How To Replace Lotus Notes With Outlook 2010
This post is designed to collate information and guide you towards moving away from Lotus Notes and into Outlook and therefore increase productivity by about 3000%.
Requirements
- Lotus Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook (DAMO) Interim Fix 6 – This is the IBM developed plug-in for Outlook that will do all the work.
- Outlook - I have only tested this with Outlook 2010.
Setup Guide
- Download (See link above) and install DAMO.
- During installation you will be asked for the following information:
- Lotus Domino Server Name – In Lotus Notes 8 go to File->Locations->Manage Locations->Edit->Servers. For example, for me the server was d23ml006/23/m/ibm. Note that I had to remove the appended slashes to get the following: d23ml006.
- Lotus Notes ID File – This is essentially your user profile. Its location will depend on where Lotus Notes is installed for you. For example, for me it was in C:\Notes\Data\myUsername.id. If you still can’t find it, do a search for *.id.
- The installation will create a MAPI profile for Outlook to use, which is basically a collection of settings for talking to your Lotus Domino server.
- Start Outlook and select the newly created MAPI profile.
- Note: If you get an error that Outlook cannot access a file, it is because in Windows 7 you must elevate Outlook to administrator. You can do this by right clicking on the Outlook icon in the start menu, and selecting properties->compatibility, and checking the “Run this program as an administrator” checkbox. Please note that running Outlook as an administrator is a bad idea in general, so please set this option back to normal once you have completely setup DAMO.
- The DAMO plugin will launch another setup process and retrieve mails and other settings from your domino server.
- Note: You may find that DAMO will not download all of your data or stop. This is ok. It often takes several restarts of Outlook to fully download all of your data. Be patient.
- Close Outlook if requested.
- Done! Enjoy a new life free of email evil!
Known Issues
- If you are an IBM employee, certain emails that access the Domino databases such as Payroll and Claim receipts will not render in Outlook. It is suggested that if you want to keep these emails that you open Notes and print the email to PDF and store it elsewhere.