Book Image

IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 User Guide

By : Karen Hooper
Book Image

IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 User Guide

By: Karen Hooper

Overview of this book

IBM Lotus Notes is an integrated desktop client option providing security-rich e-mail and calendar capabilities with a powerful platform for collaborative business applications. Lotus Notes enables you to take your business communications to a new level efficiently, quickly and productively. Many of us use Lotus Notes in our work on a daily basis and being able to use it more efficiently and smartly will benefit our hectic work lives. This exciting user guide enables business users to master all these aspects simply and effectively.This book provides comprehensive coverage of Lotus Notes in its entirety. It is easy to follow the instructions as they come with clear explanations and screenshots. This book will introduce the important features of Lotus Notes and at the same time give business users a deeper and clearer understanding of basic functionality, providing the answers to many questions that are encountered while sending mails, using calendars, and working with Lotus Notes applications.This practical, hands-on user guide shows you how to master all of the new features of Lotus Notes 8.5. This book begins by exploring the client interface of Lotus Notes including the Open List, the Home Page, the Side Bar, as well as many other options. You will see how Sametime facilitates instant communication, and how to get the most out of it. Widgets— small applications that you can install in the Lotus Notes side bar— such as LinkedIn, Google Maps, World clocks, Wikipedia search, and more are discussed at length, enabling you to access valuable information and also customize the widgets quickly.Messaging is covered in detail, with many time saving features explored. You will learn how to manage your Contacts, and even offer access to others as required. Moving ahead, you will see how calendars can be used to manage time effectively, especially with meetings. Next you will explore Notes applications, and how to work remotely with Lotus Notes. Finally, we introduce Symphony, which is an office suite that is included in Lotus Notes. By following the practical, real-world examples, you will successfully master Lotus Notes and be able to get the most out of this diverse application.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 User Guide
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

SideBar


The sidebar is located on the right-hand side of the Lotus Notes screen. It contains some of our key applications such as calendar, Sametime (which is IBM's chat application), and our RSS Feeds as well as Widgets and Activities. The concept of the sidebar is that one can be in his/her inbox working and see on his/her right-hand side what is on the calendar today in the Day-At-A-Glance panel of the sidebar.

What is available in our sidebar is determined by what has been made available in our organization. For example, our organization may not have enabled RSS Feeds; if this is the case, we will not see the Feeds panel in the sidebar. The following is a screenshot of the sidebar. This sidebar has three panels: Feeds, Day-At-A-Glance, and Sametime Contacts.

The sidebar has three states or three ways it can be viewed—open, closed, and thin.

  • Open allows us to see all your sidebar options.

  • Closed means it is not visible. We will have to click the small white arrow shown in the next screenshot to open.

  • Thin means we see only available icons. We can click an icon to open the sidebar. The following screenshot shows the sidebar in the thin state:

Our sidebar can have the following components:

  • Sametime Contacts: Sametime is IBM's chat application. From within the sidebar, we have all the Sametime capabilities available to us such as seeing our contacts and, if they are available, being able to chat with current contacts and add or remove contacts, along with many other features. We may not see this option in the sidebar if Sametime has not been enabled in our organization. The next is a screenshot of what Sametime looks like in the sidebar. Sametime is discussed in detail in the next chapter.

  • Day-At-A-Glance: This shows the current days calendar entries such as meetings, appointments, and so on. We can use the arrows to go back or forward through the days or click in the calendar below to select a different day to view. If we double-click any of the calendar entries, it will open that entry. Alternatively we can right-click and select the Open in New Window option.

  • Feeds: This shows RSS Feeds we have subscribed to. In this section, we can also manage and add new feeds. This is explained in detail in Chapter 3, Feeds.

  • Activities: This application helps organize our documents under categories.

  • Quickr: This is a document management application that integrates with Lotus Notes.

We can change which of these applications is displayed in our sidebar. Each of the panels includes a panel menu that we can use to manipulate the panel (including floating or removing the panel), as well as context commands for the application.