Genii Weblog

All your base are belong to IBM: resources are images, too

Thu 16 Jul 2009, 01:35 PM



by Ben Langhinrichs
In this post, I talk about one of the strengths of Lotus Notes rich text that IBM has, very unwisely in my opinion, neglected when it comes to email: the image resource.  Image resources were added in R5 in 1999, and have been enhanced in a few different ways since then.  Unfortunately, one area that IBM neglected, as it so often does, is emailing that image resource.  It isn't difficult to include the image resources, but the technique seems to have escaped IBM in the past decade.

Email in Notes client with multiple image resources (taken from our Web Editors page)


Original email in Notes with image resources



Email received in Gmail after Notes 8.5 rendering (would you want your customer/client/colleague to see this?)


Email rendered by Notes 8.5



Email received in Gmail after iFidelity 3 rendering (more appropriate for customer/client/colleague to see)


Inline JPEG image

Previous Topics in this series

In Part 1, I showed how IBM's rendering of MIME messages could lead your customers to think you were still running Notes R5, and how our upcoming iFidelity (sign up for the beta) would allow you to send out more professional looking email, rendered as it is in Notes.  In Part 2, I showed how content rendered by Domino on the web was likely to make prospective customers think twice, or more, before buying Lotus Notes, and how CoexEdit could dramatically improve that default rendering.  In Part 3, I showed how rendering is made even worse when the rich text is edited on the web, and how CoexEdit can improve that process as well.  In Part 4, I showed how HTML signatures are prone to some of the same rendering issues (as well as different ones) as we have seen elsewhere.  In Part 5, I showed how tabbed tables do not translate well through email, and how iFidelity could help.   In Part 6, I showed how sections could lose titles after Notes client render, and how iFidelity could help there as well.    In Part 7, I showed how checked and unchecked lists rendered badly, and how iFidelity could help.     In Part 8, I showed how attachments were handled inconsistently, and how iFidelity could help. 

Copyright © 2009 Genii Software Ltd.

What has been said:

No documents found