#2--Lotus Notes rant (alternate title: When Technology Makes Your Life More Difficult)
When I began my current job in August, I had never used Lotus Notes for email and calendaring; I was quite familiar and satisfied with Microsoft Outlook. They basically do the same things--email, calendar, contacts, tasks, etc--but with a few extra bugs thrown in there by Lotus Notes.
I don’t’ know if it’s my company’s policy or if it’s a problem with LN, but we’re only allowed a certain amount of space in our accounts—mine was nearly full by the end of my 4th week on the job. Underneath your name, you can see the percentage of space you're already using--when you reach 100% or more (yes, you can be above 100% full), you can receive email but not send it. Archived emails count against your total, and I work in a regulated environment, meaning we need to save pretty much EVERYTHING we get.
One trick people have figured out is that you can "reply" to emails in order to get around the 100% capacity block and still send emails. Some people have even designated a message in their inbox "USE FOR EMAILS"--they just open it, hit "reply," and change the addressees and subject.
Another option is to archive everything yourself by saving all your emails that you don't need everyday as PDFs and putting them on your personal drive on the LAN. I prefer this, because I have this issue with letting my email get out of control--in my personal email account, I reply to, delete, or archive emails as soon as I get them--I hate having a lot of stuff in my inbox.
LN also limits the types of files you can send as attachments. For some projects, we share .zip files. LN does not permit this, so to get around it, we save them as ".sip" files (not a real file type), and then the recipient has to save the file, then change the extension back to .zip in order to open it.
Lotus Notes is intended to help people organize their tasks and do their work in the most efficient manner possible. Unfortunately, this is not the case for me!
I don’t’ know if it’s my company’s policy or if it’s a problem with LN, but we’re only allowed a certain amount of space in our accounts—mine was nearly full by the end of my 4th week on the job. Underneath your name, you can see the percentage of space you're already using--when you reach 100% or more (yes, you can be above 100% full), you can receive email but not send it. Archived emails count against your total, and I work in a regulated environment, meaning we need to save pretty much EVERYTHING we get.
One trick people have figured out is that you can "reply" to emails in order to get around the 100% capacity block and still send emails. Some people have even designated a message in their inbox "USE FOR EMAILS"--they just open it, hit "reply," and change the addressees and subject.
Another option is to archive everything yourself by saving all your emails that you don't need everyday as PDFs and putting them on your personal drive on the LAN. I prefer this, because I have this issue with letting my email get out of control--in my personal email account, I reply to, delete, or archive emails as soon as I get them--I hate having a lot of stuff in my inbox.
LN also limits the types of files you can send as attachments. For some projects, we share .zip files. LN does not permit this, so to get around it, we save them as ".sip" files (not a real file type), and then the recipient has to save the file, then change the extension back to .zip in order to open it.
Lotus Notes is intended to help people organize their tasks and do their work in the most efficient manner possible. Unfortunately, this is not the case for me!
Lotus Notes sounds like a nightmare. I've only ever used Microsoft Outlook and never remember any caps on email storage, except empty threats from managers. It seems like your organization should have one universal system in place to store information, if they will need to refer to it in the future. Otherwise, how will they keep track of all the different storage methods of individual employees?
Best of luck finding the shortcuts!
It’s funny how much you need to change the way you think to effectively and efficiently use technology.
It's funny that you bring up universal storage--we are actually going to be moving all our files off the LAN and onto a web-based intranet-type system at the end of the month. That is another nightmare--I am responsible for saving back-up copies of a lot of our shared files in case they don't "migrate" properly--I can't help feeling like everyone's just sort of crossing their fingers and hoping it all works out...