Lotus Notes is NOT just an Email client
As we already experienced, Notes is not very easy to use. For first-timers, it's like learning a super-secret alien language that sometimes makes no sense. Fortunately, Lotus Notes is not that hard to learn, too. Once you get used to it, it's actually easier than you think.
The big secret in learning Notes for the first time is to not treat it like Outlook,Outlook Express,Thunderbird, etc. Although Notes email looks similar to those email programs, it is entirely different. If you have some free time, take a closer look at those icons on your workspace. You will find that Lotus Notes also has a lot of surprises:
1. Notes is not just an email client - to be more specific, it is not a "100% pure" email client. It is more than that. It is an environment. Lotus Notes is a program where you can run "other programs" inside it. Notes Email is just one of the programs that come with the default installation.
As you can see from the images, Lotus Notes also has an Address Book, Bookmarks and a Personal Journal bundled with your default installation.
2. Notes has "killer" features - There are 2 sides to everything. So many negative things have been said about Notes that its best features have been overshadowed or just ignored. There are so many but I will just list down the most important ones:
3. Notes is one of the OLDEST applications - A lot of people don't know that Lotus Notes has its own story to tell. With its humble beginnings as a simple bug reporting system called PLATO to being a sophisticated workflow application for the big enterprise today, Notes has its own place in computing history: it came before the PC (personal computer) came in to the scene.
Read more about the history of Lotus Notes.
This article does not exhaustively list down all the features of Notes, of course. There are already many websites that do that. My advise is to simply search for it on the Net if you haven't already done so.
Now that you've taken a second look at Lotus Notes, why don't you take that small step and try to get to know it better? The time you invest on re-learning it is worth it. Nobody gets it right on the first try. Check out the Notes help docs by pressing F1 and you will see the answers to most common questions can be found there.
"Change begins with that one single step".
The big secret in learning Notes for the first time is to not treat it like Outlook,Outlook Express,Thunderbird, etc. Although Notes email looks similar to those email programs, it is entirely different. If you have some free time, take a closer look at those icons on your workspace. You will find that Lotus Notes also has a lot of surprises:
1. Notes is not just an email client - to be more specific, it is not a "100% pure" email client. It is more than that. It is an environment. Lotus Notes is a program where you can run "other programs" inside it. Notes Email is just one of the programs that come with the default installation.
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| Basic Notes apps: Email, Address Book and Bookmarks |
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| More apps: Personal Journal and Lotus Notes Help |
2. Notes has "killer" features - There are 2 sides to everything. So many negative things have been said about Notes that its best features have been overshadowed or just ignored. There are so many but I will just list down the most important ones:
- Create "mini-programs" embedded inside an email message - For example, let's say you want to create a survey for your organization's Baking Club, and you need to send them out to your loyal members:
- Notes is known as a Rapid Application Development tool because it takes a short amount of time to create your "mini-program". The Baking Club example above can be done in 30 minutes to an hour!
- If you have Visual Basic programming experience, you will find it easy to start developing in Lotus Notes! The former has VBScript while the latter has LotusScript, which has exactly the same syntax. If you're interested, go to this Lotus Notes IBM Forum.
3. Notes is one of the OLDEST applications - A lot of people don't know that Lotus Notes has its own story to tell. With its humble beginnings as a simple bug reporting system called PLATO to being a sophisticated workflow application for the big enterprise today, Notes has its own place in computing history: it came before the PC (personal computer) came in to the scene.
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| Notes 1.0 |
This article does not exhaustively list down all the features of Notes, of course. There are already many websites that do that. My advise is to simply search for it on the Net if you haven't already done so.
Now that you've taken a second look at Lotus Notes, why don't you take that small step and try to get to know it better? The time you invest on re-learning it is worth it. Nobody gets it right on the first try. Check out the Notes help docs by pressing F1 and you will see the answers to most common questions can be found there.
"Change begins with that one single step".
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