IBM just released lotus notes 8.5.3, available from IBM Passport Advantage website.
This is the new features of lotus notes 8.5.3
Lotus Notes 8.5.3 delivers significant enhancements to support social businesses and help users get their work done fast, for example:
- Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.3 includes entitlement to the IBM Connections files and profiles components adding significant capabilities to help clients become a social business
- Enhanced new mail notification which optionally provides a pop up preview (containing both sender and subject) of new mail messages as they arrive.
- Improved sorting on email subject content that ignores the “Re:” and “Fw:” prefix, from reply & forward respectively, providing a more accurate sorting of your data.
- A new option to search by sender or subject available when you right click an email.
- Optionally leave countered meetings on your calendar. Allow countered meetings to show up in a unique color, with the time the meeting was originally scheduled for as well as maintaining the ability to act on the original calendar invite and with hover text indicating the new proposed time.
- Optionally notify existing invitees when adding or removing attendees from an existing meeting, informing them of the change and updating the invitee list on their calendar invitation, as well as other options which negate the need for a user to process any meeting updates for anything other than a change in time, eg. a reschedule.
- Significant improvements to recent contacts, allowing end users more control over who gets added to recent contacts and improved data integrity.
- Geographic and time zone information is be displayed in the business card.
- Apple Mac usability improvements for e-mail gestures include the ability to drag one or grouped files to the Lotus Notes icon on your dock, and a new mail message will be created with those files attached.
- Embedded IBM Sametime is upgraded to V8.5.1 with an incremental installer to IBM Sametime 8.5.2, and embedded IBM Lotus Symphony is upgraded to V3.0.
- Additional platform support includes RHEL 6.0 Desktop, Citrix XenApp 6.0, and enhanced 64-bit toleration for Microsoft Windows.
- Added ability to remove signature file from a thread
What is interesting is that is now lotus notes can sort the subject easily, without problem.
Prior this version, user have difficulties to sort emails based on their subject, because the “Re: ” and the “Fw: ” are treated differently. Outlook users do not have this kind of problem, but now lotus notes client too 
. Better late than never.
Hope that IBM much more open mind to user inputs than before.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Recent Contacts, the goods and the bads
Personally, I like the new feature of lotus notes 8, Recent Contacts. Where as default, it will automatically added any names (or email addresses) to Recent Contacts, where than user can use it to look up email address. Later, names in the Recent Contacts can be moved to Contacts if you like.
For me, it saves time. I do not have to add manually the sender to my contacts, and it only able to add sender, not all people in the To or CC. Now, with Recent Contacts, all the To and CC names (or email addresses) will automatically added to my Recent Contacts list, and saves a lot of time.
But, there are users who do not like this feature, specially users who like to have their contacts clean and manage able, they only want to add names to their contacts only if it important, while Recent Contacts will automatically add all of them.
Luckily, Recent Contacts have many options, you can choose it in Contacts preferences.
You can choose that Recent Contacts DO NOT automatically added:
- Any names to Recent Contacts, for short to disable the Recent Contacts feature.
- CC and BCC names to Recent Contacts, so it only add names in the TO field.
- Names from emails that I receive (Only add names from email that I send), that already explain it.
So, for users who really hate this feature, they can simply disable it.
One of the annoying thing about this feature, it will add invalid or junk names (or email addresses) to Recent Contacts, specially when users received spam emails with a lot of email addresses in the TO and CC fields.
Do you want to go with this features or not, is your choice. I personally like this feature, and once in a while clean up the Recent Contacts for junk names.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Things that makes Lotus Notes crash
Lotus notes is a very good software, but still a very good software can
have bugs that may cause the software to run unstabale, or incompatibility issues with other softwares or even with hardwares.
After searched the web, contacted with ibm engineers, I have note down
several things that can makes lotus notes to crash.
FYI, I’m using lotus notes, 8.5, 8.5.1 and 8.5.1 FP4.
If you have found that your lotus notes crash many times in a day, you can check the list.
Anti Virus
Try to disable your anti virus, if necessary remove it. I know its
extreme, but the are some reports that certain anti virus not very
compatible with lotus notes. If you found disabling anti virus solved the problem, maybe you need to check other anti virus that much more friendly with lotus notes.
Embedded Mime Email
Enable the disable embedded mime email. Its reported that embedded
mime email can crash lotus notes. Thanks to Ying Le Jia for the hint.
Basic Version
Switch to basic version instead of standard version. The Standard version have many features with eclipse, but with more features, it have more possibilities to crash.
Bottom Preview
Use bottom preview rather then right preview. Its also reported that
right preview pane may cause lotus notes to crash. (anybody can confirm this?)
Adobe Reader 9
If you using adobe reader 9, try to download it to adobe reader 8. Its
reported that after user upgraded their adobe reader to version 9,
their lotus notes start to behave unstable. Thanks to Gunawan TW for the hint.
This list is not completed, will never be completed, because there are still many things that can cause lotus notes (or many other softwares) to crash.
Popularity: 10% [?]
Evaluate, the bridge between Lotus Script and @Formula
In lotus notes programming, I usually use Formula for simple program and Lotus Script for more complex program. I try to avoid many lines of Formula, because it difficult to read and not structured.
But, Formula have many method that Lotus Script do not have, like @Implode and @Explode. Even we can write our ownLotus Script function to do that, it just a waste of time and energy.
But, we have Evaluate in Lotus Script.
Evaluate function is one of many of my favorite functions, because it able to run Formula and than pass the result of that Formula intoLotus Script variable (variant).
This is the syntax of Evaluate
variant = notesSession.Evaluate( formula$, doc )
We can use Evaluate function to pass the result from any kind of Formula, from simple formula like @UserName to more complex formula like @Implode.
Recently, I use Evaluate in my program, to shorten the length of theLotus Script.
I need to calculate the difference in days between two date, but only in business days ( so saturday and sunday will not be counted also holidays).
Formula already have the function to calculate that, so I don’t need to create another lengthly Lotus Scriptfunction just to calculate that. I use the formula instead, so I need the Evaluate function.
varDay=Evaluate(“@BusinessDays(@Date(datFinal);@Date(@Now);1;datPublicHoliday)”,doc)
Remember that Evaluate function return value is variant.
With Evaluate, Formula and Lotus Script can coexist together.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Send email notification with LotusScript
Lotus Notes and Domino is not only about email, it’s more than that. One of it’s feature it workflow, where people can create workflow application faster an d easier than any other application out there.
One of the important thing in workflow is email notification, to let users know that they have one job to do, or just simply notification.
Example, if a staff create a leave request and when he or she submit the request, his or her manager will get an email notification about the request.
I have this one of my favorite sub program to create an email notification, well I named it “CreateEmailNotification” .
If you like, you can use it for free. Just copy the sub program in one or new Script Library.
This is the sub program.
=====Start of Sub Program
Sub CreateMailNotification(doc As notesdocument, strSendTo As Variant, strSubject As String, strCopyTo As Variant)
Dim session As notessession
Dim db As notesdatabase
Dim docMail As notesdocument
Dim rtitem As Variant
Set db = doc.parentdatabase
Set session = db.Parent
Set docMail=db.createdocument
Set rtitem=docMail.CreateRichTextItem(“Body”)
If strSendTo(0)=”" Then Exit Sub
‘=====set mail
docMail.Form = “Memo”
docMail.From = session.UserName
docMail.Principle = session.UserName
docMail.SendTo = strSendTo
If Isarray(strCopyTo) Then
If strCopyTo(0)<>”" Then
docMail.CopyTo = strCopyTo
End If
Else
If strCopyTo<>”" Then
docMail.CopyTo = strCopyTo
End If
End If
docMail.Recipients = strSendTo
docMail.Subject = strSubject
docMail.PostedDate = Now
‘=====set body field
Call rtitem.AppendText(“Please click this doclink to see more details about the status ” + ” “)
Call rtitem.AppendDocLink( doc, “click to open document”)
Call rtitem.AddNewLine( 2 )
‘=====send mail
Call docMail.send(False)
End Sub
=====End of Sub Program
Feel free to do some modification if necessary.
You can call it from any lotusscript with simple line like this.
call Call CreateMailNotification (doc, doc.nmSendTo, strSubject,doc.nmCopyTo)
Don’t forget to put use “Script Libary Name” first.
Popularity: 14% [?]