Scrotes Exports - surely not in the 21st century.

November 1, 2006 3:32 AM

What are the alternatives to exporting emails from Lotus Notes client to text files in order to share information. Is this best practice anyway?

We use Lotus Notes as an email client at work. We are a small section who work on several hundred jobs at the same time.
Because of email quotas imposed and the managers dislike of allowing access to his inbox we export emails to a text file which is then stored on a network shared drive. The text files retain no formatting of the original email and cannot include attachments which have to be saved separately.
We do the export so that a) if one of us is off -other staff can catch up on what's going on and b) in case of conflict with a customer, to have a record of all contact.
I hate the system as it's slow, you lose the context of attachments, it's difficult to get any meaningful info out of them and I have a nagging suspicion that there must be a better way.
Our notes developers charge a fortune for creating simple databases so I think that's out of the question.
I wish Notes could export emails like Outlook can...
Has anybody got any good ideas here!

posted by razzman to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Sounds like you need to interface to Notes/Domino and grab as much data out of it as you can. Looks like IBM/Lotus provide a COM interface (check this out which I found after some light Googling). The obvious next step would be then to use VB/Python/Perl/whatever-you-like to export that data into some decent universal format (HTML is probably your best bet) and then use some search system on those exported files (Google Desktop would be a good choice) to actually search through that mess.

You're going to need a coder to do the API interfacing though... I'd say jump online and ask for bids (RentACoder, Guru.com).
posted by costas at 4:54 AM on November 1, 2006

The standard Notes way of handling this problem would be to create a database to handle the work requests. If each request just needs a few fields, perhaps an attached document or two and a simple workflow then this is not something that should cost much at all. If your developers threaten to charge a fortune look for competing quotes. It makes more sense to store the work orders in a database than it does to have to extract them from an email.
posted by rongorongo at 5:45 AM on November 1, 2006

I assume from what you are saying that the emails are sent to a particular person's mailbox, and that person does not wish to allow other people access to his inbox. Does he perform the export himself? If not, how is the export performed? Is it done by a scheduled agent?

The easiest way to handle something like this would be to create a mail-in database on the server and have all the mail related to the team's work sent to that mailbox. Then you could set the access control list to allow access for the team and they would retain all the context, including the attachments. If the manager wishes to retain the messages in his mailbox, you could also set up an agent in his mailfile to send a copy of messages that meet a specific criteria to the shared mail-in database.

I could walk you (or the server administrator) through either of these in about 5 minutes. Unless there is some additional requirement here that I am missing, developers shouldn't be charging much at all for this.
posted by bedhead at 6:15 AM on November 1, 2006

Another possibility is to create a Mail Archive database on your server and give everyone access to it.
The advantage of an Archive instead of a mail-in database is that you'll get a link for the database in your mail (Assuming your running Notes 6 or 7). Just drag your documents over to the link to archive them. If you use Policies, you can push out the archive settings to everyone's client automatically, too.
Either method (Mail-In or Archive) takes about 5 minutes to set up. No design work necessary.
posted by Eddie Mars at 10:30 AM on November 1, 2006

We had a similar problem at my office. We need many Lotus Notes e-mails as legal documentation for Sorbanes-Oxley related stuff and many people will need access to it. Giving all users access was out of the question and we needed the documents to "live" outside of Lotus Notes.

Solution: We installed CutePDF (free) and print the e-mails to CutePDF, which creates a PDF (Acrobat Reader) file in the network directory of our choice - the emails retain all formatting and appear just like a full-color printout of the e-mail would look. It also is not editable, so it can be used as quasi-legal proof/documentation. We name them according to a set of rules so that we can always tell what the file contains, and any attachments in the e-mail are saved with similar-but-slightly-different names on the network so that the files appear together in the directory listing. The only drawback is that the attachments must be saved separately from the original e-mail, but this works great for our office and has been in use for the past 2.5 years or so.
posted by jspierre at 7:59 AM on November 4, 2006