Notes 8
IBM Lotus Notes 8… not only does it look great but it’s also packed with excellent features to help users wade through the ever-growing volume of e-mail and improve their collaborative life. Here’s a list of my top ten favourite features – in true ‘Spinal Tap’ style, there’s eleven, and if you don’t get the joke, go watch the movie.
1. Message threads – have you noticed that if you send an e-mail someone will send you a reply? And if you send that e-mail to several people you’ll get several replies. And then several more. Soon, like the reproductive cycle of a pair of cabbage aphids, that one e-mail spawns several thousand other e-mails (okay, bad analogy, but you get the point). All these replies lie scattered around your Inbox, making your working life look worse than it really is. If only there was a way to pull these e-mails together so that you’re looking at just one e-mail thread…
Notes 8 has an option to pull all the related e-mails together into one ‘conversation’, even if the e-mails are stored in other folders. Gathered up they will appear as just one e-mail in your Inbox, but clicking on the twisty will reveal the entire e-mail chain in it’s full horrible glory.
Bonus feature – this works with draft e-mails too. I have an awful habit of starting a reply, saving it as a draft and then finding it (incomplete) several weeks later. Conversation mode shows that there’s a draft hanging off the received e-mail.
2. Type-ahead addressing – so what? We’ve had type-ahead addressing for ages, and so have the competition. Big deal. So what’s great about this? For a moment, imagine how many people there are in IBM with the surname Smith. I can tell you there’s over 250 in the UK alone. Yet when I type “smi” into the address field in a Notes 8 e-mail, I will be given a list of people, with names containing “smi”, that I collaborate with most frequently… and Martin Smith will pop straight to the top, he being the Smith who I work with most frequently. That’s the difference – Notes 8 keeps track and suggests the most likely names to you. It also keeps tabs on external contacts (i.e. not in the corporate address book) and suggests those when required, even if you haven’t added them to your personal address book. That’s not only very cool, but it’s a great time saver.
3. Prevent loading of remote images – spammers embed images into e-mails knowing that if a request to load the image is sent that will show the e-mail account is live. Notes 8 will block the loading of remote images, so you have to explicitly make the request (just in case the e-mail is actually valid). Okay, other e-mail clients do this too, but that doesn’t make it any less useful.
4. Integrated Sametime – previous versions of Notes gave you just a little bit of Sametime (presence awareness and instant messaging, and the ability to save a chat into your mail box). This meant to get integration in Notes AND access to the full raft of Sametime features you had to have two clients installed and logged in.
Notes 8 has fully-featured Sametime plugged in. This means you get all the features in a single-client install – this is easier to manage and provides an overall better experience for the end user. It also means that unified communication capabilities (Voice over IP, telephony integration, video, etc) are made contextually available in Notes – so you could start a phone call with someone directly from the e-mail they sent to you.
Please note: this doesn’t mean full Sametime is free. You require a Sametime Standard Edition license, otherwise you fall back to a more basic level of functionality (but that’s still a much richer experience than previous versions).
5. The search bar – Notes’ searching has always been very good. With a certain other e-mail product searching is a known weakness, and customers of this product are usually a bit jealous of the fact that Notes can do stuff like search for words that exist inside file attachments held within e-mails. So what’s the deal here?
Here’s an example of why Notes 8′s new search bar is a vast improvement – in previous versions of Notes, if you wanted to search your entire mail box (not just your Inbox, I mean everything) you’d have to go to the All Documents view and then perform the search. In Notes 8 you just type the search term into the search bar and hit ‘Search’. No moving away from the Inbox or calendar or whatever application you happen to be in. What’s more, your searches will be saved so that you can refer to them again – this applies to any Notes applications, not those seen here.
And there’s more – from the same search bar you can search your calendar or contacts list, and do a Google or Yahoo! search. If you have it installed, a Google Desktop search can be performed.
6. Lotus Symphony is included – had enough of feeding the Microsoft Office cash machine? Notes 8 includes a spreadsheet, word processor and presentation editor – these Symphony editors can read and write Microsoft Office documents and also the Open Document Formats. The message is simple – if you don’t pay all that money to Microsoft you free up budget to do something more useful with it, such as improving your collaborative working or expertise and knowledge location. So what if Symphony doesn’t support all of Office’s features… no-one uses all of them.
7. Integration with Lotus Quickr – ask anyone what their biggest pain is with e-mail and I bet you they’ll say one of two things… too many e-mails, or too many damn file attachments. File attachments in e-mails can be a pain. Firstly there’s the issue of someone editing a file and then you don’t know which is the up-to-date version (because they’re just being e-mailed around, which isn’t following any sort of cohesive process). Secondly, they take up too much space, which means you spend too much time keeping your mail box in check rather than doing your job.
Quickr integration into Notes 8 helps you with these issues. It won’t solve the issues 100% because people remain as the weakest link… but it does put the right tools in peoples’ hands. With Quickr integrated into the sidebar you can drag and drop a file straight into a library, share it with your colleagues, and remove it from your Inbox. When you send an e-mail with file attachments, the Quick Connector for Notes can (depending on your preference) pull the file attachments out, pop them into a library and replace the attachments with a link. Please note that the Quickr sidebar plugin is available with Notes 8.0.1 and Quickr 8.1, and it will also work with Quickr Personal Edition.
8. Improved calendar form – this may sound a bit of a generalisation, but there are loads of improvements to the calendar form which make it worthy of inclusion. The whole layout is better, it’s easier to navigate and find the options, and the free-time scheduler is much easier to use. But here’s my favourite… starting with Notes 8.0.1 you can store your conference call details in your calendar preferences and instantly include them on a meeting invite (if it is, indeed, a conference call). This may be the end of people putting conference call details (including details of every country on the planet) in the subject field. Yes, the subject field. These people exist, and I’m slowly but surely hunting them down.
9. Integration with activities – boy, do I love activities. What is an activity? It’s something you do with a team of people – a project, a deliverable, perhaps an event. Activities can be short or medium-term (something long-term might warrant a TeamRoom or Quickr place) and are probably ad-hoc in nature (although templates can be used for repeated activities). However, for me the compelling factor about activities is that they tend to contain or require lots of different chunks of information that traditionally originate and sit in different solutions or places. E-mails, calendar appointments, tasks, instant messages, files (documents, presentations, spreadsheets), links to web pages, contacts, ad-hoc notes, Lotus Notes documents… lots of different stuff that tends to sit in different places and often isn’t easily shared. An activity drags these items together and makes them available to the team.
Notes 8 provides integration with activities. You can see your activities in the sidebar, you can drill down into an activity and see it’s content. You can grab an attachment from within an e-mail and drop it straight into an activity (thus sharing it with the team). You can end a Sametime chat by clicking on the activity icon and capturing the transcript in an activity. And (this is really clever) you can click on someone’s name (the sender of an e-mail for example) and see a list of the activities that you and that person have in common.
Please note that activities require an additional license, either acquired as Lotus Activities or as part of Lotus Connections.
10. Type-ahead search in the ‘open’ list – many Notes users are still emotionally attached to that old favourite, the workspace. Ever since bookmarks arrived in Notes R5 (March 1999), Notes users have been concerned that the workspace will disappear. I don’t think it’s any secret that a revamp of the workspace / bookmarks concepts is planned for a future version (maybe 8.5). Anyway, Notes 8 has a great feature which means I don’t have to use the workspace. We have loads of applications in IBM, but as long as I know part of the title of the application (doesn’t have to be the first characters, it can be characters from the middle of a word) I can type those in and find the application quickly.
11. Widgets and live text – I debated over whether this counts as two features. You can have widgets without live text, but not live text without widgets (as far as I know), and the two go hand-in-hand so it’s best they’re covered as one. So, what can you do with widgets and live text?
Add a Notes view, web page, RSS feed or Google Gadget to the Notes sidebar – the cool thing about this is that the sidebar is no longer necessarily the domain of the developer, it’s in the hands of the end user.- See recognised ‘live text’ which has associated actions – and create your own recognisers to recognise items which are important to you.
- Associate your own actions with selected text.
The real power of widgets is realised when you see some content in a Notes e-mail or document that you need more information on. For example, a postcode or an address in an e-mail or calendar entry, and you’d like to see the location of that place in a Google Map. You can teach Notes 8 to recognise postcodes since they’re a recognisable format, and therefore a postcode can become ‘live text’. You can then create a widget which passes the postcode to a Google Map web page just by clicking on the text. An address is a less regular format to recognise, so you could also configure a widget to pass an address to a Google Map web page by selecting the text and then right-clicking.
Some other things I’ve done with widgets:
- Search Wikipedia and dictionary.com for a selected word
- Linked recognised person names to IBM’s corporate employee directory, BluePages
- Configured a widget to translate selected text from one language to another (using Google Translate)
- Configured a widget to perform a search on our customer contact Notes application (using a customer’s name selected from an e-mail or document)
