mail merge to Lotus Notes email?

[Kevin]

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.

 

[Graham Mayor]

I don't know much about Lotus Notes or for that matter Microsoft Exchange
Server, but for the former you are going to need the latter for this to work
as planned. There is a raft of Exchange newsgroups where you should find
more information on this type of integration.

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP


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[Peter Jamieson]

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]

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.