Wednesday, March 10, 2010

The Notes File Navigator - pure genius!

One of the best tools to come out through OpenNTF is the File Navigator widget available for download here. The screenshot tells it all:



If you're the kind of knowledge worker who bounces between Notes and Symphony throughout the day then you'll find this tool invaluable. I especially like the drag and drop for email attachments - goodbye paperclip! Thanks to Xiao Lei, Jian Kang and Rene Winkelmeyer for this masterpiece.

NOTE: You will have to upgrade to R8.5x to use this widget.
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7 comments:

Unknown said...

ha ha. Love the awesome folder names and drive naming.

Oh and yeh File Navigator is awesome.

Graham Dodge said...

It's a fair cop...in the interest of security I did rearrange some pixels on the screenshot but the general layout of the widget is as you see it.

Anonymous said...

You don't have to worry about running out of disk space, I see...

NotesTracker - Tony Austin said...

Yeah Graham, I just nutted out how to install it (after a bit of prayer, and flying by the seat of my pants). It seems quite good, though I've only played with it briefly. My initial response is to query if it has any more functionality than the OpenNTF File Explorer widget. The latter is dead easy to install, so any Notes user can do it just like falling off a log, by simply dragging the link from the OpenNTF page into the Notes sidebar -- none of that Eclipse Update Site "silliness" (which adds several levels of rather arcane indirection to the installation process, way beyond the capabilities of the average user). Fair comment, or not?

René Winkelmeyer said...

Hi Graham,

thanks for your feedback! It's very much appreciated.

-- René

Graham Dodge said...

@Tony... the technically aware and experienced Notes consultant will always prefer the quicker way of doing things when they are dealing with their own PC. If you are an admin for a 1,000 seat organization with a strong desktop policy then you may find advantages in doing it via the Eclipse update site.

NotesTracker - Tony Austin said...

Yes, I'll concede that to you Graham. It's a case of "horses for courses" I guess.

What I'm getting at is that the tiny/small/medium Notes shop without any Eclipse skills -- and not wishing to hire in an expensive IT consultant just to install a sidebar plug-in -- the simple "drag the icon from the OpenNTF web page into the Notes Client sidebar" approach for File Explorer is surely more attractive.

The File Navigator is well documented, coming with a Deployment Guide, an Administration Guide and a User Guide. Never having done it before, I needed to peruse the Deployment Guide, where Section 3.1.2 (Installing the plug-in) shows part of the process, but misses out on explaining how to take the zip file downloaded from OpenNTF and transform it into a local or Domino server-based Eclipse Update Site (which never having done it before is what I had to nut out, and would be beyond the desires/capabilities of many Notes shops).

From a user experience point of view, I know which of the two approaches I prefer (putting myself in the shoes of an average Notes user). ... I'll stop there!