Welcome to HCL Notes®
Welcome to the latest release of HCL Notes®. Notes is a powerful, multifaceted software that gives you instant access to all the information that is important to you. You can use Notes to send and receive email and Internet mail, schedule appointments, browse the Web, and use powerful business applications in your daily work.
What's new in HCL Notes 14.5
Learn about the many new features and enhancements in HCL Notes 14.5.
What's new in Early Access Drop 1?
Learn about the new features and enhancements in HCL Notes® 14.5 Early Access Drop 1.
What's new in Early Access Drop 2?
Learn about the new features and enhancements in HCL Notes® 14.5 Early Access Drop 2.
What's new in Early Access Drop 3?
Learn about the new features and enhancements in HCL Notes® 14.5 Early Access Drop 3.
Components no longer included in Notes 14.5
As of 14.5, the following components are no longer included in Notes.
About HCL Notes
The following topics provide information about HCL Notes.
Accessibility features for Notes®
Accessibility features help users who have a physical disability, such as restricted mobility or limited vision, to use information technology products.
Getting Help
You can get help that is specific to many of the tasks you are performing, or you can open complete Help on all areas of HCL Notes®.
Elements of Notes®
The HCL Notes® user interface is comprised of views menus, toolbars, navigation panes, and a sidebar that you can use for easy access to some frequently used applications.
Using the Open list
Use the Open list to open HCL Notes® applications, documents, bookmarks and bookmark folders. The Open list displays icons and a brief description for each item.
Toolbars
Toolbars work with all the applications in your workspace. Some toolbars are context sensitive, which means that they change depending on the task you are performing.
Using the sidebar
The sidebar provides constant access to your HCL Sametime® Contacts, Calendar, Feed Reader, and Activities. You can change which of these applications displays in your sidebar. However, depending on your organization, you may not have all of these applications in your sidebar.
Status bar: current state information
The status bar appears at the end of the HCL Notes® main window. As you work in Notes, system messages and features appear in the status bar.
Working with window tabs
Window tabs make it convenient for you to switch from one open document or application to another in HCL Notes®.
Preferences
You can customize HCL Notes® so that it runs and displays just the way you want it to using Notes preferences.
Using the Discover page
HCL Notes® opens to the Discover page by default, unless you set up Notes to open to an application, such as Mail or Calendar, or to a customized home page. The default Discover page is a central location from which you can find targeted Notes client information more quickly and easily, including new features in the release, introductory material for new users, and helpful hints and tips. There is also a Quick Links tab that allows you to launch your workspace, Mail, Calendar, and other Notes applications you have recently used.
How do I change the default home page?
You can easily change your current home page to another layout or to another type of home page you have created.
How do I create a new home page?
You can create your own home page that includes information that is important to you from HCL Notes® and the Web. To create a home page, you use the home page wizard.
How do I delete a home page I created?
You can have more than one home page design, and you can delete any that you have created.
How do I customize my home page?
Once you have created a home page, you can change the content and rearrange the layout of the page at any time.
Using the Notes workspace
The HCL Notes® workspace, the legacy user interface for Notes, displays pages containing Notes application icons.
How do I create a workspace page?
You can create a workspace page to organize your links to applications. A workspace can contain up to 32 pages.
How do I name a workspace page?
You may want to name workspace pages to help organize your work. For example, if you work with three types of applications -- applications containing human resources information, applications related to sales issues, and applications related to international issues -- you might enter the names HR, Sales, and International on different workspace tabs and move applications of each type to the corresponding workspace pages.
How do I change my workspace background?
You can use your own background image for the workspace or you can remove an image an use the workspace tab color as the background.
How do I delete a workspace page?
You can easily delete workspace.
How do I switch to a different workspace page?
Click the page's workspace tab. To use the keyboard to switch to a different page, press CTRL and the left or right arrow.
How do I change the color of a workspace page tab?
You can change the color of a workspace tab.
To compact your workspace file
You can save disk space by compacting a file called desktop6.ndk, which is part of the workspace files. Compacting recovers unused disk space by removing references to applications you no longer have on your workspace.
Using bookmarks
Bookmarks are links that point to HCL Notes® applications, views, documents, or Internet elements, such as Web pages and news groups. Bookmark folders organize your bookmarks. They can contain bookmarks or more folders.
How do I create bookmarks?
You can create a bookmark in a number of different ways.
How do I set a bookmark as my home page?
Once you have bookmarked an application, document, or a web page, you can set that bookmark to be the home page (the default display) that appears every time you open HCL Notes®. You can redo this as often as you like.
Working with bookmarks
You can easily customize and manage your bookmarks and bookmark folders using a number of different menus and tools, including context (right-click) menus and drag and drop.
Notes views and folders
Views display specific documents with similar criteria. For example, your Mail has an All Documents view that displays every document contained in the mail application, and a Sent view that displays only documents that you sent.
Shared and private views and folders
There are two main types of views and folders in a Notes® application: shared (available to many users) and private (available to one person).
Creating or deleting views
You can create views in Notes® applications, as long as you have proper access. You can also delete any view that you create.
Working with views
Use the navigation pane to switch views easily. In addition, you can perform a variety of tasks from the View menu, such as refreshing the view, showing only the unread or selected documents, or searching the view.
Customizing view column displays
You can customize how entry information displays in your views.
Managing views with categories
Categories help you organize data in views that contain many documents and move around in these views more quickly. Categories can be sorted alphabetically, numerically, or by date.
Creating or deleting folders
To create personal folders in a Notes® application, you must have at least Reader access in the Access Control List (ACL) for the application. No one else can read or delete your personal folders.
Adding or moving documents to a folder
You can add a document to a folder by moving it to that folder, or by adding it to the folder, while maintaining a copy in the original folder.
Removing a document from a folder
Removing a document from a folder does not delete the document from the application or remove it from views. You can still find the document in any view where it was originally placed, such as the All Documents view.
Moving folders or views
You can move the folders or views in the navigation pane into other unrelated folders or views.
Renaming folders or views
You can change the name of any personal folder or view. You can also rename any shared folder or view in an HCL Notes® application where you have at least Editor access and Create shared/folders/views access in the Access Control List.
Printing
You print a single document or multiple documents at the same time. You can also print views (lists of documents in an HCL Notes® application) and the framesets found in both Notes and the Web.
Printing documents
You can print a document while it's open, or select document(s) in a view and print them.
Printing views
In HCL Notes® applications, views are essentially lists of documents; you can print all the text that appears in a list.
Creating headers and footers for printing
You may want to add a header or footer to the pages of the HCL Notes® documents you print. For example, you use headers or footers to add page numbers to printed documents.
Getting Started - Advanced
The topics in this section have been written for more advanced Notes users.
Limits of Notes
Limitations of HCL Notes® are listed in the following table.
Using Notes Smart Upgrade
Your administrator can set up HCL Notes® Smart Upgrade to send you a notification to upgrade your Notes client to a later release. Whenever you log into your HCL Notes Smart Upgrade compares your installed version of Notes to the version the administrator has made available, and prompts you to upgrade if appropriate.
Upgrading your mail file design
Your administrator can manage upgrades so that your mail file template is automatically upgraded after you upgrade your HCL Notes® client. When you first start the Notes client after upgrading, Notes begins upgrading the design of local application templates, such as Contacts.
Viewing advanced menus
A set of advanced menus can be displayed for the advanced user. Options on advanced menus are targeted more for system administrators or designers, and include menus for tasks such as archiving or deleting Notes® applications, creating an embedded element, or debugging tools.
Tasks
The following topics provide details for common tasks in HCL Notes.
Creating a TeamRoom
Create a TeamRoom application to create a place where you and your team members can store documents, share information, and collaborate with one another.
Setting up the TeamRoom
The TeamRoom setup serves as the foundation for TeamRoom. By completing the Setup, you configure and customize TeamRoom for your team's use.
Maintaining the TeamRoom
The procedures that follow are tasks necessary for the Team Facilitator to perform in order to effectively manage and maintain a TeamRoom. For additional information about maintaining a TeamRoom, click Help > Using This Application.
Archiving TeamRoom documents
After a set of archiving criteria has been created and enabled for your TeamRoom application, you can mark documents as expired on a specific date. Archiving documents decreases the size of the TeamRoom, which improves performance.