Using Outlook with Domino instead of Lotus Notes

In some previous posts (here and here) I blogged about having to use Lotus Notes at work and some of the things I didn’t like about the client.

Well today I had a go at installing Microsoft’s Outlook Connector for Domino. The connector can be downloaded from here: http://www.microsoft.com/DOWNLOADS/details.aspx?FamilyID=8ebbba59-5f17-4e52-8980-c4f0dfa92d65&displaylang=en

Having installed the connector, I loaded up Outlook and proceeded to add a new email account (Tools > E-mail Accounts > Add a new e-mail account > Additional Server Types > Microsoft Office Outlook Connector for IBM Lotus Domino). You must have the Lotus Notes client application installed and configured to use the connector, so the connector will automatically get the settings.

This didn’t work for me, giving me a message about the service not being able to start. As always with errors, I did a Google search and found many posts where people said that they went through uninstalling each update to Office 2003 since SP2 (note this connector is not designed for Office 2007).

This seemed long winded and should be my last resort.

Eventually I found another blog that told me to make sure the path to the Lotus Notes executable was in the PATH environment variable. On my system this was no longer there. So I added it (Right-click Computer > Properties > Advanced system settings > Environment Variables > Add it to System variables).

On my Vista system my path was C:\lotus\notes, which contained all the DLLs and the nlnotes.exe executable.

I then loaded Outlook again and it picked up my settings. Sorted!

I can’t open the Shared Calendar yet, but I’ll let you know when I have that working also!

Neil

Minimise Applications to the Task Tray in Windows

One of the things I liked about Outlook was that I could leave the application running but have it minimised to the task tray in Windows when not in use. I’d be informed of new emails etc. as normal and then could double click the applications icon to restore it.

Now we are using Lotus Notes 6.5 at work, it annoys me that we have to have the application take up space on my taskbar all the time!

I found there is a utility called ‘Lotus Notes Minder’ that will sit in the task tray and check emails as Outlook does. However, when a new email arrives and I click the button to view the email, when it starts Lotus Notes it always asks for a password. This is highly annoying, and our IT Support team are currently unable to solve this problem.

So I searched for a solution and discovered this application TrayIt! that will allow you to minimise any application to the tray area!

I can now leave Notes open and get similar functionality to Outlook. Not ideal, but it works!

Today we change from Microsoft Exchange to Lotus Notes at work…

So today begins the change over from using Microsoft Exchange with Outlook 2003 as its client to a Lotus Notes environment at my place of work.

Having used and administered Exchange for many years I really like it. Add to it the ability to sync over-the-air with devices such as the iPhone and I can’t see why we’d change. It can’t discuss the reasons here, but we are changing.

We are using version 6.5 of the client, and yes I know there is a newer version, but we have to use this version.

So what do I think of Lotus Notes 6.5?

I really don’t like it. It looks outdated for a start. I might as well run it in a Windows 9x client as the improvements of the UI I get with Windows Vista and eventually Windows 7 are wasted. Nothing seems obvious either… I want to select multiple emails (say to delete or move to another folder), so I held down the CTRL key and clicked the emails with my mouse. Did it do what I wanted? No! I eventually worked out how to do this, and thankfully the CTRL + A key combination worked to select all emails.

I’m sure I’ll learn to slowly get used to Notes and its different method of working, but if the decision was left to me, I’d choose Exchange every time!