Friday, April 27, 2007

Vertical Preview Pane

One of the new capabilities that has been featured in Notes 8 mail is the ability to have a vertical preview pane of your message. This feature emulates what has been found in Outlook for many years. As I was developing an interface for our contact management system, I discovered that this capability has been in Notes all along at least Notes 7 and most likely in Notes 6 and Notes 6.5. There are two critical factors to get this to work. First, you need to create a frameset that has two frames that has been split vertically. In the first frame, set the frame to the view that you would like to display.



Next, name the second frame to a given name that you would like. For example, "NotesPreview". Second, in the property box set of the first frame set "Default Target Links in Frame" to the name of the second frame.

As a result, when you click on a document in the view, a preview of the will be previewed in the second frame, vertically.

3 comments:

Charles Robinson said...

I've been doing this for years. I'm a little baffled why a vertical preview is such a big deal since it's been in the product for a long time. :-)

Anonymous said...

I have Notes 6.5 and do not see any of the options you described. Is this really possible in 6.5?

Also, I am sincerely surprised by your evangelism of Notes. I think it's possibly the least intuitive program I've ever used, especially given all the UI and performance advances in every other email and communication platform. I've been a Notes/Domino user off and on since 1995. And through v7, it's been excruciating every step of the way.

Domino Interface said...

If you go to the frameset properties and define the frame for a view you will see the settings. You need to have Lotus Notes Designer, a user is not able to make this change. Yes, most Notes interface are bad not because the capabilities are not there, but developers do not spend the time to address the UI issues. There are a host of addition features that IBM can have added, but they didn't. Some are in the Notes 8 Standard client, but they should have added it into the Basic client. Is it frustrating, yes. But the capabilities of Notes and Domino out weight some of these issues.

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