I am facing a design decision which was already resolved long ago for our Midas Rich Text LSX, but I have to decide whether we should make the same decision for OpenSesame...   (read on)

One of the tentative products that I have been developing under the umbrella name of OpenSesame is the ability to edit a view in a spreadsheet.  Actually, you are not editing the view, but rather the documents in the view.  It is a bit like "in view editing" on steroids.  You choose the action "Edit view in spreadsheet" and go from a Notes view to a spreadsheet. Then, you make whatever changes you like, using whatever macros or tools or tricks you like to use in a spreadsheet, and save.  Back in the Notes view, you pick "Update view from spreadsheet", and voila! the documents are updated.

So, as cool as all that is, it doesn't quite explain the title of this post...   (read more) to see screenshots and see the numbers on scalability.

Does anybody have an opinion on whether we should use products for idea spaces, so a list such as: CoexEdit, CoexLinks, Midas Rich Text, OpenSesame, New Product Ideas

or should we use functionality for idea spaces, so: Coexistence, Editing, Migration, Programmability, Rendering

or something else entirely.  Any opinions?

A curious friend wrote and asked, "What kind of extension is that 'Edit view in spreadsheet' anyway?"  It is a good question, but has a non-obvious answer.  Right now, it is callable in three ways.  It can be called as part of a larger LSX, in which case the call I use is something like:

Sub Initialize
   Dim ws As New NotesUIWorkspace
   Dim session As New NotesSession
   Dim db As NotesDatabase
   Dim sheet As New OpenSesameSpreadsheet
   
   Set db = session.CurrentDatabase
   
   If ws.CurrentView Is Nothing Then Exit Sub
   Call sheet.GenerateView(db.Server, db.FilePath, ws.CurrentView.ViewName, "c:\temp\trial.ods")
End Sub 

or it can be called as part of a formula language extension, in which case you could have a smart icon like this:

@DbCommand("OSODF":"NoCache"; "EditViewInSpreadsheet"; @DbName; @ViewTitle; "c:\\temp\\trial.ods");

or it can be in a menu addin so that the Action menu simply has an entry called "Edit View in Spreadsheet".  My guess is that I will sell it with the latter two choices, so that you can either add it to your Action menu or add it to a smart icon, but you could also call it from the web or from Java or from LotusScript or anywhere else a formula can be evaluated.  That would be the most flexible.

For example:



and prior to that 



Man, what a shame nobody is working on those ideas!

(Actually, John obviously knows what it is called, as he showed an early demo of OpenSesame in Kansas City a couple of months back.)

As I mentioned in my first tip today, I wanted to insert some text at the beginning of a message.  It turns out that with the Midas chunk model, this is a bit more difficult than appending at the end.  The reason is simple, but perhaps more clear if I write in pseudo-code:

[Text 1 ==>]This is the first line of my rich text, and it can go on until a paragraph break, [Text 2 ==>]or until a font or style change[Text 3 ==>], which breaks the text into multiple records.

The text above represents a paragraph, with each text record identified.  Now, let's try and insert the following

Subject: A fairly meaningless paragraph

If we go with the intuitive choice, we would have:

Set rtchunk = rtitem.DefineChunk("Text 1")
Call rtchunk.InsertText("Subject: ", "+Bold -Italic 10pt")
Call rtchunk.InsertText(doc.Subject(0)+Chr(0), "+Bold -Italic 10pt")

but let's look at what the result after each line of code

Set rtchunk = rtitem.DefineChunk("Text 1")

[Text 1 ==>]This is the first line of my rich text, and it can go on until a paragraph break, [Text 2 ==>]or until a font or style change[Text 3 ==>], which breaks the text into multiple records.

Call rtchunk.InsertText("Subject: ", "+Bold -Italic 10pt")

[Text 1 ==>]Subject: [Text 2 ==>]This is the first line of my rich text, and it can go on until a paragraph break, [Text 3 ==>]or until a font or style change[Text 4 ==>], which breaks the text into multiple records.

Call rtchunk.InsertText(doc.Subject(0)+Chr(0), "+Bold -Italic 10pt")

[Text 1 ==>]A fairly meaningless paragraph
[Text 2 ==>]Subject: [Text 3 ==>]This is the first line of my rich text, and it can go on until a paragraph break, [Text 4 ==>]or until a font or style change[Text 5 ==>], which breaks the text into multiple records.

This obviously ins't what we want, as the subject goes before the word "Subject:".  The problem is, as soon as we insert the text, the newly inserted text becomes Text 1.  The easiest solution, although it looks odd in the code, is to add the desired text in reverse:

Set rtchunk = rtitem.DefineChunk("Text 1")
Call rtchunk.InsertText(doc.Subject(0)+Chr(0), "+Bold -Italic 10pt")
Call rtchunk.InsertText("Subject: ", "+Bold -Italic 10pt")

[Text 1 ==>]Subject: [Text 2 ==>]A fairly meaningless paragraph
[Text 3 ==>]This is the first line of my rich text, and it can go on until a paragraph break, [Text 4 ==>]or until a font or style change[Text 5 ==>], which breaks the text into multiple records.

There are other ways, such as inserting a table and adding content to that, or adding something fixed, such as an anchor, and then inserting before that so that it never shifts, but I want to make clear that this is not a bug, but a feature.  (You knew that, right?)  Of course, it is also why OpenSesame offers a chunk which can become a cursor.  We have to learn, don't we?

As others have noted already, IBM and OpenOffice.org have announced that IBM is contributing both code and resources to OpenOffice.org.  Andy Updegrove has a good writup of the facts and possible implications.

One item jumped out at me.  IBM is dedicating approximately 35 developers to this effort.  Holy cow!  I am highly tempted to point out that IBM sometimes seems resistant to dedicating one developer to Notes rich text, but that might be snarky of me.  Still, it might explain to some naysayers why I am focusing on OpenSesame these days.

John Head is giving a developers session on the new productivity editors at Collaboration University, which will be held first in Kansas City September 10-12, and later in London on September 19-21.  John asked if he could introduce and demo OpenSesame.  It is a rare thing for me to let somebody else demo one of my products, and particularly the first live demo anyone has seen, but I thought the opportunity was too good to pass up.

So, what will John be showing?  I don't want to give it all away, so I will just describe the first scenario, and if you want to see more, you can just go watch John's demos yourself.  You know you want to go to Collaboration University anyway, and here is your excuse.

Scenario: Approval Cycle
As team leader at Pinnacle Products, Melissa is responsible for ensuring that the sales data in her regional sales database is accurate, but her team is spread out in various locations.  To give each team member a chance to review and edit the sales data, Melissa uses OpenSesame to take the data from her Lotus Notes database and send it out as a spreadsheet attachment to Tim.  Tim has Notes 8, so he simply edits the spreadsheet in the Lotus Spreadsheets productivity editor, makes a few changes, then sends the spreadsheet to Gerald, who does not have Notes on his laptop, but does have OpenOffice.  Gerald edits the spreadsheet with OpenOffice Calc, makes a few more changes, and sends the spreadsheet on to Mary.  Mary has Notes 8, so she makes her changes and sends the final edited spreadsheet back to Melissa.  Melissa opens the spreadsheet with Lotus Spreadsheets, and is able to review each change using the built in revision tracking, rejecting one or two edits, accepting others, and making an edit or two of her own.  Finally, she incorporates the changes back into Notes using OpenSesame again.

Intrigued?  I bet there is still room if you hurry.

Tags: OpenSesame ODF

A few people have questioned me over the past few months about my fixation on OpenDocument Format, and particularly my work on OpenSesame.  I'm clearly not some open source nut, so why not focus where the money is, or will be, and write tools for Open XML and Office 2007.

Well, they are right that I am not an open source nut.  I write proprietary software in order to make money off selling licenses, and I'm proud of it.  But Rob Weir of IBM had a post today which explains a little part of the "why?".  In his post, So where are all the OOXML documents?, Rob makes an interesting observation.  Despite the supposed 97% market share Microsoft enjoys, and despite the brisk sales of Office 2007 which Microsoft reports, and despite the fact that OOXML is the default format for Office 2007, the adoption of the OOXML formats seems a bit slow, at least out in the wild, wild web.

Google offers the ability to search by filetype, and Rob had the clever idea of simply using Google to see how many documents were out there of each type.  Now, ODF has been out there longer, and there is an inevitable "network effect" where nobody uses a format until everybody does, but this is still pretty astonishing.  I updated the numbers myself, and will note, as Rob did, that the larger numbers seem to be rounded.  I also added the percentage of the OOXML documents that are on the Microsoft website, as that seemed interesting.

Format	Count
ODT	85,200
ODS	20,700
ODP	43,400
Total ODF	149,300
DOCX	516 (12% on Microsoft.com)
XLSX	68 (6% on Microsoft.com)
PPTX	80 (13% on Microsoft.com)
Total OOXML	664 (11% on Microsoft.com)

Tags: ODF

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?

Tags: ODF

I am working on a free series of How To articles about using the productivity editors with Notes 8.  I could really use examples of how you use Office products, particularly word processors, spreadsheets and presentation editors.  For example, mail merge seems to be a very popular topic, so I have included that.  Another seems to be pivot tables for simple on the fly reports, so I have included that.  But what else?  What do you automate, what do you do manually that you wish you could automate, and what do you do manually that you want to do manually with the productivity editors as easily (or more) than you do with Microsoft Office?

Aside from that, does anybody have any suggested or requested topics for the How To articles?  I know there is a lot of interest in the productivity editors, but I don't know what level of information people want right now, whether feature comparisons or programmatic examples or whatever.  

<disclaimer>Since I am also in the middle of working on OpenSesame, any ideas given here may also be fodder for features or demos that I will use in that product.</disclaimer>

I am considering whether to start a beta of some of our OpenSesame utilities for ODF that would coincide with the public beta for Notes 8.  This would allow people to try out tighter integration with the productivity editors (now renamed to Lotus Documents, Lotus Presentations and Lotus Spreadsheets, by the way) right from the start, but I don't know whether the mix of two betas would be annoying or helpful.  Obviously, it would be helpful to us, as it would allow release of at least some of the utilities along with Notes 8, but would it be helpful to developers/users who wanted to have a full picture of what they could accomplish with Notes 8?

Tags: ODF