ZipMail for Lotus Notes Databases
First we'll take a look at the ZipMail family (at http://www.mk-net-work.com). Since last time, I've been able to test an evaluation copy of ZipMail for Lotus Notes Databases. What this product does is scan a Notes database on your client and compress all the attachments in it. The evaluation copy I tried will only actually work on a database called test.nsf, so I copied an existing database that was full of quite large attachments and set ZipMail for Lotus Notes Databases loose on it. You do that by opening the database and selecting "Compress your database with ZipMail" from the Actions menu. Figure A shows the options dialog that appears at that point.

FIGURE A

ZipMail options for zipping database attachments. Click picture for a larger image.

Hit compress, and off it goes. It worked, exactly as advertised, trundling through it and the database and replacing attachments with zip files. The resulting savings were quite good, in my case about 30% of the space. I could then recover that space with a Compact operation if I wanted.

The only problems I can see with ZipMail for Lotus Notes Databases are its side-affects. You would need to factor these into your working practices.

After running ZipMail for Lotus Notes Databases on a database, you will have made significant changes to some documents in the database--after all, that's what you were trying to do. You might have updated quite a large number of documents. So what happens next time the database replicates? Just don't do ZipMail for Lotus Notes Databases operations while you're off-line, unless you're sure that you don't need to replicate that database again before you get back in network contact, or you might be on the phone for quite a long time while it replicates all the zip files down to the server. That one phone call will probably blow all the cost savings that you made zipping the database in the first place. And even if you are server connected while you zip the database, remember those people who aren't. Think of the effect your work will have on their next replication, or on the next replication down a slow network link to some remote server you may have.

And there's a second issue, which is that zipped attachments are just harder to use, because you have to do two operations and not one to read them. In mail, the value from zipping the attachments to save space and transmission time is, to my mind, worth the extra hassle of reading them. Now I know Notes has a zip file viewer and that it's really quite functional, but it's still harder than dealing directly with the core attachment file. I personally hate attachments where all they contain is a Word file, but that's another story. I'm less sure that there is as much value delivery in zipping attachments in shared databases, particularly if those databases never leave your servers.