Update @ 3:24PM:

My post got noticed and in a big way at IBM.  In my defense I’ve decided to moderate the tone–but not the content, of my blog post.  I had a great chat with the product manager for Notes and he was very cool about this.  I’m adding a few additional notes at the end as well.

Update @ 4:47PM:

Be sure to read my follow up article, I LOOOOOOOVE Lotus Notes!

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Here’s a recurring theme at work which I will now formalize into a serial column — I Hate Lotus Notes.  We converted to Notes recently I had used and supported (and indeed, hated) Notes several years ago in a helpdesk job at Hewlett-Packard several years ago.  I can’t tell you how pleased I was to learn that I had to quit using Microsoft Outlook over Notes.  I miss Outlook, which I have been power user #1, support engineer, trainer and so on for many years.

Oh well, spilled milk.  Let’s now concentrate on the goodness that is Lotus Notes!  Notes is, at it’s core, a database engine and development environment.  Contrast this to Outlook which is at it’s core a personal information management (PIM) client.  The Notes GUI is where most of my complaints lie.  I’m really glad that I don’t personally know any Lotus engineers, that would make any relationship with those guys extremely awkward.

Today’s post will show you the many and varied ways you can add people to your Sametime contact list.  Sametime as some may know, is the Lotus instant messaging service.  With Notes 8 the IM client is integrated into the main application, which I have no problem with.  One of the problems with the Notes GUI is that it is inconsistent.  I’ll highlight some of that in the following screenshots.

First let’s look at the message list and preview window of a Notes Mail database (Notes 8 beta M4 to be precise):

Figure 1:  

I have selected one message and a preview of it appears below.  You can see the subject line and author name in read there at the bottom.  What I’ve done in this shot is right-click on the author name in the message list, then selected the very first item which is the author’s name context menu.  In there are a dozen or more options, one of which is Add to Sametime.  Fine, moving on.

Figure 2:

This time I’ve right-clicked on the author name in the preview pane.  Notice how different the context menu is!  That’s the full thing, where the one in Figure 1 was so large I had to truncate it.  Check it out–no Add to Sametime option!

Figure 3:

Now this is where things get weird.  If I hover over the author’s name, I get this bubble you see above.  The bubble has it’s own context menu!  How weird is that?  This menu is the same as the one in the first screenshot.  However, this bubble doesn’t make sense to me.  Also there’s an awkward focus issue in that, as bubbles tend to do, it disappears when it loses focus.  Well when that happens your context menu goes away.  So in order to use this menu in Figure 3, you’ve got to hover (taking 500 msec or so), right-click, then speed-navigate your cursor to the right option and hope you don’t accidentally slip off of the menu or take too long because if you do–the menu disappears!

So as I said at the top, my blog post got noticed in a big way.  I am of course, flattered.  At the same time, I do so love my job and wish to continue doing it for money.    I’ve volunteered to give to the product management a serious Microsoft-slanted (which is my background) GUI review to Notes 8 final and I’ll be working on that next week.  As a software gear-head, power-user, and unofficial but extremely aggressive QA tester in various career roles and OSS project work, I can’t tell you how cool it is to have the ears and eyes of the right people. 

Thanks in advance for not killing the messenger, kthxbye!