I set about creating the tutorial using Visual Basic, Lotus Domino, and the Microsoft Agent SDK (Software Development Kit). The result? Once again, I received the electronic equivalent of a standing ovation.

This month, I'll show you how to create the animated, context sensitive help for the Notes client for your own application. In future issues, I'll explain how to create the animated help for users accessing your application via a Web browser, and finally, how to create an animated tutorial.

For the purposes of demonstration, we'll be creating a new database based upon the Lotus Notes R5 Discussion Template.

What is the Microsoft Agent?
Chances are good that you're already familiar with the Microsoft Agent technology, but you may not know it. If you've used applications such as Microsoft Office, you've interfaced with technology very similar to the Microsoft Agent. If you've experienced the little paper clip that appears with Microsoft Office to provide help with the software, you've already experienced technology very similar to the Microsoft Agent.

Microsoft Agent is royalty-free software provided by Microsoft to allow developers of many different types of systems to provide an animated interface. In addition to the information presented in this article, Microsoft Agent also supports speech to text. This means you can actually speak through the microphone on your workstation and have it translated to text. If you're really ambitious, you could use Microsoft Agent to display a character on the screen asking the user what information they would like. The user could then simply speak the answer into the system's microphone, and Microsoft Agent would then interface with your application to produce the requested information. For those of you with an artistic side, Microsoft also provides the Microsoft Agent Character editor, which allows you to create your own characters.

Microsoft provides a Software Development Kit that allows developers to provide interaction between the Microsoft Agent and their software application. This is good, because that's what we're going to be doing--interfacing Lotus Notes with the Microsoft Agent SDK.

Installing the Microsoft Agent core components
Before you can get started creating animated files using the Microsoft Agent API, you need to download and install them on the workstation you'll be using to develop the software. At a minimum, you'll need the following:

• Microsoft Agent core components;
• Microsoft Agent character file (please select the "Merlin" option for this demonstration).

Both of these files can be downloaded free of charge at http://www.microsoft.com/msagent/downloads.htm.

Once you've downloaded both of these applications, perform the installation by double clicking on the executable file for the core components. Simply follow the instructions displayed during the install process. Once the core components' installation is completed, install the character file by double clicking on the executable for the character file.