Workplace Forms & Workflow-Xpress Demo Site at last!

Well here it is at last. I can't say that it is finished as it seems the more we do the more ideas we come up with to make it better.

Here is a link to the ISW Workplace Forms Demo site. We have a few forms on show however the best area is the Form Gateway. The concept is that organisations can have a Forms Gateway where external (and internal I guess) users can gain access to forms they are allowed to complete. They can fill them in and submit them and they start a Workflow process using Workflow-Xpress. We are pretty happy with the progress however it is really just a proof of concept. The possibilities are great though and it is great to see the products coming together in the exact way we thought they would when we started with Workplace Forms last year.

We have many ideas of what else we can do and essentially I can see this turning into a product offering for organisations that are looking at Workplace Forms and are interested in a Forms Gateway. Feel free to make suggestions/ask questions etc. 

DBLookup Tips

One of my colleagues pointed me to this DeveloperWorks article on performance tips for DBLookup. Some excellent tips here and I am sure a few of us have made some of these mistakes in the past.

I know I will be checking some of our larger Notes applications for some of these tips. 

Double Right Click in Notes 8

When I first installed Notes 8 Beta I almost freaked when I realised Double Right Click to close a document/database/view etc was not supported. I searched preferences trying to figure out how to turn it back on. After a while I looked at the Notes 8 Beta discussion forum and found that it wasn't supported but Mary Beth Raven had committed to bringing it back.

But then why wait!!! Nathan Freeman has posted on how to bring it back now! That is what I call a righteous hack! Well done Nathan. 

Notes 8 beta is now available

While I am sure many have already realised the Notes 8 beta is now available.

http://www.ibm.com/lotus/getnd8now

While there seemed to be some download problems early on due to the rush it seems to be fairly speedy now. I am off to install the beta now:) 

Workplace Forms Integrated with Workflow-Xpress on Domino: Part 2

Awesome. I have managed to install Workplace Forms Server API onto a Domino server and have got the Mortgage Form Sample working. At this stage a user can access the Mortgage form from a browser (using the Workplace Forms Viewer at this stage) and enter a customer number. The form is then prepopulated with customer data that is extracted from a Notes database. The user can then complete the form and submit it back to the Notes database. The submit will update any changed customer details and create a new Notes document with the Workplace Form attached. The data from the form is parsed out and populated into the Notes document.

There were a few little tricky bits where the documentation wasn't quite correct (mainly to do with new versions of the API's). Also the setup of the PureEdge configuration needed a little tweaking.

The next step is to modify the Form so that it used the Workplace Forms HTML Translator so that users don't need the Workplace Forms viewer and can have a zero footprint. Once I have that going I plan to integrate the Notes database with Workflow-Xpress so that the submission of the form kicks of a workflow business process to route the form to appropriate people.