Leadership By Numbers :: Message Tracking Under the Radar

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Message Tracking Under the Radar

Category IBM/Lotus

Oh sure, I can be a real expert on all-things-Lotus and then completely overlook a cool feature. Some senior helpdesk staff and I were talking about a few of the differences between Outlook and Notes. "Well," I was told, "one feature that I loved in Outlook was being able to see the status of a message after it has been sent."

Of course, Domino has message tracking, and the administrator can always generate a report using the Notes Admin client (usually to ensure Service Level Agreement compliance). But, message tracking for the end user? I didn't know of a ready answer. Only Later did I stumble into the message tracking feature in the Sent folder (under tools as "tracking request"). I only learned about the feature because it has been added to the ND6.5.3 release of iNotes.

I have no idea how such a cool feature slipped under my radar, but I'm glad to see it.

Posted by Jack Dausman On 10/01/2004 | Permalink

Comments

4 - I've never heard of an admin complaining about the MTC load--but I'm also sure that that notesbench.org doesn't run it during their tests.

The biggest issue, in my view, is that it requires the Full Text Index (FTI) and not everyone likes to run FTI on their mail servers. Naturally, if you do use MTC, then you should filter out all the attachements in the FTI which only contain binary data (images, exe files, etc). Also, the MTC doesn't give real-time accuracy because it is dependent on the FTI which is queued hourly.

Posted by Jack Dausman At 10:05:51 AM On 12/17/2004 | - Website - |

3 - Does anyone know how much load it puts on the server when message tracking is enabled?

Posted by Ari Kiirikki At 10:17:10 PM On 12/10/2004 | - Website - |

2 - Handy feature for end users. Rarely used but one of those "nice to haves" for the paranoid mailer. A nice tip is to promote this feature to the admin team on the site. They will tell the end users and stop the masses of calls asking "I want to know if Joe Bloggs read my message - he says he never got it, etc.." Its been in the client since R5.

Posted by Paul Mooney At 05:53:21 AM On 10/01/2004 | - Website - |

1 - It is definitely a "nice to have" to assure those in need that the mail has been read. Now, what I didn't really go in to is the administration of the MTC. Not everyone loves it (it has an interval setting for committing, and relies on the FTI which is not real-time). I suspect that the official Lotus end-user training material leaves out this tracking feature because not all admins use the MTC. But, still, I'm left somewhat chagrined that it is 2004 before I discovered this feature.

Thanks, Paul

Posted by Jack Dausman At 08:46:05 PM On 10/01/2004 | - Website - |