In Notes/Domino 6, you can reference a profile document from a view in order to determine the appropriate color choices. The mail template does this, and this allows a user to specify that emails from (for instance) Fred Merkle should appear in blue, while messages from Alice Merkle should appear in orange. This is a powerful feature for enhancing the user interface of any application.

Notes/Domino 7 takes this a step further and allows you to actually populate a view column with icons based on choices made in a profile document. We'll go through a simple example, and then we'll look at how to employ this feature.

Imagine that you've got a Sales Tracking application. There are many thousands of companies and customers and products. Each month, your management team chooses a small set of customers and products that should receive special attention. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a column that had a special icon that would display whether the record...