Comments on: You’d avoid using Lotus Notes if you were me – Part II http://brendancooper.com/2007/04/23/you%e2%80%99d-avoid-using-lotus-notes-if-you-were-me-part-ii/ Digital, social media, and everything in between from someone who likes to live in bubbles, be they dotcom, social media, or whatever's next... Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:02:59 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Andrew http://brendancooper.com/2007/04/23/you%e2%80%99d-avoid-using-lotus-notes-if-you-were-me-part-ii/#comment-10568 Mon, 11 Jul 2011 22:01:49 +0000 http://thefriendlyghost.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/you%e2%80%99d-avoid-using-lotus-notes-if-you-were-me-part-ii/#comment-10568 Still using notes 7 here. I have the copy/paste error, and it is very annoying. I tried the proxy thing and IT WORKED! Thank you very much Alan Bell, you have lowered my blood pressure by quite a bit =)

]]> By: Br. Bill http://brendancooper.com/2007/04/23/you%e2%80%99d-avoid-using-lotus-notes-if-you-were-me-part-ii/#comment-6870 Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:38:28 +0000 http://thefriendlyghost.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/you%e2%80%99d-avoid-using-lotus-notes-if-you-were-me-part-ii/#comment-6870 I was a certified Notes developer in the mid-1990s. Then there was a huge gap until March 2008, when I started using it again (v6.5 – I have no control over that). I’m not developing in it now; I’m just a user these days.

Here’s my biggest Notes peeve, although there are many:

Once I decline a meeting, it is invisible to me forever. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to bring that meeting back. What if my other commitment goes away and I can go to the new meeting after all? Tough. There doesn’t appear to ever be a way to deal with an accidental decline, either. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

If you took the calendar and e-mail out of Notes, I’d say it was a fine product. Those two elements of Notes are so incredibly awful, it boggles the mind.

Mozilla Thunderbird crushes both Notes and Outlook for e-mail. It’s easy, intuitive, and doesn’t corrupt its entire e-mail database if one message goes bad.

Outlook e-mail sucks, but its calendar is brilliant compared to Notes.

]]> By: Brendan http://brendancooper.com/2007/04/23/you%e2%80%99d-avoid-using-lotus-notes-if-you-were-me-part-ii/#comment-5958 Tue, 20 May 2008 13:13:36 +0000 http://thefriendlyghost.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/you%e2%80%99d-avoid-using-lotus-notes-if-you-were-me-part-ii/#comment-5958 Hi guys,

I’ve been monitoring the comments here. Good to have discussion but please, more light and less heat. Mmmkay?

Regards
Brendan

]]> By: Sir Grunt http://brendancooper.com/2007/04/23/you%e2%80%99d-avoid-using-lotus-notes-if-you-were-me-part-ii/#comment-5957 Tue, 20 May 2008 13:07:22 +0000 http://thefriendlyghost.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/you%e2%80%99d-avoid-using-lotus-notes-if-you-were-me-part-ii/#comment-5957 My thanks to the Ghost, Thomas, and Alan Bell. Since the Notes “help” contain little info of use, I often turn to the blogs.

A few years ago my company decided to “standardize” email tools. We had 10 or 15 tools in use company wide. The CIO choose Lotus Notes. We have since given him a chance to seek employment elsewhere. That siad, we are stuck with Lotus Bloats.

I too had difficulty deleting To Do catagories until Alan posted.

Mr Templar,
As I understand the history of Lotus Bloats, it did not start life as an email tool. That was an afterthought, a kluge if you will.
If Bloats help was actually helpful, or the same information could be found any ANY user available Notes documentation, we would all have more “life”.
To answer your rude remarks, BLOW IT OUT YOUR KAZU.

]]> By: CICS Guy http://brendancooper.com/2007/04/23/you%e2%80%99d-avoid-using-lotus-notes-if-you-were-me-part-ii/#comment-5929 Thu, 15 May 2008 16:22:26 +0000 http://thefriendlyghost.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/you%e2%80%99d-avoid-using-lotus-notes-if-you-were-me-part-ii/#comment-5929 Simon Templar: I am grown up and have a life. That is why I am searching the web to find out how to gain back some valuable minutes of said life which have been wasted by forgetting to do a PASTE SPECIAL from the web into Lotus Notes. And yes I am still ignorant after NINE YEARS OF STRUGGLING with Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes??? You gotta be kidding?!?!

]]> By: Simon Templar http://brendancooper.com/2007/04/23/you%e2%80%99d-avoid-using-lotus-notes-if-you-were-me-part-ii/#comment-5599 Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:28:11 +0000 http://thefriendlyghost.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/you%e2%80%99d-avoid-using-lotus-notes-if-you-were-me-part-ii/#comment-5599 You people really need to grow up and get a life. Notes is not something you should spend so much time hating and whining about. Your level of ignorance about the product is astounding but this does not seem to inhibit you from spewing. Outlook??? You got to be kidding?

]]> By: The Friendly Ghost http://brendancooper.com/2007/04/23/you%e2%80%99d-avoid-using-lotus-notes-if-you-were-me-part-ii/#comment-70 Thu, 26 Apr 2007 19:14:39 +0000 http://thefriendlyghost.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/you%e2%80%99d-avoid-using-lotus-notes-if-you-were-me-part-ii/#comment-70 Many thanks for all the responses here. I think the suggestion that the UI team has only just been brought in makes a lot of sense – even today I’m still finding idiosyncracies in the interface but I’ve decided to let it lie. This has been by far my most popular posting and it would be a cheap way to increase my hit rate! Regards FG.

]]> By: Sean Cull http://brendancooper.com/2007/04/23/you%e2%80%99d-avoid-using-lotus-notes-if-you-were-me-part-ii/#comment-56 Tue, 24 Apr 2007 08:56:44 +0000 http://thefriendlyghost.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/you%e2%80%99d-avoid-using-lotus-notes-if-you-were-me-part-ii/#comment-56 I am a huge Notes fan but to be fair I do find that pasting in content from the web does take a while, I am not behind a proxy server.

Having said that I have just tried it and it works fine so I am not sure what the pattern is !

Sean

]]> By: Jérôme Deniau http://brendancooper.com/2007/04/23/you%e2%80%99d-avoid-using-lotus-notes-if-you-were-me-part-ii/#comment-55 Tue, 24 Apr 2007 07:31:38 +0000 http://thefriendlyghost.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/you%e2%80%99d-avoid-using-lotus-notes-if-you-were-me-part-ii/#comment-55 As many people say around the world:
“Take i or leave it”. I really do not care about complaints for notes client because mo of the time the problem is:
- lack of education on the product
- really bad administration (still lack of training)
- really bad developpers (lack of training)

When MicroStuff crashes well it seems normal and obvious for everyone so “Take it or leave it”.

]]> By: Alan Bell http://brendancooper.com/2007/04/23/you%e2%80%99d-avoid-using-lotus-notes-if-you-were-me-part-ii/#comment-51 Mon, 23 Apr 2007 19:58:18 +0000 http://thefriendlyghost.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/you%e2%80%99d-avoid-using-lotus-notes-if-you-were-me-part-ii/#comment-51 ah, the lables you refer to are “categories”, in general in views categories are generated automatically from the documents in the view, the capitalisation of the category is based on the first document that would go in that category and generally to remove a category just cause all the documents in that category to go somewhere else. Now in the specific case of the Todo form something rather more interesting is going on. The formula which defines the options available is
xxNotesCats := “Holiday|H”:”Vacation|V”:”Projects|P”:”Clients|C”:”Phone Calls|PC”:”Travel|T”;
@Trim(xxNotesCats:@GetProfileField(“CalendarProfile”;”UserCategories”))

which means you get some standard options (Holiday, Vacation, Projects, Clients, Phone Calls and Travel) plus whatever is in the usercategories field on your calendar profile document. The calendar profile document is what you see when you press the tools/preferences action button. In the Calendar & Todo tab on the basics subtab there is a field containing your personal categories where you can edit the list of categories. If you make a change you would have to go back to any old misscategorised items and change their category to the new one.

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