As a member of the support team who generally does Lotus Notes
issues, I kept running into stupid, stupid Lotus Notes WTF's. Only
recently have I started writing them down as a method of venting.
Note:
I work at a large company with many different satellite links that make
some of these WTF's more obvious then normal. Many links respond above
1000ms ping and have a poor throughput.
The release of Lotus Notes
(8.5.3, October 2011) brought a brand new feature: The ability to be
notified about receiving new email by "Sliding in a Summary", a
notification that rolls in at the bottom right of the screen, then rolls
out. Revolutionary, right? Pretty sure that wasn't done more then a
Previously, the only options were a pop-up for Every. Single. Email.
that would steal focus from your current program (Lotus Notes could not
be used until the popup was dismissed, See Multitasking), or no
notification at all.
- If you're using a Local Replica, it
doesn't work. You can still enable the option, but you won't get a
notification. Normal local replicas work off synchronizing off a
schedule (say, every 5 minutes it will download new mail and upload
objects in the outbox). Managed local replicas however work from push
notification, so when you receive a new email on the server, the mail is
pushed to your local replica's inbox, which receives it instantly...
Yet the notification still doesn't show. Fan-fucking-tastic. Bonus WTF?
The Pop-up method works for both. Honestly, even for Lotus Notes, that's
just bad.
- The new option doesn't seem to work at all for new
emails while on a local replica, but it sure as hell works for the
Calendar (Which is also on the Local Replica), where it slides in a
summary letting you know when a Meeting/Appointment starts. Nice
feature, but the option I activated was specifically for Mail (File
-> Preferences, Mail -> Sending and Receiving), and Calendar has
no option at all for notices (None that I can see under File ->
Preferences, Calendar), and wasn't doing that before I activated the
option. So for those keeping score, the preference that specifies mail
to display a notification at the bottom right doesn't work on local
replicas, but will activate a hidden calendar feature that does work.
Your
Location hosts a ton of configuration settings to support the ability
to switch from "Work Mode" to "At Home Mode" or what-have-you. This is
accessed by clicking the Location Button at the bottom right of the
screen. Your mail file also has it's own preferences ("More" button on
mailfile -> Preferences), and ofcourse, Lotus Notes itself has its
own "master" preferences dialog(File -> Preferences), as well as user
preferences (File -> Security -> User Security). Want to change
the browser which is opened by clicking links? Enjoy trying to find it.
- Speaking
of, the setting for the Browser change is actually in the Location
document, which I would think is the last place to look for it. This
defaults to IE (On Windows), even though my default browser isn't IE.
You can't even change it to use the default browser specified by the OS.
Email
rules are created and followed in a very simple approach, and work as
you'd expect. However, deleting a rule causes problems. From what I can
guess, when you delete a rule that's set to "Enabled", it deletes the
entry for that rule, but most of the time it's still applied. So the
user continues to say, forward a copy of all emails received to another
user, even though no rule exists anymore for it. The fix? Create a new
rule, and disable it.
- Also, mailbox rules aren't applied
after creating/editing them, the mailbox needs to be closed and opened
on the users machine after creating rules for the rules to take effect.
- Just
found out something hilarious: The actual mail file rule (As in, the
scripting that processes mail to see if it matches a rule) is stored in
the user's calendar profile, completely seperate from their mail
profile.
If it cannot reach a server, it will pop up
with a really good error message explaining the problem and briefly
telling the user exactly what to do (File->Preferences, Notes
Ports->Trace, Enter server name, Trace). If the user following those
instructions and starts a Trace operation and the Trace operation itself
cannot find the server entered, it will pop up with the same error
message.
- Despite the WTF above, the Trace operation
solves the problem 95% of the time, and is very quick. Yet IBM still
feels the user should start this process manually, instead of just
automatically testing for it in the background should a server not be
found.
- Also, the usefullness of the error message is immediantly
countered by a Multitasking issue: The error message holds all focus
for Lotus Applications. You can't use Lotus Notes while the error
message is still alive, and you can't copy the contents of the error
message out onto Notepad or something. You've just got to hit "OK",
watch the really helpful instructions fade away, then try to remember
them. Same for every other error message, but they're all useless
anyway.
Multitasking. It's been around for a while.
Lotus Notes supports it, but still can't get it right. If you
automatically schedule your mail to be archived, it will be done
automatically at that time in the background, with only the status bar
at the bottom letting you know items are being archived. Seemless and
out-of-the-way. If you try to start an archive yourself (Either by
following the rules set up, or choosing specific pieces of mail and
archiving those), Lotus notes effectively freezes, Popping up a progress
bar in an new window (The progress bar itself being a WTF), and to top
it off, Windows will start throwing "Lotus Notes is not responding"
messages at you should you try to do anything 10 seconds into the
archive, should it be a major one. After the archive is finished, it'll
resume as normal. There is no option at all to manually run an archive
operation using the background archiver. It's there, but you can't use
it.
- The exact behavior also happens to creating/syncing Replicas of Mail files/Mail-in Databases.
- Only one instance of Lotus Notes can be open at the same time per user. On it's own, this isn't a WTF, but...
- Lotus
Notes, Domino Administrator (Which is the Lotus Notes admin tool which
LN Administrator and Service Desk use), and Domino Designer (For
creating/editing Lotus Notes agents, applications...) all use the same
Windows Processes. However, the moment when one of them throws an error,
the best case scenario is all three close down. Most of the time, one
will close down from the error, and the other two will go unresponsive
as they're waiting on a Windows Process that's been closed down.
- Sharing
the same Processes/Threadpool/Whatever also has a Significant drawback:
If I'm archiving manually or Replicating manually, the Designer and
Admin clients also go into non-responding. If I can't work on one, all
three freeze up. For whatever reason, Sametime, the Lotus Notes instant
Messenger, still works fine. So points there, I guess.