I used Lotus Notes as email client for many years, starting with Notes R2 up to R6, and for the last 3 years I’ve been using Outlook 2003. Both have their pro’s and con’s. When I started using Outlook I loved the UI and the Office integration. But there are (at least) two things I miss from Notes:
1) The All view
This is the view where you see ALL your emails – recieved, sent, drafts. With this view you don’t really need your inbox, sent folder etc (though Notes have these too).
What I miss is for example when you email someone back and forth, you want to delete everything but the last email since you already keep the email history in each email. With Outlook you have to switch between the inbox and the sent folder. Of course you can’t bother to do so, so your sent folder gets full of thousands and thousands of useless emails that should have been deleted.
You can probably build this view yourself in Outlook, I did give it a quick try a year or two ago but failed. If you know how to do this please let me know…!
2) Full-text indexing
This is my all time favourite, Notes have had this ever since I started using it in R2 (at least I think so). Anyone who uses Google Desktop or Microsoft Windows Desktop Search (WDS) knows what I’m talking about. No more looking through folders and scroll thousands of emails in search for that email about that thing from that guy who’s name you can’t really remember…
The big difference is that Notes full text indexing works and is superfast. I don’t know what’s wrong with Google Desktop and Desktop Search but it just does not index all my email no matter how I rebuild indexes, reinstall and follow various other tips and tricks found on the net.
For exampel if I search for any email containing the word “logo” (of which I have many) Desktop Search just keeps telling me “Nothing found in All locations for query “logo”. While other searches seems to be working fine. It’s just unreliable which Notes full text search never was.
I haven’t looked that much at Office 2007 yet so maybe these things will be solved there (but somehow I doubt that). The thing about Office 2007 that I personally look forward to the most is the improved use of tasks in Outlook 2007, where tasks will show up on your daily calendar. If they just fix tasks in Windows Mobile Smartphone edition everything will be great 😉 (as blogged about elsewhere…)
Windows Desktop Search Add-in for Lotus Notes
Speaking of full text indexing I just saw that Microsoft released a Lotus Notes add-in for Desktop Search. It should work for Notes R5 and up but only seems to index selected Notes databases:
The Windows Desktop Search Add-in for Lotus Notes is a protocol handler that allows you to index the conent of Lotus Notes email, contacts, calendar items, and journal items stored on your computer.
Ps: Three blog posts in two days! This is a new record for me 🙂
I was going to write about my wife’s brand new Sony Ericsson Z610 which seems to be a great phone but we can’t figure out what some of the icons on the screen mean and the manual does not have a single page explaining what is going on on the screen(!) Also the external screen does not show when a new text/SMS message has arrived for more than a few seconds. After that you have to open the phone to check the internal screen to see if there were any messages while you were gone. Or maybe it’s just a setting but I cannot find it… Well, that will have to be in another post.