Like the Direct Dial, the Hunt Group connection works with the Location document to define the phone number to dial. You use a Hunt Group connection when you're dialing into a server farm, specifically when you aren't sure which server will answer the call. This matters; if Notes dials a server and the call is answered by a server with a different name, then the call will fail. When a given number can be answered by any one of several servers, the very nature of such a setup means that the server you call probably won't host the databases that you actually want to reach, so the Hunt Group connection then expects a passthru connection as well in order to connect the client via the Hunt Group, to the destination server.

Network dial connections are used to dial to some sort of remote network, such as Microsoft's RAS (Remote Access Services). Because the phone numbers entered here don't work with location documents but instead work with the dialing properties of your modem, the rules required here for phone number setup aren't the same as for Notes direct dials. However, if you're going to use a LAN dial setup of some sort, I guess that your IS department (or maybe you are the IS department!) will have helped you set up the connection details and will help you get the phone numbers right.

Locations
The Location document is the next part of the scenario. Depending on how you work, you may well want one location document for each place that you commonly use Notes. I tend to do this, so that I set them up once, Notes remembers everything I need to know about that location, and I don't have to bother again. So let's look at the parts of a location document that are specific to a traveling user.

Once you've created the new location document and given it a name, select the Type as Notes Direct Dial. This will un-hide the Phone Settings tab. Actually, a quicker way of creating a new location is to copy and paste an existing one in the Locations view and edit the new copy. Before you go to the Phone Settings, however, go to the Ports tab and un-check all but the COMx port for your modem. The reason for this is that when you create a new Location, Notes finds all the available ports from Notes.INI settings, adds them to the new location, and checks them as available. This is a good source of problems if you create offline locations when you're at the office. This also assumes that you have a modem port set up in Notes in the first place, of course. We'll come back to these later.

Go to the Phone Settings tab next. Figure B shows the settings for my Home location.

FIGURE B


Here are the phone details for my Home location. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Figure C shows my Orlando setup.

FIGURE C


Here are the Phone details for Orlando. Roll over picture for a larger image.

You can see from these how I have filled in the fields:

• Prefix for outside line: At home I don't need one, but at a Disney Lotusphere hotel, 8 gives an outside line. The comma following the 8 adds a delay in the dialing of 3 seconds; some hotel switchboards need time to connect the outside line before dialing continues.