The yet to be released Lotus Notes 8 will have an additional feature included for setting up Out of Office messages. This new service can function only with Lotus Notes 8 Client, Lotus Domino 8 server and Lotus Notes 8 mail template. However, the present Out of Office agent is still available for backward compatibility, which means a Lotus Notes 8 client connected to a Lotus Domino server 7 or lower version can still use the out of office feature as available now. The new OOO service is an additional feature and has specific advantages over the earlier agent like an instant response as opposed to a response time of six hours. Another advantage would be the automatic disabling of the feature at the end of the period set by the user without having to manually disable it. In the new out of office service the OOO message can be set even for a period of one hour compared with a minimum of one day with the present agent.

To know more about this, read this post from IBM developer works.

Have you ever spent hours in drafting a mail and lost it because your system got crashed? Those of you who had experienced this will appreciate how useful the autosave option is. Lotus Notes client version 7 has this feature included in it, however it is not enabled by default and has to be enabled by users by changing the settings in the user preferences. When Autosave is enabled and if your system or Lotus Notes crashes while drafting a mail, the draft can be recovered without having to start from the scratch. You can assign interval durations at which autosave can happen. To enable this feature go to File - Preferences - User Preferences and in the Basics view enable the Autosave option listed in the Startup Options. Also assign the interval at which the draft must be saved.

What is this Save state feature?
Save state is a feature available in Lotus Notes 7 client where all open tabs when the system is shut down gets opened automatically at next login. This is a pretty cool feature because it helps you open all those tabs at one go without having individually opening them. The best part is that if you once save the state, the tabs open at that instant will be saved and will automatically open every time you login into Lotus Notes unless you clear the saved tab details or overwrite another time by using save windows state option.

You can have any document like mail, calendar entry, a document in a custom application etc. saved and have them open by default in the next Notes login. This helps users save time, particulary those who want several documents in multiple applications to be open at the same time and use them regularly. They dont have to open all applications and open the documents every time, instead they can have it opened once and save the status. All their documents will open by default when they login into Notes every time after that.

Lets check how to enable this feature. Once you are sure that all documents you use regularly are open just click File and click Save Window State. Thats it, all open tabs will be recorded and saved. These documents will open by default in all subsequent Notes login. Iy you want to disable this feature click File and Clear Saved Window State.

When a mail is sent to you, the sender can enable Return receipt in the delivery option which will help him/her know that you have read his/her mail. There is no direct means to avoid sending the confirmation message to the sender when you open the mail. Incase you want to avoid triggering the automated reply to the sender but want to have the message read, the way out is to use a simple trick. Just select the mail without opening it, click Reply tab on the action bar and choose Reply with History. A new memo opens as a thread showing the contents of the mail received by you earlier. You can read the message here and can also open any attachment without the sender knowing that you have read the message.

Some useful Lotus Notes Shortcut Keys are listed below.
ALT+F5           Restore Notes to default minimized size
ALT+F9           Minimize active window
ALT+F10         Maximize active windows
CTRL+BREAK   Stop operation in progress
CTRL+F6         Switch between open windows
CTRL+Q           Exit Notes
CTRL+TAB       Move to next window tab
DOWN ARROW Move to next entry in Replicator
END                 Move to last entry in Replicator
ENTER             Open selected Workspace icon, window tab, menu item, bookmark
ESC                 Close active window
F1                   Get Help on current feature
F5                   Lock User ID
F6                   Move to next pane or frame
F10 or ALT       Access menu bar
HOME              Move to first entry in Replicator
PAGE DOWN    Move to previous page in Replicator
PAGE UP          Move to next page in Replicator
SHIFT+F10      Access Windows context menus
UP ARROW      Move to previous entry in Replicator
SHIFT+ALT+S Open Search menu

There may be occasions when a scheduled meeting has to be post-poned or pre-poned or even cancel sue to unavoidable reasons. Let us check how to get this done.

• Open the calender view and open the meeting schedule.
• If the meeting was scheduled by someone else, you can counter the meeting and propose a new time. There are options to even reject an invitation sent to you from others.
• If the meeting has been scheduled by you, open the meeting schedule note from the Calender and Click Actions and select the necessary Action like reschedule, cancel etc.
• It is always better to write a note explaining the reason for change of schedule along with the meeting schedule Note.

The Lotus Notes mail client has a Calender in it by default. The Calender can be used to keep track of the Meetings, Appointments, Anniversaries, Reminders and other Events. Each of them is a form of Calender Entry and can be created from the Calender view of the Lotus Notes client.

Lets us check out how to schedule a meeting using the calender which is the most frequently made Calender entry. Follow the steps below to schedule a meeting.

• Open the Calender view.
• Click on Schedule a meeting tab or Create button on the top menu bar and choose Calender Entry.
• A new window will open, Fill in the subject, the date, time and attendees of the meeting.
• The time zone can be changed according to the need. Also there is additional option to repeat the same meeting several times, the settings of which can also be chosen.
• You can also give a small description of the meeting and its relevance or instructions in the space provided for description.
• In addition to this there are additional optional fields such as Location, Resources, Rooms, Notification etc. The Resources and Rooms have to be configured with Lotus Notes so that their availability during the scheduled meeting duration is also checked.
• The calender entry can be marked as private so that others are not able to view the detials of the entry.
• After filling up all the fields necessary click Save and Send Invitations.

The Lotus Notes Client when installed with default settings will have a tool bar at the top of the Notes view. This will contain useful utility tools such as the Rich text field editing tools, attaching tool, edit, search tool etc. However this tool bar can be enabled or disabled based on individual preferences. Follow the steps below to enable or disable the toolbar.

1. Login into your Lotus Notes account and go to File, Preferences and Toolbar Preferences.
2. In the Basics view, disable the tick mark in the Toolbar display section to hide the Toolbar.
3. Enable the toolbar by marking a tick in the show Toolbar option.
4. You can also edit the toolbar option appearence like whether to display text alone or icons alone or both, the size of the icons etc.
5. choose the desired tool bar settings and click OK to save you references.

When a mail is viewed it appears different for each user based on their mail box design and settings. The most common difference being the width of each line in the mail is different for every user. Web based mails generally tend to have smaller width when compared to Lotus Notes or Outlook. To avoid this when composing a mail we can set the standard width of each line, so that the alignment is more or less the same when opened in any other mail client. To do this follow the steps below.

1. Login into your Lotus Notes account and go to File, Preferences and User Preferences.
2. Click on the mail tab and go the Internet View, the section named Composing Internet-Style Replicas will have an option to wrap each line after a certain number of characters.
3. Choose the number of characters to wrap every line and move to the next line.
4. Click OK and save the settings.

Sometimes we do not check our mail box for a long time when we are busy with some other task. This could result in missing some important notification or message sent to us that has to be acted upon immediately.

To avoid this we can set up Lotus Notes to give an alert when a new mail is received in the inbox. Follow the steps below to enable the alert.

1. Login into your Lotus Notes account and go to File, Preferences and User Preferences.
2. Open the Mail tab, at the general view there is a section called When New Mail Arrives, there you will find options to enable option to Show a Pop-up.
3. Enable the option to get a pop up message everytime a new mail is received.
4. There are additional features such as providing alert with a sound. You can also choose the sound to be played from a file in your system .
5. Click OK and save the settings to get the alert whenever a new mail is received.