My current job is the 3rd position I have taken with a company that has inflicted Lotus Notes on its employees.
There is a great web site http://lotusnotessucks.4t.com/ that elaborates on many of the frustrating quirks of this fine application. I have tried to post some of my own favourite application anti-features to the site, but without success (I’m guessing that the site is full).
Here I list my 9 favourite stupid annoyances that come with Lotus Notes v6.5:
9. ‘You cannot drag and drop out of trash with soft deletes enabled, use restore instead’ – It knows that I want to restore an email from the trash folder to the inbox folder, but for some reason insists that you use the restore command.
8. ‘You are not authorized to perform that operation’ – This message is displayed when you try to send an email to a list of invitees on a meeting which you did not schedule. You can see the invited people, and Notes even displays a menu command, ‘Send memo to all invitees’. If you select this command while focused on someone else’s meeting this is the message you will get – duh!
7. Refresh your inbox. It knows that you have new email, because it displays a refresh tag on your inbox, but you have to click on the tag to retrieve your email. If it knows I have email, just go get it, why are you asking me to get it?
6. Create a new email from a Windows application while Notes is displaying the Trash folder. When you display an email in any folder other than Trash you will get the expected ‘Reply’, ‘Reply To All’, ‘Forward’, etc commands. If the email is in the Trash folder all you get are ‘Restore’ and ‘Delete’ commands. If you create a new email from outside Notes while Notes is displaying the Trash folder, guess what, you get the Trash folder commands displayed on the new email. You have to ‘Restore’ your new email before you are able to send it.
5. ‘The document could not be deleted because you currently have the same document open in the preview pane. This document will now be closed so that it may deleted from the current view’ – oh, give me a break. You know I want to delete it, so just delete it, but no .. Notes will display it in a view where you may press the delete button again and this time it will delete it.
4,3,2,1. This annoyance gets the top 4 spots because it proved to be a total embarrassment to me at work this week. There are at least 4 annoyances with the repeating functionality associated with scheduling a meeting. Firstly, once you schedule a repeating meeting and send out the invite there is no way to change the repeats. You have to cancel the meeting and reschedule. Also when you cancel, Notes will automatically send an email to all invitees informing them that you have canceled the meeting. Earlier this week I attempted to schedule a repeating meeting every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the next couple of months. I copied an existing meeting whose invites included some high level managers. After several failed attempts to schedule a repeating meeting, I finally gave up and sent a meeting notice for each day. The result being many many meeting notices and canceled meeting notice being delivered to the inboxes of my management and several colleagues. The result being that I looked like a total idiot who could not schedule a meeting with Lotus Notes.
Addendum: One I forgot, I guess because it happens so frequently it almost appears to be normal behaviour – if you have any text selected in a message and you hit ‘Delete’, nothing happens. Deselect the text and the ‘Delete’ button now works – duh!
If you are ever offered the opportunity to work with this unique IBM application be prepared for a whole new software experience. Alternatively just run away, it’s better for your health in the long run.
If you are interested in reading more, visit the Lotus Notes Sucks website to see many unique features offered by this application.
Les.
