Interesting ZDNet article, by Sam Diaz, on a session of the Forrester IT Forum about the future of email which gives an honourable mention to Project Vulcan.

Link: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/forrester-email-may-be-here-to-stay-but-it-definitely-needs-an-overhaul/35114?tag=nl.e539

An old problem but one which does not look like it will go away. User deletes a rule and the it continues to be executed even though it is not in the list of rules in the mailbox.

The following lotusscript can be put into a hotspot button and emailed to the user to execute. It disables all of the rules and then the user can just enable the rules that they would like to continue executing.

Sub Click(Source As Button)

Dim session As New NotesSession

Dim db As NotesDatabase

Set db = session.currentdatabase

Dim workspace As New NotesUIWorkspace

'This folder contains all the Mail Rules.

Dim folder As NotesView

Set folder = db.GetView("(Rules)")

'Find the calendar profile document in the current database. (GetProfileDocument will create the named profile document if it does not already exist.)

Dim calendarProfile As NotesDocument

Set calendarProfile = db.GetProfileDocument( "CalendarProfile" )

'Mail Rules are compiled and saved in special fields named $FilterFormula_xx

'Remove all of these fields from the calendar profile.

Forall item In calendarProfile.Items

If( Lcase$(Left$(item.Name,15)) = "$filterformula_" ) Then

Print "Cleanup " & item.Name

Call item.Remove

End If

End Forall

'Save changes to the calendar profile.

Call calendarProfile.Save( False, False )

'Disable all Rules.

Dim mailrule As NotesDocument

Set mailrule = folder.GetFirstDocument

While Not( mailrule Is Nothing )

Call mailrule.ReplaceItemValue( "Enable","0" )

Call mailrule.Save( True,False,True )

Set mailrule = folder.GetNextDocument( mailrule )

Wend

'Open the Rules folder

Call workspace.OpenDatabase( db.Server, db.FilePath, "(Rules)" )

'Message to the user.

Messagebox "Cleanup complete."

End Sub

Thanks to Mark Thompson for posting this onto the 8.5 forum.

The VOIP company whose technology is used by Lotus Sametime, Webex, Yahoo and AOL according to ZDnet (http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/google-buys-voip-engine-behind-yahoo-aol-webex-lotus-conferencing/34590).

Now the 6.x Client are no longer supported it provides a very good reason to upgrade the client base to 8.x.

But, even when the client has been upgraded to 8.x many of them require further attention again, periodically, to install fixpacks for issues which are present in the initial releases.

Why is it so difficult to get client fixes out to the clients? Windows Updates manage to do this without too much pain from a WSUS server on the LAN. If a Domino server could do the same, to connecting Notes clients, then this would reduce TCO and make the jobs of admins much easier.

Even being able to slipstream the fixpacks into the client install packages would improve things.