Bad Customer Support
Today we had fun programming a newsletter, which should be displayed properly in the Lotus Notes Email Clients (standard for our university). We wanted to add a table of contents in the beginning of the newsletter and link to the specified section, but to our surprise Lotus Notes doesn't understand that very simple html code and produced very funny behaviour on various attempts to get around that problem, including showing different views while clicking on a special link or even open the file system. After a bit of google search we found that support page, which made us laugh out loud, but left a very bad feeling about Lotus Notes and IBM and their capabilities. Here is what is their solution to the problem.
Problem
A Notes Client user receives a newsletter email generated from the Internet which contains Anchor links. Anchor links are usually at the top of a long document, and are designed to easily move the user to specific spots within the same document.
But when the user clicks any of the Anchor links from the Notes Client, his default browser opens and a page appears with an error message. For example, if the browser is Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE), the error is "The page cannot be displayed...".
If the user accesses the same mail document through the Web by accessing the mail file via WebMail or iNotes Web Access rather than the Notes Client, these Anchor links work properly. The Notes Client cannot interpret Anchor links correctly.
Solution
This issue has been reported to Quality Engineering as SPR# GCUN54MKZA, and is under investigation for a future release.
The workaround for the Notes user is not to rely on Anchor links to move to specific parts of the document, and instead use the scroll bars (vertical and horizontal).
This is almost insulting people to be to stupid to use the scrollbar and for me a worse example of bad customer care.
