Recent Contacts in Lotus Notes 8 – Good or Bad Thing ?

Your composing an email to someone outside your organization you rarely deal with but for some reason today, you need to send an urgent  email to this individual. This person is not in your Local Address book and you’re not sure if you kept any emails from them to get their email address. How nice would it be to be able to type in this person’s name you need to send an email to and have their name pre-populate for you automatically without having this person in your address book.

Well you can with Recent Contacts. Recent Contacts is a new feature introduced in Lotus Notes 8.x  where Lotus Notes determines this by keeping track of the number of times you send and receive mail from each person. After you send an email or close an email after reading it, Lotus Notes will store that contact in a different view in your local address book called called “Recent Contacts”.

As a Lotus Notes end user this feature is great. As a Domino Administrator supporting this new feature, sometimes can be a headache. The Recent Contacts and the Type-Ahead List feature is amazing to have because now you can start typing in someone’s name in the TO: field and now it will start populating, based on the people with whom you most often interact with. So if you deal with a John Smith/NewYork on a regular basis vs a John Smith/California whom you never emailed before. When you type in John Smith’s name it will pre-populate with John Smith/New York.

However for a Domino Administrator, this feature can also cause more problems for end users. What happens when a user is no longer with the organization but is in your Recent Contacts, it will still try to deliver the message and you will get Mail Router – Delivery Failure. Another issue I encountered was when we had to setup mail forwarding in a users Person Doc in the NAB (Names and Address Book). After removing the entry for the mail forwarding, anyone who sent emails to that user during this time period the forwarding was turned on, it will cache that forwarding address in the users Recent Contacts. Example: You setup mail forwarding on John Smith person doc to forward emails to Jane Doe because John is out of the office for several months. I send emails to John Smith which automatically forwards to Jane Smith. John Smith returns back to work and we remove the mail forwarding from John Smith’s Person Doc. I send an email to John Smith and John says he doesn’t receive any of my emails as well as other trying to send to him. Why is it doing this? Because its still forwarding to Jane Doe because in my Recent Contacts John Smith’s email address shows forwarding to Jane Doe.

Overall, Recent Contacts is a great idea and will make life easier for everyone. However from a Domino Administration point of view, Mail Forwarding, Local Mail Groups, Repeating Calendar Entries where a Recent Contact is pointing to the wrong person can make life a nightmare.

If you you want to disable this feature do the following:

1. Delete all the contents in your Recent Contacts
2. Go to: File – Preferences – Contacts – Select the Check Box  “Do Not Automatically Add Names to the Recent Contact View”
3. If you would like to disable this for all users. Use the Notes.ini parameter DisableDPABProcessing=1 .

Enabling Ghosted Calendar Entries in Lotus Notes 8.5

This is such a great feature to have enabled within your organization. What is Ghosted Calendar Entries?  It’s Monday morning, you just got in to the office after being off for a week and you had no access to email during your time off. You open your Lotus Notes and see you have 550 unread emails. You try to get through all the emails but realize theirs way to many to go through. You check your calendar and see you have a meeting in 15 minutes. But for some reason it’s gray in color.  You double click the meeting and realize that you haven’t responded to this meeting yet because you haven’t gone through all your emails.  It’s neither Accepted or Declined.  But how can this be? How is this meeting displaying in my calendar view without me responding or taking action on it.

With the Ghosted Calendar Entries enabled – “Display new  (unprocessed) notices.” Meetings that are sent to you will automatically populate in your Calendar view, which you haven’t responded to yet in a gray color. So if you have missed accepting or declining a meeting in your inbox or haven’t gone through your 550 emails, you will still be OK and won’t miss a meeting because you have your Ghosted Entries displaying in your calendar.

To turn this Preference on – Go to More – Preferences – Calendar & To Do – Display – Views – Place a check mark in “Display new (unprocessed) notices”

I want my old calendar views back !!

One of the issues we’ve had to deal with is that the new version (8.5x) of Lotus Notes seems to have taken away a number of ‘old favorite’ views in your calendar, like the ‘work month.’ The work month calendar was particularly nice because it gave you a fill month’s view of your calendar, without the weekend days.

Turns out, there’s a way to get them back, although this trick doesn’t “stick”, so you’ll need to do it every time …

So, we can start here:

This is the “default” month calendar in Notes 8.5x.

But, people liked the “old” month calendar. By hitting Ctrl-Alt before you click “Month”, you can get the old calendar:

And, better yet, this view scrolls, so you can have a month view that includes a couple weeks from one month, and a couple from the next. Note where July 1st falls in this screenshot:

But wait, there’s more!

In addition to being able to get the old view back, you get the old functionality back, meaning you can view a month (a whole month), or you can view a “work month” (meaning as full month, but not showing weekends).

By clicking the dropdown at the Month tab, you can select “Work Month”:

And the result is a scrolling month, with no weekends:

Wish my real-life calendar was this empty!!

It’s Widget Wonderland!

One of the most-touted features of the new Lotus Notes client is the capability to add “widgets”. These are similar to the types of things you can add to your home page in Google or Yahoo, for example – you can add stock tickers or weather watchers or any number of other useful (and sometimes not-quite-as-useful-but-a-lot-of-fun) widgets to your client.

The Notes client shown below has had the Weather Widget installed:

The nice thing about this is you’re already spending a tremendous amount of time working in your Notes client as it is – here’s a chance to bring even more personal productivity to your client.

It’s pretty simple to add a widget.

First, open the “My Widgets” box on the right sidebar of Notes. You may or may not find anything in there:

Incidentally, if you don’t find the “My Widgets” box available to you, check your preferences. Go to File > Preferences > Widgets, and make sure that the option “Show Widget Toolbar …” is checked:

You may noticed that mine is greyed out. That means that mine is turned on by a policy that the administrator set – it’s possible that yours is TURNED OFF by policy, in which case, you can’t play with widgets … so go have a chat with your Note Administrator … (Lee and I always recommend being nice to your admins – take them to lunch, bring them candy [especially chocolate])

Anyway, back to the point.

Open your “My Widgets” sidebar panel by clicking on it.

If it’s empty, you’ll need to fill it.

So, in the upper right hand corner of the panel is a menu icon (highlighted below), and if you click it, you get a substantial menu of the things you can do:

If you click “Catalog”, it brings up another menu, and you can choose “Browse” from here:

It will bring up a copy of the Widget Catalog available to you through your organization. You can select one that looks interesting and simply drag it over and drop it in the “My Widgets” panel:

Once you’ve put it there, some widgets may open up automatically.

If yours doesn’t, you can right click on the icon for your widget in the My Widgets panel. You have a number of possible configuration options, not the least of which is the ability to tell the widget how and where to display (open in tab, open in sidebar, etc.):

And, that’s all there is to it!

In addition to items you may find in your organization’s widget catalog, you can also add Google Gadgets.

If you choose “Configure a Widget from …” on the menu, you can select to add a widget from a Google Gadget, a web page, an RSS feed or from Notes itself:

So, campers, go widget yourself!