Next is the whole question of whether, as a team, you collaborate by mail or by shared databases. There's also the question of how you use attachments. Collaboration by mail is the easy and quick option, but it isn't the best way. We all know that it's better to collaborate, particularly when attachments are involved, in a shared database and send people doclinks to items that you want reviewed.

Working this way does have the downside that you then have to replicate that database, but the upside is that you can replicate it and collaborate when you're ready to do so, rather than having it thrust at you when you check your mail. And you can always replicate it in truncate mode and go back to the attachments you really need later. All you then need to do is determine whether, when you deal with a large attachment, whether you annotate in place and have to replicate the whole updated attachment back, or whether to create a response document with just the text of your comments, and so use much less bandwidth. If you write such a document well, it may even be easier for the document owner to use your comments this way than in yet another version of the attachment.

This question really widens out to the whole question of how your team organizes its business and whether it's done in a traveler-friendly manner. I'm not going to elaborate in any detail on this subject because, again, it's a much larger subject than I have space for here, and I'm not a team-dynamics expert. However, here are a few areas where current corporate arrangements can often be less than totally useful to a constant traveler:

• How you set up travel and get it authorized, and how you do your expenses;

• Whether you need access to any company manuals while traveling--for example, do you have to hand out information to invoke claims on your company's travel or medical insurance? They have insured you, haven't they?

• Do you have time during your working and traveling day to be a part of your team, as well as doing the work you're traveling for? Traveling is stressful enough without adding to it at the end of the day the need to be an employee of your company as well as doing the customer work that you're traveling to do.

I don't have many answers to these questions outside of the way I work; they are questions and answers that you're going to have to find for yourself. Here's a tip: whenever you find yourself complaining, even to yourself, about some aspect of the way you interact with your company, spend a moment visualizing a solution. Plan to discuss it with your colleagues and manager the next time you're in the office, so you can get it solved. You'd be surprised how often that approach gets things fixed.

Next time, we'll wrap this series up with some miscellaneous tips and tools I've found useful over the years with Notes, some updates from experience, and feedback from you, the readers.

Craig Schumann is Teamstudio VP of Product Development, author of Just Enough Governance for Lotus Notes, and more significantly a humble contest judge WOWed by this year's great entries!