How to send doclinks outside of Notes

A client of mine was in the process of migrating from Notes to Exchange (don’t ask, they really had no choice).  The migration was supposed to be pretty quick, so we didn’t bother with coexistence: just use SMTP to forward emails between systems.

They have a couple of applications, mainly a CRM system, in Lotus Notes, which send out email notifications with doclinks to documents in question.  When the email would show up in Outlook, instead of a doclink they saw plain text listing the database, the view and the document — no doclink.

I was ready to modify the app to start sending notes:// URLs instead of doclinks, but first decided to dig around in Router configuration settings.

Under the MIME – Conversion Options – Outbound tab I found a field labeled “Message content”.  It was set to “from Notes to Plain Text”.  I changed it to say “from Notes to Plain Text and HTML” (one of the available options) and, as if by miracle, Outlook users started seeing active clickable doclinks coming in from Notes.

In all our tests, the only mail platform that didn’t want to recognize clickable doclinks was Yahoo.  Otherwise — Exchange, Gmail, outside Exchange servers — everything was showing a hot doclink, which would take the user into Notes and to the right document.

A bit of Router magic saved me from changing code in an ugly app.

 

Moving on up to the Exchange side

I took the plunge.  I finally did it.  I moved.

As some folks read and reacted with disbelief on Twitter, I switched my email platform from Notes to Exchange.

We, at PSC, have been running both systems in parallel for quite some while:  Exchange for the Microsoft team, Notes for the IBM/Lotus team.  And as a Mac user, I just wanted to use Mac Mail and iCal.

Sadly, Lotus continues to take the high road when it comes to allowing people to use clients other than Notes with its Domino servers.  And Exchange 2010 integrates rather nicely with Apple and its native Mac apps.  I’ve been tempted to make the switch for quite some while now.  End of the year, my calendar being pretty empty, seemed like the right time to do it.

I am rather impressed how simple and uneventful the move was.  I had to setup some general mail settings (signature, refresh frequency), configure appearance and configuration of my BlackBerry, that was about it.

I used IMAP to download email from Domino into Mac Mail.  That way I still have easy access to all my messages from Notes.  Mac Mail allows me to easily move things around between accounts as does iCal and Address, making populating my newly minted Exchange account a snap.

The biggest issue I had were my contacts.  For some odd reason, Mac Address would not import all contacts exported from Notes in a VCF file.  Out of 300-some contacts, it would only import 13 – 15.  I had to resort to the magic of Outlook 2011, which imported everything perfectly and synchronized with Mac Address.

If I think about it, I’ve never ever used anything other than Notes for email in a corporate environment.  We’ll see how this experiment (pardon, “move”) works out for me.  I yet might switch to Outlook 2011.

One thing I miss already is the ability to be prompted whether I want to save a copy of the message in my Sent folder.  Not happy about my Sent folder filling up with silly 1-line responses.  Anybody knows if Mac Mail can be configured to prompt?

 

It’s the same old song and dance…

And once again, my clients, long time Lotus Notes users, are talking about moving to Exchange.  Their reasons is the same old song and dance: we hate Notes; our users hate Notes; we don’t use Notes for anything but email, so why keep it; we don’t use any other IBM products; nobody uses Notes anymore…  Etc., etc., etc.  I can probably continue for a while.  Ed [Brill], you already know about both of these places, we’re talking.

Why is it that around here, in Midwest, Lotus Notes is a perpetual uphill battle in the SMB arena?  There may not be any real business value in migrating, no ROI to speak of, but people still migrate.  The greatest ROI is possibly a very intangible one — happy users.  Organizations appear to be willing to spend lots of dollars just to avoid hearing for the umpteenth time, “Why are we using Notes”?