Real World Computing

Improving Productivity It's all great news that Lotus Notes 8.0.1 and above support Google Gadgets. A brilliant move IBM. The problem is that most of the demonstrations show you how to add really useful things, like personal fish-tanks to the Notes client. (Thanks Alan Lepofsky - a brilliant demo btw ) rather than business productivity applications. It was hard to see the immediate business value of gadgets and even harder to sell it to the business. Thankfully now, I've got a good and simple example. I'm not sure if my behaviour is unique but somehow I expect that it's not. I often find that when I am working in Lotus Notes and other applications that I am constantly copying data to notepad and making notes around it. On other occasions, I am following a particular list of requirements (again, usually part of a document pasted into notepad). Not too long ago I got myself a 22 inch wide-screen monitor. This has proved to be fantastic because I have been using notes ...

IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 got released last week and I eagerly downloaded it on Friday for a quick play. Fortunately IBM seem to have made a few changes to their download site in the last few months and I had no trouble at all finding the software (well done IBM). I downloaded the Windows 32 bit version, the Mac OSX version and the Debian Linux version. Ubuntu Linux Normally I can wait for software releases to become accepted but in this case, I was keen to get my hands on the Linux version. My earlier attempt at installing Notes on Linux had ended in failure and I'd heard that IBM had improved things with 8.5. I was not wrong. I'm truly a beginner on Linux. I don't even know the commands properly and I've deliberately not read any books or technotes on the subject. How else am I going to figure out how "people friendly" the OS is? I put my downloaded CD in and proceeded to klutz my way though, simply double-clicking on things. Nothing much seemed to be happen...

I was reading my daily blogs this morning when I saw an article on Matt Cutt's blog about starting the year with a clean Gmail Inbox and I thought.. Why not do that for Notes? So... here's the procedure. Open Your Lotus Notes Mail to the Inbox . From the Menu , select Folder then Create Folder... When the Dialog box appears, type a name for your folder like " Old Inbox " or if you're really obsessive compulsive like me, 2008 Inbox . Then click Ok . Next, tag all of your old mail in Notes by dragging the mouse down the left hand side. If you've got a lot of mail, you can do this step in chunks or you can choose Select all (Ctrl+A) and simply deselect the new stuff (the 2009 mails). Finally, click on the action bar menu and choose the new folder you created and click Move . Your old mail will move to the new location (where you can easily access it - it's only one click away) and you'll be left with a nice clean inbox ready for the year ahead.

One of my biggest gripes about the Notes 8 client was the fact that they'd removed the bookmark bar and replaced it with the "start-menu wannabe", the Open Menu. I figured that eventually I'd work out how to get my bar back but in the meantime I was too busy to bother hunting. This morning, while trying to find a different feature, I noticed an option called "Dock the Open List" under the View Menu. I clicked it and my faithful bookmark bar returned. This is so simple and so usable that I figured it was worth sharing. It made my week.