RE: Moving from MS Outlook 97 to Lotus notes R5

[Auri Poso <auri -dot- poso -at- ztango -dot- com>]

Yes, Amy, you're right. Sorry. I didn' t mean to insult anybody's
professional skills.
 
For the record, although I happen to consider Lotus (4.3) helps particularly
unhelpful, I never thought this was the fault of the actual writers. After
all, there are a few really nifty ideas - like, if memory serves, the
picture of the Notes window where you can click to find descriptions of the
various sections. I thought that was cool. But the way Lotus is set up
seemed to pre-empt any attempt at creating searchable, comprehensive helps.
Any time I searched for anything, the programme found nothing useful. I was
told that this was because of the way indexing works in Notes. Ditto for
trying to browse the help system to find relevant topics. So I totally blame
the Notes structure for the way the helps are set up; but I *still* never
(and I mean never) found anything useful in them. (Nifty, yes. :-) This
isn't to say it wasn't there, just that it never reached me.
 
It didn't help that the UI in version 4.3, which I used, is confusing,
although I believe v. 5.0 is a vast improvement. It's a Good Thing that the
helps were improved, too.
 
All this being said, the person most deserving of blame is the thrice-cursed
IT manager at the company where I worked, and his fellows in other company
offices around the globe, who inflicted Notes 4.3 on us in the first place
and then refused to move to version 5.0 :-)
 
    .apo, whose foot tastes terrible
 
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Amy_Smith/CAM/Lotus [mailto:Amy_Smith/CAM/Lotus -at- lotus -dot- com]



>ps. Oh, and to stay sane, *never* read the (un)Helps. They suck
>big time. 

Whoa baby. Them's fightin' words. This is a good example of why you should
be careful posting on this list - you never know who's going to be reading
it! :-) 

I responded privately to Yaacov, because, as a Lotus employee, I didn't
think it appropriate to boost my employer's product in a public forum.
Auri's remarks I'll address here. 

I didn't start working for Lotus til R5 was released, but I happen to know
that the User Assistance (UA) team made significant improvements in the R5
help, and continues to do so on all subsequent releases. We strongly
encourage user feedback on our documentation; Notes users on this list are
welcome to direct comments about our documentation to me. 

Thank you. 

****************************************************************************
***
Amy Smith, Notes User Assistance Group
Lotus Development Corp.
617/693-9733
amy_smith -at- lotus -dot- com

"Just get the facts. You can distort them later." - Mark Twain >
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