As already adumbrated elsewhere on the web, something was going on in MindPlan land this summer.
Yesterday, at the Notesusertage conference in Karlsruhe, Germany, we officially announced the upcoming release of a brand new MindPlan version.
In the past years, there were two questions that customers kept asking us over and over again:
1. My company is not using Lotus Notes. Do you have a version that runs without a Lotus Notes client?
2. How can we include external project co-workers in our MindPlan team that don't have Lotus Notes?
Today we're proud to announce that a new MindPlan version will be the answer to both questions.
The DOLS edition
Our internal technical name for this development project was "DOLS version".
For those who are not familiar with the word "DOLS": it's the short form for "Domino Off-Line Services", a technology that was originally built by IBM to take Lotus Notes web applications offline and provide replication features comparable to a normal Lotus Notes client.
Well, with a little bit of magic, this is not the only use case for DOLS any more. DOLS now is the perfect runtime environment for the MindPlan application.
So, MindPlan is still NSF-based, which means that we continue to store data in secure and reliable Lotus Notes databases, but as a user of this "MindPlan DOLS edition", you don't see anything of it! It's a complete background technology.
Easy setup
This new MindPlan edition will ship as a standard Windows installer package (MSI file), that does not require the existence of an installed Lotus Notes client.
Three easy steps are required to work with this edition:
- install it
- start it
- enter your name
Then you're done and MindPlan is ready to use.
It also does not interfere with an installed normal MindPlan application or Lotus Notes client. All the data is kept in separate directories.
Real team work Although you don't see the Lotus Notes user interface, we still provide nearly the full range of features of the normal MindPlan edition:
- full support for data replication with Notes/Domino to work in a team with others
- the replication can be initiated directly from within the MindPlan application
- work online on a Domino server or offline in a local replica
- You can offer hosting of MindPlan databases for your customers
- as an alternative to team work with others, MindPlan can also be used in a single user scenario
(in this case, MindPlan automatically generates the necessary Lotus Notes ID file and databases for local use)
One caveat - richtext is read-only For this very first release of the MindPlan DOLS edition, we had to limit one feature, which is caused by the lack of a graphical Lotus Notes user interface:
We can only offer the richtext of a MindPlan node in read-only mode, because we do not have a proper editor in Java that produces round-trippable Notes richtext (to be able to heavily exchange Richtext contents between DOLS and Standard users without data loss).
But you have full support for file attachments and you can of course use the title/description of a MindPlan node to enter your text.
In a future MindPlan version, we will provide our own graphical text editor that can be used as an alternative to Notes richtext and that stores its data in parallel to the Richtext in the node (e.g. in HTML or RTF format).
Interested in a beta version? The first MindPlan partners received an alpha code drop of this new MindPlan edition in August 2009. We have already reached the beta stage by now. So if you don't want to wait until January 2010 (hmm... I think there is an IBM conference in January; might be a coincidence ;-) ), just send us an email at
support @ mindplan.de
with a subject like
"I want that MindPlan DOLS version now!" to participate in the beta program. :-)
Please also add some information about your system (this is
Windows only, so tell us about the Windows version you use and the basic hardware setup).
P.S.: The
normal MindPlan 3.2 editions and the first officially available MindPlan Mac version will also be released at the end of January 2010.
P.P.S: Well, now it's finally clear why we added the
richtext preview panel and the
replication support. :-)
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Karsten Lehmann November 6th, 2009 15:53:22
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