Notes Client Tips & Tricks

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Notes Client

Tips & Tricks

Chuck Smith - IBM

Southern California

October 4 & 5, 2011

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Client specific topics



A look at the desktop



Preferences



Business card retrieval order



Notes Client Workspace features



Search Feature



Contacts features



Mail client - 8.5.2 features



Calendaring and Scheduling



Additional Items of interest

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Workspace features

Navigator

The navigator displays the views and folders that are available in the currently opened application. For example, in your Calendar, you can choose from several views, such as One Day or One Week. In your Mail application, you can you can create folders to organize your messages.

Menus

The menu bar displays menu choices that apply to an application or document. There is a standard set of menus, plus optional menus that change depending on the application. There is also a set of advanced menus that you can enable (View > Advanced Menus). Context menus appear when you right-click an object (a message, for example) or area.

Toolbars

Toolbars are made up of buttons. You can set Toolbar Preferences to specify which toolbars display, and you can add or remove buttons from each toolbar.

Action bar

Each window tab optionally includes an action bar, specific to the application or document open in the window tab. Action bars may include icons and text, or be comprised of text only. Items on the action bar are also available from the Action menu.

Icons

Icons display throughout Lotus Notes®. To see a description of an icon, move the mouse pointer over the icon.

View pane

The contents of what you select in the navigator display in the view pane.

Window tab

Each tab displays a page. As you work, you can open multiple tabbed pages. If the row of tabs exceeds the width of your screen, left and right scroll icons display that you can use to access tabs that are out of view. Alternatively, you can set a Windows® and Themes user preference to group documents in a single tab.

Status bar

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Workspace features (continued)

Open list

Click Open for a list that includes your Lotus Notes applications, bookmarks, folders, IBM Lotus® Symphony documents, and your workspace. Right-click Open and click Dock the Open List to display icons down the left side of the window.

Preview pane

The preview pane displays a preview of a selected message or calendar entry. You can display the preview pane vertically, beside the view pane (the default), or horizontally, underneath the view pane. You can also hide the preview pane.

Home Page

The home page (previously called the Welcome page) is the first item that appears if you do not have a view set to open when you first launch Lotus Notes. The default home page gives you a central location from which to access your Mail, Calendar, Contacts, To Do list, Notebook, and IBM Lotus Symphony.

Switcher menu

You access the switcher menu by clicking the small menu icon located in the corner of your navigator. Use this menu to switch to another application, for example, to switch from Mail to To Do.

Sidebar

The sidebar gives you easy access to Sametime® Contacts, Calendar, a Feed Reader, and Activities, depending on how your administrator has set up your Lotus Notes account. You can collapse the sidebar to a thin bar showing icons only (the default), or hide it.

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Workspace features (continued)

Search

Search appears at the top right of the toolbar. You can use search for a Notes® style search or a Web style search. You set a user preference to enable Yahoo! Search or Google™ Web Search.

Workspace

The workspace, the legacy user interface for Lotus Notes, displays pages containing application icons. The workspace is still available and accessible via the Open list.

Views

Views display specific sets of documents within an application. For example, your Mail application has an All Documents view that displays every document contained in Mail, and a Sent view that displays only documents that you have sent.

Bookmarks

Bookmarks are links that point to Lotus Notes or Internet elements, such as applications, views, documents, Web pages, and news groups.

Getting Help

Help is available throughout Lotus Notes on all the areas you are using. In addition, context-sensitive Help, specific to the task you're performing, is also available when you press F1.

Notes Minder

Notes Minder is a feature that checks your mail and monitors your Calendar alarms when Lotus Notes is not running. When Notes Minder is active, it displays an icon in your Windows taskbar.

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Preferences

You can customize IBM® Lotus Notes® so that it runs and displays just the way you want it to using Notes®

preferences.

Preferences are organized by category, including the following main areas:

 Basic settings that determine the look and feel of your Notes client

 Mail, Calendar and To Do, and Contacts

 Replication

 Roaming

 Sametime® Connect

 Symphony presentation, spreadsheet, and document editors (if you install this feature)

 Activities (if you install this feature)

 Widgets and Live Text (if you are provisioned to use this feature)

 Feeds (if you are provisioned to use this feature)

 Composite Applications Editor (if you install this feature)

 Web browser output display

 WebSphere® home portal account (if your organization uses WebSphere)

On Windows® and Linux® platforms, click File > Preferences.

On Macintosh OS X, click Lotus Notes > Preferences.

Some preference changes that you make will not take effect until the next time you start Lotus Notes®.

Notes displays a warning message when you modify a preferences that requires restart.

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Business card retrieval order



Business cards display data provided by Notes, Connections and Sametime



In 8.5.2, prioritize the source for the data that is displayed in the business card.

–

Edit plugin_customization.ini



Where higher letters have higher priority

–

com.ibm.rcp.bizcard/change.priority.for.NotesContacts=G

–

com.ibm.rcp.bizcard/change.priority.for.profiles=E

–

com.ibm.rcp.bizcard/change.priority.for.com.ibm.lconn.client.bizcard

.livename=C



In 8.5.2 disable one of the sources for data displayed in the business card.

–

com.ibm.rcp.bizcard/disable.content.for.<provider_name>=true



where<provider_name> is one of the following values:

–

Lotus Connections: profiles

–

Lotus Notes: NotesContacts

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Notes Client UI features

 Connections Features

– You can open Lotus Connections features directly from the Notes open list

– Open the web client version of Lotus connections from sidebar

– New status toolbar at top of panel in the sidebar (options used to be available in the footer of the panel)

– Activities preference change

 Can specify Display name for server displayed in status toolbar on sidebar panel

– Ways to invite someone to join your Connections network:  Business card (right click for option)

 Right click name in a Notes view (i.e. Inbox,contacts)

 Right click name in Sametime contacts sidebar panel

– Now you can perform Connections tasks from Tools menu  Tools-->Lotus connections

– Add to bookmarks – Add to Activity

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Notes Client UI features, cont.

Choose not to see pop-up help

that displays on hover-over

–

File > Preferences, click

Basic Client Configuration,

and then de-select "Enable

Icon Popup Help in View".

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Search feature



Improved Search syntax allows for web-style queries of

application content.



New centralized search interface for queries and results

(Domain Search, Find People, Find Application, Web/Intranet

Searches available as search scopes).



Help has a new Search capability that searches across all

"books" in the help system, such as Lotus Notes Help and

Activities Help.



If installed, Desktop Search can be launched by right-clicking

Live names, and is also available in the Search scope

drop-down menu.

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Client hang data



The Notes Client can hang for various reasons, and with the new

Hang Data Collection feature introduced in the Notes 8.5.2

release you can collect and send hang diagnostic information to

the administrator at your organization. Your administrator can

then send this information to IBM Support so that IBM Support

can have improved knowledge of your hang issues, and analyze

them to find out the underlying causes of your hang and delay

issues.

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Contacts

The former Notes and Domino Personal Address Book is now called Contacts;

functionality that was previously included in your Personal Address Book is

now included in your Contacts. New features available with Contacts

include:



Ability to include a photograph of the contact in the contact record.



Improvements to the Contact, Group, and Preview forms, and to the Preferences

UI. For more information, see Creating a new contact entry,Creating a group entry,

and Setting preferences in Contacts.



Ability to view contacts By Company



Deleted contact records are held in Trash for a specified period of time before they

are permanently deleted.



Ability to delegate access to Contacts to another user.



Recent Contacts view that shows users with whom you have recently interacted,

such as e-mail correspondence or chats.

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Contacts features



Make a contact or group private

–

New or existing contact in Contacts

view



_{Preference, so people in the Cc}

and Bcc fields of e-mails will

NOT be added to your Recent

Contacts



_{Remove someone from recent}

contacts

–

Right click name in email type-ahead

or in Recent Contacts view

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Contacts features, cont.



Send someone a group or location

–

Select group or location within Group

view or Location view

–

recipient gets an e-mail with an Import

button that lets them import the group

or location into their contacts



Improvements to Recent contacts

records

–

Renaming no longer produces

duplicate

–

DPABRemoveRule ini variable to

block certain addresses is improved



Blocks future additions to Recent

contacts and now clean up existing

records in recent contacts which

match the pattern set in the ini

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Mail features

 You can now sort messages by type, such as to do, calendar entry, or e-mail (unread, information)

 File > Preferences, click Mail, and then select the check box next to Always show details in received messages

 If a folder was open when you closed Notes, it will be open the next time you open Notes. If it was closed when you closed Notes, it will be closed.

 You can set the following Notes.ini to have the preview pane collapsed by default in your Inbox and calendar: ShowPreviewCollapsedInitially=1

 File > Preferences, select Mail, and then select the check box next to Send me a Return Receipt when recipients read mail I send.

 File > Preferences, click Mail, and then select Automatically close original e-mail when replying/forwarding on the Basics tab.

 When addressing an e-mail, groups will appear in the type-ahead list with a group icon next to them.

 When composing an email, format text to be the style you want to use as your default.

– Select that text, and then click Text > Set Current Font as Mail Default.

 You can forward a message from the Trash folder, without having to restore it first.

 When you are working in an archive, the title will say “Archive” and then the name of the archive.

 Sort inbox by surname: Click File > Preferences, and then click Mail. On the Basics tab, under Display names in mail in this format select Last, First.

 When you add a signature, you can choose to make it rich text, plain text, or an html or image file.

 Now you can save e-mails as .eml file. With the e-mail open, click File > Save As.

 The "HTML Size" MIME setting is no longer configurable; it retains a fixed value of "12".

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Mail Features (continued)



Quota indicator display in mail navigator (for users who have mail quotas).



An improved Mail form, with easier-to-access menu bar choices, requiring fewer "clicks" to perform

desired actions.



Simplified Mail preferences.



Updated and additional Letterhead choices.



User settings to display additional information when composing or opening mail (From, Sent By,

Send Options).



Improved Out of Office dialog box with new features, such as specifying hours.



Improved choices for "Reply to All," "Include History," and "Include Attachments."



When replying to a mail thread, the thread layout is displayed. Within the Inbox, you can see all

related messages in a thread. Two different options: one that collapses all messages under the most

recent response; another that provides the 'thread' on-demand from the Inbox.



The ability to right-click operations for an entire mail thread, such as deleting a thread or moving a

thread to a folder. For more information, see Viewing conversations.

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Calendaring and Scheduling



Unaccepted calendar entries display as "ghosted" entries in the Calendar view for new meeting

and reschedule notices. This feature is turned off by default; users must enable this feature in

the Calendar Preferences.



Entries with short durations, for example 1 minute, display in time slot views with a duration

of 15 minutes, to allow the user to see more information about the appointment. This feature is

turned on by default.



Calendar form UI improvements.



Users can locate free time for a subset of their Invitee list.



Canceled meetings can be displayed automatically in the calendar or removed outright. This

feature is turned off by default; users must enable this feature in the Calendar Preferences.



All Day events now display in the full day rather then just in the top area.



Scheduling an IBM Lotus Sametime Unyte online meeting from a Notes meeting invitation.



Calendar preference for saving and reusing conference call information in meeting

invitations.



Regional calendar preferences, such as displaying a secondary calendar and an additional

time zone.

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Widget enhancements

 You can set a preference in a widget's XML to define whether a new sidebar panel is opened for each widget action or whether the same sidebar panel is reopened and overwritten for each action initiated by that widget.

– <webcontextConfiguration version="1.1"> <palleteItem singletonSidebar="true"

 8.5.2 introduces the ability to control whether a widget's thumbnail is visible in the My Widgets sidebar panel

– As an administrator or power user you can add a hideThumbnail=true or hideThumbnail=false parameter to the

palleteItem element in the widget's XML.

– End users can hide any visible widget thumbnail using a new "Hide" user interface option.

– End users can un-hide all hidden widget thumbnails using a new "Show All" user interface option.

– For administrators and power users who wish to prevent users from displaying a hidden widget thumbnail in their My Widgets sidebar panel, you can add the following statement to the user's plugin_customization.ini file:

 com.ibm.rcp.toolbox/allowUserShowHideWidgets=false

 8.5.2 enables users to install a widget that is supplied to them as a .zip file

– either drag and drop the .zip file into their My Widgets sidebar panel or

– use the Import menu option from the My Widgets sidebar panel.

 new widget configuration wizard is available for creating a widget using the active composite application as the current context.

– In Notes, open a composite application and click the "Configure a widget from the current context" toolbar option to open the "Create a new widget for this application" wizard

 either create a widget that simply opens the composite application in a new tab,

 or one that is wired to act on Live Text or selected text in a particular manner.

 You can set a default double-click action to open widgets in the sidebar, a new window, a float window, or a tab

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Additional items of interest



You can create your own personal Web logs (blogs) from within Notes, using the

Blog (dominoblog.ntf) template. You add content to the blog using either Notes or

a Web browser.



If you attempt to save a document in an application on a server and the server is not

available, the document is saved to another available server, and a message

displays giving you this information.



Ability to view a collaboration history to see the most recent interactions you have

had with another user, such as e-mail correspondence, saved chat transcripts, or

shared documents.



Composite applications make it convenient for a user to access a collections of

components (applications) that address a business need for a particular group of

users.



Enhancements have been made to the Feeds user interface to improve usability and

simplify feeds-based authentication.

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General Information



A new Widgets and Live Text feature, enabling you to create and share your own

widgets, use widgets that were created and installed for you, and see and act on

Live Text in any Notes® document.



Better control on feature install and update from Eclipse or NSF-based update sites.

Users who have been provisioned to use the Eclipse update manager (File >

Application > Install and File > Preferences > Install/Update menu sequences) can

benefit from update site controls that their administrator has configured for them.



You can right-click a document and select Open in New Window to open a Lotus

Notes document that is open in a window tab, in a list in any Lotus Notes® view,

or bookmarked in the Open list. This option is available whether or not you have

set a Window Management preference (File > Preferences > Windows and Themes

to open each document in its own window. Note that you cannot open a view in its

own window, only specific documents.



In your Contacts, you can delete entries in the Recent Contacts view, and you can

promote a contact from Recent Contacts to My Contacts (the list of contacts in your

personal address book).

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