Figure E shows the Memo form with the new actions.

FIGURE E


Here is the Memo form with the new actions. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The manual says that the design upgrades have to be done using the ID that the mail database belongs to. It also says that you can do it with standard Notes Design Replace but does not mention that you'll need the appropriate ACL levels to be able to use either of the approaches. I can only reason that the statement about using the ID the mail belongs to is because they reckon that this person will have Manager access to the file and be able to do the design upgrade. Many large Notes shops don't give end users access above Editor to their mail.

I have to say that having examined the design changes that were made, I'm not impressed. Some are signed by PKZip Development/PKWare, one by Asif Bakar/Xorbix, and some are not signed at all! There are quite a lot of changes--forms, a new view, and a new Java agent. The Actions they've added to forms aren't shared actions, even though at a quick look they seem to be the same code. And they aren't protected, but the template does have a new template name. I was most impressed with the form that contains just a SaveOptions field and the body text, "If you see this screen, please report to your network administrator."

Then I restarted Notes and tried it. Now, I'm using a Notes 6.0.1 client, and their documentation does say that the product works with Notes 5.0.10 and 5.0.11 only. I created a memo, and tried file-attach. I then got three ECL violations, not unexpectedly (see Figure F) and ended up with a standard Notes attachment.

FIGURE F


I received three ECL violations. Roll over picture for a larger image.

I checked the options via the system tray icon and via the added Notes action. All seemed Okay. I sent the mail, and it sent the attachment uncompressed. Hmmm, I thought, and checked it all again, comparing it all with the supplied manuals. You get a PDF file for the installation, which describes that quite well, and a Notes help database to describe operations, which isn't so good. It didn't tell me whether the attachments are compressed at attach time or at send time, and while it displays some of the dialogs, it doesn't explain them very well, if at all.

I deduced from some comments in some of the code that the compression is supposed to happen at send time and not at attach time. If true, this, to my mind, significantly reduces the value of the product from a file compression point of view, because any saved or draft copies don't have compressed attachments. It also means that you can't automatically have attachments in non-mail saved documents compressed either.

I tried to fire off an email to tech support, only to find that in the evaluation package I had, there is no email or phone number for tech support. Having been given the evaluation copy in the first place at Lotusphere 2003 by PKware's PR people, who wanted a review, I felt it reasonable to ask for help via them, an option that would not be available to most users. I've had various responses by email, none solving the problem, but they did offer to call me. To be fair to PKWare, my schedule plus the fact that I'm in the UK and they are in the US, five or more hours away, has not helped in getting to speak with them, but to date, after more than two weeks, they've still not called me. So I don't know why it doesn't work for me, but I rather suspect that when they say that it works with Notes 5.0.10 and 5.0.11 only, they actually mean that. What they did tell me by email was that they would update the documentation to describe the backup copy of the mail file design.