I'm a mouse guy. I went to school with a bunch of engineers and have worked among them my entire career, but I somehow managed to avoid their proclivity for keyboard shortcuts. Given the choice between clicking the right mouse button (sorry, Mac users) to choose from a context sensitive menu and trying to remember the keyboard shortcut for something, I always choose the mouse. I learned a shortcut for copy and paste only because the right mouse button didn't work in all dialog boxes. Everything else, I do with the mouse. Needless to say, I was ecstatic when Lotus (before we bought IBM) introduced SmartIcons in the early 1990's. It only stands to reason, then, that I would be enthused about the drag and drop capabilities that we added to Notes 8.5. We already mentioned the drag and drop capabilities of Sametime, but there's more.
It's now possible to drag and drop things around in a rich text field. This means that when I write a couple of paragraphs and decide that the last paragraph needs to go first, I can select the last paragraph and drag it up above the the first. When I let go of left mouse button, the last paragraph has been cut and pasted above the first.
We won't stop there. With 8.5.1, I'll be able to show you a few new drag and drop tricks.
Dwight Morse | 24 June 2009 10:49:41 PM ET | | Comments (1) | Permanent Link
This week's post is something a little bit different-- a tip with a request for your feedback!
Archiving is a really great way to reduce the size of your mail file, and to keep things from getting cluttered in your mail. But we know a lot of people never set up archiving because they can't figure it out, and the current help is not sufficient. So this week's FAQ-style tips should help you out with setting up and using archiving :) See the sections below to get things started!
We also ask that if you use the information below, you leave us some feedback on it as well. We are looking to improve Notes help in future releases, and we are exploring different styles of help to do this. The information below is one of the possible new styles of help, and we'd like to know how you like it.
Please leave us a comment on: what you think about this style of help, if the information here is adequate, and any other feedback you have about it. Thank you and enjoy!
How do I reduce the size of my mail file (to avoid going over my mail quota)?
To reduce the size of your mail file, you have a few options.
Table 1. Ways to reduce the size of your mail file
| What do you want to do? | Procedure |
| Automatically archive unused messages | 1. Open your mail, select Actions > Archive > Settings > Criteria, and either edit existing criteria or create new criteria. This criteria will tell Notes which documents to archive and what to do with them. 2. After editing or creating, select the desired criteria from the list and click Enable. 3. If you have access, set an archiving schedule on the Schedule tab. Click the check box next to Schedule archiving, and then choose a time to run archiving. You must leave your computer on at the time you schedule. |
| Manually archive unused messages | Follow the first two steps for automatically archiving unused messages. During step one, for Selection Criteria, select Selected by user. Make sure to enable this criteria. At any time after this, select the messages you would like to archive, and then select Actions > Archive > Archive selected documents. |
| Automatically delete unused messages | Follow the steps for automatically archiving unused messages. When you create or edit the archiving criteria, select Just clean up this application without archiving. |
| Manually delete unused messages | Follow the steps for manually archiving unused messages. When you create or edit the archiving criteria, select Just clean up this application without archiving. |
| Automatically reduce unused messages | Follow the steps for automatically archiving unused messages. When you create or edit the archiving criteria, select Reduce the size of documents in this application, and make a selection from the corresponding drop-down list. |
| Manually reduce unused messages | Follow the steps for manually archiving unused messages. When you create or edit the archiving criteria, select Reduce the size of documents in this application, and make a selection from the corresponding drop-down list. |
Why are some archiving options greyed-out or "locked"?
When you are editing archive settings, if some options are greyed-out or appear with a lock icon next to them, then your administrator has locked these options and you cannot change them.
If you select any of the options under Actions > Archive, and you get an error message saying that you do not have access to archive, it is because you do not have at least Editor access to that mail file. If it is your own mail file, talk to your administrator. If it is someone else's mail file, talk to that person.
How do I view, delete, or restore archived messages?
| What do you want to do? | Procedure | ||
| View archived messages |
| ||
| Delete archived messages | | Restore archived messages | Unless you chose Reduce the size of documents in this application when you selected the archive criteria, you can restore any archived document. | Just cut the message from a folder in the archive, and paste it to a folder in your mail. Note: Make sure you are pasting into the original application, and not into another folder in the archive! |
Julia Brown | 18 June 2009 02:36:45 PM ET | | Comments (7) | Permanent Link
Here's a little-known feature of Notes. You can use it to impress all of your friends and managers with your very impressive speediness.
Have you ever gotten an email from your boss that looks something like,
Peon,
Please set up a meeting on this topic with everyone on the Cc: list.
Thank you,
Your Boss
Starting with Notes 8, carrying out that request became very easy. You only need to select the people in the Cc: list and open up the context (aka right-click) menu.
You can then choose to invite them to a meeting. Alternatively, you can complete a free-time look-up by choosing Find Available Time. This way you can find a time that works for most and send out an email asking those that have something else booked if they could move their other appointment for this meeting.
To do this from the preview pane, click Show Details and then right-click:
If you want to include the sender of the e-mail as well, you can type their name in manually, or use copy-and-paste.
Dwight Morse | 11 June 2009 12:08:55 PM ET | | Comments (2) | Permanent Link
In dealing with the lovely influx of comments we found after fixing our commenting, we discovered that you have a lot of questions about recent contacts! Conveniently, I just helped edit a whitepaper on that very topic, written by developer Tom Ransdell. I included some of the relevant FAQs from the whitepaper below. If you want a more in-depth technical look, here's a link to the full article on the wiki: Recent Contacts and type-ahead .
For Dwight's original post on Recent Contacts, see here: Recent Contacts
FAQ: Recent Contacts and type-ahead
How does Notes determine who goes in my Recent Contacts?
Notes keeps track of the number of times you send and receive mail from each person, and the people you communicate with the most become your Recent Contacts. After you send an e-mail or close an e-mail after reading it, Notes stores the contacts' information and uses it to determine your Recent Contacts. Notes also adds contacts' information from the Cc and Bcc fields, and from meeting invitations.
If you choose in Notes preferences to save your chat to the Notes mail file, the participants of the chat are used to determine your Recent Contacts as well. Their information is added when the chat is saved.
Note: If you read an e-mail only in the preview pane, Notes will only process the contacts' information if you have selected to “Mark documents as read when opened in preview pane” in your Basic Notes Client Configuration preferences.
How does Notes determine the order in my type-ahead list?
Notes determines the order in your type-ahead drop-down the same way that it determines who goes in your Recent Contacts. After you send an e-mail or close an e-mail after reading it, Notes stores the sender's or recipients' information and uses it to determine the order for your type-ahead drop-down. Contacts that you send or receive e-mail from more frequently will appear higher on the type-ahead drop-down list.
How long do people stay in my Recent Contacts list?
There's a maximum number of people who can be in your Recent Contacts (the default is between 2,000-3,000). If you have more than the maximum number of contacts, the people you communicate with the least will be deleted from your Recent Contacts whenever your Recent Contacts are updated, which happens about every seven days. If you don't have more than the maximum, no contacts will be deleted.
How do I keep people from dropping off my Recent Contacts list?
You can't add or edit your Recent Contacts list, but you can add a person from your recent Contacts to your My Contacts list, so you have them forever. This is useful if if you would like to edit a Recent Contact's information, or if you are worried someone might drop off of your Recent Contacts. You can add a recent contact to your My Contacts by going into the Recent Contacts view and clicking the Move to My Contacts button.
You can also do this from any Mail view, either from the More menu or by right-clicking and selecting Add Sender to Contacts.
Note: You cannot manually make someone appear higher in your type-ahead list.
How do I remove people from my Recent Contacts?
If you have a bad e-mail address in Recent Contacts, you can remove it from your Recent Contacts (This can happen if, for example, you sent an e-mail to the wrong address). Follow the steps below:
1. If you have not already, open your Contacts and click on Recent Contacts in the navigation pane at left.
2. Delete the contact. You can hit delete in the action bar, drag the contact to the trash, or right-click it and select Delete.
3. Click Trash in the navigation pane at left.
4. Click Empty Trash in the action bar above the message list.
5. Send an e-mail to yourself. This clears the recent contacts history, so it won't remember that you've contacted that bad e-mail address recently.
6. Restart Notes.
Note: You can delete a Recent Contact in Notes 8.0.1 and higher.
How do I turn off Recent Contacts?
If you would like to disable the Recent Contacts feature, you can follow the steps below. You'd only want to do this if you didn't like the feature.
1. First, delete all Recent Contacts by following the steps above for deleting a recent contact. You'll need to do this because type-ahead addressing will continue to use the Recent Contacts list (in addition to personal and public directories) whether or not the list is being updated.
Tip: You can select all recent contacts by clicking the first contact on the list and then holding down the Shift key as you click the last contact on the list, or you can hit Ctrl-A, or choose Edit > Select All.
2. Click File > Preferences, and click on the Contacts section.
3. Select the check box next to “Do not automatically add contacts to the Recent Contacts view.”
Julia Brown | 5 June 2009 03:04:31 PM ET | | Comments (5) | Permanent Link
Last week, Julia talked about the new widget catalog. Widgets were introduced in Notes 8.0.1 as a way to automatically carry out repetitive tasks. Widgets are useful for a couple of reasons.
- The widget knows where to get information, so you don't have to. Just browse a widget catalog (like the one on Greenhouse) for interesting widgets, and let the widgets do the rest of the work. (Widgets can also be pushed down by your administrator, so you might not even have to know what a widget catalog is.)
- Avoids distraction by letting information comes to you. How many times has this happened to you? You get an email and you think to yourself, I'm going to have to look that up. You fire up your browser and it opens to your home page. Something on your home page catches your eye, so you click on it. That leads you to another web page and something else that catches your eye. Fifteen minutes later, you think to yourself, "What did I come out here to do?" Opening up a browser to do work can be like having to pass the dessert cart on the way to the salad bar. It can be distracting. Widgets bring the information directly to you, precluding the opportunity for distraction.
Widgets are great, but they're only half of the story. It's one thing to know where to go, but it's quite another to know when to go there. That's where Live Text comes in. Live Text is text string recognition in Notes. For example, a 5 digit number in North America is a zip code that specifies the geographic location, and Notes will recognize that. The recognized string can then be wired to an action.
The North American zip code recognizer can be wired to widgets that bring up a map of the area or the local weather. This is great when you get an e-mail telling you about a trip that you'll be making in the near future.
Another example is that recognized names can be linked to widgets that send an e-mail (great when the name is not in the recipients list) or bring up the person's profile on a social networking site like Lotus Connections or LinkedIn.
Configuring Live Text in Notes
Live Text is configured in your Notes Preferences. It is not enabled, by default, in an effort not to confuse unsuspecting Notes users. After reading this post, you'll want to make sure that it is enabled. You can change the underline style that is used when various text strings are recognized. Personally, I prefer the "Thick Green " style, as I find it less like that which is used for URLs. Some Content Types (e.g., Address and Person) ship with Notes, while others are included when you add the widgets that employ them. It is here that you can see the list of recognizers that you have installed. If you add a lot and decide that too many strings are being underlined, you can uncheck the recognizers that you don't have a use for.
If you don't want to see all of the underlines in a given document, you can also turn text recognition off for just that document. While viewing the document, click the Tools menu and select or de-select Recognize Live Text in this document. You can also do this from the context (i.e., right-click) menu in the document.
Dwight Morse | 23 May 2009 12:38:25 AM ET | | Comments (3) | Permanent Link
Exciting news! Last week, Lotus released a bunch of new widgets in a brand new widget catalog on Greenhouse!!!!! These widgets help you do things like access Twitter, look up words from Dictionary.com, and find things on Google maps, all without leaving Notes!
Find a ton of new, useful widgets here: Widget Catalog (You'll need to sign up for a free Greenhouse account.)
Note: To download any of these plug-ins, you first have to make your My Widgets sidebar panel appear. To do this, follow these steps:
1. From Notes, click File > Preferences > Widgets,
2. Select the check box next to "Show Widget Toolbar and the My Widgets Sidebar panel."
3. Click OK.
After you do that, you are ready to download some widgets! Just go to the catalog (https://greenhouse.lotus.com/catalog), and see what widgets you like. Here are some of our favorites:
Twitter Gadget
After you drag the file to your My Widgets sidebar panel, follow these steps:
1. Right click the Twitter Widget and click Open in > Sidebar panel.
2. When prompted, provide your Twitter account information.This will be stored into Notes account preferences and will be a one time setting.
3. Now you can twitter from inside Notes! Yay!
Dictionary.com widget
You can use this one of a few ways:
Use it as a sidebar panel, and type a word in to look it up any time. After you drag the file to your My Widgets sidebar panel, follow these steps:
1. Right-click on the icon for the Dictionary.com widget.
2. Select Open in > Sidebar panel. You can type a word in and look it up any time.
Right-click to look-up a word from an e-mail, teamroom document, etc. Follow these steps:
1. Select the word
2. Right-click
3. Select Dictionary.com - Word LookUp. A window will pop up and look the word up on Dictionary.com.
Google maps
Look-up addresses and view Google maps in your sidebar. After you drag the file to your My Widgets sidebar panel, follow these steps:
1. Right-click on the icon for the Google maps widget.
2. Select Open in > Sidebar panel. You can view Google maps :)
Tip: You can get the full Google maps experience, if you follow these steps:
1. At the bottom of the sidebar panel, click the image.
2. Scroll over and click Add to iGoogle.
3. Once iGoogle opens, you can click the Maps link at the top, and the full Google maps will open.
Enjoy!
Julia Brown | 22 May 2009 01:46:26 PM ET | | Comments (2) | Permanent Link
Lately, Notes has been getting some visibility as the client of choice for David Allen of Getting Things Done fame. David was nice enough to present at Lotusphere, showing how he uses Notes to get things done. This has sparked some interest in using Notes outside of a corporate environment where one's email comes from a POP or IMAP server. While Notes is not tailored to getting email from Post Office Protocol (POP) or Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) servers, it is certainly possible, so I thought I would share how you can do this.
There are really two audiences that would be interested in this post. They are those that are new to Notes and would like to also use it for reading emails from their personal email accounts, and those that are already using Notes in a corporate environment and would like to add a personal email account. The two implementations have different caveats, so I'll deal with them one at a time.
If you are installing a Notes client so that you can read your email and run a Notes application like eproductivity™ to get things done, the experience can be different than working with other applications that just do email. I'll take you through setting up Notes to get mail from a POP mail server.
Once you've installed Notes and initially launched the application, the configuration wizard will start, asking you for the information necessary to get to your mail server. The first screen is below. It's important to understand that Notes does much more than just email. Because of that, some of things on these screens make less sense to the average email user. If you don't know what a Domino server or Replication schedules are, don't worry, you don't need to. Just click .
The next screen asks you for your name and your Domino server. This can throw some folks, but if you're using Notes for email and running local aplications (i.e., those apps that are not housed on Domino server), then you can just enter your name and uncheck .
The next screen asks you about what servers you'd like to connect to. You want to check , here. The connection type is, most likely, going to be
. Modem is only for when you use a modem to dial directly into the mail server. Most folks that use modems, nowadays, connect to their Internet Service Provider (ISP)with their modems, and then use a Local Area Network (LAN) connection to do things like get email and browse the internet. So, even, if you have a dial-up connection, you'll choose
, here. You don't need to check
. The defaults will be fine, and you'll see where you can change them later, in the next section.
The next screen asks for the specifics around the mail server that we checked off in the previous one. There are two protocols used to retrieve messages off most internet mail servers. They are POP and IMAP. The main difference between these is that POP is set up for reading email from one mail client and IMAP is set up for reading mail from multiple mail clients. With POP, you download messages to your mail client and work with them there. You can choose to leave a copy of the messages on the POP server, but it is just that; a copy. This means that when I work with messages on my mail client and then go back and access the POP mail server from a browser or another mail client, anything that I've done (e.g., read messages, delete messages, or move messages to folders) with the first mail client won't be reflected on the POP server. It be like I never did anything previously. The messages on the server will be unaffected. It's analogous to copying a document from one folder on my PC to another and editing it. When I go back to the original folder and access the document it will be unedited. IMAP is more like synchronization. Every time I send and receive mail, any changes that I've made with my client (e.g., read messages, delete messages, or move messages to folders), will be synchronized back up to the mail server. This way, if I access it from another client I don't have to delete the same messages again or mark them as read or move them to folders. POP is good if I have a limit to the amount of mail that I can keep on the server and want to use one client to transfer them to the mail client on my PC where there is no limit. IMAP is good if I want to use more than one mail client to access the mail on my server. Many internet mail servers are capable of using both protocols, so you have the choice of how you want to work with your mail. AOL®, GMail™, Yahoo!® Mail, and Windows Live™ Hotmail all allow you to use either POP or IMAP to get your mail to a mail client.
In this example, I've chosen POP to access mail on my Internet Service Provider's (ISP's) mail server. The account name defaults to . You can choose a different name, but it only matters if you have more than one that you're dealing with. I'll go over why that might matter in the next section. The "Incoming mail server" is the Internet Protocol (IP) address of the mail server. Notes needs to know where to retrieve the mail from and this address tells it where that is. You can find out the IP address of your mail server from the mail provider's web page.
The next screen tells Notes how to log in to your mail server to get the mail. You need your , which is usually your email address without the "@isp.com" at the end. You also need to enter and re-enter your password (to verify the spelling). Some ISPs require a secure connection to access your mail. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encrypts the data over the wire so that others can't read your mail as it is being transferred over the internet.
The next screen tells Notes how to send messages through your mail server. The Simple Message Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is used to send mail. This is the server that routes your mail to the desired recipient by keeping a directory of mail domains and sending the mail to the correct server. For example, the SMTP server knows where to send email that ends with "@aol.com" as opposed to "@companyname.com". The is an IP address that can be found on your mail provider's web site.
The last configuration screen is the email address that others will see when they get mail from you. When they reply to messages that you've sent, the replies will be correctly routed to your mail.
Once you've clicked , your mail will be ready to use in Notes. You will be able to open Mail in Notes and work with your mail. To send and receive mail, you just need to click on the Send/Receive Mail icon
on the toolbar located at the top of your mail in Notes.
Clicking on this icon retrieves the mail from your server and sends any messages that you have created. Your Inbox may not be refreshed to see the new messages right away. If you don't see your messages, you can press the F9 key to refresh your Inbox. The status of sending and receiving mail can be found on the Replication page in Notes. You can find this by clicking on Open -> Replication. This terminology is different from other mail applications because Notes has the additonal capability of synchronizing other applications (e.g., discussion forums, and customer relationship management applications) locally. Your Replication page will look something like this:
You can see, here, the name given to the account name in the configuration wizard; "Receive Internet mail". If you had more than one email account, there would be two entries (e.g., "ISP Mail" and "Hotmail") here. The Last Run column will show you last time you successfully received your email and the Summary column shows you how many messages were received and sent. If there was a problem connecting to your mail provider, you'd see it here. You can also set up a schedule to send and receive email, here. When you click on , you can choose how often to send and receive mail. The dialog box for scheduling updates is below. The term "Replicate" is synonymous with Send/Receive for the purposes of mail.
The second implementation deals with the idea of adding a personal account to your corporate Notes mail file. To do this, you need to add a mail account in Notes. Open up your Contacts and choose Advanced from the navigation (i.e., left) pane. Once there, choose New-> Account. The fields to populate are the same as those from the configuration wizard.
The Protocol Configuration tab is where you can choose whether or not to leave a copy of your mail on the POP server. Notes leaves a copy on the server, by default.
When adding a personal mail account to your corporate Notes mail there are a couple of things to consider. First, understand that your personal mail comes into your corporate Inbox. The same is true for multiple personal email accounts. All the mail goes into the same Inbox. Also, if you replicate your mail from a local replica back to your corporate mail server, your personal mail will be replicated to your corporate email on your corporaate server too. This can be avoided by adding Mail Rules and edting the replication options, but that is a subject for another post to this blog.
Dwight Morse | 13 May 2009 11:20:55 PM ET | | Comments (12) | Permanent Link
Here's a handy tip that helps me out a lot, because I'm always forgetting to change my Sametime status when I'm in a meeting... It's always good to keep an accurate Sametime status, so people don't interrupt you if you're in a meeting and sharing your screen, or people know they can't get a quick answer from you if you're away from the computer.
You can set a preference to have Sametime automatically change your status to In a Meeting when you have a meeting scheduled in your calendar.
Follow these steps:
1. In Notes, click File > Preferences and then click the plus sign (+) next to Sametime.
2. Click the plus sign next to Auto-status Changes, and then click Calendar Service.
3. Select whether and how often to check your calendar. For the Lotus Notes calendar, enter your Lotus Notes password.
4. Click Apply.
5. Next, click Auto-Status Change, and then select "Meetings scheduled in my calendar."
6. Choose whether you would like Notes to prompt you before changing your Sametime status, or if you would like it to automatically change.
7. Click Apply.
8. Click OK.
From this same preferences screen, you can also change other Sametime settings, like how long your computer sits idle before Sametime changes to Away.
Julia Brown | 8 May 2009 04:37:25 PM ET | | Comments (3) | Permanent Link
A recent post on the Notes 8.5 Discussion Forum got me to thinking. Somebody was using a local archive to remove older messages from their mail file and was running into a problem that many people eventually find when they've been using Notes for awhile. This person had a folder that he no longer used, and all the messages from that folder had been archived, but he found that when he deleted it from his mail file, it was deleted from his archive as well.
Let me take a minute to explain this a little more clearly. A lot of us use folders as a way to file our messages so that we can find them more easily at a later time. For example, I might be working on a project and want to keep track of all of my communication about it, so I create a folder with the project name. Once the project is over, I stop adding to the folder. Eventually, the emails get old enough such that they are moved to my local archive. At that time, I have a folder in my mail file with nothing in it. Naturally, I want to delete the unused folder, making my mail file easier to navigate. Problem is, when I do this, the folder gets deleted from my archive, as well. I go to look for the messages associated with the older project, and I can't find them in my archive.
To solve this problem, it helps to think about how Notes gets information from one place to another. Your local archive is, essentially, a special kind of replica of your mail file. To keep deletions from replicating, we just need to edit the replication settings. If a light bulb just went off over your head, great! You're good to go. If you're thinking, "What the heck is replication?", read on. This is really pretty easy. Here are the steps:
1. In order to get to the replication settings for your archive, you need to make that the active application, so open up your archive.
2. Choose File > Replication > Options for this Application....
3. It's very important to make sure that you are in the setting for your archive (and not your mail file). You can see that you are from the title bar of the dialog box.
4. Once you've determined that you're in the setting for your archive, click on the Advanced tab on the left. You should then see something like the picture above.
5. Uncheck the box in front of the word Deletions, at the bottom.
6. Click OK.
This change will keep deletions from coming over to your archive, meaning that when you delete a folder in your mail file, it won't be deleted in your archive. "But Dwight," you say, "Won't that keep all deletions from coming over?". Yes it will, but the beauty of this being your archive, is that documents that you delete in your mail file have not yet been moved to your archive and, therefore, are unaffected. Give it a try and clean all of those unused folders from your mail file.
Dwight Morse | 24 April 2009 12:24:25 AM ET | | Comments (7) | Permanent Link
I use Activities a lot to help me manage all my tasks and projects. Most of the time, when I have a task, there's some sort of information I need to reference to complete that task, and a lot of times I'd have to go searching around in my e-mail or in a Notes teamroom to find that information.
But Notes 8.5 makes it a lot easier, because you can add e-mails and Notes documents to an Activity, just by right-clicking the document.
Here's how!
So, let's say I'm working on a project, and I have created an Activity to help me keep track of information and to do's for that project.
For this project, I need to stay up-to-date on the status of features in a particular Notes document. I can open that Notes document and right-click to add it to my Activity. I just right-click on the document, select Lotus Connections, select Add to Activity.
Next, I select the Activity I'd like to add it to.
If I want to attach the document to a particular To Do within that Activity, I can even double-click the Activity and select a To Do item,.
The document is now linked to from the Activity, so when you're working on the Activity from your Notes sidebar panel, all you have to do it double-click the document to open it in Notes.
You can also do this by dragging and dropping the Notes document into the Activities sidebar panel. And you can do it with any Notes document or e-mail :)
Important Note: If you delete or move the document after you add it to an Activity, Notes won't be able to find it anymore. So, for example, make sure you move an e-mail to a folder before you add it to an Activity.
Julia Brown | 22 April 2009 05:11:19 PM ET | | Comments (0) | Permanent Link
