Here at Teamstudio, we love working with the HCL Domino platform, which is probably a good thing as we’ve been doing it since 1996. Like any sophisticated application server platform it has its foibles, and something that we know can cause frustration is the sheer number of applications that can exist in a typical Domino environment. One of the key early differentiators of Lotus Notes back in the mid-90s was the ability for any user to build a simple, forms based workflow application. The problem that can leave us with now, is that there can be hundreds or even thousands of apps scattered throughout an organization, and no easy way of figuring out who is using them and for what purposes.
That’s why we built Teamstudio Adviser. Originally launched as four separate offerings in 2006, we brought them all together into a single product a few years ago. As it stands now, Adviser provides a one-stop solution to cataloging your Domino apps, tracking usage, analyzing the complexity of the design of each application, and even providing guidance on a recommended path of action.
We designed Adviser to display data in a beautiful web UI, but we also understand that, sometimes, you want to dive deep into certain aspects of an application’s design, or you want to analyze things in a way that is not supported in the base product. To do that, you need access to the underlying data to be able to build custom reports for your unique requirements. That’s why, starting with version 6.5 of Adviser, it’s possible to export data from Adviser’s Catalog, Usage, Complexity, and Guidance Modules to comma-separated value (CSV) files for further reporting and analysis.
We’ve carefully chosen the format of the CSV file to work well with Microsoft Excel. Examples of reports available for export include all databases with complexity totals, all users with usage totals, all databases with their guidance recommendation, and all log entries.
Although it’s easy to generate the CSV files from within Adviser, it is important to follow the steps below to ensure that the file imports correctly into Excel. At least on some platforms, Excel will not import the file correctly if you simply double-click on the file in Explorer.
Reports are generally available from the Databases and Users dropdowns in each module:
The log report is available using the download button on the main navigation bar. The report can take a little while to generate, and it will automatically be downloaded to your browser's downloads folder when it is complete.
CSV, of course, is a very basic file format that does not have specific support for writing dates and times or international characters. To ensure that Adviser exports data correctly, our reports are written using UTF-8 encoding and using a modified ISO format for date/time fields. Some versions of Excel will not automatically import files like this, but the steps below should ensure that the file imports correctly.
Follow these steps to import your CSV report into Excel:
With Excel running, select File then Import.
Select CSV File from the list of options and locate the file.
Make sure that the Text Import Wizard has selected Delimited for the file format, not Fixed Width.
Accept the defaults on the remaining steps in the Text Import Wizard and choose where the report should be placed on the current worksheet.
If the report contains any dates, Excel may display them incorrectly. If dates display similarly to 31:12.0 then simply select the column(s), and choose Format Cells... from the right click menu. Selecting any format in the Date category should display the dates correctly.
Once your data is exported to Excel, you can build any report you need, or chart trends of anything you like. Meanwhile, if there are charts or reports that you think should be included in the base product, please let us know. We’re always happy to hear from customers and would love to hear your ideas.
To send us feedback on the reports and charts in Adviser, or if you have any questions about exporting raw data from Adviser or have trouble importing it into Excel, click below to start a conversation. We love to chat!