Genii Weblog


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


Fri 22 Jun 2012, 10:46 AM
After a few successful engagements with specific customers, I am starting to open the door a little wider to handling data conversion/migration on a consulting basis. For years, people have used the Midas Rich Text engine for high quality conversion to HTML and MIME, but I have additional tools to convert whole databases, validate/fix broken images, validate/fix broken links, etc. I am looking at working with customers who need this handled on a project or hourly basis, and who don't have the staff, expertise or inclination to work on the process in-house. Additionally, I have tools that I am not planning on releasing publicly which would be available for these conversions.

Targets for converted data would be:

a) XPages where higher quality rendering of Notes classic data is desired
b) migration of data to Sharepoint or SQL-based systems
c) snapshot migration of database(s) to HTML collection so that they can be delivered to a customer without Notes.

Happy to discuss with anybody interested. I am willing to collaborate with other consulting companies who need this to provide as part of a larger project.

Update: Wow, this has been better received than I expected as a new offering.

Copyright © 2012 Genii Software Ltd.

Tue 19 Jun 2012, 10:27 AM
I am curious where you think most go for help with Notes questions. Do they still go to the forums, or search blogs, or ask on Twitter/Facebook/Google+, or call a business partner? It used to be somewhat more obvious a few years ago, and I am especially curious about those companies who have let go much of their Notes staff during the past few down years. How do they figure out how and who to ask?

I ask partly because I find more customers who have a need for something with one of our products, but don't seem to have any resources when questions come up about Notes development or even administration. I'm not sure where to direct them, and they don't seem sure where to look. It seems especially hard when it is not an XPages question, as wading through the search results for years of other development leaves a bewildering confusion over what is still a valid answer.

Where do you think people go?  Where should they go?

Copyright © 2012 Genii Software Ltd.

Mon 4 Jun 2012, 03:53 PM
In my last two posts on XPages and attachment icons, Part 1 and Part 2, I stayed entirely within XPages, but many XPages databases including the default discussion database template use both traditional Notes rich text for the Notes client and XPages for the web. In addition, people have years worth of documents already in traditional Notes rich text.

A large part of the reason for adding attachment support to CoexEdit 3.0 is to handle this situation. The following two documents were created to be exactly the same, but one was created in the standard way without CoexEdit. You can see how the attachments show on the web. The second was created with CoexEdit running, and you can see the icons in the body as they were on the client. As I showed before, these fields can be edited with full preservation of the file attachments. Finally, I show how CoexEdit can handle the old documents created without CoexEdit so that even they appear as if they were created with CoexEdit.


Combo XPages/Notes rich text discussion

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Identical documents created from Notes client rich text, one without CoexEdit (current standard) and one with CoexEdit

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The document created without CoexEdit as it normally appears in XPages on web:

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The document created with CoexEdit opened in XPages on web 

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Finally, the document created without CoexEdit  but opened with CoexEdit running as it appears in XPages on web:

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Copyright © 2012 Genii Software Ltd.