vrijdag 16 mei 2014

5 minutes crash course for IBM Lotus Notes



Over the past 3 years I have been working with Lotus Notes for email and agenda. The 20 years before that, my experience with corporate email and agenda was with Microsoft Outlook. Lotus Notes took me some time to get used too.

Here are some tips for features which are pretty intuitive in Outlook, but may require some searching in IBM Lotus Notes.

Let me start by assuring you that many things work very easy and similar in both. If you are familiar with Outlook, you won’t have many problems with Lotus Notes. 
1. Selecting unread mail. Outlook has a left pane where one can select: unread mail. In IBM Lotus Notes   there is a button at the top right of the inbox, which in Dutch is labeled “afbeelden”, in English it may be something like “display”.  The most important options here are where you want your preview pane at the right or at the bottom of the screen.
There is, however, an additional option, “show unread mail only”. 

2. One feature I like about Lotus Notes is its ability to enter an appointment while I’m offline. It may be a configuration item, or something that was added in a later version,  but my outlook refused to do this.

3. In Outlook, in your left pane you can switch between agenda and email. In Lotus Notes, at the top-right of your left pane, besides your account name, there is a small drop down arrow.  Here you can select between mail and agenda. For your normal operations there are other options, but for archives this is your main switch option. 

4. Which brings me to archives. Lotus Notes, like outlook, has the ability to archive old items. Both agenda and mail items are archived. Archive files can be  moved, renamed, and so on. They can be opened by double clicking, and you can move mails from and to the archives.  There is one difference, however, when you open an archive for the first time: searching. Your normal inbox has a search box. Your archive inbox by default has not.  To search your archive, in your menu, choose View, toolbar.

5. Storing sent email. By default, my Lotus Notes came configured in such a way that it asked me for every sent mail if I wanted to store it. If you want to get rid of it, and want to store every sent email, like me, go to the preferences, email, and configure it.