I want my OLD inbox back!

We know that the UI guys at Lotus spent countless hours trying to make the Lotus Notes inbox as usable as possible, and, bluntly, as much like that “other” product as they could.

And, frankly, kudos to them. From a strictly personal point of view, I like the new look and feel.

Not everyone does.

As Lee and I were rolling out the new client this winter, there were two “what happened to” complaints that we heard over and over. The first was the “what happened to my bookmark bar” question (actually, usually phrased as in “what happened to the icons I used to have on the left side of my screen?”). You can get it back – we addressed that one HERE.

The OTHER complaint was about the inbox. It was a two-fer: what happened to the red text and what happened to the checkmarks.

The guys at Lotus probably got tired of the whole “your unread documents will be red, meaning the color red, not read” conversations.

So, the default for the 8.5.1 mail template is unread messages are in Bold Black, and the checkmark column is gone.

Well, Virginia, you can have those back too!

First, the checkmarks.

Go to File > Preferences > Basic Notes Client Configuration

At the bottom of the “Additional Options” window in the middle of the dialogue is an option that says “Show checkmarks in margin for selected documents.” Click that on, and you’ve got your checkmarks back:

Meanwhile, while you’re there, you can get your red text back also, if you want that.

This time go to Files > Preferences > Fonts and Colors.

Select “Plain Red Text” from the drop down, and click OK:

Simple enough, right?

MANY of the new features in 8.5.1 are optional – I’m not aware of ANYTHING that has been taken away from prior versions.

What else are you missing?

Want to delay delivery of an email

There are sometime situations when you’d want to prepare a message but not send it right away. It needs to wait until the official press release is made public, or it IS the press release, or you can’t announce details of the merger to the employees until the merger itself has been announced.

Wanted to bring your attention to Sherpa Software’s “Compliance Attender.” The software does a LOT more than just delay delivery, but it does handle this issue.

Detailed information HERE.

Take the opportunity to learn more

Although this site is chock full of great tips and tricks (well, it will be, anyway), there are a lot of other great ways to learn more about Lotus Notes and Domino – and one of the ways is by attending one of several large conferences held each year.

The “biggie” of course is Lotusphere. You’ve already missed it for 2010, but there’s always next year. There’s also a series of event held through the world called “Lotusphere Comes To You” (LCTY). These events capsulize the important content from Lotusphere, and package it in a day-long event. Upcoming LCTY events include Chicago (March), Denmark (March), Milan (March), London (April),  etc. etc.

In addition to those events, there are also other Notes/Domino conferences, notably The VIEW’s LotusDeveloper and ADMIN2010 conferences.  These are happening this year in May in Boston, and likely in the fall in Europe but right now, no dates set for Europe.

There are also a number of events held yearly by various user groups, one of the biggest being ILUG – the Irish Lotus User Group.

Bottom line with all these is that they’re aimed far more at administrators and developers than at end users, but the discussion is always about how to better server our customers – the users.

Incidentally, see you at LotusDeveloper 2010!

Where did my bookmark bar go in Lotus Notes 8.5?

What happened to my bookmark bar?

I don’t like this Open button. For those of us who don’t like change and miss that bookmark bar on the left hand side with all our icons on it, there is hope, you can get it back!

To get your bookmark bar back right click on the OPEN menu icon and choose “Dock the Open List” or you can go to VIEW then then second last from the bottom choose “Dock the Open List” there. VOILA you now have your good old trusty Bookmark Bar with all your icons on the left hand side.

Note that the Bookmark Bar and the Open button are mutually exclusive – you can have one or the other, but not both at the same time.