A couple of days ago John Roling (Grayhaw68) posted Shit I Use Every Day about Dropbox, a service that I also use. I think to post tips about useful tools is a great idea. I want to push for a few tools I use on a daily basis.
The first tool is the Notes tool i have been using the longest, NoteMan from Martin Scott. The NoteMan Suite consists of several programs, and they can be purchased separate or together. But for $395, it is a no brainer to buy all of them. Here are the programs which are part of the NoteMan Suite:
NoteMan.Editor
This tool can easiest be describe as “Infobox on stereoids”. You get a great overview of the fields in a document, and you can add, delete and edit fields, and even change the data type. It’s easy to see the UNID of a document, you can make a document a child/response to another one from within this tool, and much more. I use this tool pretty much every day, often multiple times.
The MultiEdit tool is great to update a collection of documents, and you can even perform the search from within the tool.
NoteMan.DocDelta
This tool compare two documents, or a document and a replication conflict. For replication conflicts, they can be resolved in different ways, either by switching the two documents, making the replication conflict the main document and vice versa, or by copying the values of individual fields from the conflict to the main document.
NoteMan.Design
I don’t use this tool that much, but it let me look at the design, see what elements inherit design from other templates, have “Prohibit design refresh” set, etc.
NoteMan.ACL
A very convenient tool, that I only use on occasion. But when I use it, I save a ton of time. It lets me export the ACL of a database as XML, then I can import it and apply it to another database.
Conclusion: NoteMan is a suite of inexpensive but very powerful tools that every Notes developer (and admin!) should have in their toolbox. Martin Scott usually have a pedistal at Lotusphere, go there and take a look.
Disclaimer: This is a tool my employer purchased. I initially got NoteMan.Editor for free at Lotusphere a number of years ago, and we purchased the rest of the tools within a few months.