Friday, April 25th 2008
Inbox Maintenance05:58:57 AMCategory : Mail
The Inbox Maintenance feature is certainly
a radical change from how most users are used to having their Inbox managed
so it's important that Administrators fully understand what's involved
with the feature before they roll it out. IBM wrote a great FAQ
that is a must-read before any implementation. I personally think
that an agent is much more flexible than this feature but it is a great
start. Certainly anything that can get a user's Inbox size down is
beneficial to the Lotus Notes client, Domino and BES performance. The
IBM White Paper Best
Practices for large Lotus Notes mail files
has been a life saver in trying to get clients to understand the importance
of this issue. Dealing with clients that have 180,000 + documents
in their Inbox is certainly a painful experience. Getting the client
to do something about those emails is problem even with all the great features
of Lotus Notes to help manage mail (Rules, color coding, attention indicators,
Follow Ups, etc.). During the Beta phase of ND8 I worked with a
gentleman who had over 175,000 documents in the local replica of his Inbox
and watched as Lotus Notes would take upwards of 7 minutes to start up
and allow the user interaction with his client. Running maintenance
on his mail file brought that down to 5.5 minutes but of course maintenance
can only do so much against those kinds of numbers. This particular
client didn't really believe (or want to believe) that his Inbox size was
a problem so I made a local copy of his mail file, removed all but 20,000
documents in his Inbox, closed Lotus Notes and ran maintenance against
his client again. Even with Beta 2, his Lotus Notes started and was
available in under a minute.
So what would I change about the Inbox Maintenance feature? The most important change I would make is to allow a minimum number. So if the Inbox had less than x number of documents, don't run the feature against that mail file at this time. Currently it will run no matter how many documents are in the Inbox so users could open up their Inbox to no documents. Of course they are still available in All Documents but still.... And speaking of All Documents, that is the second change I would make. I would allow the Administrator to specify where the documents will be moved. As in what folder. Even with the great new search feature in Notes 8, many people feel much more comfortable knowing that their documents are in certain folders and that shouldn't be taken away from them. Of course this feature can be rewritten and endlessly customized via an agent but I find that the out-of-the-box features are more likely to be used and the issue of Inbox size is important enough to have strong backing in the form of an out-of-the-box solution.
So what would I change about the Inbox Maintenance feature? The most important change I would make is to allow a minimum number. So if the Inbox had less than x number of documents, don't run the feature against that mail file at this time. Currently it will run no matter how many documents are in the Inbox so users could open up their Inbox to no documents. Of course they are still available in All Documents but still.... And speaking of All Documents, that is the second change I would make. I would allow the Administrator to specify where the documents will be moved. As in what folder. Even with the great new search feature in Notes 8, many people feel much more comfortable knowing that their documents are in certain folders and that shouldn't be taken away from them. Of course this feature can be rewritten and endlessly customized via an agent but I find that the out-of-the-box features are more likely to be used and the issue of Inbox size is important enough to have strong backing in the form of an out-of-the-box solution.
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