Skip to main content

More on Google's Services

I'm in danger of spending too much time praising google and no enough time on Notes/Domino, but here goes anyway.

The Latest Google Toolbar
I'm currently testing the latest google toolbar. There's a lot of new features in this one which are really quite useful.

Bookmark Wonders
This has to be my favourite part of the new toolbar. In fact, I think that this could well be my favourite computing enhancement in a long time - but.. since I've blogged about it before, I'll just shut up about it now.

The Buttons
Sure, the toolbar has had buttons on it for a long time - what's a toolbar without buttons anyway? These buttons are different.

1. Anyone can create them.
2. They can be hosted elsewhere and updated with a couple of clicks.
3. Google is building a library of them (they're not creating them, but they are testing them).
4. The buttons aren't simple one-click items, they work off the search field and can include RSS Feeds.

I'll post a lot more about the buttons in another post (I'm waiting on google to do an update).


The Google Home Page
This one is pretty cool too. I clicked on the customize link on the home page and found myself being presented with a bunch of options to add bits to the screen. I did so, and my screen now looks as follows;




Note that I've now got the Notes/Domino 7 forum open displaying the most recent postings. I've got my gmail account open displaying recent mail and I've got a bunch of my favourite bookmarks at my fingertips.

You can drag these things around and change their settings. You can also add more.

This really looks a lot like workplace and it certainly helps to get things done more quickly. If you haven't customized your google page, you should look into it.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to Change Your Notification Options for New Lotus Notes Mail in version 8.x

Don't worry, I'm not patronizing you (my readers), I just decided to re-document this for one of our internal users and thought you might want to be able to use it in your own user documentation. WHAT IS THIS DOCUMENT ABOUT? Some people who don't get a lot of mail, like to be notified when such an event occurs. Notification can be; via a sound via a pop-up box via the system tray (where the computer clock is) The pop up box looks like this; Other people, who like myself, get too much mail would rather not be notified. The aim of this document is to tell you how (and where) to turn these options on and off. CHANGING YOUR SETTINGS To change your settings from the Notes 8.x client; On the Menu, click File , then Preferences... On the left hand side , click on the little plus sign to the left of Mail to expand the options. Click on the option marked Sending and Receiving . In the middle section, under receiving, you can control your notifications. If you untick the box mark

How to Create an Auto-Response Mail Message in Lotus Notes 8.5.3+

Why would you do this? Suppose that you have an externally accessible generic email address for your company; support@mycompany.com or info@mycompany.com. You might expose this to the web and allow people to send messages to you. Setting up an auto-response email will tell the senders that their message reached its destination and that it will be dealt with accordingly.  It's also good practice to include links to FAQs or other useful information. Why 8.5.3 The techniques we'll be using here work in older versions of Notes but some of the options seem to have moved around in 8.5.3.  I figured it was a good time to show you where they've moved to. The Procedure Start Domino Designer and open the Mail file to be modified.  A really quick way to do this is to right-click on the application tab and choose "Open in Designer". In the Left hand panel of designer, expand Code and then double-click Agents.  A new window should appear. Click the action

How to Do a Mail Merge to Email using Lotus Notes

Why do one? In today's "green" world, it makes much better sense to send out emails than letters but you still want to personalize them. Sadly, by itself Lotus Notes doesn't support mail merge to email. Of course, we know that outlook does (but then it lets anyone and anything send emails for you - even when you don't want them to). So, how to do it in Notes? OpenNTF The first port of call is OpenNTF ( http://www.openntf.org/ ). This place is full of great things but most of them are really badly documented. Still, these guys give things away for free and they develop in their spare time, so we should be grateful for what we get. There's a great little project there called MailMerge Excel to Notes . Go there, click on releases and download the ZIP file. Getting to the Code The installation is tricky though I've noted that since I asked the author about the install, it's been updated (so maybe these steps are less necessary). Unzip the files to somewher