Lotus Notes 7

The Lotus Notes client includes a large set of new features. Details on these features are described in our previous book, Upgrading to Lotus Notes and Domino 7, from Packt Publishing. This section takes a quick review of many of these new features.

You can now, with a single click, close all open windows. Also, you can save the state of your work. Use this ability to save the window state for Lotus Notes to remember where you were working by permanently setting the window state to the currently opened windows.

Notes now offers the ability to be prompted when you send a message with no subject:

There are new client follow-up actions to help with messaging tracking and workflow. (This displays with the right mouse button.)

There are new mail rules for spam management. For those looking for a quick status on digital message signatures and encryption, there are new status bar icons that will display this status. And there are improved workspace wizards.

One of the best new client features is the ability to automatically save your work. This can be really be helpful in the event that your computer crashes and/or has a power loss. This feature will save the work so that you can retrieve it when the Lotus Notes client starts.

With Notes 7, you can sort by subject in your mail files. This option is available in the views All Documents, Inbox, Sent, Drafts, and others. Mail threads allow you to track a set of mail messages via the lifetime of that set of messages.

Notes 7 Calendar and Scheduling (C&S) includes a new Calendar Cleanup action that helps the end-user to quickly and easily maintain calendar entries.

Also with C&S, you can now set up the online portion of the meeting to restrict attendees to only those on the invite list. You can also provide a password for an online meeting. Other enhanced C&S support includes new options for managing rooms and resources. Now end-users can specify a preferred site and a preferred list of rooms and/or resources to use when scheduling meetings.

In addition, end-users can now configure the calendar to accept a meeting, even if it conflicts with an earlier meeting.

Calendar owners can also mark messages for follow up in mail files that they manage. And they are prompted to specify where forwarded mail is saved.

How about this scenario: you found the document you want, but how can you find what folders it is listed in? You can do this now with the ability to "discover" folders. When a document is selected in the view, and the Folder | Discover Folders action is selected, a dialog box will be displayed showing which folders the selected document is in.

Lotus Notes 7 also offers enhanced presence awareness based upon Lotus Sametime. End users can now see a person's name in a document or view and determine if that person is online. Presence awareness has been added to Team Rooms, Discussions, To Do documents, Personal Name and Address Book, Rooms and Resources templates, and various C&S views.

You can also access Notes mail through the Microsoft Office XP Smart Tags. Microsoft Office Smart Tags recognize certain types of text, for example, a person's name.

Notes 7 additionally includes improved Rooms and Resources usability (including a simple form to create a reservation and the ability to transfer a reservation), and improved email archiving.