Lotus Notes is cool ~ let go of your perceptions and embrace the wonderfulness

Sidebar goodies

Feature available since Lotus Notes version 8.0

The sidebar is a wonderful thing – out of the box it contains a modest three or four items, but it’s the place where you can put more stuff. Cool stuff, useful stuff, couldn’t-do-without stuff. And what better way to extol the virtues of the sidebar than to give you a tour of my own. So, follow the order downwards…

LinkedIn – a rather nice plug-in which shows updates from your network and allows you to post your own update. You can download it, free of charge, from here.

Sametime Advanced Chat Rooms – one of the sidebar plug-ins which is delivered as part of Sametime Advanced, this one lists the chat rooms you’re a member of, provides access to the rooms, and alerts you to activity going on so you can join in.

Widgets – see here for more info.

TripIt – social networking based around your travel plans and your network of contacts (and where they’re travelling to). You can download it from the TripIt site.

Sametime Advanced Broadcast Communities – another plug-in from the Sametime Advanced offering, allowing you to reach out to a community (originating in Sametime Advanced or Lotus Connections) with an instant poll, a SkillTap (ask a question), an announcement or a broadcast chat. Nice.

File Navigator – does what it says on the box, it brings your file system to the sidebar. So although I’m not condoning adding file attachments to e-mails, you can drag them straight from your file system. And if you receive a file attachment from some kind person you can drag it into the file system. A first-class plug-in provided by Lei XL Xiao, Jian Kang and Rene Winkelmeyer – available from OpenNTF.

TwitNotes – the name and the icon should give it away, this plug-in shows updates from your Twitter buddies. A treat from the genius that is Mikkel Flindt Heisterberg.

Outgoing mail – created by me. But before you get too impressed, it was dead simple. I just created a simple widget based on a Notes view (that being the view of the Notes outgoing inbox). I often go back to an e-mail before I send it because I’ve forgotten to add a recipient, or I decide to remove the swear words – so this allows me to get to the outgoing mails quickly.

Scrapple – written by another genius, Julian Robichaux of SNAPPS, this one allows you to collect re-usable scraps of information by dragging and dropping them into the plug-in’s panel. It supports pieces of text, Notes e-mails and documents, file attachments and URLs. You can then drag and drop the items back into new e-mails and documents. Nifty. Download it from SNAPPS’ widget catalog.

Character Map – also from SNAPPS, this allows you to access often-wanted but difficult-to-find characters. If you can drag and drop then you can use Character Map.

Day-At-A-Glance – one of the default sidebar features, this shows your daily schedule.

RSS Feeds – see here.

Sametime – see here.

Activities – part of IBM Lotus Connections, the Activities integration is a real winner in Notes. This will be the topic of a dedicated article soon.

Places – integration with IBM Lotus Quickr, allowing you to browse Quickr libraries, add content from within Notes (file attachments and e-mail bodies), and add content from the file system. The integration also provides the ability to capture a file attachment as an e-mail is sent, deposit said file attachment in a library and then replace it in the e-mail with a link. To be covered in it’s own article at a later date.

Sametime Frequent Contacts – Sametime contacts with whom you frequently collaborate.

Sametime Meetings – this plug-in was introduced with Sametime 8.5. It shows your available meeting rooms, your calendar schedule (and gives you a new meeting room for each appointment) and meeting rooms belonging to a selected contact. The plug-in has hidden depths as it also provides the rich experience of the meeting room itself.

Please  note: Sametime Advanced, Sametime Meetings, Activities, Connections and Quickr require additional licenses and are not entitlements provided by a licence for Lotus Notes.