I believe the following items are in Lotus Notes 8.5.1. For that reason:

Disclaimer: IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and Lotus Notes Traveler 8.5.1 is prerelease code and there are no guarantees from IBM that the functionality presented or discussed will be in the final shipping product.

I guess the above is for all those who remember the Garnet fiasco. On to the meat.....

Ever since I first got my hands on 8.0 in the early beta releases I have loved the side bar. At STS we use it for a whole host of things, including the built in widgets plus Linked-In, TwitNotes, SNAPPS Calculator, et al.

What most users don't know is that any Lotus Notes view can be added as a widget. This is especially handy when you have Notes apps (and we have a lot of them). For instance we have a heavily customized address book that is our CRM. Wouldn't it be handy to embed the contacts view in the side bar so when a users is looking for a phone number they don't have to open the application, they can just do it from the side bar? Sure it would! (you could also do this for the Domino Directory and use it as a corporate phone book).

With Lotus Notes releases prior to 8.5.1 you had to hack the Notes URLs to get this to work. For example a Notes View widget would always display the associated view navigator unless you added

&hidenavigator

to the URL. This is a difficult thing to explain to users who may wish to create their own side bar view widgets.

In 8.5.1 (at least I think this is new in 8.5.1) IBM Lotus have made it far simpler to add a view, sans navigator, to the side bar. In fact it is simply a check box on the widget configuration screen (left unchecked to hide it):


This type of functionality is much improved if you create a custom view for the side bar. This view will take into account the limited amount of real estate you have over there.

In our case I created a small view that shows the columns below:

I then formatted the columns to be a thin as possible by using @newline to separate names and numbers. Once I had the view, I simply open this new view in the Notes client and click the Configure widget from current context... icon as shown below (if you don't see the icon see the bottom of this post on how to configure it):

Select the options outlined in red below:

Click Next.....

Click finish and you will have a new side bar widget:

Now a user can look up information quickly and efficiently.

As you can see the addition of the check boxes make this type of Notes client customization much, much simpler. With a modicum of training your power users will now be able utilize the side bar all by themselves!

But I don't have the icon :(

If you don't see the add widget icon go to File/Preferences and select the options below: