Reorganizing actions
While the thirty-minute makeover will give your users the new, fresh look, you would be wise to consider some of the other R5 actions changes.

First, there are cascading actions. You can now have more than one action on the same button. It's just a matter of using forward slash-separated titles in the same time-honored Notes fashion as cascading views and folders. This will reduce the clutter of actions on the screen and also reduce the need for lots of new custom icons by sharing a single icon between several actions.

Then there are shared actions. This is a major change to R5 and one for which many developers have pleaded for years. You can now have one single version of each action and copy it into as many views and forms as you like. In the future, when you need to change the action or the hide-when formula, you need only change the single shared action. All the views and forms that use that shared action will be automatically updated. This is a real time saver and great help in maintaining consistent database designs.

The simplest way to implement the new Shared Actions is to copy actions from views, folders, and forms to the new Shared Actions element. This element hides in the same "Resources->Other" design view as the About document and database icon. Then delete the original view action and select Insert->Shared Action from the Create menu to add the newly shared action to each form and view.

Some investment now in these new action features will pay off handsomely in the future with reduced maintenance.

If you have views and folders with identical designs--differing only in the document selection--and you have an R5.0.3 designer client, you can take advantage of a new, but undocumented, formula. Since it's not documented, you should be careful to check that it does what you expect and not anticipate any help if it goes wrong. The syntax is: @UpdateViewDesign("Name of View Being Changed";"Name of View To Clone").

Conclusion
Clearly there's a great deal more new in Notes R5 than could ever be explained in one short article or implemented in five minutes work on a database. However, as far as your customers are concerned, they'll see more change from the five minutes spent on these cosmetic changes than from the long hours you'll spend adding Java agents for XML stylesheet transformations or JavaScript form validations. As usual, style wins out over substance.

Dan Simmons is a regular Contributing Editor to DominoPower and a Lotus Notes Recruiter for Continental Search, a recruiting firm specializing in Lotus Notes & Websphere. Dan can be reached at dan@consearch.com or (410) 529-7000. Job seekers and employers are encouraged to visit Continental Search's interactive career center at http://www.consearch.com.