more on corporate home page

Notes/Domino 8 Forum

Subject:

Hi,

That’s unfortunately more complicated than what you would wish…sorry if my answer got a little long

First about the policy based corporate homepage, it was a good idea when it came in Notes 6…unfortunately it never got bug free and the functionality is still the same in Notes 8… If it was bug free I still don’t think the mechanism it uses would be good enough for a corporate homepage, policy and a central bookmark.ntf combined with a spread of Lotus Notes versions can’t be to easy to manage..

I guess you have pretty high priority on actually enforcing the users to always see the customized homepage first, if not you could of course replicate the corporate homepage to the users and create some kind of link to it with recommendations to set it as homepage in the UI.

Ideal solution

In Notes 8 the home page function has got a face lift (for example a Home button on the bookmark bar) in the client, if you could find a programmatic way to set it to your separate local replicated database you might have an easy solution…the policy that disables the users so they cant change it works pretty well. Please let me know if you find the programmatic way to do it :-)

I have not tested the home page function in Lotus Notes 801 enough to see if it actually fails back and forth between local and server based replicas dependent if the server is available or not. I guess that’s not a total show stopper, it should be possible to have a database startup script to check if the server is available and if so switch over to the server replica.

Using the standard home page functionality would be great since then the users could have standard design on all deployed notes databases incl. the bookmark.ntf and still get into an enforced corporate homepage database. With a separate good corporate homepage and the new functionality in Lotus Notes 801 standard, for example day at a glance in the side bar, your users would never need to see the bookmark.nsf at all…

It is a little surprising a way to set a separate database as corporate homepage didn’t get onto the pretty long feature list of the otherwise great Lotus Notes 8...especially since the functionality is there in the client..

Reality

The way I have seen and implemented this in quite many different enterprise production environments is using a customized bookmark.ntf. You would not need to modify the bookmark.ntf enormously to show a separate database in a frame either on the server or locally dependent some kind of smart algorithm.. An advice might be to do as little modifications to the standard bookmark.ntf as possible..

The distribution mechanism for the base bookmark.ntf (for each version distributed Lotus Notes version) and updates to them can use different methods.

If you have a common PC platform and use it to distribute the Lotus Notes client I would recommend including a “base” bookmark.ntf in the install package and then use a separate msi package to distribute updated bookmark.ntfs (and update the notes.ini to implement it. Reason for this is to get the correct updated bookmark.ntf to update the PCs with a specific Lotus Notes version..

If you are on your own, sometimes (often) there is no common PC platform or program distribution mechanism or to much of a deal to use it. Then you will have to rely on a Lotus Notes script based solution, you can either replicate or copy the updated template to the clients.. Copy it might not be a good idea since it will use pretty much bandwidth, on the other hand it would be pretty easy to ,make sure each client gets the correct template if they get copies..

On the other hand replication might be troublesome since you will have to make sure the clients gets updated replicas of the correct (7.02, 8.01, 8.x and so on)…there is also a risk of getting changes back to the server replica of the template. In reality this is the most common method I have seen, the scripts to trigger the replication and design update are typically run from the mailfile..avoid running startup scripts from to many places.

Noticed that you got a great code example for the design update in a separate post, they seams to do it over the network but the code could probably also be done together with a local copy or replica of the updated bookmark.ntf..your choice dependent on wan infrastructure and such. These lines are also important
version = profile.BookmarkVersion(0)
Print "Checking for bookmark updates . . ."
With this technique you can get good control of different client versions and older different of the templates..
They also recommends you to put the code in the bookmark itself, I still would prefere having it in the mail file but of course there are scenarious when you might need to put it in the bookmark, for example if the mail design is owned by another part of the organization.

Future?

Many enterprise Lotus Notes shops are moving away from Lotus Notes client based intranets.. sometimes to Websphere Portals as corporate intranets/home pages.

The same might be truu if your home page is only a startpage for the Lotus Notes client and not an intranet, WSP in combination with Lotus Notes might be a very strong combination to make a good future work portal in the Lotus Notes client..

There are some basic functionality in the Lotus Notes 8 preferences for this, with a decent sso solution to the portal it might be useful as a homepage for the Lotus Notes client. I have not seen any good example of such a home page used in Lotus Notes. Off line capabilities might of course be troublesome but perhaps you could live with only having access to local replicas of databases while of line.

Feedback response number WEBB7CPU3L created by ~Michelle Brelu on 03/13/2008