I have just started a new project at OpenNTF, the Lotus Notes Open Source community.
The base is a project that I in part developed together with SKF about 18 months ago. Thanks to SKF and Gunilla Darrell for agreeing to donate this code to the OpenNTF community.
The aim was to enhance current functionality when using Word as editor in Notes and be able to use Microsoft Word 2003 functionality such as the Research Pane and Smart Tags (but also simpler things such as the spell checker) to boost user productivity.
Other practical things were addressed, for example that in current functionality Notes sends an email created with Word both as Rich Text and as an OLE object which increases email size by a factor 10-100.
There is one Word as Editor template for OpenNTF Mail Experience and one for standard R6 mail.
Notes uses OLE Automation for it’s Word integration and this of course has its limitations. I did manage to work around many of them but I’m sure others will emerge that will need to be addressed.
Development was done using Microsoft Word 2003 and Lotus Notes 6.
Notes 7 and Notes 8 (currently in public beta) together with Word 2007 will with all certainty add new possibilities yet to be explored.
I hope other organizations will find the project interesting and maybe even useful 🙂
I am looking for an OpenNTF “co-chef” for this project as I currently don’t have that much time to spend on it. Let me know if you want to contribute to this project.
Click here for the Word as Editor projects homepage at OpenNTF.
I would love to see such a project reach the light of day
Especially if Word can be set to be the DEFAULT editor as the LN editor is well, frankly awful.
Would love to be able to use Word editing, formatting features, spell/grammar checking and, just quietly… autotext…