More widget resources

Okay, I apologize for the ‘one-track’ topic thread this week, but have been doing some investigating (could you tell??) about widgets and I wanted to pass along some of the things I found.

You should know Mary Beth Raven, a well-know woman at IBM Lotus, who has a great blog about various things to do with development of the Lotus Notes Client.

Mary Beth discussed widgets, and more importantly, pointed at a public widget catalog. See her blog post about it HERE.

Also, thought I should pass along a link to the Lotus Learning Widget. This widget is kind of a tutorial about Lotus Notes – and a great way for end users to learn more.

Check it out!

Widgets from the admin’s chair

After my post earlier this week about widgets, it seemed like it would make sense to talk about the other side of the widget coin, the admin side.

Specifically, what needs to be done to deploy widgets for the iNotes webmail client.

The work quite differently there, and unfortunately, the end user doesn’t have much control – it’s all up to the administrator. Additional information available from the Domino Wiki and from the InfoCenter.

So, here are the steps, admins. You end users can skip the rest of this for now!

For the purpose of this document, here’s what my sample iNotes screen looked like before any of these instructions were carried out:

To enable Widgets on iNotes, steps are as follows:

1. Set up widget catalog (on server)

   (By default, it will be named “toolbox.nsf” and unless you proactively change things, iNotes is looking for a file with that name.)

   Although catalog setup is beyond the scope of these instructions, the widget catalog is the ‘repository’ for widgets in your Domain.

   Any given Notes client can be bound to only ONE widget catalog (although you could have different catalogs for different users based on policy assignment) – but ALL iNotes users will be bound to a single catalog.

2. Create (if not already existing) an “inotes_config.xml” file (on server). A template should already exist in the <Domino Program Directory>\data\domino\HTML folder:

   This file tells iNotes what catalog to use, and what categories in the catalog to make available to the iNotes client

   You can create a live file from the existing template by copying and renaming, from “inotes_config.xml.template” to “inotes_config.xml”. You can essentially accept the defaults.

   Note that it pushes down two “sample” widgets – you can comment out (or remove) that text from the file and it won’t push those two widgets.

3. Create a Mail Settings policy document (or make these changes to an existing one). On the Lotus iNotes tab, click the Configuration tab and under the “Widgets” section:
   a) Change “Show the Widgets folder in the Mail outline” to ‘enabled’
   b) “Allow users to create widgets from XML” to ‘enabled’

   Save the settings document, and make sure you’ve attached the settings to a policy that you’ve assigned to certain users.

4. Be aware these changes don’t take effect instantaneously. Policies are pushed down to clients once they’ve been processed by ADMINP and the client has logged off and logged back in. So, don’t be alarmed if it seems to take a few minutes for the change to show up. You can speed up the process by giving a console command to have ADMINP process more quickly: “Tell ADMINP process mail policy” or “Tell ADMINP process new.”
5. However, given a few moments (or given the effects of the command line instructions for ADMINP), a new entry will show up on your iNotes navigation panel:
6. When clicked, the widget entry in the iNotes navigation panel will show any widgets that have been “pushed down” such as the two sample IBM widgets shown above. However, users can now right-click on the Widget outline entry and select other widgets from the catalog they’d like to deploy on their client:
   

   Note: Only those widgets that you’ve categorized as “iNotes” in the widget catalog will show up in this list.

   Users simply select the widgets they’d like to use, click OK, and then those additional widgets will be available for them under the widget outline item:
   

   The user then clicks on the widget they want, and even has an opportunity to decide whether to open the widget in another iNotes tab, or another browser window:

   

7. Note that widgets in iNotes do not open in the right sidebar – they open essentially full screen. So you may find that widgets that work well in the Notes client do not scale well to iNotes – or you may need two versions with different layouts.

And that’s all there is to it …

A few relatively easy steps to widget-admin nirvana!

Admins, keep in mind that there are version requirements here … widgets are 8.0+ … so older versions of iNotes, etc., won’t be able to play.

Admins: worth noting

A new product called ITANA came to my attention. I don’t know too much about it, but I’m going to start digging in further …

Basically, it’s a set web applications for the iPhone giving access to the Tasks / To Dos  and Notebook / Journal found in Lotus Notes.

Admins, you might want to check it out: ITANA from Hughes Connect.