A Contractors World

LOTUS NOTES

Going Mobile

If you use Notes from a laptop and connect from a variety of locations, including disconnecting entirely, here are a
few features that will make your life much easier:- Use Location Documents
These are docs, stored in your local Address Book, that specify most of the details about your connection and your
Notes configuration, including Time Zone and replication schedule. You may need different settings, depending on the
circumstances.- Use Connection Documents If your company has a firewall, it may be necessary to
specify a particular address for your Notes server that is different than the address it uses when you're connected on the LAN. Connection Documents help sort this out. You can also specify that a particular Connection Document only be used with a certain Location Document.- Finally, you can also set Notes to prompt you for which
Location Document to use each time Notes starts. To do this, Choose File| Preferences| User Preferences| Startup
Options| "Prompt for location."

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Take Me To Your Ruler

Knowing how to use the ruler is part of using a Rich-Text field effectively. To display the ruler while in a Rich-Text field, choose View|Ruler or press Ctrl+R.

The left margin has two primary components. The slider on the top of the ruler shows where the first line will begin,
and the slider on the bottom shows where the second and following lines in a paragraph will indent (wrap). The
little tab just below the bottom one will move the two sliders in a locked manner. Does anyone recall what a
typewriter is?

Further, you can add one or more tab stops anywhere on the ruler, by simply clicking in the ruler. A right click will
allow you to specify which type of tab, from the following choices: left, right, centered, decimal. Click on a tab
again, and it goes away.

Using these features of the ruler, the text in a Rich-Text field can be formatted to provide maximum impact, if you're that type of communicator. Don't hold back -- rulers rule!

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Rich-Text Goodies

As promised a few tips ago, here are some things Rich-Text can do to enhance your communications.- Using a Highlighter. After entering text, you can use the Highlighter feature (Text|Highlighter|Use) to make text appear as if it has been marked with a yellow, blue or pink highlighter. This makes the text REALLY stand out!- Adding a Link. You can make any ord hot link to a Web site or another Notes document. Highlight the word you want to be the link, choose Create|Hotspot|Link Hotspot, and then enter the URL into the space provided. You can also have a URL or a link to a Notes document, view or database in the clipboard and paste that directly in using the little paste icon.Notes' highlighter and hotspot features can be used
anywhere Rich-Text is allowed, including the main content area of an email. Bear in mind these may not be visible to non-Notes users.

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Just A Few From The View

You may know that you can print a document from the View by selecting it, but you can also print multiple documents by adding them to the selection. To add multiple documents to the selection, simply click in the "selection margin" and you should see a check mark appear next to the selected document.

Once a few documents are selected, choose Print. You then get a dialog box where you can choose to print the View or
the Selected Documents. Printing the View will print one line per selected document, just the data that shows in the
View, as well as the column headers. Printing the Selected Documents will print the entire document for all documents
selected. If the document content is short, you may choose to use a line to separate the documents instead of printing
each small document on a separate sheet of paper. Hug a tree!

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Deja Vu All Over Again

Making a calendar entry (even meeting invitations) appear as a Repeating Entry is a very useful feature of Notes
Calendar and Scheduling. This is very handy for weekly departmental meetings or daily reminders to swap a backup
tape.

To make any calendar entry repeat, select the "Repeats" option next to the date. Then choose how you want it to
repeat, what to do if a date hits a weekend, and how long to repeat.

The repeat options include Daily, Every "nth" Day, Weekly, Monthly by Date, Monthly by Day, Yearly, or Custom (you
just enter the dates).

Be careful not to get carried away, though. Repeating calendar entries are notorious for causing issues with Palm Pilot synchronization and permanent meeting time modifications. A good rule of thumb is not to set the repeating events for more than about three months.

- Dave Campbell

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Baby, You're A Rich Man

One of the more interesting (and fun) data types found in Notes forms (including the Memo in email) is Rich-Text. A Rich-Text field is designed to hold things like formatted text, file attachments, pictures, sounds and special Notes objects like sections and pop-up text -- much more than just simple text or numbers.

You can tell when the cursor is in a Rich-Text field in several ways. First, the Text Style and Size indicators on the left side of the status bar should show some values, such as "Courier New 10." Secondly, none of the choices in the Create and Text pull-downs will be grayed-out. Finally, you should be able to change the format of new text by using the standard Windows keyboard shortcuts, such as Ctrl+B for bold and Ctrl+I for italics.

There will be more to say about Rich-Text in tips to follow, but for now, look for these signs of the Rich-Text field data type the next time you're in the Body field of a standard email memo.

- Dave Campbell

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The Real You

Have you ever noticed that some emails in your InBox show a sender's "real name" and others show the sender's email
address? As you know, a proper email address has three parts: the local name, the @ symbol and the domain. But there is an additional part called the "real name" or "regular name." This part is displayed in the From column of your Inbox; if it's not found, the sender's email address is displayed instead.

You can add this "regular name" to your outgoing messages so that your messages display your full name, not your
cryptic email address, in the recipient's Inbox.

Your "From" address was covered in a previous tip, "Identity Crisis," where you learned that you could have it stored in your Location document. (You can find this and other past tips in the Lotus Notes archives.) To add your "regular name" to your address, edit your Location document (Edit Current from Location info in Status Bar) and make these changes:

Enclose your REAL email address in angle brackets, and put your "regular name" in front of it.

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Identity Crisis

Your email address, as seen by those who receive email from you, is determined each time you send a message, by the
following rules:

First Lotus looks in your current Location document. If it finds an address in the "Internet mail address" field, it uses it. If nothing is found there, it looks in the "Internet address" field in your Person document in your home server's Domino Directory, and then for an email address in the Shortname field. Finally, it will create the address automagically, typically like this: First_Last/OU1/OU2%NotesDomain@InternetDomain.com.

So, you are in ultimate control of your "From" address by properly populating the "Internet mail address" field of the current Location document. This field is NOT used to route mail to you, so change it only with consent of your Administrator! You could mistakenly change it so that replies to your email would never get back to you.

- Dave Campbell

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HOME, HOME ON THE PAGE

By default, the first thing you see when you start Notes is the Welcome Page. This is easily modified to fit your style, but your style may demand that Notes start up in an entirely different place, such as a Task Assignment or a Discussion database. No problem. Any item on the Bookmark Bar can be set to be the Home Page, which is what is opened when Notes first starts.

To get an item to the Bookmark Bar, see the Archives for "Belly Up To The Bar." (Short version: drag-and-drop from the Task Bar) Once your item is on the Bookmark Bar, just right-click on the icon and select the bottom choice, "Set Bookmark as ome Page." This will immediately make that link your Home Page -- the first thing you see the next time you start Notes.

- Dave Campbell
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MAKE YOUR OWN SMARTICONS

Notes allows you to create your own SmartIcons. To do this, open Notes and select File| Tools| SmartIcons, which opens the SmartIcons
dialog box. Click the Edit Icon button, then select an icon. Enter a description for the icon, then click the
Formula button. Enter a formula and click OK. Remember that SmartIcons are there to save steps in relatively simple actions, so you'll want to keep the formula simple. When you're done, click OK to close the Formula box, then click Done to close the Edit SmartIcons box. Finally, click OK to close the SmartIcons box.

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SUBCATEGORISE

Subcategories allow you to add yet another level of organization to your Notes views. These are indented under the main category, and you can add up to 32 levels of subcategories. Subcategories allow you to group similar documents within a main category. For example, say you have a category that contains documents related to the Harrison account. Some of these documents are related to sales, some
to manufacturing, others to distribution, and so on. In order to create subcategories for these, access the view and select the documents you want to subcategorize. Select Actions| Categorize, which opens the Categorize dialog box. Enter the new category name in the New Categories field, with the subcategory name following the main name, separated by a backslash -- for example, Harrison\Sales, Harrison\Manufacturing, Harrison\Distribution. Click OK to close the box. The subcategories will now appear indented under the main categories.

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SORT DOCUMENTS BY CATEGORY

If you don't need to see the document titles in a view, you can show only the categories and subcategories (if there are any). To do this, open the view, then choose View-Categories Only. However, you will notice that you can't access any documents when you have this option
selected.
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RETAIN YOUR PRIVATE VIEWS--ADMINISTRATION
In general, private views and folders replicate between workstation and server replicas of a database. This is fine in most situations, but what happens when you need to transfer a mail file or database to a different server? If you replicate the database from one server to another, you will lose private views and folders (except under certain conditions within a cluster). Initiating it from the user's replica with your ID will yield the same results.

One way to get around this problem is to copy the file at the operating system level with FTP, XCOPY, COPY, EXPLORER, and so on. When you do this, you're creating a database containing the same replica ID and all the elements of the original database, including its ACL. If you're not a network administrator, you may need the cooperation of someone who is--this procedure requires direct access to the operating system's file structure. You may also need to restart the server after copying the file to ensure consistency.

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PREVIEW PANE IN NOTES 5--DESKTOP
If you're using the Notes 5 mail template, you may have noticed it's nearly impossible to leave the preview pane on all the time. This is not really a regression for Notes; rather, it's the result of using a frame set to open the database. In previous versions of the mail file, you weren't really telling it to open the preview pane automatically. The database was just remembering that you had the preview pane open when you last closed it. Since Notes tells the new template to open a frame set when launching the mail file, that template doesn't have a way to know that you'd like the preview pane to open as well.

A new preference setting may be available in the future, but for the time being you must use a workaround if this matters to you. The workaround is to open your mail file, select File, Database, Properties, and go to the Launch tab (a little rocket icon). Now
choose Restore As Last Viewed By User in the When Opened In The Notes Client list. Close and reopen your mail file and open the preview pane. Close and reopen your mail file again to see if the preview pane opens with it. Note: If your mail file is your default home page, this probably won't work. It also won't work when you click on the Mail file bookmark, since that bookmark reaches out to the frame set when you click on it.

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RUNAWAY FULL-TEXT INDEXES--ADMINISTRATION
If you're an administrator and you're keeping an eye on the size of full text indexes on your server, you may notice that some have become extraordinarily large. By large, I mean really large--up to a gigabyte or even more. At this point they may also start to create problems and might need rebuilding.

As you're investigating this issue, you should take a look at the settings used to create the indexes. If the settings include indexing
file attachments and the database has a lot of file attachments, you've probably found the reason for the runaway index. One way to solve this issue is to reduce the ACL rights of the database's users, then delete and re-create the index without including the option to index file attachments.

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NAVIGATORS ACCESSIBLE FROM THE WEB--DESIGN
If you've been using Navigators with Notes 4.x and are now using Notes 5, your Navigators may not be Web-compatible. You may not want to continue using Navigators for your Web clients, but you may not have time to develop other tools for every database.

To avoid an embarrassing error message when users enter a database set to open with a Navigator, you can quickly check to see if that Navigator is Web-compatible. Just open your database in Design mode, open the default Navigator, right-click anywhere within the Navigator, select Navigator Properties, and make sure Web Browser Compatible is checked. Save the Navigator and test it with a Web browser.

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RETRIEVE AN ATTACHMENT--DESKTOP
In an earlier tip, I mentioned how you can save replication time by not replicating file attachments. Choose this option by opening your replication page and selecting Receive Summary And 40KB Of Rich Text for the database in question; then replicate it.

The replication process will exclude file attachments for any new documents replicated for this database. The problem is whether you need to resend a document if you want to retrieve the attachments later. As one of our readers pointed out, the simple way to retrieve an attachment later is to make sure you're online, highlight the document with the attachment you want, and click Actions, Retrieve Entire Document from the Notes menu.

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RESTRICT FULL TEXT INDEXES--ADMINISTRATION
by Stan Erhart

As an administrator, you may want to prevent users from creating full text indexes. This could stem from a desire for higher service
performance, lack of hard drive space, or a number of other issues. If you want this option, here are two ways to initiate it:

To prevent Full Text Indexing on the entire server, add the following line to your server's notes.ini file:

Update_No_Fulltext=1

Then select File, Tools, Server Administration, Database Tools, and from the Tool drop-down list, select Full Text Index. In the Database Names box, select the databases in question and delete the Full Text Indexes.

To allow Full Text Indexing on the server but not allow users to initiate it, change mail and other database access in Access Control Lists (ACL) To Editor, then delete the Full Text Indexes as described above. Your Admin staff can still create and manage Full Text Indexes if they have Designer or Manager access to the databases.

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MODIFY THE EXECUTION CONTROL LIST--DESKTOP
If you receive the Execution Security Alert dialog box in the Notes R5 client, this means Notes is attempting to do something your security settings do not allow. The first time this occurs, you should consult your Administration staff to see what their recommendations are. They
may offer to adjust ECL security for you--you should allow them to do so.

If you're on your own, you can handle the problem in a couple of ways. One is to modify your settings in a way that will allow most operations to continue. To do this, select File, Preferences, User Preferences and click the Security Options button. Highlight Default and check the operations you want to allow.

Another option is to wait for the security alert box to come up, then click Trust Signer if you know the signer of the code is someone your company trusts, such as an internal developer or a consultant. This allows you to avoid opening security in advance for anyone unfamiliar.
If you're not comfortable with the code's signer, click Abort and call your IS department.
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