My Top 10 annoying quirks or features of Lotus Notes 8

Notes/Domino 8 Forum

Subject: My Top 10 annoying quirks or features of Lotus Notes 8

Feedback Type: Comment

Product Area: Notes 8 Client

Technical Area: Open Mic

Platform: Windows XP client

Release: Notes and Domino 8 - GOLD

Reproducible: Not applicable

OK Maybe there's a better place for this information, and maybe elements of the content below have been explored in this forum before, but I've been keeping a log of the things that do in fact bug me about Notes8 and thought I'd share them with you to see if anyone else feels the same or has had similar experiences.

1. Selection of documents

I used to delete documents by turning on the preview pane and then cycling through the inbox, as I came to a document I wanted to delete I would press space or click to place a tick in the selection margin.

With the new ND8 behaviour, once I've selected one document, a CTRL + [Click} operation on subsequent documents does not preview the newly selected documents in the preview pane, which inevitably slows my progress

2. Filing of documents from the sent folder

I've been a big user of the sent folder, I file messages occasionally and then delete (remove) them from the sent folder. The same process works in ND8 but there's an annoying anomaly. To reproduce this:
a) Select more than one document in the sent view (start with adjacent ones)
b) File these documents in a folder
c) Once filed, both messages remain selected or highlighted by the blue bar
d) Hit the delete key
e) Notice that only one of the highlighted documents has been removed (NB I use always remove as a preference)

3. Opening documents in a new Window

I can no longer right click on a Tab (window) and select Open this in a New Window. This was great behaviour in ND7 as I used to use it to Alt+Tab between my calendar and our Notes based Timesheet application. The preferences allow me to force all items to open in a new window so why can't we have the old behaviour too.

3. (a) While I am on the subject, why can we not have a simple way to navigate through tabs i.e. with Windows applications its ALT+Tab so why not do something like CTRL+Tab in Notes

4. Multiple mail addresses

I've raised it before but it still bugs me that I cannot chose which of the many internet addresses for a contact that I mail to. In the first instance I want the Send message / Schedule meeting actions in the Contacts DB to turn into dynamic drop downs containing all the email addresses in the highlighted contact record (a pop up will do the job if necessary when clicking the "Write Memo to" option).

In the second instance a preference to show the ambiguous name dialogue when more than one email address is found for a recipient whilst writing a memo.

5. The open database dialogue.

It used to be possible to navigate the open database dialogue box with the keyboard only. You used to hit CTRL+O, tab to the db/folder list and drill down into the folders. If you went to the wrong folder at the bottom of the listing was a ". ." symbol that would take you up one level. This has been replaced with an icon next to the Server field - looks great and is all in keeping with MS Windows, but IBM seem to have overlooked that MS have implemented the backspace key for those of us that dislike excessive reliance on the mouse - I do suffer from RSI from time to time.

6. Embedded Sametime functionality

(a) No option/pane for Primary Contacts
(b) Emoticon pallette & preferences not shared between Notes and actual Sametime client
(c) The system tray icon for Notes Sametime does not bring Lotus Notes to the foreground unlike the one for the real Sametime client
(d) Connections pallette from real Sametime client does not appear in the Notes Sametime sidebar
(e) IMPORTANT - when a dialogue box is open in Notes and a Sametime chat session is invoked by a colleague you cannot activate the Sametime chat window while the Notes dialogue is active.

Moreover, you cannot minimise the chat window allowing you to save the preferences/values that may be newly entered into the dialogue box. All you can do is hit Esc lose your changes (close dialogue) and then minimise the chat window. We need to be able to Alt-tab between Notes and Sametime windows.
I actually find myself running the full ST client to avoid this annoying behaviour.

7. The Open Button

I really like the find option on the open list, though I struggle to get it to find databases for me occasionally However I also really like my Open list to be docked to the left of the screen. yet when I do this I lose the find capability. Can we not have an option to dock the list but retain the Open button so that when clicked the only item presented is the Find box

8. Double Right click

In HTML emails, you can only double right click the header to get out of the document
Double right click does not seem to work on the Mail/Calendar or Contacts application (only when documents are open) - Why is this?

9. The switch to naming a "Database" as an "Application"

OK so IBM want to make it less database centric, I understand this, but for the sake of backwards compatibility it would have been nice to keep the keyboard accelerators working the same, (at least for a release or two)
ALT + F--> D -->... has been ingrained into my psyche over many years and I'm suffering withdrawal.

Have even looked at swapping the keyboard mapping for the T and D keys. Funny thing is though, why have IBM not changed the Properties dialogue box. The dropdown still switches between Document and Database - this is inconsistent

10. Speed and Performance

Are there any further speed improvements in the pipeline, it does seem to be a very slow client, and I'm running 1.5Gb RAM, admittedly its a 2yr old 1.8Ghz Pentium M processor, but even so the operation seems to take ages.

Interestingly though while I am working on a local replica performance is much better. Its difficult to quantify but it seems to me that Notes 7 performance with local replicas was reasonably quick, and also when opening a server based replica it was pretty good too. However whilst I can open a local replica with Notes 8 and the performance is 'more or less' acceptable, opening a server based replica can take significantly longer than the same operation with Notes 7.

Will this get better with a Domino 8 server estate (our mail servers are still Domino 7)

Feedback number MPET77WGYZ created by ~Lorraine Chuveluskietsi on 10/12/2007

Status: Open
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