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
