Go to page: 1 2 

Printer Friendly Version

If you've read some of my previous articles, you will know that Lotus Notes database applications are based on templates. A template is the skeleton of the database. In other words, it's all of the features and functionality of the application without any of the data. In fact, Notes keeps the data and design completely separate within the database.

This is a powerful aspect of Notes that allows you to completely change the features, functionality and look of an application without disturbing the data.

Because of this, pretty much everything in Lotus Notes is customizable by a developer. Without much work, you can add a view or change button behavior and then roll out those changes to the entire company within minutes.

Recent Intranet Journal Articles

Intranet Journal Product of the Year Awards SharePoint Governance, Part 1 ISYS Lauded, Open Text Humming Along Oracle Snares Stellent for Content Management FREE IT Management Newsletters bITa Planet CIO Update Intranet Journal Update Datamation IT Management Careers Datamation IT Management Update Grid Computing Planet HTML E-Security Planet Text E-Security Planet HTML DRM Watch HTML

One of the things that almost every company likes to tweak a bit is the standard mail template.

Although the mail template is robust, some cool features tend to be hidden in menus, and some default behaviors of buttons might not be to your company's liking. If you don't have time to customize the mail template yourself, OpenNTF.org has a template for you.

The OpenNTF Mail Experience

The OpenNTF Mail Experience is an alternate mail template that has many of the most common enhancements that businesses find themselves coding. The screenshots below show the standard email menu on top, and the OpenNTF mail menu below it:

You'll immediately notice that the OpenNTF template has quite a few more options than the standard template. The developers have taken some features and made them easier to find, and added some views that help people manage their mail more efficiently. I'll go through some of the additions you'll want to use right away.

Size it up

First off, if your company has email quotas and size limits, the OpenNTF template includes Usage statistics. For example, in the above screenshot, you can see that I'm using 35 percent of my 1000MB quota. This is something that administrators will like as it keeps those limits in the minds of the users. In the same vein, the Size column in all of the email views has everything broken down into KB or MB increments. The standard template that ships with Notes has that column listed with no labels and actually shows it in bytes. So a 7KB file shows up in the standard template as 7,000 and in the OpenNTF template as 7KB. It seems like a small issue, but users understand the sizes much better when it's spelled out.

Lotus Notes in general has a very robust search mechanism built in. However, many users don't realize that the search only looks in your current folder or view. The only way to search your entire database is to search the All Documents view. The OpenNTF template makes this very easy with the inclusion of the Find Memo link. Clicking Find Memo automatically switches to the All Documents view and opens the search box (which is also hidden in the standard template by default.) This makes it much easier for users to search their mail file, and cuts down on the number of support calls you may have to endure.

In the past I've talked about replication and what a great feature it is in Notes. The OpenNTF template allows you to replicate your mail quickly without ever leaving your mail file. A simple Send/Receive link is included and allows a user to kick off replication simply by clicking the link. No need to switch to the replicator and hit the start button.

Go to page: 1 2 

Printer Friendly Version