OpenLog: An Open Source Must Use Tool for Lotus Notes Shops

One of the essential elements in managing the development life cycle as part of an effective information systems governance process is having a proactive tool to track the reporting, correction, testing and deployment of changes resulting from errors and bugs in an application, as well as events that have occurred. Many Notes developers trap for errors in their LotusScript agents and script libraries, some going as far to write them to an agent log. However, for the most part they create a different notes log database for each application and they must look at the log databases each day to see if any errors have occurred. This is an approach that can lead to many errors not being noted in a timely manner and can be a control deficiency.

Julian Robichaux, who runs the excellent nsftools web blog at http://www.nsftools.com/, has made an important step in the direction of providing an open source integrated error/bug tracking management application with the release of openLog 1.0 on openNTF.org. There are not many tools that I say this about, but this is a "must download/use" tool for ALL notes developers and Lotus Notes shops. The price is also right: free.

From the "About" document:

"The OpenLog database provides a common error and event logging framework for all of your Notes databases, agents, and scripts. It is an open-source project available on the OpenNTF website. You are currently using version 1.0 of the database template. The common logging framework is provided through a script library that can be included with your code and called with a single, very simple function/method call. There is a LotusScript and a Java version of the library, both of which provide the same functionality."

I am actually in the process of writing an article on this overall topic and found the release of this tool to be very timely. There are enhancements that can and should be made to make this a tool that would fully meet COBIT objectives. I will be addressing them, including the additional context of this new tool, in the article and in a session presentation that I have submitted for consideration for inclusion at Lotusphere 2005.

You can download this tool from the openNTF web site.