Re: mail merge to Lotus Notes email?

From: Peter Jamieson (pjj_at_KillmapSpjjnet.demon.co.uk)
Date: 07/25/04

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    Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2004 12:11:54 +0100

    Another thought on this. Pure speculation really - if you don't have good
    VBA programming expertise available I'd ignore it.

    Since the Lotus Notes Client is an OLE Automation client and server and that
    you may be able to use Word VBA + Automation to get data from Notes (if
    necessary), construct Notes documents, attach Word files and send them. I
    imagine that is exactly what some of the third party Notes products do. If
    this is feasible, I think what you would have to do is
     a. create one Word document per recipient
     b. use the Notes Automation objects to create and send one Notes document
    per recipient with the appropriate file attached.

    One approach might be to adapt the approach described at

    http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/MailMerge/MergeWithAttachments.htm

    to use Lotus Notes objects instead of Outlook objects.

    Personally, I would probably take a different approach which would
     a. perform one merge for each record in my data source
     b. save the resulting document
     c. mail it (somehow) via Notes. 

    -- 
Peter Jamieson
"Peter Jamieson" <pjj@KillmapSpjjnet.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:eatlzKWcEHA.3664@TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl...
> I'm not a Lotus Notes expert either (cf. Graham) but have spent quite a
long
> time trying to see how to configure Word 2002/2003 to work with Notes 6,
> even to the point where it's possible to send a single document via Notes
> e-mail. If anything, earlier versions of Office & the Notes client seem to
> have slightly more easy to configure. But the key point is that every
> combination of Office version/Notes version seems to have its own set of
> problems. I think you are much more likely to find someone who has coped
> with this situation if you look in Notes confs. rather than Word confs.
>
> However, have you considered
>  a. doing the whole job in Notes, at least if all the data you need for
the
> merge is held there or can easily be imported? My understanding is that
> Notes was more or less designed to do this kind of thing, although I
> sometimes get the impression that it is harder to integrate Notes Database
> data and e-mail to non-Notes users than it should be
>  b. using a third party product? I'd look around, because they all do
> slightly different things. I don't know any of them, but for example some
> people have evidently found
>
> "Print Merge Express" at
>
> http://www.ivesco.com
>
> useful.
>
> At a rather techie level, what seems to be necessary in earlier Word/Notes
> combinations is that
>  a. you have the full Outlook (not Outlook Express) on your system as well
> as Notes Client. The main point of this actually seems to be that
installing
> the full Outlook is the only way these days that you can set up the
> facilities for MAPI profile configuration, but there may be more to it
than
> that
>  b. you run the Notes client using the Notes user setup/location you want
to
> use
>  c. in Windows Control Panel|Mail (which is for MAPI profile
configuration)
> or right-click on Outlook and choose Properties (should be the same
thing),
> remove all existing profiles,
>  d. create a new profile, adding the Lotus Notes Mail Service
>  e. configure that Service
>
> However,
>  f. I would be very unhappy
>  - installing Outlook on a system that didn't have it and didn't need it
for
> any other reason
>  - doing (c) on a production machine unless I knew exactly how to recreate
> my usual profile(s) (if any)
>  g. when I tried (e), on a Win2k/Office2002/Notes6 config., I just got
> errors with no useful explanation. I did, however, notice that when Lotus
> adds its MAPI-related info. to mapisvc.inf (which in theory has a list of
> MAPI-related services available on a PC), it says the Lotus MAPI dll is
> called nwnsp.dll, whereas the dll Lotus actually installs is called
> nwnsp32.dll. My impression is that the version of MAPI on my machine
simply
> can't work with that dll.Maybe people who have Lotus Notes 5 or have
> upgraded have the right bits of software.
>
> If you do find a way through all this, I would appreciate it if you could
> post back here.
>
> -- 
> Peter Jamieson
>
> "Kevin" <kdervin@kc.rr.com> wrote in message
> news:2c2201c470be$b6e9f6a0$a601280a@phx.gbl...
> > Is it possible to set up an e-mail mail merge to be sent
> > out through Lotus Notes?
> >
> > I'm a marketing consultant who's working with a financial
> > planner. We're trying to set up a mail merge so he can
> > send out a monthly market update to list of 100 or so
> > people. he would like to personalize each message with
> > the help of mail merge fields and this also helps him
> > with company and regulatory compliance issues.
> >
> > His company email system is Lotus Notes. He's in Kansas
> > City logged into the corporate network in St. Louis.
> >
> > When we tried to set up the mail merge, by default it
> > wants to send the emails to Outlook. We changed the email
> > program through IE to default to Lotus Notes, but then
> > mail merge does nothing.
> >
> > Can this be accomplished? What needs to happen? Any and
> > all assistance is greatly appreciated.
>
>
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