Day: February 2, 2008

Domino Directory – People By Client Version

Lotus Notes stores the currently used client version for each user in the user’s person record in the Domino Directory.
It also stores the client version previously used. The information is automatically updated by the Notes client.

Release Overview

One of many new feature in Notes / Domino 8 is a Notes client version view in the Domino Directory.

The Domino Directory contains a People – by Client Version view that you can use to quickly see what versions of the Notes client are deployed on users’ computers in your domains. ( from: What’s new in IBM Lotus Domino 8 and 8.0.1? )

People - By Client Version

The view looks like this

Old View

Indeed, it shows the client versions in your domain. But can it really be used to “quickly see what versions of the Notes client are deployed on users’ computers in your domains”? NO. The view displays ALL releases ever used in your domain. Not very useful.

I changed the view to only display the currently used client version as category. The main problem when designing the view was the fact the the client version information is stored in different fields in the person record. In addition to this, it is stored unsorted.
So a simple @Subset command to get the first ( or last ) entry of the ClntBld field does not neccessarily return the Notes Client version that is currently used by a user.

A great function which is available from version 6 on is @Sort. @Sort can be used in view columns and the greatest trick is custom sorts using the [CustomSort] keyword.

The first column ( categorized, descending ) of the new view contains the following formula.

_list:= ClntBld  + " - "  + @Text(@ToTime(ClntDate)) ;
_Sorted:=@Sort(_list; [CustomSort];
@ToTime(
@Trim(@RightBack($A; " - "))
) < @ToTime(
@Trim(@RightBack($B; " - "))
)
);
@Subset(@LeftBack(_Sorted; " - ");1)

Parts of this formula are 'stolen' from Rocky Olivers presentation 'AD 304 - Formula Follies and LotusScript Lunacy: Coding Feats that Will Amaze'.
The "All Releases" column contains the same formula, except the last @Subset command. The option for multiple values is set to "New Line".

The result looks like this.

New View

This gives you a better overview about the client versions currently in use than the original view shipped with release 8 of Lotus Notes / Domino.