Re: Outlook (2003 11.8010.8036 SP2) Problems -- PCTECH

Wow - what a nightmare and a mess !

Chuck

-----Original Message-----
From: pctech-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:pctech-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Dan
Sent: Wednesday, August 23, 2006 2:03 PM
To: PC Technical Discussion for iSeries Users
Subject: Re: [PCTECH] Outlook (2003 11.8010.8036 SP2) Problems

Well, since you asked... ;-)

First of all, admitting my very limited experience with LN, only using it
since three months ago, it appears to me that LN is a collaboration tool
with email poorly kludged onto it.  LN, IMO, was not created to be an email
client.  If it was, we should line up the developers and, and, well, do what
we normally do when we line up incompetent fools who actually foisted this
piece of ....

<collects self, breathes in and out>

It appears to me that LN allows a Notes admin to change the email client
"design" (just another database that an admin would be able to control), and
it is entirely possible that our Notes admin may have changed the email
client to behave badly.  I have some issues that do not appear to be issues
with the Notes community outside of my organization.  For example, the left
pane shows different folders (Inbox, Draft, Sent, Personal, etc.) and most
email clients would show the number of unread documents next to the name of
the folder and boldface the folder name.  Not so with our Notes.  I cannot
tell which folder has any new messages in it without actually having to open
the folder and scroll down to the end to see if any are marked in red.
Can't remember specifics, but it was implied to me from one of our desktop
support guys that our email "design" was customized from the shipped version
from Lotus.

But there are other issues that appear to exist with the entire Lotus Notes
customer base.  I use filters to put incoming mail into different folders,
should be pretty straight-forward for a version 6.5.3 product, wouldn't you
say?  No such luck.  The fix, IIRC, is to upgrade to version 7 or to create
an agent that will fix it.  Unfortunately, I do not have the required access
level to be able to create an agent.  And, since our organization is in the
middle of migrating to version 7, but won't be complete until at least
October, they aren't about to create an agent to do this for me.

The UI for the Notes email client is unlike that of any other mainstream
email client.  Would you think that if you typed a string beginning with
"http://"; that it might figure out that it's supposed to be a hyperlink?
Nope. One has to select some text on the form, click Create, Hotspot, Link
Hotspot, and fill in the URL in one of those godawful Properties boxes.

One of the "bonuses" of the migration efforts was that, on Monday morning,
everyone came in to find every single piece of email in every folder marked
as unread.

There's much, MUCH more I could say, but I won't bother tying up any more
bandwidth.  Unless you want me to.  ;-)

If anyone wants more, there's several websites out there devoted to trashing
Lotus Notes.  One that I found myself nodding quite a bit at is
http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com.

- Dan