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IBM Lotus released version 8.0.1 of their Lotus Notes and Domino packages last week, and in addition to a myriad of bug fixes, Lotus Notes got a new feature that will be particularly useful: My Widgets.
My Widgets is a sidebar panel in the Lotus Notes Standard client. It's basically a spot where you will be able to surface information from the following sources: the Google Gadget catalog; Notes views; web pages; and RSS feeds.
Live Text
In addition, you can wire these widgets to convert common information into what Lotus is calling Live Text.
Live Text is the ability for your Notes client to recognize certain bits of information (addresses, phone numbers, names, web sites) and create a hyperlink out of them that will utilize one of your widgets.
For example, you could set up Yellowpages.com as a widget, and have Live Text recognize phone numbers and convert them to clickable links that will automatically open the business info in Yellowpages.com. You can have the results show up in a new tab, a sidebar panel, a floating window, or completely new window.
Another thing you can do is set up Notes to allow you to pass items to external websites. For example, you could highlight text, right-click on it and check out what the definition of that text is in Wikipedia.
Getting Started
The first thing you'll notice after the upgrade to 8.0.1 is that there is no actual My Widgets sidebar by default, you have to turn it on. You can do so in the Preferences:
Click File, Preferences;
Choose the Widgets preference pane
Place a checkmark next to Show Widget Toolbar and the My Widgets Sidebar panel
Click the Apply button
Choose Live Text preference pane
Place a checkmark next to Enable Live Text by default for all opened documents
Click OK
You've now turned on the My Widgets sidebar and enabled Notes to look for Live Text from the widgets that support it.
Adding a Google Gadget
The easiest thing for you to add to your sidebar is a Google Gadget. Google has a large library of what they call Gadgets (available at http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open). A Gadget is simply another word for Widget, or a small application that can do pretty much anything you can think of. There are gadgets that show you the weather, connect to web cams, report traffic, play games, show sports scores and more.
There are currently over 41 thousand different widgets available, some really useful, and some not-so-much. Here's how to quickly add a weather gadget:
Open the Notes web browser
Go to the Google Gadgets web page at http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open
Search for the gadget you want to use, I chose the Weather Channel gadget
Once you are on the page for the Weather Channel gadget, click the Configure a Widget from Current Context button on your toolbar. It looks like a little briefcase
On the Configure a Component from this web site dialog, choose Google Gadget
Click Next to read the Terms of Service
Click Next again
Choose Display as a sidebar panel
Click Finish
The gadget then shows up as a sidebar panel in Notes and you can edit it and access it in the comfort of your Notes client.
Adding a Feed Widget
One of your options is taking any RSS Feed and making it into its own sidebar widget. RSS is a standard for tracking updates to websites and applications. Most news sources and blogs have an RSS feed that you can subscribe to, and whenever updates are made to their site, stories can show up in a feed reader.
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