"I believe the problem is that the people who know (technically) are very rarely anywhere near high enough in the organisations to prevent these decisions being made. Existing customers need just as much (if not more) attention than new or potential customers. Surely it would help if IBM Lotus would start sticking their heads back in the corporate doors and asking "How are things going here?" - they just might be surprised at the response."
Laurette Rynne

Apart from all the other reasons why I have to support Laurette (you know - husband, wife.. it's a tangled web), this is my experience too - it just seems like there are far too many cases where big companies (maybe not BIG on the global scale, but certainly big in the Australian market) are moving from Lotus Notes with little or no resistance from IBM.

Some of the reasons I've heard to justify the move are quite ridiculous, where a little research and certainly a little pre-sales would have possibly changed the decision.

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ever wanted to do this?

Set docCollection = New NotesDocumentCollection()

well... most of you will probably have come across one of the shortfalls relating to the NotesDocumentCollection data type - there is no "New" function to instantiate a new instance. If so, you've probably seen the previous examples of how people have created a new collection - by doing a database search for a string which you know doesn't exist - we think we've got a nicer way of getting an empty NotesDocumentCollection.

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Just an interesting little one to be aware of...

When the user is about to send an email, we present them with a dialog box showing the address information and content of the email for confirmation. Naturally, this dialog box is set as ReadOnly as we don't allow them to make changes in the preview window. Now, here's the tricky part - if you set the dialog box as ReadOnly, it seems that you can't use the OK/Cancel button combination - Notes only presents you with the OK button.

In our case, that doesn't quite cut the mustard as we want the user to be able to confirm (OK) or cancel out of sending the email message. So - to get around the "feature", just make sure that you show the form in Edit Mode, but with a form full of computed fields so the user can't make any changes.

ok.. on the back of recent news reports where they've translated the bible into "sms language", and literary works such as Hamlet, here's a pop quiz - which note would you prefer from a person you employ/communicate with/work for?

(a)
Thanks for your email
(b)
thks 4 yr eml

personally, I'm with (a) - at least I don't think it's a police report on the number plate of a stolen car. But, before you do the equivalent of screwing up this page and throwing it into the "fuddy-duddy-rant" bin, just consider what the impact of this might be in 25 years time.

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If you've been using templates which have shared actions, then you'll be aware of a couple of shortfalls with Lotus Notes.

First - you can't have shared actions from more than one source - you get a single set, all of which are sourced from a template, or not.

You can't have:
- some shared actions from one template, and some from another
- some shared actions from a template and some application specific actions

well - actually, that's not entirely true - you can have the 2nd situation, but you can't have the actions updated from the template in the future - you would lose your local shared actions when the template changes.

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So - if you have been using form formulas, then I guess you'll be used to the little things that happen to you during development that throw you around like a wet fish in a bucket.

The one that I particularly don't like (although I admit it would be really handy if I had the occasion that I wanted it to work the way that it does), is that when I edit a document that has been opened using a Form Formula, the new form name is stored in the Form field. Then, later, when I open the document from a view without a Form Formula, it opens with a form different to the default form that I would have expected - it opens with the one that was specified in the form formula.

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what the ..?

I know - it's not like I work on a farm, in a road gang, as a navvy or anywhere in the outdoors or something. I work in an office - the traditional, cubical-styled, low-barrier, open-plan office that I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with (if you're not - half your luck!).

So... what's all this about the whistling then?

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