In addition to developers, we also decided to involve Notes administrators in this phase of the project as well. Your administrators will give you valuable insights into application deployment, maintenance, and performance that developers (those specifically doing programming) are not always aware of. Once the project team had been assembled, we determined a frequency for our meetings and the deadline for the project.

Step 2: Determine your goals for the improved Notes framework
Now that we'd assembled a team of people with the necessary skills to complete this project, the team's next step was to determine what specific goals we wanted our new application framework to achieve. Consultants sometimes refer to this as a project's "Measurement of Success".

At Tactica, we had many goals that we set out to achieve with a new development framework:

• Increased developer productivity (both individually and especially in groups);
• Get a standard look and feel to all of our applications;
• Allow more reliable development of applications by using common components across most or all applications;
• Design applications that scale well from a single server onto dozens or hundreds of servers;
• Make our software user-configurable wherever possible, as opposed to hard coding design changes;
• Reduce the cost of training and support new users through the use of a standardized interface;
• Ease new developers into our development environment.

We didn't want much did we?

Step 3. Determine what specific technical tools exist to achieve your goals
In order to accomplish these goals, the next step we performed was to analyze all of our existing applications and determine which specific components of the native Lotus Notes development environment would allow us to achieve our goals.

An example of such a component would be the aggressive use of subforms across multiple applications. If a specific subform could be made it to work in all applications, then developers wouldn't have to write it over again, nor would they have to debug it over and over again. Plus, if it was used universally, it would give a standardized user interface to our applications.

To save you some of the analysis we performed, let me give you a list of the objects which we determined would be required in most Lotus Notes application development projects. When you repeat this process in your environment, your results could be different.

• A standard subform to be used at the top of every form (a form header);
• A standard subform to be used at the bottom of every form (a form footer);
• An enterprise-wide directory of keywords to be used by all applications going forward;
• An enterprise-wide directory of databases which would also be used by all applications;
• A collapsible section to detail the edit History of the current document ($UpdatedBy, etc.);
• A system for performing the sequential numbering of Lotus Notes documents;
• An on-line help system for a end-user documentation;
• LotusScript Libraries to ease the deployment of complex multi-database applications across many desktops without administrator intervention;
• A comment or bug report form which would integrate with a project management database;
• A Notes database icon library;
• A Notes formula library.