Successfully mailmerge

Yesterday I got our mailmerge template ready. Today I found some additional issues, thus I needed to find out if my colleges could find out how to use it.

I found out that IBM made a serious mistake when they first implemented ODF file format in Lotus Notes. I hope to see 8.01 tomorrow.

The problem is, that if you ever try to open any ODF document with Lotus Notes (productivity tool or Lotus Symphony), the Eclipse framework takes over all (amd I meen all) the ODF file types. It's easy to change this back, by selecting the file, right-click, and select open with etc. So far it's all right. But it took me some time to figure out that Lotus Notes also takes the ODB (Database) file type as hostage. You must remember, that IBM has nothing to do with such file, because there is no ODB database thing in the application.

So, in case the user has ever opened a ODF file with Lotus Notes (approx: 100%), the mailmerge didn't work, because the mail merge wizard creates an ODB file to hold the connection from Lotus Notes to OpenOffice.org.

But Lotus Notes couldn't create such file, because the file type registration was corrupted - byt Lotus Notes.

Well, I learned that lesson today.

The result ?

I made a mailmerge letter based on a search query (32.000 adresses). Search time was about 20 minutes and the merge it self was about the double.