So I would like to take this opportunity to say a MASSIVE “Thank you” to all of the Lotus business partners that have helped me understand the channel, supported me in my mad-capped schemes and ideas and just generally been some of the best people I have ever worked with and alongside.

I’ve had some great times and met some fantastic people along the way and I’m grateful for all the fun we’ve had too.

So what am I going to be doing? I am going to working in Lotus Technical Sales in UK & Ireland. This is the “Back to the Future” bit for me as I have done this role before, just before I stated in Channel Technical Sales. I’ll still be at ILUG and Lotusphere 2011 (hopefully) so I’ll see you all there.

So it’s not “So long and thank for all the fish” but more of a “Where are the keys to the DeLorean? And can we make sure the flux capacitor is working right this time?”

I called the lease company and demanded to speak to the head of the relationship between IBM and Leaseplan. Then I ask her what on earth they are doing. She was very empathetic with my situation and asked me to email her, which I did.

AND

Today I got a call giving me an update as to what she has done and what she is waiting for and what I should expect to happen next.

Why has is taken them 90 days and me ranting to produce reasonable customer service? I guess I’ll never know, but it’s very frustrating.

On the GTD front I have managed to get to an empty inbox today. YIPEEEEEE. This momentous event occurred on a flight from LHR (London Heathrow, UK) to CPH (Copenhagen, Denmark) this morning. I am in Denmark to present, what might be my last, XPages workshop.
So now I have finally finished the collection phase, it’s time to start on the action phase. Time to start calling people back and using this eProductivity mail template for really GTD (Getting Things Done). I have a huge list of stuff to do so I’d better get on with it. ;o)

The BMW garage said it needed a new engine and the leasing company, naturally, took a very sharp intake of breathe at this point. And I don’t blame them. £9,000 for a replacement engine is a lot for a car that’s just two years old.

After much tooing and froing, and tooing and froing and some more tooing, just for good measure, the car is with a garage that are going to replace the engine.

I rang them just after lunch today to find out what is happening. I remember something about “the engine is out of the car and we don’t have an engine that works yet to put back in” before my brain melted and ran out of me nose.

So it’s not going to be back tomorrow (day 70) and then it’s a bank holiday weekend. So that’s going to be up to day 74 at the earliest and if they work on it over the holiday weekend. (not going to happen)

I think I might get to day 80, but not as far as day 100 before I lose it completely and scream at someone down the phone about this.

Anyone want to guess on the what date I’ll get the BMW back? Day 80 onwards……..

I’ve added a whole new department of people in a bunch of nested groups. But while I was doing this I came across a problem. Whilst I have everything sorted alphabetically (groups and people), that mixed up all the people in amongst the groups.

So I needed something that would make the people sit above the groups. A simple full stop works just fine.

Lets say that you create a group for your team and you want your manager to appear at the top of the list when they are online. All you have to do is edit the “Nickname” of the contact and add a “.” to the front of their name. Then they pop to the top of the list.

.Robert Manager
Fred Bloke
Georgina Lady

Taking this one step further, I have a group that has people and groups in it, and a manager. So to the manager I added two full stops and just one to the other people in the group. They all appear above the groups and the manager appears everyone.

..William Manager
.Fred Bloke
.Georgina Lady
Admin (GROUP)
Finance (GROUP)
HR (GROUP)

So whilst it’s a bit of a drag to edit a few peoples nicknames in Sametime it’s not too bad to look at and it works.

Now I can start on the GTD process stage one. This involves getting EVERYTHING into a trusted system, in this case eProductivity, and clearing it from my mind. Then I will be one step closer to David Allen’s goal of ‘mind like water‘.

So I will spend the rest of day and tomorrow collecting everything into eProductivity and then working through what the next actions are for each thing I have collected.

The collection process is made really simple in eProductivity as you can drag and drop any emails into a context (more on these later on) and you can also “MindSweep” and collect your thoughts about projects or stuff that you are thinking about but don’t have email about. My inbox stands at 704 emails right now and I want to have that down to none either by the end of today or tomorrow lunch time.

I’d best stop writing about it now and actually go do some of it.

More updates on the next 4 steps will follow.

Having listened to David Allen read his Getting Things Done (GTD) book a bunch of times (I have it as an audio book), I think I get the process. I have no decided to take the plunge and investigate integrating that into my Lotus Notes mail file to get the full effect of what it can do for me. eProductivity is just such an application that will change the look, feel and functionality of my mail file. It’s safe for me as I know how to control the security in Notes (ECL) and I have complete control over my mail file (Manager Access). If after evaluating this on a 4 week trial I discover that it’s not for me then I can revert back to the Lotus designed mail file and nothing will be lost. You have to love Notes for it’s flexibility.

So here goes, downloading the template now and replacing the design of my mail file this morning. Then it’s off to lunch for a stiff drink. ;o) When I come back I’ll start the spring clean with a trawl through my existing inbox and work out what needs to go where.

I’ll post my progress and let you all know how I’m getting on as I get into this. I’ll also share any tips and tricks I find along the way.

Full Disclosure
I feel it only fair to inform everyone that I will not be hiding anything in these blog posts, but if I like eProductivity, they have offered me a free license if I want to continue using it. All I have to do is blog about it. But I want you all to know that if it’s bad, needs changing, crashes my mail file, revolutionizes my life or annoys the life out of me, I’ll be telling everyone.
My thanks go to Erik Mack and Ryan Heathers for offering this opportunity to me.

The file resources that you would need to create the LOANr application yourself in your own time can be found here. (This has been edited and a corrected .pdf included 27-Jan-10)

Included files are:

show112.pdf – the presentation that becomes your manual on how to create the LOANr XPages application.
scriptsnippets.txt – this is all the code that you are going to need to type in to make it work, but we have typed it in already numerous times so figured that we’d save you the effort.
LOANr-Start.nsf – The database that started from with just the ordinary Notes resources in it. e.g. forms, views, pages and image resources.
LOANr-Final.nsf – Is what the database should look like if you follow the instructions all the way to the end.

We hope you enjoyed the breakout session and if you have not already done so, please complete your evaluation for the session.

Please feel free to ask questions or leave comments here.

Last night I curled up at midnight and then woke up at 3:00am with slides running through my mind. Every time I closed my eyes, back the slides came and that’s the way it’s been since. Do you think I have something on my mind? Possible

So after 6 hours and 30 minutes sleep in the past 48 hours, I get to present at 1:30pm today. Then I’m going to bed. If I don’t see you at the beach party tonight I apologise in advance. ;o)

In this example I’m picking up values from lookup documents in a lookup view. They could be anything but I have used simple  two field Notes form.

In your custom control or XPage drag two combo boxes onto the page.

Combo Boxes

In the first combo box I have bound it to the form that I want to store the data in. In this case it’s comoboboxtest with two fields on it.
For the Values I have used the following @formula

@DbColumn(@DbName(),”vwLookup”,1)

(note the capitalisation and commas)

Lookup formula

For the Events of this comobo box you need to click the onChange event (ServerSide) and then select partial refresh. In the dialog pick the other comob box that you dragged onto the page. Also you need to select the “Do not update or validate date” check box.

Event setting for Combo Box 1

Then in the second combo box bind it to the other field in your destination document.
For the values you need to add another formula.

var combo1 = getComponent(“comboBox1″).getSubmittedValue();
@DbLookup(@DbName(),”vwLookup”,combo1,2);

This sets the variable combo1 to the value that you have picked in the first combo box and then uses combo1 to lookup the values in your view. (Your view must be sorted for this to work and what you are looking up must be the first column)

values formula for Combo Box 2

The other important thing here is that you need to set this script to run dynamically instead of at page load.

And that’s it.

Download a small sample here. XPagesTesting

My thanks for Paul Hannan for helping me bug fix this with thousands of other things running through my head this morning.