Bananas - bananahome.com

I've volunteered to beta test the new iFidelity from Geniisoft. It's really a fantastic product, and it shows all too well how much IBM is NOT doing with Notes and Domino.

I did a simple test before and after installation of the product. I created a mail with a table, and sent it to my GMail account, which is set to forward all mail to my Notes mail. My environment is Lotus Domino 8.5, with Lotus Notes 8.5.

I created a mail with a 4x4 table. I merged the four middle cells. I set the border color to red, 1 px. I set the middle merged cell's border width to 4 px. The text in the middle, merged cell, is centered, blue, bold, italics, underlined. The text in the other cells is left justified, superscript, italics. Font and font size are all Notes default.



I did 3 tests, one with Domino converting to plain text, one with Domino converting to HTML, and one with iFidelity converting to HTML. The results of each test is checked first in Google mail, and then in Notes mail.

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Test 1, Domino converted to plain text

Google mail

No font styles, the table has no merged cells. Borders are text.

Notes mail, via Google mail

This actually looks better than it did in Google mail, because Domino, by default, uses a non-proportional font for plain text internet mail.

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Test 2, Domino converted to HTML

Google mail

No border color, but the merged cells are there. border widths are all 1 px. Font styles are there. Superscript doesn't look right, but it is set.

Notes mail, via Google mail

The merged cells are still there, but the border widths have been lost completely. Font styles are there, and even Superscript is correct.

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Test 3, iFidelity converted to HTML

Google mail

Border color is right, and border thickness is also right. All font styles are correct, including Superscript.

Notes mail, via Google mail

The table looks almost exactly the same as in the sent mail. Almost. Font size seems to be a bit off. However, if I go into edit mode on the received mail, the font size looks more like the original, so it could be the client doing something weird. It has lost the color blue and underscore of the text in the middle, merged cell, though, and has become a serif font, and not the sans serif font seen both in the original mail, and in Google mail.

This concludes my first test of iFidelity.

1. Ben Langhinrichs2009-01-31 13:19:44
Homepage: http://www.geniisoft.com/showcase.nsf/GeniiBlog

I think it is a wondeful idea to blog the results (scary as anything for me as a developer watching the first beta exposed so publicly, but I'll get over it). It sounds like the results were pretty good. Two quick comments to clarify your last results.

Where you point out that "the font size seems to be a bit off" after sending to GMail and then from there to Notes, the issue is that the font is set to "sans-serif" by iFidelity when you have "Default Sans Serif", but your renderer has chosen a slightly different sans serif font.

When you switch to edit mode in the Notes client, you switch to the generic Notes MIME rendering engine. While iFidelity tries to set up the attributes such that that conversion won't be too painful, it does not handle the inbound conversion itself yet, which is what this would require for really good fidelity.

Thanks again for beta testing. Would you mind if I posted a link to your blog on mine?

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2. Peter2009-01-31 14:16:28

@Ben: Scary as it may be, being part of a blogging community such as ours, it should've been expected

That explains a couple of things about the differences. Thanks for clearing that up. And of course you can link to my blog!

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3. Peter2009-01-31 16:36:52

Ben has posted about this post on his blog here: { Link }

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4. Ben Langhinrichs2009-02-01 18:18:04
Homepage: http://www.geniisoft.com/showcase.nsf/GeniiBlog

Peter - I think there is an additional problem with the last issue, which is in a bug identified by another beta tester. There will be a new version out tomorrow with the fix (and other goodies).

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