Go to page: 1 2 

Printer Friendly Version

One thing all of us can probably agree on is that free is good. We are inherently interested in saving money, and if we can find free things that make our day-to-day jobs easier, that’s always a bonus.

Since many users live in the Lotus Notes client all day long, I wanted to write an article on some of the free products and programs you can find on the internet to help you enjoy your Notes experience a little more. And don’t think I just have end-users in mind here, I’ve also included some stuff for developers and administrators to join in the fun.

MarvelClient Skinning Edition

The MarvelClient Skinning Edition (otherwise known as GYWAM 2.0 -- Give Your Workspace A Makeover 2.0) is software that allows you to customize your Lotus Notes Workspace with various color schemes and graphics of your choosing.

The workspace is generally a fairly bland landscape of buttons (called chiclets) that you use to click on to access databases. Well not any more. You can customize your Workspace to your heart’s content. The default is a very nice homage to Lotus Notes 8.

The MarvelClient Skinning Edition default interface

This free version works in Lotus Notes 6.x, 7x and 8.x and works on Windows versions only. It can be found here.

Integra for Notes Personal Edition

Integra for Notes Personal Edition allows you to print labels, create mailmerges and export spreadsheets from your personal Contacts in Notes. A simple wizard-based interface walks you through all three tasks quickly. Most developers have written code to do this several times during their career and it always seems to break with every new version of Microsoft Office.

Integra can take the complexity out of it for you. It works with all recent Windows versions of Office and soon will work with Lotus Symphony. You can download the Personal Edition by going to http://www.integra4notes.com/aboutintegra and clicking the Integra for Notes Personal Edition link in the right-hand navigation.

TwitNotes

Twitter is a microblogging site where people post short messages (under 140 characters) to tell others what they are currently doing. People can post and reply to others and it basically acts like a large water-cooler discussion.

If you want to be a part of that discussion without leaving your email client, Mikkel Heisterberg has released a plugin for the Notes 8 sidebar that integrates Twitter directly into Lotus Notes 8.

TwitNotes in the Lotus Notes 8 client

You can find the information on how to download and install TwitNotes here on Mikkel's site.

Lotus Notes Diagnostic Utility

Whenever a Notes server crashes, it saves diagnostic files that can be used by you or IBM support to troubleshoot the problem. The Lotus Notes Diagnostic Utility can be used by your administrator to parse those very large text files and give you a ton of great information. You get tabs to see all of the threads and processes happening on the server at the time of the crash as well as all the server info such as memory and log entries posted before the crash.

If you’ve ever gone through a diagnostic file by hand in your text editor, this will save you an immense amount of time. It will even automatically link to Knowledgebase articles referencing your problem if it can find them.

The Lotus Notes Diagnostic Utility Pointing to a Knowledgebase article

Go to page: 1 2 

Printer Friendly Version