I have developped a Google Panel to monitor some IBM Lotus Quickplaces.

With this panel, one can: Scan every hours a set of Room Index to get the latest publucation Click on an entry to go an see the selected publication on the Quickplace The user-loging is handled automatically This use IE automation, so if you can access your quickplace with IE, you will be able to modify this panel and use it Some statistics are gathered to see the performance o accessing your QuickPlace

I am writing a technical note describing how to do such a development.

The outline of this note is 

1.Tools
 1.1.JavaScript editor and debugger
 1.2.Editing a panel JavaScript source
 1.3.Debugging your panel
 1.4.Generating a panel install file
 1.5.JavaScript Plug-in Development cycle
2.Outline of Panels object model
3.A sample panel using IE automation to monitor Lotus QuickPlace

The first chapter is now available

With Google Desktop version 2, in Beta even if not fully debugged for locals, Google is really entering the "widget, gadget and consor..." game. They call there xgets panels and they propose a framework, including tools, API and documentation to create new "panels".

The purpose is to provide monitoring of various data sources one's can benefit from, and to combine search ing those data & knowledge sources:

• The web of course
• Your hard disk and network appliance storage
• RSS Feeds
• Any data source you wnat to monitor and present

So, its a personal dashboard application framework.

It's quite light to load, few hundred kbytes, and the API allows to do the nice graphics one's expect from xgets artefacts...

Of course, the API allows to define the update period for refreshing the panel content and you can get data from the web with HTTPRequest. The framework allows to manage a collection of panels (add/suppress/setup...).

The race for widgets has really started, as the majors have now started...

For those who are familiar with QuickPlace, it's not a surprise but a good news.

QuickPlace is built on the paradigm of nested rooms: a Quickplace is a Tree of rooms with the root as the Main room where you manage member access.

Each sub-room allows a group of people using the Quickplace to manage activities or projects of some part of the group: access rights with according roles are granted to members to support the organizational goals.

With QP before 7 release, rooms had to support another use case: Document and Folder clustering: i.e: support for document classification.

It was not wery handy! Document classification usually requires many levels and you needed also to manage access rights to those clustering sub-rooms without any benefit... Plus, the navigation of QuickPlace is one level at a time, which is good for few rooms, but get quite confusing when you reach multiple levels. Now, browsing a folder with the tree of subfolders is implemented as a treeview in the QuickPlace table of content.

Hence, you have a clear distinction between classifying documents into nested folders and group activities breakdown supported by sub-rooms.

Nice feature: thank you to Lotus QP dev team.

IBM Lotus launch QP7 in September. As Ed Brill said, the name is now QuickPlace again! I signed for a trial place with lotus in order to see what's new in this release.

Main topics are

• Title change: not only original author, but who modified a document. No more surprise to see your document show-up in the daily notification despiste you did nothing...
• Editor role: people who can delete documents of other authors
  Those two functions where already part of 6.5.x
• Folder nested into folders: that's a nice feature!
• Search scope global to all places of a member: a nice feature for those who have a lot of Places...

Here is a document who summarize those changes QP7_new_features.doc (889,5 KB)