Lotus Rock Star

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We're getting into some eye candy and heavy Dojo work with this one folks! For my ninth demo, we'll have a look at QContacts, the contact management application for Lotus Quickr. Contacts? Why would you need that when you have a member list? Good question, easy answer. You need more information than the member record can supply, or the project contact isn't a member of the place, or you need to share role-specific information about this contact with the team. There's nothing more frustrating than having an out-of-date, incomplete, or low-confidence contact list. QContacts help to solve these problems, centralizing contact information while automating much of the work involved in maintaining it.

The use case is simple. You're running a project using Lotus Quickr, and you want to maintain a contact list with more comprehensive information than is available in the member list (which is, in fact, mostly for authorization). You also don't want to re-enter information from the member list, and it makes no sense to duplicate information available about a contact that may be a member of another place, or not a member of a place at all. QContacts consists of a single form for the Lotus Quickr place, and a Domino database to coordinate, automate, and consolidate contact data. It lets you add information about people that can be shared across places including all pertinent addressing information, personal contact information, a photo, and place-specific comments that are kept in context even if the contact is a member of multiple contact lists.

Viktor has done some significant Dojo work on this template, including a method to use a true Domino form and make it look 100% integrated with the Lotus Quickr place - even though it's part of another database. Also, we've added type-ahead search for contacts, Ajax submit of new contacts, cool rollover tooltips (business cards), and more. Jerald wrote the engine for QContacts that gathers all member records from the Lotus Quickr places (contacts1.nsf databases) and does a relational-style add/change based on the email address as a key, each night, to pick up new membership and clean up contact lists. It does this without destroying any of the supplemental information such as address, photo, etc. and can also be run on demand to start things off.

An amazing benefit of QContacts is the simplicity of its implementation in the Quickr place, and its portability. Only one single custom form must be uploaded into a place in order for this feature to work in any place! We're delivering the place and the code, so you can either use our place or simply implement it in your own.

Enough of me explaining, go have a look at the QContacts demo.

Don't forget - ask questions and make comments here...