Jul 032007
 

For the ninth demo, QContacts, we are getting into some eye candy and heavy Dojo work. I showed you a preview of it in my post Embedded Domino forms with Ajax submit and JSON view refresh a couple of days back. From Rob Novak’s blog:

Contacts? Why would you need that when you have a member list? Good question, easy answer. You need more information than the member record can supply, or the project contact isn’t a member of the place, or you need to share role-specific information about this contact with the team. There’s nothing more frustrating than having an out-of-date, incomplete, or low-confidence contact list. QContacts help to solve these problems, centralizing contact information while automating much of the work involved in maintaining it.

The use case is simple. You’re running a project using Lotus Quickr, and you want to maintain a contact list with more comprehensive information than is available in the member list (which is, in fact, mostly for authorization). You also don’t want to re-enter information from the member list, and it makes no sense to duplicate information available about a contact that may be a member of another place, or not a member of a place at all. QContacts consists of a single form for the Lotus Quickr place, and a Domino database to coordinate, automate, and consolidate contact data. It lets you add information about people that can be shared across places including all pertinent addressing information, personal contact information, a photo, and place-specific comments that are kept in context even if the contact is a member of multiple contact lists.

Take a look at the QContacts demo.

Jul 032007
 

The eighth Lotus Quickr Template demo has been posted. This time it’s QIssues.

Similar in feel to QSurvey, the form creation process is very simple. A floating window lets you build questions for your issue form and submit them to build the form. There are a couple new types of questions not found in QSurvey, a member list and date control. Once the questions are built, you can move them around, define a layout (1, 2, 3 columns or a wizard) and – this is key – decide right at the form what kind of workflow to put submissions through. And of course, using the workflow engine we’ve bundled with several templates, you can define that workflow yourself.

You can see a demo of QIssues here.

Jul 032007
 

The Dojo Toolkit has released the brand new Dojo 0.9 in beta. Very exciting! This is a brand new Dojo that is much faster than the 0.4 release, easier to customize the branding and with great accessibility (a11y).

SPEED: Stripped of all ‘excessive’, redundant, and backwards-compatible code, the new Dojo core is a speed-demon. It consists of a streamlined, compact Base (aka: dojo.js) which provides a plethora of reliable features for you and your application to expand upon. Our goal was to keep the new Base under 50K on disk and we’re happy to say that even with the many improvements to it since M2, Dojo Base still clocks in under the wire and gzipped it’s even smaller: 24K. The base of the new widget system (dijit.js) is even lighter, weighing in at 21K on disk and 11K on the wire.

You can download it here.

Jul 032007
 

From Rob Novak’s blog:

For the seventh Lotus Quickr Template demo, you’ll see QMeeting, an organizational and planning aid for complex meetings. Not the 2-hour staff meeting or the 90-minute group conference call, those are better handled with your Notes Mail and Quickr’s native group calendar, respectively. The meetings that benefit most from QMeeting are those that make you tear your hair out – multiple agenda items, planned breaks, different people responsible for each agenda item, multiple electronic resources (attachments), and a timeline to keep. Examples of such meetings? Shareholder’s meetings. Conference tracks. Corporate retreats. Financial reviews. The big ones!

QMeeting lets you distribute responsibility for agenda items to individuals, or lets you manage agenda items as discrete elements as a proxy for an outsider, or even create them on the fly. Agenda items are the building blocks of complex meetings, and each can have its own “Owner”, resources, rich text, and set of appropriate attachments. So if John is in charge of Finance, let John manage the agenda item for the financial report!

The meeting manager – a person who puts together the meeting agenda – can then easily assemble an electronic meeting agenda that automatically computes time slots, adds breaks and lunches, and even includes online meetings. If someone hasn’t completed their agenda item, it can be added easily. Once the meeting agenda is built, it has direct links to each agenda item, and (this is cool) direct links to each attachment. This document becomes the easy access point for all meeting participants. In practical use, it can be projected and run by a person when the meeting is live in person, and used online when the meeting is managed via teleconference or Sametime. It becomes a nice adjunct to online meetings by storing all meeting “artifacts” in one place.

Go have a look at the QMeeting demo.

Jul 032007
 

Rob Novak has posted the sixth Lotus Quickr Template demo: QAnnounce. From Rob’s blog:

QAnnounce lets you put structure around the creation, edit, approval and archive process for any kind of “official” communication. The form is fairly simple, with the kind of metadata fields you would expect – a distribution date, a field to track the disposition of the document, and (something new) a field to track comments as each edit is made, and display them in an audit trail along with the name of the person making the edit, the disposition at the time, and the date and time the edit was made. Of course, we’ve included some flexible views to let you categorize the communications by disposition or category.

Go have a look at the QAnnounce demo here.

All the demos are now done. Check back here today for the postings!