Weekly e-Tip – No. 4

ITS will provide weekly e-Tips to help employees prepare for the new Outlook email system.

Initially, e-Tips will focus on clean-up and prioritizing essential email employees need to keep and as the conversion gets closer, tips will focus on using Outlook.

This week’s e-Tip — Save messages AND attachments to PDF files

Knowing that we will not be able to keep all email when we migrate to Outlook, another way to save old messages is to convert them to PDF format. This format will retain the message information, including links and attachments. In order to use this feature, however, you must:

  • Have a PC (Macs will not work);
  • Have Lotus Notes installed (not Notes Web Mail); and
  • Have Adobe Acrobat 9 or later installed on your computer (Adobe Reader will NOT convert the messages, nor will this work with Notes Web mail.).

The price for Acrobat Pro X (win) license is $66 (Mat ID: 129835). The users need to go through their workstation support person to order and install. The workstation support person will send the request to datainstallserv@unmc.edu

Select the messages you wish to convert and from the Actions menu option in Lotus Notes, select “Convert selected messages to PDF.” You will be asked for a file location (save onto a network drive) and the files will be converted into one file, with each message starting on a new page. Attachments are embedded within the PDF allowing you to open them. You can also convert folders and append messages to existing PDFs.

Warning

If messages are more than two years old, they may be archived which requires the messages to be opened prior to converting (to temporarily remove them from the archive server). Otherwise archived messages will not be converted. So check your PDF files to make sure your messages are intact before you delete them.

Keep in mind that messages that are more than two years old continue to be archived from the Notes server, so don’t unarchive more messages than you plan to convert to PDF.

View video demonstrations or more detailed instructions on saving messages to PDF.