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You might be a Domino geek ...
OK, so I like Mike's blogg titles, and thought I'd borrow a theme from Jeff Foxworthy.
When Dana McCurley invited me to be the next featured expert for the Expert answer centre, I started thinking about a theme for my blogg.
I could have expounded the virtues of Domino, written about my latest problem with a Radicati report, or even tried to pass on years of experience with Notes in a few short sentences a day.
I've decided to concentrate on how a software product affects mine, and a few close people around me, almost daily.
Today, it's how I store my information.
You might be a Domino geek if ... you have a database that contains every joke you've ever received via email.
If you've ever played with Notes, you know how it works. A Document (Note) is stored in an unstructured database, and you present this list of documents to users via a View (Document List). The really neat thing about this list of documents is that they can have nothing in common with one another, except for a title, a creation date and an author. Since these databases are customizable via a design client, you can even change the way the application works, and how it looks.
So I can take an email, copy and paste it into the database, and it displays in the list of other documents with the email subject, the date I received it, and the name of the person who sent it to me.
Over the years, i've added functionality into the jokes system so I can pull in the content of documents (Word, Ami-pro, WordPro, etc) and it automagically finds from the document properties, the creation date, the author and then uses the file name as the document title.
Using similar code, I can input a URL and in comes the content, the page title, the date I found the web-page funny, and the web domain as the author.
After years of using the jokes system, most of the people I know don't send "funnies" to me personally anymore, they email straight into the jokes database.
Why? You ask. Well, it's like a good book. It sits on the shelf and evey now and then you can pick it up and flick through it. The jokes database to me (and to a few people I know) is one our favorite places to visit. Need cheering up, or just looking to "invest" some time, you browse through the Jokes database. You'll always leave feeling better.
The jokes database is just one example of why Domino is such an oustanding platform for document mangement, whatever that content happens to be.
An application like my jokes database is a fantastic example of Notes collaboration. Administratively, it's not hard to create and maintain.
1. Create the database (a dicussion, document library, or journal template is ideal)
2. Set the ACL (you don't want people to access these amusing documents who aren't supposed to)
3. Create a mail-in database document (now it can receive email, just like any user can)
4. Create a web document (so your audience can find it easily via a browser)
5. Populate with content.
It's as easy as that. Write once, read anywhere. Notes client, web client, or with a little tweaking, even an NNTP or POP client.
4 1/2 gigabytes of data, litterally thousands of documents, and finding "little Johnny" jokes is just a quick search and a few seconds away.
Notes Rulez...
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