Ytria Tools

A few weeks ago I posted about useful software and mentioned that I had heard good things about Ytria but had not been able to get their tools to work myself. Well within a day I had been contacted by the guys at Ytria who wanted to help me get it to work. In the end the problem turned out to be the fact that I run an old version of Teamstudio CIAO. Their technical support couldn’t have been more helpful.

Anyway, I thought I should play with the tools for a while before commenting further but now I have to say I am very impressed. Of the five tools I am trialling, I won’t use three very often (designPropEZ, actionBarEZ and viewEZ) but when it comes to releasing an application, to audit and making sure there is consistency they will be hugely useful. They allow you to bulk update the designs of all or a selection of design elements in a database using common settings. I think probably if you’re a Notes developer (I do almost exclusively web development) that these would become required during day to day work.

signEZ will be superb for our release manager who we send our templates to before they go live. Whereas in the Admin client in Notes you have a simple “Sign” button, Ytria give you an incredible set of signing tools using your own or some other ID. It will certainly improve their life of switching IDs all day.

But to be honest the single best tool, and by far the most feature rich is ScanEZ. In the simplest terms this is the old classic Notespeek on steroids. But as well as being able to read notes, it allows you to update them. Looking at design elements it tells you everything about every field on a form such as data type, formula and so on. The thing which has proved most useful to me is when you are looking at individual documents. As well as seeing all of the fields on a document (which you can find by any number of methods such as by UNID, formula, view or formula) you can actually edit them as well. But beyond that you can compare documents side by side. This has been and will continue to be an absolute lifesaver for me.

Each of the tools can be downloaded and tried for free and work in reduced, read-only mode for ever. Now they do cost to buy but I think most serious developers will be able to justify them to their managers. Certainly ScanEZ is worth it’s weight in gold for me and I’ll be recommending it to my clients.