Idea: Profiles for Lotus Notes

Vaughan was wondering aboutwhat would be the most useful kinds of Lotus Notes templates to include with a Notes / Domino install.

I was giving the question some thought and it occurred to me that a nice, friendly staff contact list could be a winner. Now I know the Domino Directory is meant to serve this purpose - there are fields for phone numbers and position and good stuff like that - but frankly, the Person Document in the DomDir is just not the right place. Any user in their right mind will be put off by all the "other" stuff like Keys for your Certificates and th eLTPA User-name or Encryption settings. And that's just the forms - you don't even want to think about views of Configuration Parameters or Alternate Languages - Gah!

I think we'd be better off with a clearer separation between the "technical" elements of the Domino Directory and teh "user" elements. What I have in mind is more something that has the organisation and contact fields (department, position, phone, email etc), maybe a photo and a chance to put a wee blurb or Twitter-like message to announce who you are. None of the rest of the person document stuff. The database would have a small number of views - People by Firstname, Lastname, Department etc. and that's it. You could also maybe throw one or two of these views into the Notes 8 sidebar for easy access. If the database could update the Domino Directory, too and write your message to your Sametime status then so much the better.

Now taking off my end-user hat and putting on my developer-hat I have to think that this thing really shouldn't be that hard to build - in fact I've actually developed something similar for a (Notes / Domino 7) customer. For the customer I actually kept all the data in the Domino Directory and the new database was just a frameset that opened special views (with a special dialog-box that popped up when you opened the documents). However, that required a modification of the Domino Directory template. However, you could just as easily keep a separate database and just synch the information back to the Domino Directory.

Ultimately, something like this becomes a bit like the "Profiles" functionality of Connections and I suspect that this is one of the reasons we don't see something like this in Notes already. As Peter proposes in the comments to Vaughan's blog entry - we can also have Blog and Wiki templates in Notes but once you have that then suddenly Connections isn't offering that much more than Notes / Domino.