An interesting Lotusphere "person
on the street" article. What I found to be most positive is
what isn't in the article -- there's no questioning of the future of Notes,
no comments about confusion in product roadmap, no "Microsoft is going
to take over the world" thought. As I said in sessions yesterday,
the thought that Notes is dead is dead.
There is one bit of the article worth
quoting:
He particularly liked a feature in Notes 7 that allows an e-mail to be pulled back after it has been sent to another Notes/Domino system. "That's a good feature that they're finally adding," Tincher said.Well..... that feature is not in Notes 7. It's a feature announced this week, coming in Domino Next/"Hannover".
Link: ComputerWorld: Lotusphere 2006: Users scour the show for answers, tools >
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- 2
Gregg Eldred http://www.ns-tech.com/blog/geldred.nsf | 1/26/2006 8:06:00 AM
I agree with Lawrence, that is why there is a Drafts folder, if used to park 'questionable' mail messages. In fact, Ed, you called this feature in a competing product "useless." :-)
{ Link }
- 3
Joerg Michael | 1/26/2006 8:59:15 AM
Gregg, I don't think Ed called the feature as such "useless". The criticism was about the implementation, which really is incredibly useless. Basically, Outlook says "Please open *this* mail so I can delete the other mail you're not supposed to see". That's just stupid.
- 4
Mikkel Heisterberg http://blog.lekkim.heisterberg.dk | 1/26/2006 9:06:14 AM
I totally agree that there is a negative side to the retraction possibility but from my perspective it is mainly based on how difficult I think it is going to be to explain it to users. Since retraction is only going to be possible within your own organization, users will need to understand the difference between mail destinations. In my experience a lot of users do not know when the e-mail they are sending is for an internal or external "customer" and what the difference is. An external recipient could be a recipient in another cross-certified Domino infrastructure.
That aside I think it's great that it is being added but there are a lot of technical issues that needs to be addressed. Out the top of my head I worry the most about retraction in a replicated environment and whether retraction will be possible once the receiving user has read the e-mail. What if some but not all of the recipients has read the e-mail?
Back in my IBM days when using PROFS (3270 terminal emulation) we had the retraction possibility but only if the recipient hadn't read the e-mail yet.
Just some thoughts.
- 5
Nathan T. Freeman | 1/26/2006 9:19:59 AM
I think they mentioned that it will be policy-based. So you can turn the entire feature on and off for your domain. You'll probably be able to expose it to just a subset of users as well.
- 6
Lawrence Micallef www.lcem.com | 1/26/2006 9:44:02 AM
Oh good :) - hopefully default = NOT AVAILABLE!
- 7
David DeWell http://workdomosphere.blogspot.com/ | 1/26/2006 11:13:39 AM
I think this brings up the typical SOX compliance issue on email that contains company financial information. Hopefully this will be implemented like PROFS in @4. I could see a retraction being helpful for hasty email sends or inaccurate information that needs to be updated. But I would be frightful for an email sent weeks ago to be retracted because of something illegal and the sender knows they are being investigated.
- 8
Bill Brown | 1/26/2006 11:49:16 AM
I recall hearing from Lotus that to implement mail recall would require weakening the security of the server, something they didn't want to do.
I'm still not convinced it's a good feature from a technical standpoint, but from a marketing perspective it's a nobrainer needed to compete with that other product that offers it, regardless of merit.
- 9
Ben Rose http://www.jaffacake.net | 1/26/2006 1:51:45 PM
User asks about email retraction. Response:
What feature? Innocent look...
- 10
Sean Burgess http://www.phigsaidwhat.com | 1/26/2006 2:38:47 PM
I have only one thing to say about this.....Blackberry.
A number of users at my last company didn't synch the deletions between their BB device and their Mailbox. If that option is set, email retraction will be a moot point.
Sean---
- 11
Senthil Kumar | 1/26/2006 5:37:57 PM
We are all guilty of clicking "send" too quickly and regretting it - especially with "flame" type emails bashed out in haste and without a clear head.
It was a very good point,and my advice to those users would be to have a local mail replica even if they are @ office and set the replication interval for 5-10mts. 90% of the time you can still recall by going to Mail.box and delete the message.
Only when you are very unlucky then the time you hit the "Send" button in your mail matches with the next replication time then it is gone.
- 12
John Tincher | 1/30/2006 7:02:09 PM
OK, I'm the guy who's being quoted, so I figured I'd add my reasoning for the comment about email retraction. The ONLY reason I care about it is with high-level executives. There are times when they do accidently send an email which they'd like to retract. Granted, it doesn't happen often, but as an admin, it does happen and it would make my life a lot easier.
- 13
Tracy L | 2/8/2006 3:36:46 PM
Another useful application for this: We have the occasional individual that will send a "retirement/birthday party" email, complete with 5 megs of attachments, to 2000+ users. It would be nice to take the cleanup/deletion and "user training" and combine them into one stop shopping by making the offending user "retract" their own email.
This type of thing happens about once a week here.
Hmm... I am still in two minds about the whole "email retraction" concept.
If one compares email to snail mail (that concept of sealing a piece of paper in an envelope, affixing a postage stamp and posting it)... then the idea that once you have put your envelope in the letter box, it's GONE. You cannot get it back... and trying is illegal.
So why do we want to have retraction?
User pressure mainly... from people who are generally too quick to hit the "send" button without thinking about the consequences.
One thing I always stress to a user who is relatively new to email is the above postbox concept. It helps them understand the idea that with post, there are big processes behind the delivery of the letter, and that email is similar - especially across the internets - we cannot control what our net-neighbours and net-partners use to deliver that email, so message retraction is nearly impossible.
That raises the important point that users need to recognise that message retraction will only really be achievable inside their own organization. I do hope that the Notes client interface will make the user aware of this - or just not offer the retraction option for internet/external email.
We are all guilty of clicking "send" too quickly and regretting it - especially with "flame" type emails bashed out in haste and without a clear head.
Ah for the ideal mail system that scans my mail for heated language and flames, along with spelling errors, and forces me to wait 2 minutes and to re-read it before sending it!