Kids Say the Darnest Things …
 

And End Users Ask the Darnest Questions … point in case: an employee calls me up and asks the following simple question:
 

“Hi Marc, I want to add an arrow into my email. In Microsoft Word, I click on Insert → Symbol and then I get to pick the arrow from the Wingding font selection and insert it right into my Word document… it’s soooo easy … I need to know where’s that option in Lotus Notes R8.5.1 because I can’t find it!”.
 

The answer is: *nowhere*. Seriously it ain’t there. Don’t bother looking.
 

A PMR a Day Keeps The Doctor Away?
 

Since I couldn’t find the option myself, I did what I usually do: I opened a PMR (I swear, I’ve opened almost 1 PMR day over the course of our 8.5.1 rollout for various questions, bugs and issues that I couldn’t figure out myself).
 

And the answer I got from Lotus Support was a bit surprising. Here’s a copy-paste of what the Support Rep wrote me:
 

I did discover that there was an SPR enhancement request submitted for this and the SPR# is MCHZ6DUMHZ. The SPR was closed with “No plans to fix in the 8.0 code stream”
 

I just wanted to let you know that I created an Notes client 8.5 code stream document for this issue. This will increase the”weight” of the issue. If weight increases sufficiently, it may be re-raised for triage for an upcoming maintenance or feature release.
 

So, there you have it … it won’t be added to the R8.x codestream. Tough luck heh?
 

But It’s In Outlook! [Cried the End User Weilding A Torch and a Pitch Fork in front of My Cube]
 

Yes, I cannot deny that this feature is in Outlook (and MS Word). In fact, here’s a screenshot of the Outlook 2010 client (I think) with the button that shows up in the right hand corner when a user clicks on the “Insert” tab of the [evil] “Ribbon interface” at the top …
 

So, there you have it folks … the option is right there in Outlook. Even better: they can insert mathematical Equations that are transformed into embedded images once the email is sent (it’s kinda neat, I have to admit) … but it won’t be in Lotus Notes R8.x …
 

Dear Lotus … Help us Help You …
 

Before I end this blog post, I must utter the following prayer …
 

Oh Lords of Thy Yellowverse
Please Add Unto Lotus Notes
The Ability to Insert Symbols
And Maybe Even Equations
So That My End Users Will Be Satisfied
And  Love Thy Email Client Even More
 

Ok, seriously Lotus … please add this “feature” into the next client … and my users will love their client even more!
 

One Last Thing …
 

Just in case someone smarter than me reads this blog post … is there anyone out there who would happen to know the code that I could put into one of the Toolbar icons to do this? This is just out of curiosity … maybe someone … somewhere has already done this(?) …
 

Conclusion …
 

Well, there isn’t much to say really … with the R8.5.1 client, Lotus has improved the email side of things by leaps and bounds to a point where my end users are amazed when I show them some of the new features (messsage recall anyone?) .. but there still is a bit of space left for improvement …
 

Anyhow … thanks for reading!
 

Marc

Ever Get a Problem That’s Straight Outta Comptom The Twilight Zone?
 

Well, I had a call today that made me go “whhaaaaa?” … and the problem was somewhat simple: the employee had lost his “Follow Up Mini View” in the lower left corner of his mail file.
 

I checked it out and it was true: there was no way for me to get the Follow Up Mini View back. Here’s a screen shot to show that we could not “drag” the mini-view back onto the screen.
 

Here’s The Solution …
 

Before you start following this procedure, please verify if the employee is using any widgets and make a note of each of them: he will loose them all and you will need to find them and re-add them.
 

However, in the case of the employees in our company, we don’t have or use any widgets (for now) so, I followed these steps to get the “Follow Up Mini View” to display again:
 

01. [Click] on File → Exit to close Lotus Notes.
 

02. [Click] on Start → Program Files → Accessories → Windows Explorer.
 

03. In the Windows Explorer left pane, navigate to My Computer → C: → Notes → Data (or wherever the Lotus Notes client is installed).
 

04. [Click] on the “workspace” folder to select it.
 

05. [Right Click] on the “workspace” folder to get the options menu.
 

06. [Click] on Rename in the options menu that appeared.
 

07. [Type] “workspace-old” and press <Enter> on the keyboard to rename the folder.
 

08. [Click] on File → Close to close Windows Explorer.
 

09. [Click] on the icon to start Lotus Notes R8.5.1 … and once Lotus Notes R8.5.1 has started
 

10. Verify that the “Follow-up Mini-View” has reappeared in the employee’s mail file.
 

11. [Click] on the menu “File → Preferences” and verify that his settings are the way he wants them (some of the settings are reset after removing the workspace folder.
 

That’s it … “simple” as that.
 

Conclusion?
 

I actually opened a ticket with Lotus Support about this and they were puzzled too … but that little “workspace” procedure above resolved it.
 

I just hope this helps someone … somewhere …
 

Thanks for reading!
 

Marc

Sometimes, I Just Want To Share the Pain …
 

And this blog does allow me to do a bit of that.  But before I explain what happened, I must mention one thing …
 

My users just L-O-V-E the Message Recall feature in Lotus Notes R8.5.1! They really do. When any employee starts to complain about their new Lotus Notes, I listen to them, I fix whatever they need fixed and then I show them some of the new features of Lotus Notes. And it never fails: as soon as I show them the Message Recall feature, they go bezerk and want to kiss and hug their new Lotus Notes client (ok, maybe not that much but … close).
 

So with this said, something happened today at work which could have ended up being “The Greatest Message Recall Ever” … but didn’t. 
 

Here’s the sad sad story …
 

Step 01 – Someone fowarded an email to a very important employee that contained a link that needed to be sent to all the employees.

Step 02 – The very important employee, copy pasted the link into a new memo.

Step 03 – The very important employee, selected the “All Employees” group into the “To:” field and clicked on ”Send”.

Step 04 – The email got sent to a few thousand employees … but, unfortunately, the Lotus Notes R8.5.1 FP3 client of the very improtant employee crashed.

Step 05 – A few minutes passed by.

Step 05 – A wave of panic ensued as more and more people reported that the link in the email did not work.

Step 06 – Panic ensued even further when the very important employee realized that the email had *not* been saved into the “Sent” view of the mail file (probably because of the crash) so the email could not be recalled.
 

At that point, my phone rang, a couple sametime windows appeared on my screen and my cell phone rang … I was being called in to help.
 

However, there isn’t anything an Administrator can do when the email that needs to be recalled isn’t in the Sent folder, and unless someone at Lotus has a tool for such a special occasion, this is the sad reality that I was faced with.
 

Bottom line, I would really really really have liked to see the servers around the world recall that message. We’re talking a few thousand employees on servers spread across each and every continents all connected together with just about every type of link imaginable (from 56k ISDN lines all the way up to T1′s).
 

But that message recall never happened … and I’m sad.
 

So until next time, I’ll just go cry in a corner somewhere while I open a PMR to ask Lotus to figure out why the client of the very important employee crashed.
 

Just sharin’ the pain …
 

Thanks for reading!
 

Marc
 

PS: Yes, I took the time to upgrade that very important employee’s Lotus Notes to Fix Pack 4 after her crash … maybe it will help for the next email that needs to go out to all the planet.

Ever Get a Surprise?
 

Well, I did this afternoon! I was opening [yet another] PMR and I was a bit surprised to see that I could select Lotus Notes R8.5.2 and Lotus Traveler 8.5.2. I took a screen shot just to share it with my coworkers (and you).
 

Oddly enough, , 8.5.2 wasn’t in my list of products when I opened a PMR [yes another!] last Friday.
 

So, I presume that someone at Passport Advantage went a little bit too fast when updating our entitlements … or … maybe it’s been added so that beta customers can open PMRs on this upcoming release (but we are not beta customers).
  

Anybody knows why it showed up suddenly?
  

Marc

I Don’t Like Cryptic Error Messages …
 

And my users don’t like them either. Saddly for me, one of my users that has been using Lotus Notes R8.5.1 FP1 for a while now started receiving a weird error each time he would click on a person name in his Sametime Contact list in the side bar panel.
  

An internal error occurred during: “save person job”
 

The Solution?
 

Well, I opened a PMR with Lotus Support and they had never heard that one before which is not a good sign. So, I decided to try something and it worked. My initial idea was to delete the workspace folder … but this solution does not require it.
 

1. Log off the user from Sametime by [Clicking] on “Available” and then [Clicking] on “Log Off”.
 

2. [Click] on File → Preferences.
 

3. [Click] on the “+” sign in front of the Sametime section.
 

4. [Click] on the “Server Community”.
 

5. [Click] on the “Reset User” button.
 

6. [Click] on “OK” on the confirmation screen.
 

7. You will be re-asked to login to Sametime right away: [Click] on the “Connectivity” button.
 

8. [Click] on the check box “User token based single sign on”.
 

9. [Type] your Sametime server host name in the “Authentication server” field.
 

10. [Click] on the check box “Automatically log in”.
 

11. [Click] on the “Options” tab.
 

12. [Click] on the check box “Use canonical names for status lookup”.
 

13. [Click] on “OK”.
 

14. [Click] on “Login” (even if the fields are blank – don’t worry). That will log you back into Sametime.
 

15. [Click] on “OK” to close the Preferences screen.
 

16. Test the solution.
 
 

Conclusion
 

Well, I’ve seen a lot of weird error messages but this one ranks pretty high up in the list of cryptic ones.
 

I hope this helps someone, somewhere …
 

Thanks for reading!
 

Marc

Trojan Horse and Virus: 1 … Eclipse: 0 …
   

Yesterday, me and one of the guys from the lan admin team worked on a weird issue on the laptop of another VIP in our company (yes, it does sounds like  my company has tons of them … more on that in the Addendum #2 at the bottom). Basically, we were beating our heads against the very sharp corner of that VIP desk trying to figure out why Lotus Notes R8.5.1 Standard wouldn’t start. 
  
The “symptoms” were very simple: we’d click on the icon to start Lotus Notes R8.5.1, the splash screen would appear, the progress bar would then show up in the upper right corner [of the splash screen] … and, then, everything would stop right there. Nothing else would happen. No disk activity either. No task going nuts in the Task Manager. Nothing at all except dead silence.
  

What Did We Try Before Figuring It Out?
  

Before we figured out what was causing the issue (i.e. a combo of trojan horse and virus), we tried the all the usual stuff in the book …
   

- Run NSD to get more info and open a PMR with Lotus Support.
- Run the ISA collector (startcollector.bat) somewhere in the Framework folder and add it to the PMR.
- Rename the “\Data\Workspace” folder to create a fresh one on the next start up.
- Rename the bookmark.nsf database … just in case we are dealing with some weird corruption.
- Delete the cache.ndk … because you never know when it helps or not but it feels good to delete something anyway.
- Rename the “\Notes\Framework” folder and then copy the Framework folder from another *working* machine with the same version (FP1 was also installed on that machine so we made sure to pick the Framework folder from a computer with FP1 (this sounds like the Eclipse equivalent of a brain transplant if you ask me).
- Copy the notes.ini to another location and remove all the lines (except the first two lines) … but that didn’t fix it either so we putted it back to the way it was.
  

Oddly enough … R8.5.1 Basic Works!
   

While Lotus Support was going over the gazillion files I had sent them, the rep asked “Did you try to launch it in Basic mode?”. The answer was “No … let me try”. So, to our amazement, Notes R8.5.1 started up in Basic Mode! The VIP was happy for a few moments … until it dawned on him that he was looking at an R7ish interface. On my side, I was shocked and surprised (to say the least).
   
So after this, I knew I was dealing with something really weird in Eclipse (but I didn’t know yet it was a combo of trojan horse + virus).
   

In The Meantime … 
  

That was yesterday. Lotus Support is still looking at the the files I uploaded to them and I haven’t heard anything about it … however, the VIP did call back the lan admin guy and asked him for help with *other* issues he had … with Internet Explorer.
  

CSI 101 … or The Clues Will [Usually] Lead Back To The Killer …
  

So, the lan admin went back to the desk of the VIP to help him out. Once he got there, the VIP explained that some websites weren’t loading up properly and others would simply not diplay properly. The lan admin did a few checks and noticed that the VIP had about 5 different Internet Explorer toolbars installed. Knowing that having 5 different toolbars installed is the computing equivalent of begging for trouble, he proceeded to remove them all. That didn’t resolve everything however.
   

Then he had a flash of Genius and he ran a scan using the “Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware” software. And to his surprise (and mild horror), the computer of the VIP pretty much had the whole gammut of bad things that a computer can get: memory modules infected, registry values infected, registry data infected and files infected. Oddly enough, Symantec Antivirus on that machine was in a buddist zen like state (or high-as-a-kite on whatever computers get high on) and wasn’t reporting anything bad. Here’s a small example from the log of the Malwarebytes Anti-Malware log:
  

Removing the Malware fixed it!
   

Yep, once the viruses and trojan horses were removed from the system, Lotus Notes R8.5.1 worked like a charm! One happy VIP … for today anyway (you know how it goes … hero one day, zero the next).
   

Conclusion?
  

The Eclipse based interface has allowed the team at Lotus to extend Notes in so many ways that the community is still discovering each and every day new things to do with it. And we all love it for that. However, back in “Pre-Eclipse” days (I refer to them as the “R7 days”) , the worst I had I seen with viruses and trojan horses affecting Lotus Notes was the good ol’ “The TCPIP Stack has run out of memory” (which was a clear indication you had a virus). They were rare but I saw one of those almost once per year. So whatever this trojan horse and/or virus was doing on this system, it was doing something that Eclipse (or parts of Eclipse) really didn’t like at all (maybe like blocking certain ports or using them … I have no idea).
  

So, to me at least, it appears that the Eclipse based framework on top of which is now based our beloved groupware solution (client side anyway)can be both a blessing  because of all the good things that it allows us to do and a curse because it introduced a new point of failure and “vector of attack” for viruses. Am I right? Am I wrong? Heck, I hope I’m really really really wrong.
 

Thanks for reading!
  

Marc
  

Addendum #1 – Aftermath
 

I asked the antivirus team in our company to check why Symantec Antivirus for Windows had not detected the virus and prevented it … I haven’t heard back from that team. Needless to say, the VIP has learned his lesson and will not be installing new toolbars when he gets prompted for that (even if it looks really cool and awesome). Anyway, he’s been reduced from “Administrator” to “Power User” on his machine (he had Admin before for a reason which is beyond me and completly beyond my control).
  

Addendum #2 - Why VIPs?
  

Lotus Notes R8.5.1 is pretty … and we started by upgrading just a few VIPs in our company. But, usually, after any of the other VIP sees how nice and beautiful the new interface is, they want it. And they want it now too! So, thanks to Smart Upgrade, it’s spreading slowly but surely from the top of the pyramid down to the bottom.

The Devil IS In The Details …
  

A VIP in my company was recently upgraded to Lotus Notes R8.5.1 FP1 and had to print a list of the contacts from the address book of a roaming user (the address book is on the server) in a list format. As you probably know, it’s a very simple thing to do: open the address book of the roaming user (the VIP has access to that address book), click on File -> Print, make sure that “Print Selected View” is selected and then click on “Print”. Then, casually walk to printer, grab the stack and run with it to the person who requested it. It’s easy and it makes everybody happy to know that the list of contacts is safe and sound on sheets on paper in a file somewhere in somebody’s desk drawer.
   

But if you are using Lotus Notes R8.5.1 (with or without the FP1), there is a bug with the “Print Selected View” in the Contacts (names.nsf) database based on the R8.5.1 design.
 

The bug might be easy to miss but it’s there: the “Print Selected View” only prints 1 line per contact. You might say “That’s not a big deal” IF you only have 1 phone number per contact BUT if you have contacts with multiple phone numbers … only the 1st number will appear on the printout.
   

I’m not kidding. The VIP wasn’t impressed either.
  

And that VIP has the hear of other VIPs in my company and that makes Lotus Notes look bad (yes, a simple thing like that … but hey, the devil IS in the details).
  

So the CIO called up Patrick and Patrick then called me up and said “find a workaround” … and since nobody reports to me, I can’t delegate this request … dang … oh well … I told myself, “it’s probably something stupid … this should be easy” and after 13+ years of working with this product you’d think I’d remember never to say that … but no. I was wrong …
  

Before the Workarounds … the PMR (and the SPR)!
 

After testing a few things, I decided to open a PMR with Lotus Support. And I consider myself super lucky because John St-Germain was assigned the PMR. John St-Germain was instrumental on the gazillion of Smart Upgrade related PMRs that I had opened last year, all of which,  allowed me to create the two presentations here and here. And, once again, I received an excellent level of customer service from John St-Germain on this PMR!
  

Anyhow, after a bit of catching up on the latest news with John and giving him a bit more info about the issue, he went back to his test environment (or evil genius lair somewhere in a volcano on a deserted island as I like to think about it … hey – it makes life less boring to think of it that way) and reproduced it super easily.
  

Because he was able to reproduce it so easily, he did a bit of digging around and when he called me back he explained that “Yes”, this is a bug in R8.5.1 Standard (but not in 8.5.1 Basic) and that the issue had already been reported and SPR’ed.
  

The SPR # is CAML7YUTUW and John said that it’s being investigated to be fixed in 8.5.2.
   

So after I realized that that 8.5.2 won’t be around until a couple more months, we discussed a few options. So here’s a few workarounds.
  

Workaround #1 - Basic Mode
  

Simply put: close your Lotus Notes R8.5.1 Standard and launch it back in “Basic” mode. There should be an icon for that either on your desktop or in Start -> Program Files -> Lotus Applications. If not, just create a shortcut to nlnotes.exe and that will launch it in “basic” mode.
  

The bug does not occur in “Basic” mode because the Contacts database dosen’t load as a Composite Application …
   

Workaround #2 – Copy Selected As Table
  

Select the Contacts you want to print, then click on on the menu Edit -> Copy As -> Table. Then start your favorite Word Processor (either Microsoft Word or Symphony Documents). Once you are in the word processing application click on “Edit -> Paste”.
  

Once the pasted contacts appear, tweak the table, remove the borders, change the fonts, etc, etc … basically spend some time to format the table so that it looks nice when printed … not fun to do.
   

Workaround #3 – Open Contacts in Basic Mode (Thanks to Craig Wiseman for this one)
   

I had forgotten about this but Craig Wisemen posted a comment to simply hold down CTRL+SHIFT+ALT and then click the contacts icon (assuming you are clicking on the icon in the bookmark bar). As he wrote in his comment, this will open the Contacts database “Basic” mode (i.e. without the Composite Application settings) and you’ll be able to print the selected view.
   

Workaround #4 – Add a Form Specifically for Printing the List
   

If you go back to your R8.5.1 Standard client and then open your contacts, if you click on File -> Print, you’ll notice a drop down list for “Print Styles”. In that drop-down list, there’s a bunch of options to print your contact lists on labels and in various other exotic formats (the phone directory is kinda cool in a old school way). See below for a screenshot of the drop-down list.
  

  
    
   
   
Since all the options displayed there are actually forms that are stored in the local Contacts database (or local Address Book if you prefer), what’s stopping you from coding your own form to print a list of all (or selected) contacts that would display properly? Answer: nothing… except maybe time.
  

So you’ll be happy to know that I spent the time to create the said form and that it works OK for our VIP. I couldn’t figure out an easy way to get the column headers to appear on each page but the VIP didn’t care about that.
 

The form is stored in the attached zip file below as a DXL file: simply click on it to download the zip file to your hard drive. Once you extract the contents of the zip file, you’ll also see an LSS file and that contains the code for the agent that you’ll need to create to import the DXL file.
   

So, to import the DXL, start by opening your local names.nsf in Designer (or the one of one of your roaming user who needs this) and then click on Create -> Agent. Give the agent a decent name like “Import Form” and then click OK.  Set the agent to be in LotusScript and then import the LSS file for the agent (it’s in the zip file that that you unzipped). Once the code is imported, save the agent and run it.
  

Once you run the agent, you will be prompted to select the DXL file. And once you select it, it will create the new design element.
  

At this point, you’re almost done but to wrap things up, you’ll need to open the address book in designer and open the form “Print Selected Contacts – Portrait Format”. Once the form is opened, ask for the form properties and enable the option “Include in Print Menu” and save the form. You can close Designer at this point.
  

Once you’ve done those steps, you can go back to your list of Contacts, select a few from the list (or all of them), click on File -> Print, select “Print Selected Contacts – Portrait Format” and then click on “Preview” to see what will get printed or print “OK” if you feel lucky …
  

Conclusion …
  

Well, there isn’t much to say except to repeat “The Devil IS in the details”. Seriously, their computer(s) can crash once per week … people almost expect it when they use Microsoft Windows nowadays,  and they won’t make a big deal out of it. But when something that worked forever (probably since the R1 days!) suddently stops working for no particular reason … some people find this extremely annoying and complain … and sometimes they have other VIPs within earshot … more specifically those that are making the big decisions that can help or hinder the future of a particular groupware solution in a company …
  

Thanks for reading!
 

Marc

Summary

Well, this is going to be a quick blog post … nothing fancy and maybe lots of people out there already know this. Anyhow, long story short, Patrick just noticed that there was no option to archive documents from the “Chat History” view in his Lotus Notes R8.5.1 mail file.
    

I thought that was weird so I investigated and I saw the same thing. I was worried that I was dealing with a mail85.ntf that was missing design elements so I opened a support call with IBM out of sheer unadulterated paranoia (note: in my opinion, being slightly paranoid should be job requirement for every admin job … and as long as the admin doesn’t start to wear a tin foil hat to the office then everything is fine if you ask me).
  

The answer from Lotus: “That’s normal … you can only archive from [very] specific views and the Chat History view isn’t one of those. You can find them in the All Documents view and archive from there…”.
   

But There’s Hope …
 

After a short discussion with the Lotus Support rep in regards to this, I asked her to create an SPR for this and she was kind enough to create one. The number for the SPR is #AKNX7Z7U4J.
 

Enjoy!
 

Marc
 

PS: On the topic of “Tin Foil Hats”, some folks at MIT did some research (click here to view the website or here for the Wikepedia article) and determined that “a tin foil hat could either amplify or attenuate incoming radiation depending on frequency; the effect was observed to be roughly independent of the relative placement of the wearer and radiation source.“

Summary

[Right out of the gate, please note that this is a very "basic" post ... nothing fancy but I wanted to share this in case someone else runs into this same question...]

An employee calls you and asks “Hey, when I search (using the full-text search feature) for something in my mail file, I can’t sort it by date … but I asked my friend in the next cube to try and she’s able to sort by date after doing a full-text text … why is that?”.

Well, just in case someone else runs into the same exact question … here’s the solution.

The Solution

Basically, IF the mail file HAS a Full-Text index (which was the case), the search results are by default, sorted by Relevance. To be able to sort the columns, the employee has to click on “More” and then must change the “Sort results by” field from “relevance” to “keep current order (sortable)”. IF the mail file DOES NOT have a Full-Text index, the results are always sortable.

The "Sort results by" field before

The "Sort results by" field after

Also, please note that this appears to be on a “per database” setting so you need to change it in each database that you are searching.

Have fun searching …

PS: I am on vacation in a place where my cell phone dosen’t work and there’s no internet … I created this blog post last week and I set it up to be published today … the “scheduling” feature in WordPress is nice for situations like these …

Summary

A while ago, you deployed Lotus Notes R8.x to some people. Nothing in your experience could have prepared you for the emotional backlash and severe beatings complaints that followed when people realized that their precious “unread” emails which used to be displayed in red since the last century were now displayed in BOLD BLACK TEXT. Nothing. And I really mean it. No amount of psychological training or even special Navy Seal training could have prepared you to support the weight of all the complaints. Ok, I might be exagerating a wee bit here (actually, I am) … but anyway, the point being is that they weren’t happy about it (even if you told them this would happen).

I get the feeling that Lotus also took a lot of flak on that “feature” so they added back in Lotus Notes R8.5.1 an option, in the Preferences menu under “Fonts and Colors”, to select “Plain red text” for unread email. Suddenly the world seemed a better place.

The option for "Plain red text" in the Preferences menu

Oh joy … so you start to deploy this to the people who complained (the most) and it appears to work correctly. But out from the woodwork, 1 employee reports that only external emails, i.e. those coming from all his FaceBook friends on the internet other companys, are displaying in plain red text and, worse, “real” unread emails appear in plain black text. So the employee has no way to track which emails are truly “unread”.

So, what’s the solution?

This bug is caused by something so pure evil that I shall not even name it in this paragraph but I will show you what it is … are you ready? Here it is: .

Yep,  nothing much to see right? That’s because the problem is caused by a plain ol’ space. Yep. A tiny space, somewhere on a line alone by itself in the senders colors tab of the mail file preference.

Seriously, this is strange. But to “fix” this you must open the mail file, click on “More”, then click on “Preferences”.

To fix the "Plain red text" issue, start by going into your Preferences in your mail file.

Once you are in the preferences go to the “Sender Colors” tab and click in each field. VISUALLY make sure that there are no “empty lines” with just a space or boxes with 1 space in it’s list of users. I am not joking but I wish I was. If you spot a space on a line by itself: remove it and click on OK.

Plain red text: an example of a list of names with no space in it.

Plain red text: an example with a space in one of the names box ... remove it to fix this.

Addendum

I was told by Lotus Support that this is an “old bug”. However, I’m a bit surprised as I have never seen this happen in my 12+ years of working with and supporting Lotus Notes … maybe I ran out of luck?