What you should know about attachment handling in Lotus Notes/Domino

Does your Notes or Domino application allow users to attach files into Notes documents? If so, are you confident that business users know how to save attachments, how to update them and save them back accurately?

In Notes 5, if you wanted to edit an attached file, you had to detach, edit, and re-attach it back in the Notes document. It was time consuming and led to numerous lost updates.

Lotus Notes 6 was supposed to eliminate tedious file detaching and re-attaching. When an attachment is double-clicked, the properties infobox is displayed:

More often than not, people are confused with the View/Open/Edit options. Not to mention the properties tabs. Users open the document, make changes, and then lose them on save! ("When asked if I wanted to save, I clicked Yes! What’s happened?") Not surprisingly, they blame the application for lost updates.

In Notes 7 and Notes 8, IBM was attempting to address this problem. They have made a bigger dialog box, and have added some instructions (“Click Open if…”, “Click Edit if…”):

However, the major problem persists. A dialog box like this one is not something that you would like to have opening each time when your users double-click on the attached document. That leads to the conclusion:

What works for the email client may not work for your Notes application.

And this is only half a story. We have been talking about the Notes client so far. What about Domino Web applications? How do you upload documents using a Web browser, and update them later on?

The solution

There is a proven solution that lets Lotus Notes and Domino developers manage attachments consistently and accurately. Whether your application is Notes-based, Web-based, or both, SWING Integrator provides intuitive attachment handling.

When you open an Office document for editing, SWING Integrator handles all events on both sides – Notes and Office. That means, when you click on "Save", you can be confident it is saved. When you click on "Save and Close", the document is closed on both sides.

In addition, SWING Integrator lets you exchange data between Notes/Domino and MS Office or OpenOffice. For example, you can easily create personalized sales letters in Word using Notes data.

Other key features include:

Produce highly formatted MS Office, OpenOffice, or PDF documents with Notes data
Use centrally managed document templates
Set rules for automated document assembly and field exchange
Reuse rich text fragments and images (e.g. standard clauses)
Deliver documents as PDF
Report and analyze Notes data with Excel
Perform mail-merge or print labels with Notes data

Once SWING Integrator has been plugged into your database, it is seamlessly integrated within it, becoming totally transparent to end-users. There is no third party product installation needed.

SWING Integrator is the tool of choice for thousands of Lotus developers, across 60 countries worldwide.

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