Will Notes ever get it 100% right?
This screenshot has been in my folder for a while now. In an attempt to take it easy on Domino, I've been in two minds whether or not to mention it. What the heck. It's sunday, I'm hungover and I feel like taking it out on an easy target. Can you spot what's wrong in this picture?
Notes 6 introduced the unread count to our inbox. Nice feature, just a shame they couldn't get it to work properly. This is what it all boils down to with Notes and me. They continue to add features but never take the time and effort to perfect them. If you can't get it right then it's best not to bother at all. As I write this, I have three unread messages in my inbox. According to Notes that is. As far as I can see there are two. Where's the elusive third? Is there one at all? Could it be that offer of a dream job I've been waiting for?
Don't even get me started on Notes' "When new mail arrives" notification. Wonder which I waste more time doing? Deleting spam when there is new mail or checking my inbox to find there is in fact no new mail at all? Most places I've worked at as Domino Developer have used Exchange/Outlook for mail delivery. It's not hard to see why!
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another feature that they have not added that would be easy is an icon indicating whether you have replied or forwarded an email
HUK: Forward and Reply is in Notes 6.5.
Time to upgrade! :) or use the OpenNTF template.
Once we have some of our apps out of the Lotus Note client, we have options.
Once option is to use the Microsoft Client for mail, calendering and scheduling? How well does this work?
I only ask because you mention it being used a lot?
Jake,
I gave Outlook a chance when we converted. I am now shouting at it on a daily basis, neither client is perfect but some of the 'features' of MS's product drive me crazy. Have you tried resending a failed message, turning a mail into a task/calander entry (attachments are stripped). Group scheduling is pants...
Yeah, I guess minor things like this can be irritating. But get it into perspective. I sat next to an Outlook user on a train last week (looked like Outlook 2002) and he continually cursed for an hour as it crashed, refused to open attachments, refused to open mails, refused to allow new mails to enter the outbox. When he eventually closed his laptop and caught my eye, he said that it was a step down from what he used to use. "What was that?" I asked. "Lotus Notes" came the reply. The grass is not always greener. Better to be yellow.
Dave is right. It's not always greener on the other side. For instance, in Outlook you can't even do a simple find and replace. Also, have you ever tried searching your exchange mail db in Outlook? It is horrendously slow. Also, I have yet to find the equivalent to an "All Documents" view, which in Notes, was indispensable!
This is driving me crazy!!!
"As I write this, I have three unread messages in my inbox. According to Notes that is. As far as I can see there are two. Where's the elusive third?"
I'm sure I can see 4 unread emails not 2 or 3 ?!?!?!?!?!
Andrew - that 4 is from what we see.we still don't know how many more red lines with * mark exist.
or perhaps two of the read message was changed to unread using edit->unread marks..but notes failed to reflect them :-)
Dave. You're making it up right?
Andrew. You've misunderstood me. As you can see from the grab, it was back at the beginning of this month. Now, when I write "As I write this", I mean it's still the case now at the end of the month.
I wish I hadn't mentioned Outlook now ...
No, I wasn't making it up. I know several people who work for companies that use Outlook / Exchange, and they all say that Outlook as a mobile client sucks - and sucks in many other ways too. Notes may be clunky in some ways, but once you know how it works you can manage those things. Outlook just misses some major things, and there's no way to navigate round the big gaps.
We switched to outlook at this client almost a year and a half ago. When we did, we replaced 4 notes mail hubs with 37 Outlook mail servers because they can't handle as much load (please avoid the obvious questions). Our incidents of viri penetrating and executing inside our firewall went from almost 0% of those in the wild to about 60%. Now, instead of just keeping the NT file servers patched, the exchange servers have to be looked after as well.
The search IS slow. There are some nice uesability features though, like the busy time - seems a little smoother to use than Notes group scheduling. But, the overall 'hork over the opearating system' effect, combined with the increase individual workstation processor load because we're running THREE separate viri protection 'wares / desktop managment solutions to keep up with all the crap Outlook lets in, and you have a lot of people pretty much unsatisfied.
The best thing Outlook has going for it is the slick looking GUI. It also has a pretty good web client. On the balance, though- Notes was better despite the fact that the interface was 7 or 8 years old. It was nicely contained in the Notes client, which was hosting dozens of other apps and the worst complaints were network response time.
Jerry
let us not forget another reason notes can be viewed as better than outlook > virus'. Ever heard/had a virus that rips through your notes personal nab and emails virus to all contacts? I think not!
No problems here with unread count with any of our users. Of course we are using the openntf template.
:).
e
Why is it always the least important part of a blog that people pick up on...
Forget the comment about Outlook. Here I am talking about the matter of USABILITY. All I was saying was that Outlook is more "useable". If it says there are three unread messages, there ARE three unread messages. If it says I have new mail. I HAVE new mail.
Whether it has more viruses or needs more servers is irrelevant and an admin issue. When writing this blog entry I did it as a USER who has grown tired of the Notes client.
Yeah, I guess that goes along with not designing a feature because it's a cool thing to do with the code.... design it because it makes the GUI better and more useable. Our arguments about how devastating the introduction of outlook has been on our corporate environments really are off mark when talking about useability. ;-) It's alright Jake, we'll give you a good ribbing for no particular reason... outlook was just the convenient target. :-)
hehehe... it's starting to remind me of a montey python sketch. One person casually mentions something in the merest hypothetical sense with all good intention at academic discussion, and all of the towns people set about cracking him on the head with bats and clubs for being such an outspoken proponent and blatant danger to society.
I think people like to vent about outlook in general... it's hard not to make a slight comparison without uncorking all sorts of emotions.
What you mention makes me think of DECS. Back when I started Notes I couldn't understand why my boss refused to use those "packaged" type solutions in Notes that take the coding out of your hands. He even went as far as insisting that instead of using the document.send method, we get a handle on the mail.box, create the memo and drop it there.
Then I used DECS. What a waste of frikin' time. I asked and asked about things that I had problems with and through the feedback (and lack of it) that I got I became aware of the idea that DECS is in there, but they don't really want you to use it that much. It's just there for marketing more than for actual practical use.
Maybe I pushed the envelope with it, but the envelope was pretty frikin' small, lemme tell ya.
On Outlook: I used Notes for a long time, and now I use Outlook. At work, not travelling I like Outlook better. It's an easier client to work with, it has stuff that Notes doesn't/can't (recall message) and in our environment, we get ZERO...yes ZERO viruses from it. Maybe we just have a great team.
HOWEVER, the two things that Outlook absolutely falls flat on are remote use- don't bother, and recovery. Much easier to go recover someone's mail database than to recover that big fat thing Outlook has just to get a few MB worth of messages out of it.
So, Jake, are you switching to Outlook?
*Just kidding!*
You can add that in 6.5 client some of the calendar views appear to be well and truly broken. I remember the same in 4.5x and one of the earlier 5 clients. They work in 6.02 so how did Lotus let that slip through - along with mail calendaring has to be the most fundamental part of the client from a normal user perspective.
I was at the Admin Dev 2003 conference on Monday and I beleive Bill Hume from IBM said that unread marks are fixed in 6.5.1 and they will even replicate properly. You can turn this on on the server, as performace is hit slightly.
Perhaps the solution is not far away.
Jake,
you could always use IBM Lotus Domino Web Access ({Link} IBM Lotus Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook (ftp://ftp.lotus.com/pub/lotusweb/messaging/Lotus_Messaging_Solutions_flyer_v17.pdf) thereby using your preferred mail client and still keeping the back-end safely Domino.
;o)
Dear Jake,
I think you can do it the MS way. Add some features (but not too many, not more than 3 important ones) every 3 years, leave the rest consistent and hire 5000 programmers to become solitaire experts or you can hurry as IBM has done since R5. While MS had a mature client since its early releases IBM had to do much more to bring the "old" R4 to current software standards. The short release cycles of patches also might have an influence. The backward compatibility of Notes does the rest. My company also has a product that has been in business for 18 years. Do not ask our developers how they fight every day to tame the outdated code that is still present.
MS and IBM Lotus just have different views on how to produce software. There are a lot of annoying things in Notes and Domino but I hardly ever had critical errors. The funny thing is that long time Notes users do not even care. People indeed get used to this and enjoy the stable parts of the software.
So do I and at least it is always good for a quick rant at codestore :o)
Good luck with your business. I hope that it will be a success.
Cheers
Heini
select all(ctrl-A) in the particular folder are "cleaning"
Edit> Unread Marks> Mark Selected Unread
then
Edit> Unread Marks> Mark Selected Read
unread count now resets to zero for that folder (mailbox)
Unfortunately, I did it slightly diffently and reset all my folders... oh well, fresh start.
In Lotus Notes 6.5, when I read a email it goes from Unread to Read. But if I reply to it, it turns red again (Unread). Any idea how to keep this from happening? I want it to stay Unread even after I reply to it.
I have a user with the same problem as Mark. Would be interested in the resolution. Thanks.
Edit-> Unread Marks -> Scan Unread
I had the same problem with it showing 5 unread messages in my inbox, but I only had 3!!
I went to:
Edit -> Unread Marks -> Scan Preferred
then I clicked Mark All Read
Then I went back and re-highlighted the 3 I wanted marked as unread, now by Inbox count is 3. YIPPEE!!
After this, I tried View First Unread and realized that I may have been able to scan the original 5 unreads, find the 2 mystery unreads (that I couldn't find before) and mark those as read.
Anyway, it's fixed.
Shewww
I am having the same problem as Mark. It's yet another wonderful feature of Bloated Notes.
However, the good news is that the INSERT key will change your unread e-mails to read, and vice-versa.