Mastering calendar and to-dos (Intermediate)
Now that we have covered mastering your mail, lets walk through some calendar and to do features to improve your Lotus Notes experience.
Getting ready
This will entail using your IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.3 mail file. You will need an installed IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.3 client and access to your mail file. You will need to be in your calendar view
How to do it...
To create a federated calendar, go to your calendar and click on Add a Calendar. This will bring up the window shown in the following screenshot:
From the Add drop-down menu, select the type of calendar you would like to federate on your calendar. If you want to view this calendar when offline, check the setting View this calendar when offline. Any updates will not be reflected until you have access to the federated calendar. On calendars other than Notes users, you can select to view offline or on a mobile device. When you select the option to sync with a mobile device, you will see your federated calendar entries 45 days before and 45 days after the current date on your mobile device. Each federated calendar can also have a unique color so you can visually differentiate between federated calendars.
There's more...
Calendar Federation
Calendar Federation allows you to federate calendars from external sources, such as Google. You can federate calendars from web-based sources, other Lotus Notes users, or from files. It will overlay the calendar into your Lotus Notes 8.5.3 calendar. The benefit of the overlay feature in Lotus Notes 8.5.3 is that you have the option of adding another user's calendar directly into your calendar.
Calendar cleanup
Calendar cleanup will help you to clear out your calendar of old entries that you no longer need or use. It will also help when you are trying to reduce the size of your mail file. To run a calendar cleanup, from your calendar view, go to the More menu and select Calendar Cleanup.
The Calendar Cleanup dialog box will now come up. You can specify a cut-off date or timeframe, along with whether to act on Calendar entries or To Do entries. The latest cleanup you can specify is for entries that occurred over 1 day ago or entries that occurred before <yesterday>, which would include documents up to two days prior as shown in the following screenshot:
A meeting will not be removed unless all of its response documents meet the criteria, and it is not a repeating meeting whose end date is later than the date specified. One thing to note is that deleted calendar entries do not go into Trash, but are deleted completely. This means once you have deleted or removed the calendar entries, they are no longer in your mail file. If you do not want to delete the entries, archiving is an option to clean up your calendar.
Repair Calendar
This feature in Notes 8.5.3 fixes issues where duplicate repeating calendar entries exist in the mail file. The Notes client detects the duplicated calendar entries and displays a Repair Calendar dialog box when you attempt to open any of the entries in the repeat set that contains duplicates. When you click on OK, the Repair Calendar feature fixes the duplicates. The duplicate calendar entries are not removed from the mail file. They will no longer show on the Calendar view, such as One Day, Two Day, and so on. If you need to reference them, they can be found in the Entries and Notices or Grouped Entries lists views.
Accept and Decline in the preview pane
You can act on calendar invites in your inbox preview pane as shown in the following screenshot:
Calendar view customization
To control where the preview pane is or how your calendar entries will be displayed, go to the Show menu from the calendar view.
You can choose to filter what calendar entries will show and how they appear from here.
Online meeting and conference preferences
If you have an online meeting URL or a conference line, you can add these to your preferences. When creating a new meeting entry you will be able to add these to your invites.
Under preferences on the Calendar & To Do tab, on the Display tab, under the Entries tab is where you put your conference call information.
After adding this information, you will have the option to add your conference call information to meetings.
If you have an online meeting URL, you can add it to your invitations as well. When creating a new meeting click on Online Meeting. To add a new online meeting URL, first click on the New button. You will be able to select the type of meeting and add additional information, such as the meeting password, as shown in the following screenshot:
Countered meetings
By default, Lotus Notes will leave a countered meeting on your calendar. If you do not want countered meetings on your calendar, you can simply change the setting in the following manner, that is, by unchecking By default, leave a placeholder for countered meetings:
Countered meetings will display on the calendar with the following characteristics:
The countered meeting will be at the time the meeting was scheduled for
The meeting will have a unique color on the calendar to visually distinguish itself
When hovering over the calendar entry, the hover text will indicate the new proposed time
All invitee actions will still be available so that an invitee can modify the response
Auto processing
A preference has been added to turn on invitee list updates and auto processing information updates. This preference can also be set via a policy.
When the option When I add or remove meeting invitees, update other participants is checked, all participants are notified when adding or removing invitees. This is sent as an informational update to the meeting. Be aware that in some cases of repeating meetings, enabling this can result in multiple updates being sent in order to maintain data.
Enabling Automatically process meeting updates and apply changes to meetings, will automatically apply any non-time change updates to accepted meetings. This removes the step of having to update the calendar from the inbox, or having to open the calendar entry to update it. This will not apply to reschedules. A reschedule will still require you to accept or decline it.
Copy Into
The Copy Into feature is very helpful when you want to create a message or To Do from an existing calendar entry. This can also be done to create a calendar entry from an existing message. To do this, select the calendar entry either from the Calendar view or the side bar and right-click the entry. This will keep all of the information from the calendar entry and add it to the message.
Personalize your To Do settings
Just as you can sort your Inbox view, you can also sort your to-dos by priority, due date, category, assigner, or assignee. Click on the column and drag-and-drop it to the order you prefer.
To do items can be displayed or hidden on your calendar. Navigate to File | Preferences, click on Calendar and To Do, and then click on Display. Click on Views and then select or clear Display To Do Entries.
Select Display overdue To Do items on the current day. Otherwise the to-dos remain displayed on their due dates.