Another quirk is that if you index attachments, then opening search result documents with attachments in them can take ages while Notes determines if the attachment should be highlighted as containing the search result. Only index attachments if you actually need them indexed, and remember that to index Acrobat files requires Acrobat to be installed.

After making sure you have the Notes help files installed on your client and indexed, what else should you carry? Here are some suggestions.

Lotus Notes Knowledgebase
Lotus Notes Knowledgebase is vital to any Business Partner, and valuable to any Notes professional. If you get the CDs or have an online connection, get the thing onto your laptop and keep it up to date. The 400 MB occupied on my laptop is space more than well justified. For speed of update I operate this with document truncation turned on in my replication settings. You'll probably be happy with this setting because, frankly, your chances of needing any of the attachments is pretty small, and if you do, there's a reasonable chance that you have access at the time to a Web connection and can grab the attachment from there.

IBM Redbooks
If you aren't aware of IBM Redbooks, you now have a reading assignment! IBM Redbooks are so named because the covers used to be red. They're developed by IBM's International Technical Support Organization (ITSO), written by IBM and Business Partner people, and are intended to provide the real world, coal face slant on using and making the best of IBM products. They aren't product manuals, but like all books of this sort, vary from vital to "so what." Though, to be fair, your value assessment of them will depend on your level of expertise in the subject and your need.

You can get these things on CDs. One free source of the CD is the Redbook stand in the Lotusphere Product Showcase, and you can download them from the Redbook Web site at http://www.redbooks.ibm.com. I keep a Notes Document Library of the thirty or so I find useful, and I check back to the Redbook site once a month or so for updates. Actually, I also use the same Notes database for other product manuals too, including Lotus Yellowbooks. The just under 200 MB that this database occupies is well justified This is one database I don't keep full-text indexed.

Lotus Info
Along with the help manuals, you should think about installing the help databases for other Lotus technologies that you might need; specifically things like the DECS help, the C API user guide, and reference (useful to Lotuscript coders as well as C programmers). Other databases that come into this category include the Lotus R5 App Dev Best Practices Guide, LSX help databases, Sametime Toolkit database. and so on. You can find a lot of this material at the new Notes.Net at http://www.lotus.com/ldd in the Documentation Library section.

By the way, has anyone seen the rumored Sys App Best Practices Guide? If so, can you send me a copy or a link?

Customer and project information
This is the "keeping it all at your fingertips" idea. For years I've kept everything of value in Notes databases, and I use Notes databases to keep everything I write for and about projects and customers. That way, it's always in one place, so I know where to go to find it. It sure beats keeping stuff in file system folders too, and having it available certainly beats having it on a file server somewhere and completely unavailable.