Genii Weblog
CoexLinks Tip: Doclinks for your Blackberry (or other mobile device)
Mon 21 Aug 2006, 09:28 AM
Tweetby Ben Langhinrichs
Mobile devices have become a vital part of many people's active schedules, allowing them to check e-mail and access websites while on the road or just out of the office. Try to take away a busy executive's "Crackberry", and you might find that hell has no fury like an executive disconnected.
But for all their usefulness, mobile devices do have limitations, including bandwidth and screen space. These limitations are addressed a number of ways, one of which is the use of "plain text" e-mails instead of HTML e-mails. For many e-mails, this is not a problem, but when an e-mail contains links, whether URL links or Notes doclinks, the links are lost. A particularly critical issue is those doclinks used in an approval cycle, where the executive is supposed to approve or disapprove a specific action. The workflow cannot be completed until the executive returns to a standard e-mail system, the business process is interrupted, and that is the last thing an executive wants.
In cases such as this, CoexLinks can be used to convert doclinks to text based URL links. While the message is still received on the Blackberry in plain text, the Blackberry itself recognizes text strings which follow the URL format and makes them active. Thus, a doclink could be rendered as http://myserver/mydb.nsf/myview/docid?OpenDocument and be clickable on the Blackberry. Anticipating this, the database could be web enabled with a mobile friendly interface to allow approval or disapproval of the action, and the executive could get on about his or her business, knowing that the workflow was uninterrupted.
To configure text based URLs with CoexLinks, you would need to set
COEXDocLinkType=4
in the NOTES.INI file. An additional parameter which is useful with text based URLs (and which requires at least CoexLinks 2.7d) is the COEXMapDBTo parameter, which allows you to shorten the URL to bake it more Blackberry-friendly. For example, while the default value for a text based URL is
COEXMapDBTo=http://%server%/%db%/%view%/%note%%ext%
which would be used if you do not specify a COEXMapDBTo value, you could shorten this to use
COEXMapDBTo=http://%server%/%db%/0/%note%
Using this mapping, a doclink which would have been rendered as
http://a.geniisoft.com/__85256E6B000AC32F.nsf/739D29AF412B35C985256C220060FBAB/A1477DA2DEE5168485256E6B00111009?OpenDocument
would instead be rendered as
http://a.geniisoft.com/__85256E6B000AC32F.nsf/0/A1477DA2DEE5168485256E6B00111009
If you would like to know more about how to use CoexLinks with your Blackberry or other mobile devices, give us a call at +1 216-920-4378 from North America or +44 (0) 208-099-8324 from Europe, or drop us a line at . We'd be happy to help you set up an evaluation today.
Copyright © 2006 Genii Software Ltd.
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