The Lotus Notes user experience
The Lotus Notes/Domino Hints ad Tips blog is excellent, I am a firm believer in the integrated user experience and this blog is already helping me to use Notes more effectively. Integrated attachment editing is a feature I already new about, but it illustrates my previous post about user experience very nicely.
Prior to Notes 6 you could store documents in a Notes database by attaching them to a Notes document. If you wanted to edit the document, it went like this:
- Right click
- Select Open the document
- Edit
- Save document somewhere, for example “my documents”
- Switch back to Notes
- Delete old version of attachment
- Click attach
- Navigate to “my documents” or to file if my documents is already selected
- Attach file
- Switch to “my documents”
- Delete the file
As a result unless I had to I never stored documents in Notes, in Notes 6 and above you now:
- Right click
- Select Edit the document
- Edit
- Save the document
A really major improvement, well done Lotus. Only thing is whilst I really like this feature and the fact that I can keep a replica of my documents on the server and all of my PC’s, I still don’t use document databases much because the doc links between them only work if I create them on the server copy of the replica, since I always work in the local replica this breaks the user experience for me.
I wish there were more Lotus/IBM blogs like this though and I wish there were more comments on this one!
