Blog Archives
Some tips are worth revisiting each year: Holidays in Dom Dir and Inbox Cleanup
Some topics are worth revisiting every year. Here are two of my favorites:
How to create holidays in the Domino Directory for importing into calendars
Microsoft hires Lotus Professionals for Cloud Computing at Office 365
That’s right. You read the headline correctly. I’m not the only Lotus professional working on the Office 365 project. My friend, a fellow Lotus professional just joined the team. Surprisingly, I didn’t know anything about it until a week before he started. Now you might be asking yourself: “What would Microsoft need Lotus professionals for?” No, it has nothing to do with things like mail migrations. It’s all about BlackBerry Enterprise Servers and messaging. I think this illustrates more than ever that if you have universal skills, like understanding the concepts of messaging or troubleshooting, you are highly marketable, regardless of the details of what product those skills are used on. It’s not about being a professional of a particular brand. It’s about being an expert of a process. Conceptual understanding transcends the syntactic details. Demonstrate that and you will display higher value (DHV).
Now for some quotes you might hear among us Lotus experts at the Microsoft:
“What do you mean, I can’t paste a screen shot in a Lync IM chat?”
“Where is the ‘Send and File’ feature?”
“You mean if I want to file a message into multiple folders, I have to make copies of it?”
“Why does everybody CC everyone on the team for every email? Don’t they have discussion Dbs for that?”
“What do you mean, we don’t have a knowledge base? How do we collaborate? Oh, CC everybody.”
“I’ll just Google that, uh, I mean Bing it.”
“I could do this so easy in a Notes app!”
“How do I create a reminder on my calendar?”
“Notepad++ ? Don’t let anyone see you using that.”
“Where is the workflow in this app?”
Yes, my friend, welcome to the team.
Notes Admins: It’s that time of year. Remember how to create those holidays for importing into calendars?
It’s December. By now your HR department should have published the holidays for next year for your company. But did you add them to your Domino Directory and did you let HR tell people how to add them to their calendars? Shame on you if you didn’t. But it’s not too late. Here is a quick reminder of the steps:
- Get your list of holidays from HR for each country you have users. Remember, they are different around the world.
- Open the Domino Directory and go to the view: Configuration – Miscellaneous – Holidays
- There are already national holidays listed, but leave those alone. Those are the official holidays which may not correspond exactly with the days your company takes off. Instead, create a new set of holidays. When you do this, put them into a group named appropriately, for example “2011 Office Holidays – Canada”. I like to put the year first so it is easier to find in the list.
- If you already have a holiday listed, just edit it and update the dates and change the group. Be careful about repeating the entry for more than one year. Most HR departments don’t finalize the holidays more than 1 year in advance and they don’t always follow a set rule, so talk to your HR department first.
- Tell your users how to import the new holidays. Repeat this information again in January when everyone is back from their vacations. Some people who have a lot of vacation to burn are already gone for the year and won’t go back to read your message. Ideally, this message would come from HR and would be included where ever they post the holiday list.
You should also ensure new hires are given the instructions on how to import calendar entries. And just in case you forgot how to do that…
- Open your calendar.
- In the Action buttons, click on More – Import Holidays.
- Select the groups of holidays you want imported. Here is where you’ll be glad you put the year first. If you work with users in other countries, you may want to import the holidays for those countries too.
Consider this my holiday gift to you. Happy Holidays!
(You read it, now please rate it.)
The Notes Guy in Seattle 