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.
