Team Mailboxes

Posted on January 5, 2009 by qtzar

One thing I have come across in all
the different organizations I have either worked for or I have done consultancy
gigs at is the need for generic mailboxes that can be accessed by multiple
people. Common examples of this would be a mailbox for Sales or HR.

When creating these mailbox you have
the option of registering a new user in the NAB which will create a new
ID file and a new mail file. Then you can open that mail file up to the
people who need access with a few ACL adjustments and then the staff will
be able to see the emails that the mail file has received and they can
send emails from that mail file, however all emails sent will always have
the ‘Sent By’ moniker attached to them.

Another option is a fantastic Open Source
template available from OpenNTF called ‘Domino
TeamMailBox‘ by Brian Green.  This
template has been around for a good few years and was distributed on Brian’s
website long before it was put
on OpenNTF.

With TeamMailBox you create a new database
based on this template on your server and then create a Mail-In Database
record in your NAB to point to the database.  You can give this mail-in
record any email address you like ( as long as it doesn’t clash with an
existing email address of course ) and then you adjust the ACL to grant
the required people access to the mail file.  Then it’s a simple job
of setting the configuration document in the new TeamMailBox with the name
of the mailbox and the email address and now when people send out emails
it will show that it is from that email address and it will not add the
‘Sent By’ bit to the email.

There are also two scheduled agent in
the TeamMailBox, one to send auto replies to received emails. This could
be handy for the likes of a HR database that sends back a message to say
your query has been received and the second agent is a notification agent
that can send an email to all the members of that HR team to let them know
a new message is waiting to be looked at.  I particularly like the
notification agent as I know that sometimes staff do not bother to look
in the shared mailbox ever day and this will stop an email from sitting
in there unnoticed for any period of time.

We have recently started using this
template here at work and I have made a few code adjustments that allows
you to have multiple email addresses associated with a single TeamMailBox
with the option to send emails from any of the associated addresses. Hopefully
this extra functionality will end up on OpenNTF soon…

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Introducing DomCastr An Enterprise Twitter Server For Domino

Posted on October 16, 2008 by qtzar

Twitter is getting more and more popular
and it is starting to reach into the enterprise, IBM has an internal system
called BlueTwit and Oracle have been working on a system called OraTweet
and there are other hosted systems available like Yammer and now I am pleased
to introduce you to DomCastr, a Lotus Domino based twitter like server.

As more companies look at enterprise
twitter like services they need to make a choice, they can select to use
a hosted service, with the risk that the service goes down or is compromised
or they can elect to deploy an internal system which means making sure
the infrastructure is there to support it.

If your running Lotus Domino then it
makes sense to look at a system that you can deploy over your existing
infrastructure and that’s where DomCastr comes in as the first Lotus Domino
Twitter like server. While still under major development to implement some
of the more important features of Twitter It is starting to come together
nicely and so I wanted to show it off to the Lotus Communnity in the hopes
that they will see the potential for a Twitter like system in their enterprise.

So how much will DomCastr cost when
it’s finished? Nothing, Nada, Free. It will be on OpenNTF for anybody to
download and deploy. I won’t even ask you to buy me a beer at Lotusphere
( although I won’t complain if you do ).

Let me know what you think of it, if
you have suggestions for enterprise features you’d like to see then post
them as comments here and I’ll see if they fit in with my plans for the
product. if you want to lend a hand in developing the application then
send me an email.

Try it out for yourself….

http://www.domcastr.com

Username : Demo Account

Password : demodemo

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My Inbox Is My ToDo List

Posted on October 1, 2008 by qtzar

A few months ago my mailfile in work was
getting overwhelmed with old emails and stuff that I didn’t really need
to keep so I started a little experiment to see if I could work differently.
The first thing I did was archive everything from my mailfile so that I
had a nice empty mailfile with 0 documents in it. I then removed all the
folders that I had created and I set the soft delete option to 336 hours
( 14 days ).

Now that I had an empty mailfile i waited
for the first email to come in. It was a simple request, make a small change
to an application to add a field into a particular form. It only took a
few minutes to do and afterwards I emailed back the requestor to say it
was done and to test it etc and then I did something different. I deleted
the original email request. I had an empty inbox again.

Over the next few weeks I kept doing
the same, as requests would come in I’d work on them and then as soon as
it was finished I’d delete the email. Not everything can be completed in
a few minutes so sometimes the original email would sit in my inbox for
a day or two but as soon as they were done the email got deleted. This
meant that everything I was working on or had to do was sitting in my inbox
until I was finished it.

Of course not everything is a request
to do some work, there are emails that contain information that I need
to keep, like installation codes, or login info for online services.  These
emails don’t stay that long in my inbox either. I have a couple of journal
DB’s sitting on my workspace, a personal one to store info I need to keep
just for myself, like login info for the company healthcare plan, I have
a ‘local office’ one to store info that only pertains to the office I work
in and I have a ‘Company KB’ to store info that belongs to the company,
like the info needed to install our helpdesk system etc. So when an info
email hits my inbox I just move the info it contains into one of the journal
DB’s for future reference and then delete the email from my inbox.

So two months later and my inbox currently
has 8 emails in it. I know what I’m working on and it is a great motivator
to try and empty my inbox by getting things done. As emails come in I evaluate
what to do. It’s it’s an instant resolution and I can put my current task
on hold then I’ll do the new request and get the email deleted. If it’s
something that will take a little longer then I just leave it in the inbox.

My inbox truly is my todo list and it
works great.

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Blogsphere V3 Development News

Posted on September 30, 2008 by qtzar

A few people have asked recently what’s
happening with BlogSphere and the answer is that it is still being worked
on but due to time constraints, real work etc it’s being worked on a lot
slower then before. Also all the other developers who have helped by adding
features and fixing bugs are suffering from the same burdens of work etc.

I am please, however, to reveal a preview
version of BlogSphere V3.0.2 that is available to download from here. This is a preview
version so unless you have a good backup I’d advise against upgrading right
away but by releasing this version you will be able to set it up on your
server and test out some of the new features like the Web Administration
UI, PicLens support in the Photo albums and full iTunes compatible podcast
feeds.  There are also a large number of other bug fixes and other
things behind the scenes to make everything fast.

Download it here.

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