Send Mail Notifications for Calendar Events
January 17 2007 07:41:43 PM
Add/Read Comments [16]
A fellow Notes user was telling me today about how a web-based calendar he uses sends him text messages for calendar entries. Guess what? Notes can do that too!
On the top right corner of a calendar entry, select Notify me, or click on the Alarm icon.
The brings up the Alarm Notification Options dialog. At the bottom you can click "Send mail notification" and enter the email address for your phone.
I don't have a use for this feature, since my Notes calendar automatically synchronizes with my phone/blackberry, but in case you need it, the feature is there.
UPDATE: Reader Philip Jensen pointed out to me that in order for this to work, your Notes client must be running. That makes sense, since the sending of the email is tied into the clients alarm function. Thanks Philip, I appreciate the information.
On the top right corner of a calendar entry, select Notify me, or click on the Alarm icon.
The brings up the Alarm Notification Options dialog. At the bottom you can click "Send mail notification" and enter the email address for your phone.
I don't have a use for this feature, since my Notes calendar automatically synchronizes with my phone/blackberry, but in case you need it, the feature is there.
UPDATE: Reader Philip Jensen pointed out to me that in order for this to work, your Notes client must be running. That makes sense, since the sending of the email is tied into the clients alarm function. Thanks Philip, I appreciate the information.
One of the staff where I work uses this as a kind of Out of Office without the initial inbound email for the lawyers she works for and the reception desk.
Last week, I received an email with an invitation to a meeting. I accepted it and selected the option to remind me five minutes before the meeting (by sending me an email). For some reason, I did not receive any notification regarding to the meeting but luckily, I remembered the meeting. Is this some kind of bug in the calendar database?
Hi Carolyn, sorry but I can't really de-bug that from here. Was it a one time occurrence, or can you repeat it?
The meeting was an one time occurrence. I will not be able to repeat it until the next invitation to a meeting.
Yeah it works well, the only problem is you need to have the Notes client running for this functionality to work. I am in the process of building a server based reminder utility which I will integrate with the Mail DB.
Thanks Philip, that is a huge caveat! I did not realize that, since I pretty much always have Notes running, and as I mentioned, I don't use this feature much anyway since my calendar synchs via Blackberry Enterprise Server. I will upgrade the main post to indicate this.
Hi,
Philipp told it, but some more.
This feature is a local agent. So you have to activate local agent in User preferences and your notes client have to be open for this alarm function.
And you have the same feature in Mail 'To Do Items'.
But in this type of document you first have to enter a 'Due by' date.
That makes sense because you need a date for which you want to get a notification.
But the big problem for a normal user is, that you cannot immediately see the 'Notify me' option. After you have entered the 'Due by' date you have to leave the field or press F9 to refresh the display.
Is there anybody who can tell the Lotus Mail Template Developers that they should activate the flag 'Run Exiting/OnChange events after value change' for the field 'DueDate'.
In the partner forum Lotus told me:
Working as designed. New behavior introduced in 6.x: No notify options visible until due date is set ensures that the inconsistency cannot occur.
But I am sure they did not understand this little little little refresh problem.
But at most customers it is very hard to change the design of the mail template even to repair this little refresh problem.
Another problem with this feature is that you need to select a reminder notification for each calendar entry you have. There is no global setting that can be set to send notifications for all meetings.
I have users that use the reminder a lot.
they have daily reminders for some jobs they have to do daily.
about every 2 months the reminder fails and I have to clean up the past reminders and recreate them
otherwise the notify me doesn't work anymore
overload ? to much ?
anybody has an idea
I have the same problem with the Lotus Notes reminders, whether it be calendar, to-do's, follow-ups, etc. I am constantly writing emails. It is probably the most time-consuming thing in my average workday. While I am typing, the notification/reminder comes up and "Done" seems to be the default button (instead of "Snooze" or "Cancel"). Well, good old *spacebar* or *enter* serve as selection commands for this "Done" option, so as Im typing the reminder quickly pops up and I end up telling Lotus Notes that I am done with these things, when I likely want to Snooze it for another hour - how is this possibly acceptable? This is so frustrating.
All,
I also have this peculiar problem. The Alarms for the meeting (have 15 minutes notify me) set up doesn't come. Suddently it comes after say 2 weeks with all the alarms coming up in a single window.. Not sure what could be the problem. I created new replica that didn't help. Am i missing some agents? Not sure. Also due to this i missed 2 important meetings.
Regards
Namachi
I am running Lotus 6.5 not sure whether thats the problem.
Namachi, I don't think I can really debug this for you via a discussion on this blog. I suggest you open a support call, and they should be able to help you figure out what is wrong, and how to correct it.
Alan, thanks for the post! Once we get a Domino 8 server set up, I intend to use this in conjunction with iNotes Ultralite on my iPhone for event notifications.
Im having a problem with Lotu