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Civility in critiquing the ideas of others is no vice. Rudeness in defending your own ideas is no virtue.


Wed 18 Apr 2007, 12:19 PM
As I work more and more extensively with the productivity editors in Notes/Domino 8 (mostly for our OpenSesame tools), a linguistic obstacle keeps hampering my documentation and internal discussions.  It appears that the productivity editors have been renamed as Lotus Documents, Lotus Presentations and Lotus Spreadsheets, although inside Notes 8, they will still just appear as Documents, Presentations and Spreadsheets.  But what should we call the Documents document to prevent confusion with a Notes document?  If you saw a method entitled CopyDocument, would you assume a Notes document or a Lotus Documents document?  What about an EmbedSpreadsheetInDocument?

It is possible we could refer to these as ODF Documents, but nowhere is ODF mentioned in the Notes 8 product, in the productivity editor Help or anywhere else I can find.  In fact, OpenDocument format is not mentioned either.  Of course, there are lots of hits for "Open Document", but they all point back to the discussion at hand, as they have nothing to do with Lotus Documents.

Perhaps we should refer to these as Office Documents, but that might confuse people who are used to Microsoft Office being referred to as just "Office".  (It is nice being the dominant leader, isn't it?)  Similarly, we could use "WP Document", but only if we use it in menus and such, as otherwise it will still sound like something external, maybe even a "WordPerfect Document" or "WordPro Document", either of which would cause more confusion.

We can hardly say a "Lotus Document", as that could be used interchangeably with "Notes document".  I guess we could say "Productivity Editor Document", or just "Productivity Document", but that sounds pretty awkward, and will certainly blow up those method names.  Imagine EmbedProductivitySpreadsheetInProductivityDocument.  Ick!

So, what should we call these?  If we come up with a good enough name, I can pound on Mary Beth Raven and others and see if we can get them to use it, but it has to be reasonably short and reasonably clear.  Any ideas?

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