Have you ever sent an email to the wrong person because their name was the same as, or similar to, the person that you actually intended to communicate with? The story goes something like this...
You start typing the person's name, and the wonders of type-ahead take over. Without looking too closely, you select a highlighted name and choose Ted Johnson in Atlanta instead of Ted Johnson in New York, whom you really meant to select. Another time, you mistakenly sent an email to Ted Jones! Sometimes, sending an email to the wrong person seems to happen in slow motion, like shutting your locked car door with the keys inside. You have the feeling that something is wrong, but you're helpless to stop it from happening. Other times, unfortunately, you're oblivious to the fact that you've emailed the wrong person.
The first scenario can be embarrassing, but you know that it happened and can take measures to correct it. The second scenario is more of an issue. You're at the mercy of Ted Johnson in Atlanta or Ted Jones to alert you of your mistake. Otherwise, you wait, wondering why Ted Johnson in New York hasn't responded to your well-crafted email.
Lotus Notes 8 can help make these type of mistakes a thing of the past. Lotus Notes 8 keeps track of the people that you communicate with most often and moves those names to the top of your type-ahead list. Instead of being sorted in alphabetical order, the type-ahead list is sorted based on the people with whom you most often interact. If you've never sent a message to Ted Johnson in Atlanta or Ted Jones, they won't appear on the list, eliminating the possibility of choosing them by mistake.
It's a simple concept, really, based on the premise that the people with whom you are most likely to collaborate in the future are those with whom you have collaborated in the past. It's a feature called Recent Contacts, and it's also used when sending meeting invitations. One of the best attributes is that the Recent Contact list is stored locally, along with your other Contacts (don't worry, it doesn't take up much space). That means that when you're on an airplane or otherwise disconnected from the network, your Recent Contacts are still there. Once you've stopped collaborating with a person for some time, they fall off the list, making room for someone else that you're more likely to collaborate with in the future.
Dwight Morse | 6 February 2008 10:43:31 PM ET | | Comments (0) | Permanent Link
Everyone leaves the office for a period of time (if you don't, you should try it!). Our absence doesn't stop the constant stream of email, but we can slow it down by using the Out of Office functionality in Notes. The basic concept is to enable an automated reply to emails sent to us when we're absent. This alerts people to the fact that they can expect to wait for our response. This functionality isn't entirely new in Notes 8, but enhancements have been made that people should be aware of.
When people learn of our absence
The most significant difference in the Out of Office functionality in Notes 8 is the immediacy in which people learn of our absence. In prior versions, notices were sent to people on a schedule. By default, it could take someone up to six hours to get an email telling them that we were not going to be able to respond right away. With Notes 8, notices go out to senders the instant the email is received. This helps to avoid instances where the sender is looking for an immediate response and doesn't realize that the message needs to be redirected to an available resource.
The duration of our absence
People are used to being connected at all times. This is the reason for alerting senders of our absence immediately, and it is the reason for our second change; the duration of our absence. In prior versions, the shortest time that you could enable the Out of Office functionality for was one day. In Notes 8, the shortest duration is one hour. Now, we can enable the Out of Office functionality for doctor's appointments and offsite meetings.
Automatic disabling
Remembering to turn the Out of Office functionality on when we're going to be gone is the second hardest part of the feature. The hardest part is remembering to turn it off when we come back. Notes 8 automatically disables the Out of Office functionality when we return to the office, giving us one less thing to think about upon our return.
Setting up Out of Office
We can configure and enable Out of Office from our Inbox by clicking on More in the toolbar and choosing Out of Office..
From that dialog box, you can configure the elements of your Out of Office notification including:
- The duration that you will be out of the office
- The fact that you will be unavailable for meetings during that time
- The text included in your Out of Office message
- Alternate notification messages for specific individuals (e.g., you may want some people to be aware of a phone number where they can reach you)
- Sender groups to exclude from notifications (e.g., mailing lists that don't need to be notified)
The next time you plan to be out of the office, take advantage of these new features and relax, knowing that Notes 8 will respond for you while you're gone.
Dwight Morse | 29 January 2008 09:13:53 AM ET | | (0) | Permanent Link
If you're like most Notes users, the Notes client becomes the center of your world during the work day. You open emails, open applications, create new documents, send and receive meeting invitations, If you're working on multiple projects, multiple tasks, and multiple fire drills, you may forget to close out a tab here or there. In the end, the top of your Notes interface gets pretty crowded with open tabs:
As you open more tabs, you end up spilling over into the overflow tab
The Notes 8 client, offers a way to clean up your desktop and help keep you organized. Notes 8 allows you to group documents from each applications under a single tab. So, all your open emails appear under the email tab, all your open calendar items are under the calendar tab, etc. Your multitasking may keep you busy but Notes 8 helps keep you organized. Your desktop will look clean and neat as shown below:
The number next to the name of the application shows the number of open documents. By clicking on the number, a drop down list of the open documents appears, allowing you to choose the desired document from the list.
To group documents by application, simply launch the Notes 8 "Preferences" control panel and click on "Windows and Themes". Select "Group documents from each application on a tab". You could also decide to have every open document launch in its own window, allowing you to use the Alt-Tab key combination to cycle through open documents.
James Pouliopoulos | 7 December 2007 01:19:13 PM ET | | (0) | Permanent Link
Have you ever made a mistake? Have you ever wished you could take something back? If you're like most people, the answer to these questions is "yes", and Notes 8 has a new feature made just for you. Starting with Notes 8, users have the ability to recall messages. If you've sent a message in error (or spite ) and would like to take it back, you can.
Face it. It's happened to most of us. You send an email and later realize that you may have sent it to the wrong Samantha, or spend time responding to something and find later that the information that you were basing your response on has changed. To bring back the message using Notes 8, you just need to find it in your Sent folder, highlight it, and click on the Recall Message button on the action bar.
This brings up a dialog box that allows you to further specify what corrective action you'd like to take. If the message has been sent to multiple recipients, you can choose from which recipients the message should be recalled.
Recalling messages raises some interesting questions. For example, you may choose to only recall messages that have not already been read by the recipient. Otherwise, recalling messages may serve to cause confusion and might be better named "the disappearing email trick". There are times when we want to be very sure that the message has been recalled successfully. Choosing to receive a recall status report can serve to set our minds at ease.
There are five basic rules when using message recall that are important to understand
1. Your administrator must have turned this feature on for you to use it. If the Recall Message button is not available in your Notes 8 client, your administrator may not have activated the feature.
2. You must be using the Notes 8 mail template. This new feature requires the new mail template. Not having the Notes 8 mail template would be another reason why the button wouldn't be available.
3. Mail can only be recalled from Domino 8 servers. If you are attempting to recall a message from someone whose mail file is not on a Domino 8 server, it won't work.
4. The user that you are trying to recall mail from can choose not to allow people to recall messages in their preferences.
5. Mail can only be recalled from the server, not a local replica of one's mail file.
Dwight Morse | 20 November 2007 10:50:59 PM ET | Westford, MA | (0) | Permanent Link
The last couple of Notes 8 Tips talked about the new selection model and conversations. In this post, we're going to combine those two ideas and talk about managing conversations. You may notice that when you expand a conversation in your Inbox, all of the threads (i.e., the pieces of that conversation) are highlighted.
The reason for this is to alert the user that when the conversation is collapsed, the same is true. All the threads are selected.
This is important because it helps us understand that when we act on a collapsed conversation, we are acting on all of the messages that make up that conversation. If I hit the delete key on the message above, I get the following dialog box:
If I thought I was just deleting one email, this kind of warning can be a bit surprising. It's certainly not something that I wish to do by mistake. (Admittedly, I've never checked the box to suppress future warnings). However, this opens up ways to manage my Inbox much more efficiently.
Here's an example:
Have you ever been away from the office for a few days? Did you notice that, while you were out, things didn't stop happening? Many times you'll come back to find an email from a colleague asking you to respond immediately to their urgent request, copying many others on the correspondence. You think to yourself, This person must not have realized that I was out of the office when they sent this email.
Of course, you had turned on your Out Of Office notifications before your extended absence. The sender of the email would have known that you would not be responding immediately to their urgent request. However, you may still be wondering if you need to respond or not. Did the sender of the urgent email get his response from someone else?
In the past, you would have spent time sorting through your Inbox trying to figure out if there was another response while you were away. The longer you were away, the harder this would be to do because the emails keep coming even if you're not around to read them. With conversations in Notes 8, I can expand the conversation and scan the threads to see if the urgent request has been addressed. If it has, and I don't need the information in the conversation, I can delete the entire conversation thread. This is where deleting the entire conversation suddenly makes sense! I can delete the collapsed conversation and all of those emails relating to the urgent request that filled my Inbox in my absence are all gone! I don't have to go through and delete them individually in a vain attempt at staying under my Mail File quota!
The preceding scenario is not the only reason that having all the messages in the conversation selected is useful. I can drag and drop an entire conversation into a folder for future reference. This helps me keep the number of emails in my Inbox to a minimum (which also cuts down on the time to load and search my Inbox). I have been viewing my Inbox in conversation mode for over a year now, and I can't imagine how I ever lived without it!
I don't always want to act on the entire conversation, however. Often, people will respond with history, making some of the information contained in the messages redundant. What if I am only interested in keeping a subset of the messages in a conversation? That's where the selection model comes in. With the conversation expanded, I can choose only the messages I wish to delete or move by holding down the control key and clicking on them.
This way, I can keep only the information that I will need to refer to later.
Dwight Morse | 8 November 2007 11:01:14 PM ET | | (0) | Permanent Link
One of the more innovative features of Notes 8 is something called conversations. In order to understand this feature, it's helpful to think about how we communicate in everyday life. If I have a conversation with someone, I'll usually end that conversation before starting a new one. This may sound obvious, but it's a contradiction to what goes on in our Inbox every day. If we look at email communications as conversations it quickly becomes clear that it differs from how we would communicate with someone if they were standing in front of us. We hold multiple conversations in our Inbox and try to follow each as they transpire. Imagine trying to have a dozen people in front of you and holding a conversation with each at eh same time. This is what we do through email every day. To make things worse, the responses are not ordered sequentially. Email is a great way to communicate with colleagues, but it is very difficult to manage because the response to our conversations are scattered throughout our Inbox.
Notes 8 makes this much easier by gathering the various conversations for us, allowing us to see the entire conversation in sequence.
This way, there is no need to hunt through your Inbox for pieces of a communication. When you couple this with preview mode, it's incredibly easy to find the content that you're looking for by quickly toggling through the messages in the conversation. Conversations doesn't stop there, however. This feature gives you visual cues that are so intuitive that you might not notice them. First, notice how the responses are indented in the picture above. The indents indicate that the message was in response to the one immediately to the left. Second, the information in the subject line is not limited to the subject itself. If all you see is "Subject" and "Re: Subject" that doesn't give you any insight into the content of the response. Instead, Notes shows you the "abstract", or the first part of the body of the message. This allows you to better understand the information contained in the response. Scanning the abstracts gets you to the email that contains the information that you're looking for, quickly.
Dwight Morse | 27 October 2007 11:21:31 PM ET | | (0) | Permanent Link
One thing that you're sure to notice about Notes 8 if you've used previous versions of Notes is that selecting messages in your Inbox is done differently. Notes 8 employs the familiar Microsoft Windows selection model where the the Shift and Ctrl keys are used. In addition to its familiarity for many users, this selection model can also make selecting large amounts of messages less time consuming.
Let's take a look at how it works. To select a number of contiguous messages simply choose the first message of the desired selection by clicking on it. Then, hold down the Shift key and click on the last message. All of the messages in between will be selected. You can start your selection at the bottom and proceed up, or at the top and proceed down.
To select noncontiguous messages, hold down the Ctrl key and select the messages by clicking your mouse.
You can use both of these keyboard controls when selecting a large number of messages. Use the Shift key to select a large number of messages, then use the Ctrl key to de-select the messages that you don't want as part of your selection.
Once you have your desired selection, you can can act on it. For example, you could drag and drop it into a folder, delete it, or forward the messages in an email.
Dwight Morse | 17 October 2007 10:57:27 PM ET | | (0) | Permanent Link
Lots of people subscribe to news, blogs and other types of content using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and Atom feed readers. Notes 8 software makes it easier to keep on top of your favorite RSS and Atom feeds while staying focused on your daily tasks. The Notes 8 feed reader is a customizable plug-in for the Notes 8 sidebar.
The feed reader in Notes 8 comes with this Notes 8 Tips blog pre-configured. You can add new RSS or Atom feeds easily by clicking on the "Subscribe to Feed" button. You simple enter the URL of the RSS or Atom feed in the "Add New Subscription" dialogue box. .
Once you've entered the URL of the RSS or Atom feed you want, you'll be given a chance to manage the parameters of this new subscription including the name that appears in your list of subscription feeds, how often to check for updates, and how long to keep entries.
You can also edit all the parameters of your existing feeds by simply right clicking on the feed name and selecting the appropriate action from the menu list.
Did you know?
If you're using a browser that supports tabs, you can add RSS and Atom content to the Notes 8 feed reader by simply dragging the tab from your browser into the sidebar.
James Pouliopoulos | 17 September 2007 03:23:27 PM ET | | (0) | Permanent Link
One of the great things about Lotus Notes 8 software is that it can show you information from many different sources. Emails, presentations, chat transcripts, web pages, news feeds, and ERP systems are just a few examples. Given that kind of flexibility, it became imperative to make navigating information sources easier than ever. You'll find options for navigating Notes 8 in the Windows and Themes section of the user preferences.
There are a number of options for opening new documents in Notes 8. The default is for each document to open in its own tab across the top, allowing you to change documents by clicking on the appropriate tab. You can choose to open new documents in a separate window, however, if you'd prefer to navigate your open documents through the Alt-Tab keyboard combination.
The preference shown above pulls together documents from each application under a single grouped tab. This gathers open documents from each application (e.g., Mail or Spreadsheets) under their own tab, making it easier to navigate open documents. As more documents within an application are opened, the number on the grouped tab increases. To navigate to an open document using this window management scheme, click on the number and choose the document from the drop-down list.
The screen shot above shows a grouped tab with Frank Adams' inbox and a couple of open email messages gathered into a single list. This grouped tab approach helps you keep your Notes 8 interface clean and uncluttered allowing you to be more efficient.
Dwight Morse | 15 September 2007 04:57:53 PM ET | | (0) | Permanent Link
Lotus Notes 8 goes well beyond the standard capability of allowing users to view attachments. You can open, modify, and share documents without needing a license for any additional software. It's interesting to view the results of a forecasting spreadsheet. It's highly productive to be able to see the formulas behind the numbers. You can even change some of the numbers that you don't agree with and immediately see how that affects the entire forecast.
Lotus Notes 8 software includes a major new set of capabilities called the IBM productivity tools. These productivity tools include a word processor (Lotus Documents), a spreadsheet application (Lotus Spreadsheets) and a presentation application (Lotus Presentations). The IBM productivity tools support the ISO and IEC OpenDopcument Format (ODF) international standard for document editing and storage.
What's all this mean to you? Well, it means that when you're using Notes 8 software, you have a complete set of office productivity tools at your fingertips. You can create, edit, save, and share documents without ever leaving the Notes 8 user interface. You can open your existing documents from a variety of file formats (see below). And the best news of all, the IBM productivity tools are included at no additional charge with your existing Notes 8 license software .
From your Notes 8 interface, you create a new document by clicking on “File” - “New” and selecting which type of document you want to create:
Check out this shortcut: If you're working on document in one of the IBM productivity tools, you can create a new document by simply pressing Ctrl+N.
The Notes 8 “Open” button is pre-configured to allow you to launch any of the productivity tools.
One capability that may not be immediately obvious is that you can export any document that you have opened in the productivity tools as a PDF. This makes it possible to share with anyone an uneditable version of your document. You'll find this option under the File menu.
Dwight Morse | 7 September 2007 07:09:54 AM ET | | (0) | Permanent Link
