Michael Brown - Blogging for Dominos

Came across a scenario where a group of users were complaining about personal folders they created in the Notes Client were not appearing when they checked their mail using iNotes.  As an Admin if I opened their mail file via the client, I saw the exact same folders when I opened their mail file using iNotes.  It wasn't until they sent a screen shot of their Notes Client and iNotes that I realized several of the user's personal folders were not appearing in iNotes.

History & Competitive Product Lesson:
This group of users were migrated from MS Exchange to Lotus Notes a little over a year ago.  Recently they had their mail template changed from the Standard Mail Template to the DWA Template in 6.5.  Once they were changed to the DWA Template and started using iNotes, they immediately noticed the problem.
MS Exchange has a feature called Public Folders.  When you create a Public Folder, anything you put in your Public Folder can be seen by other users.  Nice feature if you want everyone creating random collections of data out of their mail files to be shared with everyone in the company.

Anyway, how this problem got started was when these users started creating personal folders in their Lotus Notes Mail files, they realized they could create both "Shared" and "Private" folders.  They thought that since MS Exchange had Public Folders, obviously Lotus Notes has the same functionality and just call it "Shared" folders.  One big problem is these folders can not be seen with in iNotes.  Similar problems exist when doing a Load Convert -U because the server can't see the folders either to convert them.

Solution:
Well, to fix the problem we have to send a button via an email to every user that has created private folders.  The button has code that creates a new folder with the same name but appends "temp" to it.  Then moves the contents of the private folder to the new Shared folder and deletes the old private folder and then changes the new folder back to the original folder name by removing "temp".  If the private folder happens to be empty, we just delete the private folder and move on.

Thanks to Robert Michlowitz for writing the LotusScript.
robertm25@yahoo.com

Sub Click(Source As Button)
       Dim ws As New NotesUIWorkspace
       Dim session As New NotesSession
       Dim db As NotesDatabase
       Dim view As NotesView
       Dim entries As NotesViewEntryCollection
       Dim str_foldername As String
' process thru array of views and folders
       Forall folder In session.CurrentDatabase.Views
' identify private view/folder
               If Not Isempty(folder.Readers) And folder.IsFolder Then
                       Set entries = folder.AllEntries
                       If entries.Count = 0 Then
                               Call folder.Remove
                       Else
                               str_foldername = folder.Name
                               Call entries.PutAllInFolder(str_foldername &"temp", True)
                               Call folder.Remove
                               Set view = session.CurrentDatabase.GetView(str_foldername & "temp")
                               view.Name = str_foldername
                       End If
               End If
       End Forall
       Messagebox "Private folders have been updated.  Your mail file will now be closed so the changes can take affect.", 64, "Update Complete"
       Call ws.CurrentDatabase.Close
End Sub