Advance (out-of-the-office) notice

July 18 2005

I met with an former colleague today, whose new employer is using Outlook/Exchange.  In talking about differences between the two environments, I learned about another one of those feature differences between the two products that I never knew before.  In Outlook, setting an away/out-of-the-office notification is immediate.  When you set it on, it's on immediately, until you turn it off.

Notes is smarter than that.  You can actually anticipate when you'll be out of the office, and set the out-of-the-office notification up in advance.  For example, choosing Wednesday to Friday as days away, and clicking "Enable", produced this dialog box for me:
Image:Advance (out-of-the-office) notice

I had no idea!  First, I didn't even know this was how Notes worked (I know, shame on me).  Second, I didn't know the difference in the Exchange/Outlook world.

I learned one other feature difference today, too.  In Notes, when drag a mail message to the calendar, the mail message stays in place.  A new calendar entry is created, but you still have your mail.  In Outlook, when you drag a mail message to the calendar, the message is gone from the inbox -- it now only exists in the calendar!  That makes it hard to find the information if you need to follow-up on it as well.

I am asked from time to time for a whole list of such differentiators.  Generally, I push back on creating one, because I don't believe that one individual feature is going to be the key to choosing or keeping Notes.  Still, when we find stark differences like these, it's worth highlighting.  Anyone have any others?  My other favorite is the ability to "delegate" an individual calendar invitation to another person.

Ed Brill Sydney, NSW Australia Category:  Lotus  Add/View Comments [25]

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  1. 1  Subhan http://slate.blogspirit.com | 7/18/2005 12:09:28 AM

    Notes has always been smarter.

    Though I am not a very expereinced user of Outlook, I am sure it doesn't support simple "ADD to folder" of messages. Its only Move to Folder.

    In my Notes I have project specific folders, and when I get an appreciation from a user for a Project I also add them to a "ThankYou" folder. But in Outlook its either this or that folder.

    On positive feedback for Outlook, its Mail content editor is much better than Notes' RichText.

  1. 2  Gerald Mengisen  | 7/18/2005 1:35:04 AM

    After a two year "detour" in MS Outlook land (Outlook 2002 to be precise), I'm happy to be back with Notes 6.5x.

    Things I like better in Notes:

    - "Send and File" button so your sent mail is also where it belongs

    - Create a mail, hit the ESC key and have the option to only send the mail without saving it.

    - The "All Documents" view that allows you searching sent and received mail.

  1. 3  Lyset  | 7/18/2005 6:20:42 AM

    Although I'm a Notes fan, I do like 2 options in Outlook:

    - the ability to send mail at a specified time, instead of right away

    - the ability to recall a message -> the message will be removed from the recipients mailbox (when he/she didn't read it yet)

    In Outlook I really miss the 'all documents' view

  1. 4  Chris Doig  | 7/18/2005 12:08:16 PM

    Another big Outlook problem: In Notes you can full text index the mail database. If you want to search for an email in Outlook, be prepared for a long wait... (like 3 minutes in a 10 MB mailbox.) Then, if you don't get a hit on first try, it's another long wait. I've tried the Google desktop search. Its much better than the Outlook search, but still not as good as Notes FT search.

    Of course in Notes FT indexes must be enabled. That takes up quite a bit of disk space, but that is space that need not be backed up. There is a small problem with FT indexes that occasionally trips up users: If indexing is done, say every 24 hours, users won't be able to find an email that arrived "today". Training users makes a big difference; training should include how to use the FT search.

    As for moving vs adding messages to folders (@1) - you can copy messages to folders, but then you duplicate the message, which means more redundant hits from something like Google search. After using Notes folders for years, I find the Outlook folder implementation so weak that I don't bother to use them.

    Finally, why is it that Notes mailboxes can be as big as you like (e.g 5 GB), but whenever I go to an Outlook shop, the mail boxes are puny, e.g. 10 MB in size? (My current employer has about 150,000 outlook users)

  1. 5  Chad Schelfhout http://www.chadsmiley.com | 7/18/2005 12:45:39 PM

    I have been a Notes user for many years but now have been using Outlook 2003 for a couple of months.

    Things I miss about Notes:

    - 'Copy Into New' feature

    - 'Replay to All' after selecting 'Reply'

    - Calendar invitations having an alarm based organizer/chair not my settings

    Things I like about Outlook:

    - Not having to debug my Mail database when I am trying to debug an application

    - Desktop alert

    - Two signatures (New memo, and Reply/Forward)

  1. 6  Ben Rose http://www.jaffacake.net/bensblog.nsf | 7/18/2005 5:33:45 PM

    Ed, is your mail server really called what the f...?

  1. 7  Paul Robichaux http://www.e2ksecurity.com | 7/18/2005 6:35:15 PM

    @4: the same is true for Exchange & Outlook; if you enable full-text indexing on the Exchange server, Outlook will use those indices when searching. This makes a huge performance difference.

  1. 8  Eric Parsons startingblockcomputing.com | 7/18/2005 8:28:22 PM

    Well done Ed. I'm not sure a list would win the day alone, but for trying to "sell" management, or that new jr. exec. it sure would be handy.

  1. 9  Bob http://www.bobcongdon.com/blog | 7/18/2005 10:10:46 PM

    @6: WTF == Westford, MA. Ed's mail server is probably in Westford. WTF is also used as an prefix for IBM office buildings in Westford. One of them is WTF4, which, when used with your definition, can sound pretty funny.

  1. 10  Edward Doan  | 7/18/2005 11:07:55 PM

    Oh man, you had to bring up Out of Office comparisons with Outlook.

    Here in L2 support land, I think a good portion of our calls are regarding questions with the Out of Office agent. MS Outlook has the ability to enable/disable OOO notifications immediately and also auto-respond to e-mails within seconds. Notes R6's default setting is to enable immediately but to send notifications out every SIX hours. Changing this to "After new mail arrives" will put a heavy load on the Domino server, subsequently causing performance to bog down and maybe even crash the box. So we recommend customers (if they must) to set OOO to run every 30 minutes at the most frequent.

    What else? Outlook has a better rich text editor because it's Microsoft Word. They autoexecute VBScript and other nasties. We don't (which can cause administration headaches when code NEEDS to be executed on the client and we tell people to manually click this button to add a DB to your workspace, etc.) We do local replicas, they do PST/OST files which seem like a crutch to me more than an actual nice replica scheme. They have MS Office integration, we have Lotus SmartSuite integration.

    Well, all in all, we have a better product. Duh. That's why we still have half market share and growing!

  1. 11  Philip Storry http://www.not-so-rapid.com | 7/19/2005 2:56:25 AM

    Manual trackback...

    { Link }

  1. 12  Ned Speed  | 7/19/2005 6:17:01 AM

    @5: 'Two signatures (New memo, and Reply/Forward)'

    I use this fantastic little app... { Link }

  1. 13  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 7/19/2005 7:28:13 AM

    Ned Speed -- Haven't seen you around yesterday/today...too bad the Lotus day at the Expo was offsite. Are you perchance geeking with us tomorrow?

  1. 14  Hosun Lee  | 7/19/2005 1:15:22 PM

    There are a lot of little Outlook features I miss.

    F5 to send/receive.

    Dragging + Dropping emails to your local folders (not archiving). Dragging + Dropping in general is easier.

    Support for more PDA/Wireless devices.

    But mostly the interface. It was so shiny....bright colors....hypnotic.

    Notes is more powerful, but it's still missing some of those little touches.

  1. 15  David Price www.kbnconsulting.com | 7/19/2005 4:06:55 PM

    The ability to have multiple PST opens in the left pane so one can drag and drop from the main mail file to a local PST.

    On the other hand policies and the ability to customize the mail file outweighs the issues mentioned.

  1. 16  Philip Storry http://www.not-so-rapid.com | 7/19/2005 4:50:16 PM

    Hosun [14], David [15],

    PST files are evil. See here for more details: { Link }

    You might like it, but I'm afraid that there's no good reason for you to do it, and plenty of reasons not to. :-(

  1. 17  david bell  | 7/19/2005 6:09:10 PM

    "F5 to send/receive."

    Ahh yes, that well known "standard" keystroke that does the same in all Windows applications :))

  1. 18  David Price www.kbnconsulting.com | 7/19/2005 11:46:17 PM

    Philip @16

    Agreed, PSTs are evil.

    There are plenty of legal and other reasons to prevent local archiving. That is why I often use policies to restrict or control at my Domino clients. Or we force archiving to another Domino server, where it is part of a DR plan.

    The point is the Notes UI could make it possible to have both dbs available.

  1. 19  tonyo  | 7/19/2005 11:56:16 PM

    Ed,

    I just tested the dragging an email to the calendar thing. in Outlook 2003 it makes a copy of the email into a calendar item and leaves the original email intact.

    Say hi to Shaun for me.

  1. 20  Konstantin Lessle  | 7/20/2005 4:38:33 AM

    One thing my clients continously complain about is that Notes does not send out an Out-of-office message as soon as new mail arrives after the Out-of-office agent has been enabled. This must be the complaint that I have heard the most often. We have have 60.000 Notes mail files at the moment in our company.

    The second most frequent complaint is regarding the calendaring functionality in Notes.

    Mr. Brill: If you should have a comparison between MS Outlook and Notes this information would be very helpful for me in arguing with our management.

    Kind regards from Germany,

    Konstantin Lessle

  1. 21  Philip Storry http://www.not-so-rapid.com | 7/20/2005 5:52:17 AM

    Konstantin [20],

    I must admit I'd like to see the Out of Office agent respond faster. The problem is that the OoO agent is, well, an agent. It runs on a schedule on the server, and takes CPU time whilst doing that.

    The OoO agent itself is pretty smart - when it does run, it checks who it would be responding to, whether or not they've already recieved a response, and then behaves accordingly. t the end of your Out of Office period, you are then presented with a list of everyone who got a message from the OoO Agent.

    All of this takes processor cycles. Six hours is the current balance, and works well. You could feasibly set the agent to run every ten minutes, but your server would quickly bog down with OoO agents running - it's a resource issue.

    It's been so long since I used the Outlook OoO Agent that I'm honestly not sure exactly how the actual features of the OoO agents compare. If anyone could let me know, I'd be grateful, as I have a couple of Outlook fanatics here at work who I'd like to be able to better counter on this issue and others like it. ;-)

  1. 22  norm van bergen  | 7/20/2005 7:23:11 AM

    Forgive my ignorance of the Outlook OOO thing, but if IT can run immediately and not kill a server (or will it?), why can't Domino? Don't get me wrong, I make my living w/Domino/Notes and love it/them, but in all honesty, how does MS pull it off with immediate response? Is the MS OOO thing simpler, thus requiring less CPU to process? Is it that Exchange servers have less users (for other reasons) and thus they don't get nuked by OOO processing like a single Domino box with 10,000 users might?

  1. 23  Philip Storry http://www.not-so-rapid.com | 7/20/2005 8:42:41 AM

    norm [22]>

    Outlook/Exchange has no concept of agents as Domino has, because it's a plain mail server. It's one of those fundamental architecture differences between the products.

    When Lotus were seeking to add an Out of Office function, they used their existing Agent facilities.

    When Microsoft built their solution, they put the OoO function into the code on the server side. So your OoO agent is actually processed by the Information Store service(?).

    I've often pondered suggesting moving the OoO functionality into the mail router in Domino, to get similar performance benefits. But every time I think about it, it occurs to me that IBM would lose some flexibility in the process of doing so - at the moment, you could do anything you like to the OoO agent. The moment you take the Exchange Server route and hard-code it into the product, you're losing some flexibility and customisation potential.

    I hope that helps!

  1. 24  Hosun Lee  | 7/20/2005 8:55:21 AM

    The Outlook OOO function is pretty straightfoward. Via a pull-down or a button, you select the function. You leave a note, specify whether or not you want people to get multiple copies of the note and that's it. You turn it on when you're leaving and turn it off when you're back.

    It does have some levels of prompting if you are using Outlook and you have OOO enabled.

    Back to my original point of F5, PSTs, etc. I am not an IT admin nor do I understand what life is like for IT admins. My comments were from an end-user. As an end-user I loved it. It made my life easy. I loved being able to import and export PST files. I could load up my school mail from home, my home mail from work, etc.

    I understand this may causes issues with some IT departments. I don't know if you can disable exporting or importing PSTs in Outlook. Regardless of the technical/legal implications though, it cannot be denied that Outlook users like this capability.

  1. 25  Chris Whisonant http://cwhisonant.blogspot.com | 7/21/2005 1:43:05 PM

    @14/24 - Good to see end-user comments here.

    "F5 to send/receive."

    Funny thing, but last time I installed Outlook 2003 for a user, F5 is now F9. You can also hit F9 in Lotus Notes to "send/receive" (refresh the view)...

    "Dragging + Dropping emails to your local folders (not archiving). Dragging + Dropping in general is easier."

    How can drag/drop be more or less easy? You click, hold, move, unclick - works well in newer Notes releases.

    "Support for more PDA/Wireless devices."

    This is not something that you should fault Lotus for or even praise MS for. Remember supply and demand. People with PDAs generally will have Outlook installed on their home PC too. Outlook is not just a business product but it's also a home/personal product. The PDA sync companies know that they have a wider target audience who use Outlook (be it the corporate or home users) and that's what they code for. There are many products for Notes as well to allow you to synchronize almost any device.