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

Preferences


There are many options that we can select to personalize Lotus Notes. Some preferences may be set on one's behalf by the company's IT department as they have a set of policies that they can set that determines almost all of the possible preferences and features that might be available. For example, the IT department can set a policy for whether or not to show the Open List as a button, or whether to show it as docked.

We can customize Lotus Notes so that it operates and displays just the way we want it to. The following is an example of some of the available preferences:

  • Basic settings that determine the look and feel of our Lotus Notes client

  • Our Mail, Calendar, To Do, and Contacts applications

  • Replication

  • Lotus Sametime

  • The IBM Lotus Symphony such as Spreadsheets (if available)

  • Activities or Websphere Portal accounts (if an organization uses them)

We have already explored some of the preferences available such as window and themes and toolbar preferences.

To access preferences, select File | Preferences. There are numerous preferences that can be set; to simplify finding a particular preference, type the name in the field at the top of the preferences dialog box as shown in the following screenshot:

An excellent preference to enable is the Document AutoSave, which is available under the Basic Notes Client Configuration option.

To enable, just check the box next to the AutoSave every field and then select the minutes. The default time is 15 minutes; in the following screenshot I have changed the time to 8 minutes.

Once enabled, Lotus Notes can automatically save documents we are working on to prevent loss of data due to a system crash or power outage.

AutoSave is available within our mail file and any other databases that have been upgraded and the AutoSave options that have been enabled.

If a crash has occurred, on restarting Lotus Notes we are prompted to recover documents; if we select Yes, we will then be prompted with the following choices:

  • Recover: This option will open the selected document and then close the dialog box.

  • Recover All: This option will open all documents listed and close the dialog box.

  • Remove: This option will remove the selected document from the AutoSave database.

  • Remove All: This will remove all documents listed from the AutoSave.

There is a manual option to recover documents. If we choose to say No to the prompt received when we first open Lotus Notes after a crash, we can at any time select the option to recover documents by selecting File | AutoSave | Recover AutoSaved Documents.