SnTT - When your name is no longer your name

Welcome back everyone from the long weekend here in the US, UK and some other places as well.

What we have here is a failure to follow the simplest rule in the book and a little empathy needed by admins until IBM enhances the rename function in Domino.

KISS - Keep it simple, seriously

The Eclipse client, better known as the Standard one in the Lotus R8 stream brought many changes, one of which really bothers me and unfortunately there is nothing I can do about it. Maybe Mary Beth Raven's team can.

I have multiple mail files, corp, private, test user, other customers, etc.

In past versions, and in basic mode, changing the title, in Database properties of the mail file or db in question changes the name in the tab as well when the window is open and that's how I always knew which mail file I was in.

Well no longer and it is really annoying to me in my day to day work.

So why do I bring this up? One of our customers called this morning and was having problems with someone's name showing up incorrectly in their tab using their maiden name.

We walked through how the admin had changed the name(created a new ID insteasd of using rename for some unknown reason, probably lack of knowledge) and they did a good job, we made sure ACL's and location documents got changed. Checked groups and ID and all seemed fine.

They called back a little later and asked how to change the mail tab to get the new name. They had checked the title properties of the db and changed it so what is wrong?

My brain hurt from my recent experience with our ISP, so I asked on Twitter and Andy Donaldson pointed out to me we should check the Mail-Owner under More-preferences.

EDITED 5/27: Marie reminded me to include the ability to set this also when inside DWA if you are using webmail. Sorry, forgot that addition.

Sure enough her old name was still listed.

Ok, that resolves her problem. But who thought this was a good idea? Sometimes people want to provide original titles to their mail files, why does the Eclipse client prevent this?

Something so simple has gone awry. Why can't the tab still call the properties title up and use it?

A secondary aspect of this customer is this.

If someone changes their name, for whatever reason, and wants all references to their previous name erased from what they see why isn't there an option to change the mail file name as well as the user name?

So in true Web 2.0 fashion, there should be an option in the Admin client when performing a user rename to ask if we want the file name changed too. A posting from Paul Davies on ideajam.net has this already and has 90 approvals and is from Jan 2008!

So go vote for it and think about how you can make someone's life easier, especially if they are getting divorced and don't want to get reminded of their previous name and life.