LepoLand - A Blog by Alan Lepofsky

, and updated from it's original 09/25/07 posting.

Update: April 14, 2009
Here is information about the official version of the Learning Plugin, and here is Andy Pedisich's blog post about it.

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Originally posted: 09/25/07
Here is another great example of how mini-apps can be added to the Lotus Notes 8's sidebar.  In the image below I am showing the "My Lotus Learning" plugin.  The Education and Training team at IBM (in this case, think of IBM as a company just like any other, not the company that develops Notes) developed this plugin as a way to provide Lotus Notes 8 users easy access to educational material.



Here is a close up.   You can see that employees choose the context they want to learn...



... and then clicking on the item will launch it in another window.   The content format could be anything.  A a document, a web site, or as shown below a video tutorial.



In my opinion the ability to customize Lotus Notes 8 is perhaps the most important feature of the entire release.   I think of it as similar to how FireFox has so many tweaks and extensions.   My Notes install now has some many additions in the sidebar, the toolbars, and the search center that I often forget what comes in the base product and what does not when I am giving demos!