Writing special purpose agents
Undoubtedly, you will come across many, many agents as you discover applications and tackle maintenance chores. What do agents do? Anything you like. Here are two examples of processes you will likely encounter.
Send e-mail notifications
Applications can issue e-mail to notify users of events that transpire within the application. Perhaps a new task has been assigned or an old one completed, and the responsible parties are so informed. A notification might be triggered when someone changes a field on a document, such as a status field. Alternatively, a scheduled agent might run periodically and issue notices for overdue items, and so on.
Notification agents like this work pretty much the same way for Notes users or web users, with one notable difference: for the web user, the notification might include a clickable URL which opens the browser directly to the document requiring his attention. This kind of notification is particularly important for users who do...