How do I create public folders like exchange.Example people want to drag and drop emails to the public folders like outlook clients do.
Thanks…
Subject: How to create public folders like exchange.
I don’t think that there is any direct equivalent to public folders in Notes (There probably is a way… there always is). You can check this solution as a possible alternative;http://www.alanlepofsky.net/alepofsky/alanblog.nsf/dx/share-documents
Subject: RE: How to create public folders like exchange.
Thanks. This app is to basic. It also changes to many fields of the orginal document. You loose who sent the email etc. It moves the info into the body therefor becomes a dead end document.
Thanks… I’ll keep looking. I dont understand my such a common feature is not part of Notes.
Subject: RE: How to create public folders like exchange.
As they say in the PERL world, TIMTOWTDI (there is more than one way to do it). Simply copying the message to a publicly-accessible database is the least demanding on the IT org. Automating the same process is only a little more difficult. Automating the process while keeping some restrictions in place (access by groups, etc.) is only very slightly more taxing.
Why isn’t it “in the box”?
Exchange is an email system. Notes and Domino is a groupware system that features email as one of its out-of-the-box applications. The concept of “shared folders”, or multi-user databases, is the core of Notes and Domino – it’s the personal email databases that are the odd man out. If mail is destined for shared use in the first place, then the appropriate destination is a multiuser mail-in database, not an individual’s inbox.
Subject: RE: How to create public folders like exchange.
While Domino has many ways to share documents none of them apply to real world how people use email. eg. A group of 10 people are working on a project where all information and documents are passed via email. The from address in email is what people repsond to. This is most noticable when you send info/ emails outside of your office, where there is another group of 10 people that use a varity of email programs. When the outside people click on rely the from address is what they know. So the email goes back to the originator of the email. Now the person reads the email and determines someone else in his team should respond so we forwards the email. Now the from address is the person that forwarded the email. also now there are 2 copies of the same email. What the staff wants is to be able to move emails to a shared location and anyone can view or respond to the email to the original person that sent the email. Inter office processes work great by using teamroom’s but its difficult to get outside people to intergrate with lotus applications. We have added products like sametime to allow for better instant communications but outside people still us email in a very simple way. They relationship is usually a many to many via email and not a many to one. This is where a shared public folder helps. People don’t CC everyone becuase they are not sure who best to send to. If a mail-in database would send email out using the person’s name and the reply go to the mail-in database with a link in the person email that would be cool.
Subject: RE: How to create public folders like exchange.
Set the reply to property of the outbound mail to the mail-in database address.
Subject: RE: How to create public folders like exchange.
Ok setting the reply to always needs to be a human. Outside people deal with people. The common mail in database needs to be in the background invisible to outside parties. The complete solution needs to be a many to many relationship with outside parties where all reply to address are real people.
Subject: The reason it’s not part of Notes is…
that in the “Notes way” of doing this, the data would not have been in your mailbox in the first place. It would have been created in a shared database on the Domino server. If you absolutely have to have something in your Inbox, well… the “Notes way” would be to send links to users, which they can click on from their Inbox to take them right to the appropriate document in the shared database. Notes provides that, and it’s a lot more versatile than anything that Exchange provides with public folders.
But of course there are ways to do exactly what you want, too Cut/copy/paste would be a piece of cake, but it’s not as cool as drag-drop – and admittedly Notes doesn’t make drag-drop integration easy enough. The way I would probably do this is with a “dummy” folder in user mailboxes, which you can drag messages into, along with code that monitors the folder and moves messages into a shared database and takes care of any requirements like mapping, tracking, notifying, etc. Generalizing this into something that allows users to create their own shared spaces and provides separate drag-drop targets for each one, though, isn’t easy at all. Like I said, Notes doesn’t make drag-drop integration easy enough.
And BTW, I do agree that Lotus should make it easier to create aribitrary shared collaborative spaces and drag email messages into those spaces. And in fact Lotus agrees, too. They have something called Activity Explorer that is designed to do exactly that for ad hoc collaboration, but it’s a separate product. They also have something called Quickr which is geared more toward ongoing collaboration instead of ad hoc.
Update: Above I mentioned Activity Explorer. Duh! That’s soooo last year 
Activities are now a part of Lotus Connections. Still a separate product from Notes, but integrated.
Subject: How to create public folders like exchange.
As someone else pointed out, the first question to answer is why data that needs to be shared is being mailed into someone’s Inbox in the first place. When people are asked this question, or pose it themselves, they sometimes “begin to get some light”.
It would be a fairly simple matter to alter the mail template to provide drag-and-drop functionality that lets people copy documents to some application somewhere. The first thing I would try is, add a folder to the mail outline and have people drop their document on it. Use the database’s QueryDragDrop event to ask the user where they want to copy the documents. Create a list of eligible targets - applications they can copy docs to – and store this in some sort of profile - say, a small application replicated to every server.* Give the user the option to copy or move. Use a profile doc to keep track of the user’s selections and bring those up as the default next time. Pretty simple stuff for anyone familiar with LotusScript. Of course if IBM has a solution you should look at that also.
- You could describe this data as individual documents, and then put a Readers field on each document, to control who sees what apps listed in this prompt.