Users

Mary Beth Raven — Thu, 21 May 2009 10:26:16 -0400

Boisterous Blackberry users,

Philippe (our end user persona) can synchronize Notes contacts with Blackberry contacts if he chooses the option to store a copy of the local contacts in his mail file. However, Recent Contact records are not currently replicated as part of this copy, so the Blackberry can not make use of this information.

Calendar Weekend Columns: Stay Skinny?

John Lance — Wed, 20 May 2009 16:45:27 -0400

Hi all, John Lance here. You may remember me from such past blog posts as "The Preview Pane Buttons Cometh" and "The Notes-in-ator" (extract: "I'll be baaaaaaack - at 4:00 since the Find Available Time feature tells me that's when we're both next available." (How I love that feature - JL) ).

Moving right along....

In the week and month views today the last two columns are actually slightly thinner then the other columns. Since these columns are intended to hold the "weekend" days we thought that the column would require less real-estate. You can set the first column to be any day you want, but the last columns are always thinner. This made sense when the primary focus of the Notes calendar was the work world and people did not typically book a lot of entries on the weekends of their Notes calendars.

However, with federated calendars, particularly calendars that are more personal/family oriented, it seems that giving the "weekends" equal real-estate might be the right move.

Thus do I turn to you, noble and faithful readers, to supply guidance. Do you like the way things are or should we make all the days equal? What about your Samanthas and other users?

So basically it's a question of this:

vs this (the higher the resolution the for significant the difference - if you're really interested in playing around with the 7 day equal width view you can do that using your Work Day view and setting the preferences to display Sat and Sun as well).

There would be a similar change in the Month view as well.

Thanks in advance

- John

Recent Contacts and Administrative Assistants

Mary Beth Raven — Wed, 20 May 2009 10:23:42 -0400

Recent Contact records are stored in the same file as the Local Contacts. The Recent Contacts for an Administrative Assistant will be combined with the Recent Contacts that were created from the Mail files they are managing.

Let's use Betty, Ted's AA, as an example. She has her own Contacts, and she also manages Ted's mail. The names in Betty's DPAB/DIP are names in mail message that she has actually sent or read independent of what mail file she is in. If Ted has sent some message to someone that is NOT in Betty's DIP and Betty never reads that message, then the name will not be in Betty's DIP. This combination will give Betty a consistent type-ahead experience. When she types "Sam", we want her to consistently get "Samantha" at the top of her typeahead list-- regardless of whether she is in her own mail or Ted's mail, as shown in the following picture.

We fear that if we did it any differently, then typeahead would feel broken to Betty, and if we've learned ANYTHING, it's to make those AAs as happy as possible...

Vocabulary review:
DPAB,or “Dynamic Personal Address Book”, is a repository of recently seen high value contacts. It is represented in the use's Personal Contacts as Recent Contacts.

DIP,or “Dynamic Interest Profiler”, controls the weighting that determines the order of the type-ahead drop down list in Local Contacts and the Search Directory. This weighting represents the user's relationship to a person. It is based on the number of times the user sends and receives mail from that person, either as a To or CopyTo recipient. The DIP weighting is not visible to the user.

Roaming Users and Recent Contacts

Mary Beth Raven — Tue, 19 May 2009 10:19:16 -0400

Realistic Readers,

Because the Recent Contacts are stored with Contacts (names.nsf), that information roams with the user. In Notes 8.5 we started roaming the user's DIP information so that the type-ahead drop down list order would be consistent.

Remember, DIP = “Dynamic Interest Profiler”, controls the weighting that determines the order of the type-ahead drop down list in Local Contacts and the Search Directory. This weighting represents the user's relationship to a person. It is based on the number of times the user sends and receives mail from that person, either as a To or CopyTo recipient. The DIP weighting is not visible to the user.

Symphony integrated with Notes on the Mac

Mary Beth Raven — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:29:41 -0400

Simplicity-seeking Symphony users,
We are working on the design of how Symphony is integrated on the Mac, and I have a question for you about how you want it to appear in the applications folder.

Specifically, the way we have it implemented now, Philippe (well, actually, it would be Samantha who sees this, Philippe is not a Mac user, but Samantha is). Anyway, Samantha would install Notes 8.5.1 on her Mac and she'll see just the Notes.app in her applications folder, as shown in the following picture. To start a Symphony Spreadsheet, presentation, or document, she'll have to start Notes and then the Symphony tool. Since this is the way it's coded now. we hope that this is acceptable to you. :)

This would give her a consistent "launching" experience on the Mac (read about the INconsistency below)

I am wondering if we need to show all 4 of the apps in the Applications folder -- it might look like the following picture. And if Samantha were to click one of the editors before Notes, it would open in a separate window, not requiring login. However, if she clicked on one of the icons after she launched Notes, it would launch in the Notes window. This inconsistent behavior (er, behaviour if you are Warren Elsmore or Paul Mooney) concerns me, but it would at least be consistently inconsistent across Windows, Linux AND Mac if we did it this way. Please feel free to share your thoughts on this issue. Thanks.