SFSU DoIT | Help Desk | Lotus Quick Reference Guide

Introduction to Lotus Notes

Lotus Basics

Lotus Notes is a productivity and collaboration suite designed to integrate your many workplace tools. Lotus offers you one central location to access and create email, organize your personal and work calendar, schedule office meetings, reserve office resources, create to-do lists, manage personal contacts, and even browse the web. As an integral part of San Francisco State University's new Campus Email / Portal Project , Lotus Notes will act as your central interface for many important tasks, integrating the independent calendaring and email client applications into a cohesive workspace.

Customizing Your Welcome Page
Email Basics
Calendar Basics
Address Book
To Do List
Getting Help

Customizing Your Welcome Page

This is the first screen you will see after you install and setup your Lotus Notes Client.

Choose 'No thanks, just give me the defaults'. You can always modify this layout by clicking along the top of the Welcome Page on 'Click here for Welcome Page options'

Lotus Notes Interface

Application shortcuts are available in the Bookmark bar.

The Toolbar contains common tasks for your selected Window tab.

Action bar buttons provide functionality to the selected Window tab.

Window tabs can be closed by clicking on the X or by using the ESC key.

The Status bar provides status updates as Lotus checks mail or uploads/downloads information.

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Email Basics

Note: Lotus refers to email messages as memos. The term memo will be used throughout this document to refer to Email messages.

Accessing Your Email Memos

To access your email memos, click on the Mail icon within the Bookmark bar. Doing this will open your Inbox and show you all current memos.

To check for new email memos, select the Refresh button in the navigation toolbar or press the F9 key.

To read an email memo, double click the memo in the Inbox.

To move to the next memo, press the Enter key

To go back to the previous memo, press the Backspace key.

To open included attachments, double click on the attachment icon in the body of a memo. For security reasons, Lotus Notes will ask you to confirm your intention to open the attachment. After clicking Open, your operating system will route the file to the proper application based on its extension (ex. pdf, doc).

Composing New Email Memos

To access your email memos, click on the Mail icon within the Bookmark bar . Doing this will open your Inbox and show you all current memos.

To create a new email memo, click the New Memo button from the Action bar.

Reply to an email memo by clicking Reply menu . From the menu, select Reply to respond without previous memo contents. Select Reply with History to include any or all communication from previous memos.

To select a name from the Address Book, click the Address button at the top of the new memo page.

To attach a file to an email memo, click in the body of the email memo where you would like the attachment to appear, and click the Paper Clip icon from the Toolbar.

When adding multiple names into any of the Address fields, separate them with commas, semi-colons, or carriage returns.

Customizing Email Memos

To set an Out-of-Office notification for your incoming mail, from the Action Bar select Tools > Out of Office, specify the duration of your absence, and a memo you would like others to receive. When you are done configuring this memo, click Enable to activate the notification. When you return to the office, be sure to disable your Out of Office notification.

To add a signature to your outgoing mail, from the Action Bar select Toolsand then Preferences. In the Preferences window, under the Mail tab, select the Signature tab. In the Signature box provided, type your text signature, or select 'HTML file or Image File' if you plan to use a non-text signature. Click on 'Automatically append a signature to the bottom of my outgoing mail memos' box, and then click ok.

Organizing Your Email Memos

To access your email memos, click on the Mail icon within the Bookmark bar . Doing this will open your Inbox and show you all current memos.

To create a new folder for email memos, from the Action Bar click Folder and select Create Folder from the menu. Next, give your folder a unique title and designate where you want the folder to be placed.

To move an email memo to a folder, select the memo and drag it into the appropriate folder in the navigation pane and then release. Alternately, select a memo, go to the Action Bar and select move to folder. Specify the folder where you would like to move your memo and click Move.

Moving email to the Trash folder does not immediately discard your memos. Memos placed in the trash will be automatically purged after 48 hours.

Lotus Email Extras

If you would like a pop-up window to notify you of new email memos, you can configure Lotus to provide an alert. On a PC, go to File > Preferences > User Preferences. On a Mac OS X system, go to Lotus > Preferences > User Preferences. Expand the Mail tab and check 'Show a popup'.

To spell check a specific memo, select the appropriate memo in the Window tabs, go to the Edit Menu > Check Spelling.

To configure Lotus to spell check each memo prior to sending, click on the Mail icon within the Bookmark bar and click the Tools option from the Action bar and select Preferences from the menu. In the Preferences window, under Mail > Basic, check the box next to 'Automatically check mail memos for misspellings before sending.'

To search for a specific memo, click the magnifying glass icon in the Toolbar. Below the Action Bar, a search field will appear.

Lotus uses Rules to filter and sort your mail to mailboxes, folders, and even the trash. To create a Rule, click on the Mail icon within the Bookmark bar. Next, from the Action Bar click Tools > Mail Rules. With the Mail Rules Window tab selected open, click New Rule .

To create a distribution list, access your Address Book by clicking on the Address Book icon . From the Action Bar, click New and select Group from the Menu.

Under Group Name, give the group a title for reference. Under Members, type an email address or click the downward arrow to select a member from an address book or directory . When done adding members, click Save & Close to complete the group entry. When typing future emails, you can address a group by typing the Group Name in the To: field.

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Calendar Basics

To access your calendar, click the Calendar icon on the Bookmark bar.

To change the view of your calendar to a daily, weekly, or monthly format, click on the corresponding tab in the Action Bar.

Creating a Meeting

To schedule a meeting, click the Schedule a Meetingbutton at the top of the Calendar screen

Add a Subject to the Invitation and specify the date and time of your meeting.

Invitees to your meeting can be designated as Required (to) or Optional (cc) participants. The FYI (bcc) field keeps non-attending staff or managers informed of meeting times and topics.

Each Required and Optional invitee will receive an invitation email memo with the details of your proposed meeting and will be able to respond regarding their attendance. FYI recipients will be notified of the meeting, but it will not appear in their personal calendar.

Specify location and resource details about the meeting in the Where section.

To view the availability of invitees, rooms or resources, expand the Scheduler by clicking 'Click to see Invitee, Room and Resource availablity'

To receive an alarm about a pending meeting, check the Notify me box and select your alarm preferences.

To schedule a repeating meeting check the Repeats box.

The Repeats option window will appear to set meeting repeats.

Creating other Calendar entries.

Lotus offers additional types of Calendar entries (Appointments, Anniversaries, Reminders, and All Day Events).

To schedule one of these event types, click New in the Action bar button and select your Calendar Entry choice.

These event types are different than meetings in that they do not schedule invitees, rooms or resources.

Allowing Others to View your Schedule

To allow co-workers to view your schedule go to the Calendar Action bar, click Tools and select Preferences from the menu. In the Preferences window select the Access & Delegation tab, then Access to Your Schedule tab.

In the section titled, "Who is allowed to see your schedule information (when you are busy or available)," specify what level of visibility you prefer. Using the settings in this section, you may specify campus-wide visibility to view your busy time, you may block all users from viewing your busy time, or you may allow only certain people to view your busy time.

If you need to grant detailed access to your information, use the "What schedule information they may see" section to customize the level of visibility you would like to allow.

Granting Access to your Calendar (Proxy)

To delegate access to your calendar (Proxy) go to the Calendar Action bar, click Tools and select Preferences from the menu. In the Preferences window select the Access & Delegation tab, then Access to Your Mail and Calendar tab. To give access to an individual, select 'Add Person or Group'.

In the Add People/Groups window, specify in section 1 who will have proxy access to your calendar by clicking the downward triangle icon and selecting the user from the address directory.

In section 2, specify how much access you will grant to this particular user. Typically, most people will delegate access for 'Only Calendar and To Do.' However, if the specified person or group needs to be able to send mail from your email account, you may want to grant access to your mail file by selecting "All Mail, Calendar, and To Do."

In section 3, specify the level of read and write capabilities you would like to grant to various mail and calendar tasks.

In section 4, specify whether you would like to provide automatic notification to the proxy user by forwarding meeting notices. By enabling one of these options, the proxy user can be aware of calendar modifications without regularly watching your calendar for daily modifications.

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Address Book

Access your Address Book by clicking on the Address Book icon .

Add a new contact by clicking New, and selecting Contact from the menu.

Create a list of contacts by clicking New, and selecting Group from the menu.

To extract contact information from a memo, meeting invitation, or To Do item, click Tools from the Action Bar and select 'Add Sender to Address Book'.

Lotus supports the vCard contact lists standard. To import a vCard, go to File > Import, change the 'Files of Type' to vCard, and navigate to the location of your vCard.

To Do's

To access your To Do List, click on the To Do icon on the Bookmark bar.

To create a To Do item, click the New To Do Item button from the Action bar.

Getting Help

Go to Help > Context Help while working in any Notes screen for context-sensitive help.

Lotus contains a robust Getting Started guide and detailed documentation via the Help menu along the top of the screen.

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Last Modified: 11 May 2006
doit@sfsu.edu