Intranet Journal
The online resource for intranet professionals

Enhance Your Lotus Notes for Free

5/27/2008

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

You can always find the most recent version of the utility by searching Lotus Support for "Lotus Notes Diagnostic Utility." As of this writing, the current version can be found here.

Noteman Toolbar from MartinScott

The next free tool will benefit your developers and admins as well as some of your power users. It’s the Noteman toolbar from MartinScott.

The free version allows you to compare two documents side-by-side, find replication conflicts, test formulas, see readers and authors fields, and see and sort a table of all of your field values, field types and modification times for a particular document. It’s very handy tool when troubleshooting issues in a database.

You can find the Noteman toolbar at http://www.noteman.com and it works on Windows, Linux and Mac.

Notes Connect

Notes Connect is nearly a decade old, but I still use it all the time when I’m troubleshooting server connection issues. Notes Connect is a tool that allows you check to see if a certain service is running on one of your Domino servers. For example, Lotus Notes clients talk to the Domino server on port 1352. Notes Connect will attempt connections to that port to see if the proper services are running.

You can utilize a list of common services by name, or you can choose Other to attempt a connection to any custom port you wish. This is a great easy way to see if you have connectivity to the process you are trying to hit.

The NotesConnect client allows you to check if Domino is running

NotesConnect is available on the Notes Sandbox on IBM’s Developerworks for Lotus. You can find the post from 1999 here.

StopNotes

Let’s face it, as much as well all love Lotus Notes, it does crash sometimes. When it does, it crashes hard, and doesn’t want to re-start without a reboot. This is typically because several processes are hung in the background and the Notes client cannot restart if those are in use.

Enter StopNotes from VirtualObjectives. StopNotes is a Windows-executable that will shut down all of the Notes processes and allow you to restart the Notes client. That’s all it does, and it does it perfectly. Use it to stop having to reboot Notes whenever it crashes.

Free is Good

The main thing I want you all to take away from this article is that free is good, and you can enhance a lot of what you do in Lotus Notes every day by taking advantage of all the tools available out there. Don’t be afraid of things just because they are free, just be aware that free generally means no support and use at your own risk. Also, as many of these tools have editions you can pay for, you can solve some of the risk problems right there.

Do you have any other favorite free tools for Lotus Notes? Feel free to let us know on my blog or here in the discussion forums.

About this Series

This series of articles on intranet solutions with IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and it's companion products is intended to help readers understand the fundamental methodology and capabilities of the product and how to utilize it to deliver a feature-rich, secure, and functional corporate intranet solution. It will include implementation strategies, case studies, industry-tested tips and tricks, and, with your input, true value to the administrator or developer who wants to utilize IBM Lotus technologies to deliver winning intranet solutions.

If you have any questions on the series, Lotus Notes/Domino, or if there's something you'd like to see addressed, visit the Intranet Journal Discussion Forum.

About the Author

John Roling is the Senior Groupware Administrator for a North American trade-show exhibit company and a certified Lotus Notes Administrator, Developer and all-around geek. You can keep up with him at his blog (www.greyhawk68.com) or drop him an e-mail at jroling@gmail.com.

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