Notes on Productivity Home Page

I'm always looking for tools to make Notes development more productive, so earlier this year, I contacted TeamStudio and Ytria to look at their tools. Ryan Hum, of  Ytria, responded immediately and offered to assist me. Since then, we've chatted about some of the tools that Ytria offers and last week, I met with Andre Hausberger, of Ytria, to discuss their suite of developer productivity tools for Lotus Notes.  I had several interests: professionally, I evaluate tools so that I can make recommendations to my corporate and enterprise clients that do their own Notes/Domino development; for myself, I wanted to learn how these tools could save me and my team time as we continue to enhance eProductivity for Lotus Notes.

I plan to post a more thorough review of the Ytria tools, once I have had the time to really work with them and to get feedback from my developers.  Meanwhile, here are a few highlights from my conversation with Andre:

ActionBar EZ - useful for managing actions and action bar properties. Great for consolidating and managing actions across forms and views.
ViewEZ - used to analyze view column formulas; provides an overview of where you are using what column formula, allows comparison of formulas; for backward compatibility, you can treat individual columns as virtual shared columns. I can use this to edit, move, restructure my view columns and I can see all columns in all views at a single glance.
SignEZ - Allows developer to sign a database without access to the physical ID or password; allows partial signing (e.g. to specific agents or forms).
ACLEZ - Provides a powerful view of database (and template) ACLs across all servers. It does not use catalog.nsf; instead, does a full audit for accuracy; Installed at the client, but provides a server view.
ScanEZ - Think of NotesPeek with the ability to edit values in a field; change replica ID, Differential analysis; global find/replace in field values; powerful resolution for replication conflicts.
AgentEZ - provides a server view of all agents running across all databases across all servers.
DesignPropEZ - Mass propagation of design element changes across multiple databases across multiple servers.
FormEZ - A free tool to edit field formulas

OK, those are brief notes - I'm just getting into these tools. My take, so far,  is that the Ytria tools take the tedium out of notes development, especially when it comes to the time consuming and boring tasks like reconciling views and forms, field properties, view properties, and design analysis. From the little I've seen so far, It won't surprise me if I don't want to give up the tools after I've used them some more.

I'm certainly going to recommend these to clients who do their own development.

Through August 26th, Ytria is making use of all of its tools available for free.

Andre sent me an email to remind me that during the Month of August, Ytria is making all of its tools available for free. Check out the Ytria web site for more information. While you're there, I suggest watching their two-minute videos which demo each of their products.

For those of you using Ytria, I welcome your comments and suggestions as I'm still learning about what this powerful suite can do.