Use tools like SignEz with care, and ensure that your application promotion and deployment processes are properly robust.

ViewEz view controller
ViewEz is next. This, as you might have guessed from the name, is a view and column exploration tool. Figure K shows the display of column properties -- formulas, really, for the selected view.

FIGURE K


You can explore column properties with ViewEz. Roll over picture for a larger image.

You can also see how you've used Shared columns, and see where you have similar columns if you've selected more than one view in the database. You can reorder columns, and even copy them between views. And there's a column analyser that helps you to be sure that views that are supposed to be similar are indeed so.

Now here I have to come a little clean, too, about my testing of ViewEz. I started this article using the Notes 7.0.2 client, and did the initial exploration of the tools with that. ViewEz worked just fine, but I didn't make any screenshots at that time.

But when I came to do screenshots, nearly every feature of ViewEz crashed my Notes 8 beta 2 client. I reported the crashes to Ytria, who told me that it crashed their Notes 8 Beta 2 clients too (beta = broken, after all). But by the time that Notes 8 goes Gold, all these issues will surely have been fixed.

New additions to the family
Lastly, Ytria have new additions to the family: FormEz, AgentEz and AclEz. As these are still incomplete, I'm just going to mention them briefly, and I've excluded them from consideration of my overall ratings.

FormEz as I tested it, lists all the forms in a database, and for each shows the three traditional formulas attached to each field: Default, or Value, for computed fields: Translation, and Validation. You can see and compare these, and click on each to be able to edit it.

The edge that this tool has is that it enables you to see and explore formulas on several forms at once, but you cannot edit and make the same change to more than one formula at a time. But again, the ability to compare and standardize formulas on several forms at once is very valuable at the time you need to do it.

AgentEz and aclEZ work on completely different premises from the other tools. The rest of the toolset, as we've seen, works on a single database. These tools work on a selection of databases, either local or on a Domino server. You select some or all databases on the target, and the tool presents a list of agents (AgentEZ) or ACL entries (aclEZ), enabling you to compare, contrast and explore.

While these functions are not going to be enormously useful to most developers, they will be most valuable to Admin guys faced with a mishmash of mis-set ACL entries or a complex agent schedule in many databases whose understanding taxes the Admin guy and whose execution taxes the server.

Our rating
So, what's all this lot worth, in DominoPower Dominos, and to you? These products, as seen on Ytria's Web site, are not cheap. The whole bundle is just short of $2100, including two years support, or you can buy individual components separately.