eProductivity – Cool New Journal Feature

As I intimated in my last post, I think Lotus Notes did themselves a great disservice when they named one of their standard databases “Journal”.  It meant there was a perception that it was only good for recording what was happening on a day to day basis, something like a personal journal.

In reality, the database is extremely powerful, so when Eric Mack and the eProductivity team wrote a template for it they renamed it simply as a “Reference”.  That change alone was enough to get me to look into its capabilities and they are great.  Admittedly I’m using a database enhanced by an eProductivity template but nonetheless, the vanilla “Journal” can actually do much more than I had ever imagined or expected.

The one thing it didn’t do well though was, interestingly enough, operate as a daily journal!  Curious but true.

In my role as a Pastor there are a few things this would be really handy for as you can imagine, but I think that we could all benefit from something that does this very well, especially if it integrates with our normal email, calendar and productivity systems.

Along comes the latest eProductivity release and lo and behold, this missing link has been neatly dealt with.

Starting from scratch here’s how to use it:

Open your Reference Database using whatever you named it when you set it up.  Select the eProductivity menu and choose Preferences.

Select the “Journal Entry” Tab and make sure the same boxes are checked as per this screen shot.

Click “Save and Close”.  Close your database and then re-open it.  You will now have an additional button in the ribbon called “Journal Entry”.  Click it… go on, I know you want to…

A new document opens with the category pre-populated as Journal.  Pout in a title, click in the body and enter some text (notice my intentional mis-spelling to keep you all amused).  Click “Save and Close”.

At this point you may have to close the database again and re-open it.  I didn’t see the Journal category below until I did.  Once you’ve created this first entry, you won’t need to do this again.

If you select “Journal” from the category you’ll see your entry and note that it is recorded based on the day you created it.

But that’s not the good bit.  Go to another view, any other view and click the :Journal Entry” button again.

It brings up your original entry, date and time stamped below what you wrote. 

Enter more text, close and save and it date and time stamps that as well.

And it all gets filed as one entry per day.  Pretty neat I think you’ll agree.  And as you can have three reference databases associated with eProductivity then you can run three separate types of these journals if needed.