Instant IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.3 How-to : Book Review
Tags :8.5.3 book review packt
I had the opportunity to review Instant IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.3 How-to from Packt publishing. I was hoping for a linear book with some great tips. This book could then be leveraged to show cool things to the doubters and on-board new users at a faster pace by showing quick tips.
One immediate concern I had was that this book was based on IBM Notes 8.5.3 and was published after IBM Notes 9 was released. The public beta was out long enough for IBM Notes 9 to be included in this book. It would have been beneficial to showcase some of the new mail features just as a tease of what can be found in IBM Notes 9.
It is a quick 68 pages written by an IBMer and reviewed by IBMers. There were simple, intermediate and advanced type tips scattered throughout the topics. From the preface:
A mini Lotus Notes User Guide, this book covers best practice, hints, tips, and tricks of
Lotus Notes 8.5.3. As a user, you will find this book to be an invaluable reference for the
8.5.3 Lotus Notes client. This book covers the new features in detail so that you will be able
to take advantage of them.
Some of the tips, like adding a feed have been around for years and are not really deployed anywhere in the real world. It starts with customizing the Homepage of the client. With the new IBM Notes 9 Discover page that would have been helpful. I did appreciate they mentioned the Workspace.
There was a brief section on saving emails as .eml files. I definitely would not have included this in the book as saving loose files of messages defeats the purpose of having a mailfile that is searchable, indexed and sorted. Message recall was also mentioned (many of you know I hate it with a passion) but it failed to mention this feature may not work unless your administrator has configured and allowed it.
Creating replicas was helpful but having user manually edit notes.ini files was not. I would not recommend a user even knowing that file existed. There were some good tips around calendar cleanup, adding more calendars and color coding. I just wished some sections were better grouped together.
Some other reviews have been done, such as the one on Conxsys. I think we agree there are some valid tips but the flow and content matter wasn't spot on.
Overall, the book had a good goal but missed the mark that would have me put it in the hands of users as a getting started quick guide. Using words like provisioned widgets meant nothing since the user doesn't understand what that is. Another thing because clear when I showed a normal user the guide. Their statement was "Lotus sure has a lot of menus and preferences". While this has nothing to do with the book writing, it definitely showed in the step by step portions.
You can get your own copy of Instant IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.3 How-to right at Amazon
Yes, I was sent a copy from Packt for free to perform the review. No guarantees are ever given in the type of review. I just type them out as I go.
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On Thursday, May 30th, 2013 by Chris Miller
