Useful Utilities: zapnotes (Kill Notes Today!)
For the past couple of months, I’ve been using Lotus Notes as my email client. Not by choice, mind you. While Notes has it’s good points, it’s not exactly the most user friendly piece of software on the face of the planet. For the most part, it’s a great tool for team collaboration and such.
- Lotus Notes -
The problems with Lotus Notes is compounded when you have a slow connection to the Notes server. In my case, we have to VPN into the office network in order to gain access to the server located in Australia. That’s a pretty long way to go to retrieve our mail. As it stands, I sometimes receive important plain text emails after it ceases to be relevant. Imagine what happens when you have attachments and such.
As I mentioned earlier, Notes incorporates some pretty nifty collaboration tools. One such tool is the Team Room. It’s much like a forum for a team to work together. It doubles as a useful repository, etc. The unfortunate bit is that it requires some heavy resources. More often than not, it suffers from a slow network connection, much like emails do.
Today, this piece of [insert expletive] software hung on me. It spun out of control, took a nose dive, and stopped responding. Killing it manually is no good. I tried that and was greeted with a not-so-friendly message telling me something was screwed up when I attempted to restart the application. I was contemplating the good-ol’-tried-n-tested method of rebooting the notebook. That’s when a colleague of mine sent me a message telling me to try running zapnotes.
Colleague: go to start, all programs. run the zapnotes
Me: oh?
Colleague: it will kill the notes then start notes back
Me: ic. that’s cool. so that’s what you learned at the notes class?
Colleague: ibm knows notes is crap. so they created the zapnotes
Me: Haha. zapnotes. that’s a cool name
Colleague: yeah
You can just tell that there’s little love lost between us and Lotus Notes. Zapnotes is indeed a cool name. I can just imagine the infomercial.
- ZapNotes Mock Logo -
Tired of your Lotus Notes? Sick of that constant hanging sensation? Have moments when you want to throttle the damned thing and bury it in some far off cyber-graveyard? Zap your blues away with zapnotes. Zapnotes is a revolutionary software that makes killing Notes fun! Order now and we’ll throw in a free copy of zapwindows. All this for a low low price of USD2.99. So order your copy of zapnotes today. Simply dial 555-ZAPNOTES and we’ll do the rest. Windows sold separately.
So yeah. If you ever run into any problems with Lotus Notes, just zap it with zapnotes.
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Sheeva Said,
December 10, 2008 @ 11:25 pm
Sorry to hear of your problems. We’ve been a NOTES/Domino user sicne 1997 and through the years have had very little problems. In regards to services hanging up try creating a batch file that does the following (modify as necessary):
> cd \lotus\notes\data
> ..\nsd -kill
You can have users just double click the batch file from the desktop to completely terminate Notes.
As for slow connections, this will happen with any application and not just NOTES/Domino. However, unlike other applications, NOTES/Domino does allow you to replicate (mail, applications, etc.) on a schedule. We have some customers that are in areas that are not served well by network speeds so we set up their replication based on their schedules. We’ve not had any complaints to date.